John Muir. Frederick Turner

Journal had some of the facts right, anyway. Muir had been readily admitted to the grounds and the hall once his peculiar inventions had been seen. Within a few minutes he had set the clocks in working order and had rigged up his early-rising machine while a line of the curious formed to see how it might work. Everything did work, of course, and so well that a Journal reporter wrote up Muir as “An Ingenious Whittler”:

      While at the Fair Grounds this morning we saw some very ingenious specimens of mechanism, in the form of clocks, made by Mr. JOHN MUIR, of Buffalo, Marquette County. They were without cases, and were whittled out of pine wood. The wheels moved with beautiful evenness. One registered not only hours but minutes, seconds, and days of the month. The other was in the shape of a scythe, the wheels being arranged along the part representing the blade. It was hung in a dwarf burr oak very tastefully ornamented with moss about its roots. We will venture to predict that few articles will attract as much attention as these products of Mr. Muir’s ingenuity.

      So, he was something of a hit, if an odd one, and the secretary of the State Agricultural Society was impressed enough to send an emissary to look over the inventions and make a recommendation to the fair officials: they were so unusual they fit into none of the judging categories, yet evidently they were worthy of some sort of commendation. When Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr arrived at Muir’s booth on her errand of inspection she found a line of small boys, including her two sons, waiting to take their parts in the experiment of the early-rising machine. Mrs. Carr was impressed not only with the inventions but also with the patience of their inventor and his very evident fondness for children. Boy after boy would climb into the bed, shut his eyes, and await the working of the clock that would cant the bed forward and drop him out onto the ground to the cheers of the others awaiting their turns. And all the while the bright-eyed, shaggy-bearded young inventor cheerfully answered the pestering questions of the kids. Mrs. Carr reported back with a recommendation of a special cash prize.

      Muir was wholly unused to the entire spectacle—the crowds, the level of activity, and most especially the flattering attention—and he seemed stunned for a few days. Then, as he steadied himself, he saw that the greatest wonder of the fair was not on the grounds but on the hill above them. The three large buildings of the university seemed wonderfully compelling. He had seen grand buildings before, of course, like Lord Lauderdale’s castle at one end of the old high street in Dunbar, but nothing recently so imposing as the just-completed University Hall that dominated the campus hilltop. What sort of incredible, privileged life, he wondered, went on within those walls?

      Meanwhile, the news of his success had gone back to Hickory Hill, and Muir hastened to assure the folks that his head hadn’t been turned, that in fact he had not even read the favorable notice in the paper. Possibly he had not, for his father’s lessons had been deeply implanted. Still, here was a young man hungering for some sort of recognition, and for the first time he had it. The temptation to enjoy it must have been great. In a letter to his sister Sarah at the beginning of October, he confessed this, adding rather pathetically that she knew how tempted he would be by this situation since he was so very fond of praise.

      Among those lauding the backwoods inventor was a Norman Wiard, himself an inventor whose improbable contribution to American technology was a steam-powered iceboat that promised to solve the problem of winter travel on the upper Mississippi. The Lady Franklin had already been exhibited—but not tested—in the East and had drawn considerable attention. Now it was here, and Wiard recognized that Muir could be useful to him. The young farmer was obviously untutored in formal mechanical arts, but just as obviously he had talent. Wiard offered to instruct him in mechanical drawing and give him access to textbooks in exchange for Muir’s serving as mechanic on the Lady Franklin. He was also to work in Wiard’s machine shop and foundry at Prairie du Chien, whence the boat was to be launched that winter.

      Muir accepted this offer, though apparently there were others. Probably he would have wished to enter the magical-seeming university rather than a machine shop had there been any way to do so. But he was a man without money and without the prospect of getting any, and besides, Wiard’s offer was precisely what William Duncan had predicted: Muir’s inventions had indeed opened the door to a machine shop. He ought to accept, and he did so, though not without some misgivings, some of which he kept to himself and some of which he wrote to Sarah. Was Wiard, for instance, possibly a Catholic and thus another potential source of improper influence?

      The arrangement with Wiard was to be strictly a trade—Wiard’s instruction for Muir’s services—with no cash involved. This meant that in Prairie du Chien Muir would have to find the means to board himself. He found lodging at a small hotel in the midst of town where he did chores in exchange for a room and meals. Near the end of October his mother wrote him in care of the Mondell House, telling him that his father had at last been successfully prevailed upon and was sending him a trunk of store-bought clothes to replace his homemade country ones.

      Life at the Mondell House was pleasant enough, though by now Muir was thoroughly homesick. Mrs. Pelton, wife of the owner, quickly became a surrogate mother to him—not the first nor the last older woman who would willingly accept this role—and there were a number of young people then boarding at the hotel, including the Peltons’ niece Emily, with whom Muir established a friendship.

      In this first, belated experience with the wider world Muir was discovering the discrepancies that existed between that world and the view from Hickory Hill. For one thing, he was learning that, despite his rustic appearance and manners, he had a certain charm. People liked his directness, his earnestness, his cheerful energy. Isolated as he had been, this new view of himself must have been about as surprising to him as his reception at the fair. His father had said that if John found him a hard taskmaster, he would find strangers in the big world a good deal harder yet. It was not so; in fact, those strangers seemed to think more highly of Muir than his own father had, and they treated him with greater consideration. The lesson implicit in this was not lost on Muir. The world was not so hard a place as he had been led to believe, nor was he so poor a specimen. He was ignorant of much, to be sure, and he found out daily just how ignorant of worldly ways he was. But he had strengths, too, and one was in simply being who he was; he need contrive no special effort to ingratiate himself with people. Being John Muir would be quite good enough.

      Surely he was innocent and rough-hewn enough to have attracted derisive attention, but Muir was fortunate in his associations at the Mondell House, where the Peltons and their boarders liked him and overlooked his gaffes and his offenses against the customs of the house. They also bore with good grace his relentless pursuit of the self-improving studies which disturbed their early mornings with the heavy clatter of the early-rising machine. Harder for them to bear was Muir’s lack of patience with what he thought the silly behavior of the young residents. As at Fountain Lake and Hickory Hill, so at Prairie du Chien he again found himself beyond coy courtship, chitchat, and parlor games. Driven by a sense of the brevity of life, of his own late beginnings and uncertain destination, he could not abide such apparently criminal wastes of time. Returning to the hotel one evening, he found the young folks at play in the parlor and when requested to join them solemnly and priggishly rebuked them with words out of Solomon: “My son, if sinners entice thee, consent not.” More like Elijah than Solomon, he smothered that evening’s festivities, as he said in a letter to Sarah and David Galloway, and concluded that such behavior had given him a great character for sobriety.

      The Mondell House boarders forgave and went on with their entertainments though doubtless wary of offending the young man in their midst, a complex, puzzling combination of stiff sobriety and natural cheerfulness that was his legacy from family and nationality.

      November came to the old French trade outpost, stripping the oaks, hardening the road ruts in the onset of winter. At the end of the first week there had been the national elections, splintered by sectionalism into a welter of parties and candidates, heavy with portent. Wisconsin went for Lincoln, and so, barely, did the country as a whole, though in the South neither Lincoln nor the Republican party appeared on any state ballots. In the North a tellingly heavy vote had been cast for secessionist presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge. None knew whether there would now be war, but all felt that the elections had decided something. In South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi people welcomed Lincoln’s