A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
In September 1867 a twenty-nine-year-old Muir left Indiana with a plant press, a change of clothes, and a copy of Burns, meaning to walk to the Gulf of Mexico by the wildest route he could find. The journal he kept through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida stayed unpublished until 1916, two years after his death. It catches him before he was anyone: sleeping in a Savannah cemetery because he had no money, arguing with himself about whether the world was made for people, going down with malaria at Cedar Key. The passage defending alligators as honorable creatures with their own place in creation still stops readers cold. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.
About the Author
John Muir (1838 to 1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and preservationist whose wanderings through the Sierra Nevada made him the country’s most influential wilderness advocate. He co-founded the Sierra Club and helped establish Yosemite and other national parks, shaping American conservation.
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