How John Muir Got Here 175 Years Ago This Month, and Why It Matters

Like other immigrants of the time, he was riding a colonial wave.

As synonymous as John Muir is with Yosemite and the national parks of the American West, it sometimes surprises folks to discover that he wasn’t a native-born American. Indeed, his immigration to the United States is key to understanding his take on wild lands.

Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in April 1838, the third child and first son of David Muir, a successful grain merchant, and second wife Ann. After the fervently religious David converted to the evangelical Disciples of Christ, he felt himself called toward holiness. That meant leaving his roots in Scotland and heading to America, which to the Disciples represented the new Promised Land.

In late February 1849 David, 10-year-old John, and two siblings boarded the packet ship Warren in Glasgow’s Broomielaw Harbor and crossed the wintry Atlantic to New York. From there they headed by Hudson River boat, railroad, Great Lakes steamer, and open wagon for the Wisconsin frontier. The rest of the family was to follow later.

The Ivanhoe, a packet ship of the sort John Muir took to America, depicted in 1849, the year he left Scotland. (Creative Commons license from the Royal Museum of Greenwich.)

The Muirs and the 72 other passengers on the Warren were part of a thousands-strong wave of Scots headed that year to the New World. They were staking their futures on what is now called settler colonialism.

Say “colony,” and it’s easy to imagine India under the British Empire. The British conquered the subcontinent with superior military force, controlled its resources and peoples to their profit, and put Indians to work producing wealth for Britain’s benefit. A relatively small number of Britons served in the army and colonial administration needed to keep the colony under the empire’s thumb. Still India’s principal purpose was never to provide a new homeland for British immigrants. India was what contemporary academics call an “exploitation colony.”

North America started out much the same as did colonial India. Following Columbus’s voyages, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the English established exploitation colonies that extracted profitable resources, from beaver pelts and timber to sugar and tobacco, and exploited Indigenous people to do the heavy lifting. Sometimes Europeans traded with the locals, particularly for furs, and they relied on enslaving Indigenous labor far more than most contemporary Americans realize. When that supply fell short, imported Africans made up the labor gap.

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English-speaking colonies shifted slowly but inevitably away from their exploitation-colony origins. Fewer and fewer single men on the make came to seek their fortunes and return to Britain with a stash. Now whole families, even entire communities, crossed the Atlantic not only to take advantage of America’s resources but also to claim new homes for themselves. They sought less what could be extracted from the land than the land itself. That shift gave birth to the “settler colony.”

In an exploitation colony, the locals were needed for the trade and the labor they provide. But once an exploitation colony became a settler colony, the locals simply got in the way. For settler colonists to obtain full control of the land and make room for ever more of their own kind, the Indigenous people had to go.

The Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe describes this dynamic in a single succinct sentence:

Settler colonialism destroys to replace.

All colonies are violent, founded at root on conquest and control by superior force. In an exploitation colony, violence kept the locals cowed and subservient and enforced their role in producing the resources the colonial overlords valued. In a settler colony, violence served to wrest the land from Indigenous ownership, sometimes by dispossession under force, sometimes by extermination.

Settler colonialism was what the Muirs, arriving expectantly on the Wisconsin frontier, were signing up for. And when John Muir was all grown up, he would help carry the settler-colonial ethic into the West and its wild wonders.

“Kicking Native People off Their Land Is a Horrible Way to Save the Planet”

That’s the title of a recent New York Times opinion piece by University of Arizona law professor Robert Williams. Sometimes called the Yosemite model or fortress conservation, wilderness policy begun in the United States and exported across the globe holds that the best way to preserve wild spaces is to drive out the peoples indigenous to them. In essence, this approach is settler colonialism applied to wild lands. It’s unjust, of course, and it doesn’t work. Williams’s thoughtful piece is well worth a read.