John Muir in Wisconsin

Fountain Lake Farm

 

Wisconsin Dells

Now a popular Wisconsin vacation spot -- a stretch of narrows on the Wisconsin River some twenty miles west of John Muir's boyhood home -- John Muir visited and found the Wisconsin Dells to be a beautful botanical wonderland. 

On a letter to his sister (ie., Mr. and Mrs. David M. Galloway) in 1863, Muir describes the Wisconsin Dells with poetically: 

"The banks are rocky and romantic for many miles both above and below the Dells. On going up the river we were delightfully opposed and threatened by a great many semi-gorge ravines running at right angles to the river. . . . Those ravines are the most perfect, the most heavenly plant conservatories I ever saw. The last ravine we encountered was the most beautiful and deepest and longest and narrowest. The rocks overhang and bear a perfect selection of trees which hold themselves towards one another from side to side with inimitable grace, forming a flower-veil of indescribable beauty. The light is measured and mellowed. For every flower springs, too, and pools, are there in their places to moisten them. The walls are fringed and painted most divinely with the bright green polypodium and asplenium and mosses and liverworts with gray lichens, and here and there a clump of flowers and little bushes. The floor was barred and banded and sheltered by bossy, shining, moss-clad logs cast in as needed from above. Over all and above all and in all the glorious ferns, tall, perfect, godlike, and here and there amid their fronds a long cylindrical spike of the grand fringed purple orchis."

 

Madison

"An Ingenious Whittler" - 1860 newspaper account of Muir's inventions at the state fair

"College Friend Describes Muir's Mechanical Marvels" by Harvey Reid

University of Wisconsin

John Muir's Clocks

John Muir- Address Delivered by Charles R. Van Hise upon the Occasion of the Unveiling of a Bronze Bust of John Muir by the Sculptor C. S. Pietro at the University of Wisconsin, - December 6, 1916 (offsite link).