Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness

“Muir’s ideas on race and religion . . . were far from remarkable and very much congruous with contemporaneous ideological hegemony. What stands out . . . was his ability to popularize those ideas and catalyze a social movement around conservation.”

The American conservation movement has its roots in the later 1800s and was very much shaped by the dominant ideas of that time. Scottish émigré and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir (1838–1914), was equally a person of his day. Muir’s introduction to America was through settler colonialism on the Wisconsin frontier in the mid-1800s. Settlers, many of whom were European immigrants, formed a buffer against increasingly displaced and impoverished indigenous communities.

Westward expansion and indigenous displacement was deeply informed by a racialized evolutionary model that scaled from savagery to civilization with indigenous peoples occupying the bottom rung with Anglos at the top.

Muir was not destined to be a lifelong smallholder farmer. McNally underscores how Muir was keen on cultivating his life of the mind and attends the University of Wisconsin when the Civil War broke out. Enrollments decline precipitously in public universities as young men went off to war. Universities in the north were saved by the Morrell Act of 1861, which created land-grant institutions by bequeathing them with “open” lands in their state. Of course, those lands were once indigenous territory. So, while public universities were saved by their newly flush endowments, it was at indigenous peoples’ loss.

Muir, a religiously influenced pacifist, was not a religiously influenced abolitionist. While he managed to avoid the war, McNally notes that his writing reflects the racial hierarchies embraced by many of that era.

The book counterbalances Muir’s garden-variety racism with a religious lens through which he saw the natural world. Like many other of his contemporaries (think here of the Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson), he envisioned nature and wilderness as a return to Eden. And he found his Eden in California; first in the San Joaquin Valley and later in Yosemite.

Though Muir had some admiration for how lightly indigenous people moved over their lands, he nevertheless made a hardened distinction between the Edenic wilderness and the fallen indigenous people who happened to be there. Indeed, he was seemingly obsessed with a purity/pollution binary as in: the wilderness is sacred/clean while indigenous peoples are profane/filthy. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously explored this dynamic. It also brings to mind Philosopher Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection in which certain elements disrupt the perfectly harmonious symbolic order.

Make no mistake, in this construction, the forces of the profane world threaten to destroy the sacred one. Consequently, indigenous people had to be cast out (as did ranchers and capitalist profiteers). And indigenous populations had also been decimated by extraction and settler colonialism. California is a particularly noteworthy case because of the gold rush (1848–1855) that brought legions of outsiders to the Sierra Nevada. When the gold fizzled out, those same people wanted land and other resources.

In 1864 the Yosemite Act protected the region for public use and recreation. It was now a tourist destination if you had the time, money, and inclination. Muir gets swept into the fledgling Yosemite tourism industry. Like many other parts of the world, indigenous peoples became the tourist industry’s reserve army of the working poor.

While working in Yosemite, Muir meets and befriends a wide range of intellectuals who championed both his views of the natural world and racial hierarchies. Through his Yosemite connections, he begins to write for outdoor magazines. His artic Through his Yosemite connections, he begins to write for outdoor magazines. His articles began to build the case that not only was nature beautiful, but it nurtured peoples’ souls that had been enfeebled mentally, spiritually, and physically by urban living.

Muir’s ideas on race and religion, in other words, were far from remarkable and very much congruous with contemporaneous ideological hegemony. What stands out instead was his ability to popularize those ideas and catalyze a social movement around conservation.

Print media was Muir’s ticket to become the conservation influencer of his day. Through a partnership with Robert Underwood Johnson, the associate editor of The Century Magazine, Muir had his bully pulpit and chief networking officer. For Underwood had plentiful and powerful political connections in Washington, DC. Between Muir’s corpus of articles and Underwood’s testimony before the congressional committee that was considering the Yosemite National Park bill, which would be signed into law in 1890. It was only the second national park after Yellowstone (1872), but with many more to come.

Riding on a broad wave of public interest in America’s noteworthy wild lands, Muir brings institutional power to his conservation advocacy with his founding of the Sierra Club (1892).

Along the way, many outdoor luminaries cross Muir’s path including Teddy Roosevelt, John Wesley Powell, and many other notables. The Century Magazine’s parent company published Muir’s books. He was on a roll.

Muir would not live to see the founding of the National Park Service in 1916. The NPS, however, very much embraced his general ethos of wild purity. That ethos was legally codified in 1964 through the Wilderness Act. Not surprisingly, a trip to most national parks will find only scant reference to indigenous peoples who had once lived in those places and used their resources.

The book ends by exploring notable change in the NPS approach to parks and their relationship to native peoples. McNally begins with the saga of Bear’s Ears in southwest Utah whereby indigenous groups collaborated to protect that sacred region. Given NPS history, this was a highly enlightened moment and a sign of real progress in recognition of and collaboration with native groups. Furthermore, Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) is now Secretary of the Interior overseeing the NPS; there are now a number of co-management arrangements between the national parks and native groups, as well as other cooperative partnerships.

This is a well-written exploration of John Muir’s life and legacy. For anyone not familiar with the fraught and complicated history of American conservation, it will serve as a solid introduction. For those familiar with it, it covers considerable well-trodden ground, though the particulars of Muir’s life might prove interesting. The book’s focus with Muir’s 19th century views on racial hierarchies feels rather heavy-handed. Readers are cautioned to recall that this was the dominant ideology of the day, and McNally has not uncovered some novel, salacious revelation.