John Muir was born in 1838 at Dunbar, along the North Sea in Scotland. He was an active boy who liked to explore the meadows, wooded hills, and seacoast near his home. With his brother David he climbed the walls of an old castle, visited old battlefields, and sat on rocks to watch ships at sea. As a schoolboy he especially enjoyed reading adventure stories.

When Johnnie was partly grown his family came to America and settled on a farm in Wisconsin. Here he and the other Muir children helped to clear the land, raise crops, and care for farm animals. As a young man he entered the University of Wisconsin where he specialized in natural sciences. In botany he made many field trips to study flowering plants and became an avid lover of nature.

When Muir left the University of Wisconsin, he started lifelong explorations of the great outdoors. On one of his first trips, he took a thousand-mile hike through the southeastern part of the United States. He tramped through forests, waded streams and swamps, climbed mountains and slept under the stars at night.

In the spring of 1868, Muir arrived in California, where he set out to explore. He soon reached the huge Yosemite Canyon with majestic waterfalls tumbling down from the Sierra Nevada. Later he helped to have this natural wonderland preserved as a national park.

In succeeding years Muir explored the full length of the Sierra Nevada and made several mountain-climbing trips to Alaska. As he traveled about, he became alarmed at man's wasteful destruction of mountains, forests, and streams and lakes. As a result he became an ardent conservationist.

In his later years Muir spent much of his time writing about his explorations and the need for conserving natural resources. He wrote numerous books, magazine articles, and news stories, which were widely read. Many wonders of nature have been named after him as monuments to his life work.

The author of this book, Montrew Dunham, carried on extensive research in order to write this delightful story. She is a well-known author who has written six other volumes in the Childhood of Famous Americans Series. In private life, she is a teacher in a suburb of Chicago and a frequent speaker before literary groups.

From the dust jacket