John Muir

John Muir immigrated from Dunbar, Scotland, to Wisconsin as a boy and became an inventive mechanical genius before an industrial blinding accident sparked his vow to study nature directly. He walked a thousand miles from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico before arriving in the Sierra Nevada of California.

Muir's poetic essays mobilized American public sentiment to preserve wilderness. In 1890, his advocacy helped create Yosemite National Park, and in 1892 he co-founded the Sierra Club, serving as its first president. In 1903, his three-day camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt led to the establishment of the US National Park Service.