Happy birthday, naturalist John Muir

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park (1906).

It is the birthday of naturalist John Muir (1838), who founded the Sierra Club and helped preserve Sequoia National Park and Yosemite Valley in the West, and influenced President Theodore Roosevelt to protect other vast wilderness areas. In 1867, Muir set out on a wilderness walk from Indiana to Florida. He ended up at Cedar Key, where he began working at a sawmill. He nearly died of malaria there but recovered and took a ship to Cuba. His journal was published as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) two years after his death. Muir wrote extensively about the wilderness and the importance of preservation, including Our National Parks (1901), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), and The Yosemite (1912).