John Muir: The Father Of Our National Parks

Have you visited a national park? Do you ever walk around and enjoy nature? You can thank a man named John Muir. John Muir was a naturalist who can be known as “The Father of Our National Parks”. He helped preserve many of our national parks that we see today. John Muir and his love for the wilderness helped the American people learn that they need to preserve the natural beauty around them.
To understand how he helped the people learn to preserve the environment, we need to know about his childhood. First of all, John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland in 1838. He was the third child of eight and his parents were Daniel and Ann Muir. While in Scotland his grandpa took him on walks around nature, which sparked his interest and love of the wilderness. In 1849 John Muir moved to Wisconsin. John Muir was fascinated by Wisconsin and it’s wilderness. He would later write how he felt about Wisconsin’s wilderness in his autobiographical, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, "This sudden splash into pure wilderness--baptism in Nature's warm heart--how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming
These interactions helped John Muir teach the people to preserve the wilderness. Most of the interactions were through John Muir’s writings. He wrote many things from articles, essays and novels, all to talk about the beauty of nature. An example of a novel he wrote is Stickeen: The Story of Dog, here is an excerpt “In the summer of 1880 I set out from Fort Wrangell in a canoe to continue the exploration of the icy region of southeastern Alaska…the Rev. S. H. Young , for whom we were waiting, at last came aboard, followed by a little black dog, that immediately made himself at home by curling up in a hollow among the baggage.” (1). Another novel of his is My First Summer in the Sierra. In this novel John Muir explains the beauty of his first summer in the sierra in vivid detail and with great love of the