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A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf | 
 enlarge | Author: John Muir
Creator: Peter Jenkins
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $11.95
Buy New: $6.61
You Save: $5.34 (45%)
New (30) Used (21) Collectible (1) from $4.25
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 134931
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0395901472
Dewey Decimal Number: 508.76092
UPC: 046442901475
EAN: 9780395901472
ASIN: 0395901472
Publication Date: August 26, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new book. Same day superfast shipping. Excellent customer support.
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Product Description
Here is the adventure that started John Muir on a lifetime of discovery. Taken from his earliest journals, this book records Muir's walk in 1867 from Indiana across Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to the Gulf Coast. In his distinct and wonderful style, Muir shows us the wilderness, as well as the towns and people, of the South immediately after the Civil War.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Did not receive! November 19, 2007
April M. Tinker (Woodstock, GA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I did not receive this product. One week after I ordered it I got an email stating that I would not receive this book & my account was refunded. Not sure what the deal is.
 A perilous journey to discover the natural world June 3, 2007
K.S.Ziegler (Seattle)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
After an accident in a carriage factory while working as an inventor left him temporarily blinded, John Muir vowed that he would break the moorings of life in Indianapolis and embark for wilderness places to study plants. His intention, which he later acknowledged as foolhardy, was to find his way to a tributary of the Amazon and float down that great river. He never made it to South America. He was lucky enough to survive a bout with malaria and be diverted to California.
It's hard to imagine a much more dangerous undertaking than to set off alone soon after the Civli War to places unknown in the heart of the South. He was warned repeatedly by kind strangers and knew quite clearly of the dangers ahead: the guerilla bands of roving white bandits, displaced and desperate former slaves, a migration of rattlesnakes, the alligator-infested swamps, and the worst of all: catching malaria from mosquito bites (the thing that did catch up to him). It shows how single minded he was in his desire to study and learn about the natural world. As the blacksmith who took him in along the way characterized him: what a tough-minded man he needed to be in order to subordinate the dangers to what he wanted to do.
Some do get rather tired of reading Muir's descriptive passages, but for anyone with a love of plants, this book offers a very unique and special view of the native vegetation along the route that he took to Florida. The cultural observations are less common, but they are keen and say a lot about the times: the people and how simply they lived. Then, there are some amazing experiences such as the time he spent in the natural refuge of the St Bonaventure graveyard in Savannah waiting for a parcel from his brother to arrive. There's a prophecy by a friend along the way about the coming prevalence of electricity long before the light bulb was invented. And, there are Muir's observations that plants do have secret lives, unknown to man, who tends to blow himself up out of all proportion to the rest of Creation.
Natures bounty in a war-torn land May 22, 2007
Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
John Muir (naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club) left his home in Indiana at age 29 and "rambled" 1,000 miles through the woods of the southern US ending in Florida in 1867/68. It was just 2 years after the end of the Civil War and he ran into "wild negros" and long-haired horse-riding ex-Confederate bandits who would "kill a man for $5". He passed through uninhabited stretches of burnt out fields and deserted farms and was often seen as a northern interluder mistrusted by his southern guests. He lived mostly on stale pieces of bread, almost dieing of starvation while camping in a graveyard outside of Savannah, GA. He caught malaria and was bed ridden for 3 months, cared for by a kind family in Florida.
This is a snapshot of the south right after the war and the contrast between Muir's beautiful nature writing and the devastation of war are just as striking today as they must have been for the many people who encountered this unusual walker in the woods. Muir's writing is under-stated - the book was published posthumously and is more a diary than a finished book, which gives it a truthfulness and matter of factness. Fundamentally a Romanticist world-view - the power of nature and mans relation to it - Muir delights in finding, sampling and discussing plants, animals and geography. The genre is best compared with Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes and Thoreau's The Maine Woods.
John Muir is really underrated as a writer February 6, 2007
Glenn Yates (Nashville, TN USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The title sums up quite a bit of the review for me. Not only was he a brilliant naturalist and visionary, but he was a better than decent science and adventure writer. This book, thousand mile walk to the gulf, is from Muir's younger days when he basically dropped out and went exploring. He walked from Wisconsin to the gulf, shortly after the war, and literally slept wherever. Hedges, roadsides, the occasional house. His observations on reconstruction South are all the more insightful because they are unadulterated (is that a word?) by any agenda, and have the overpowering reality of truth.
While his time in the Sierras is what he is most famous for, and the mountains more rugged and inspiring, this pre-Jenkins "Walk Across America" is a tamer warm-up for reading his journals from Yosemite days. I highly recommend it myself, it gives a bit of botany and a lot of background on Muir himself.
Interesting Journey December 14, 2006
J. S. Kaminski (Aberdeen, NJ United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One of John Muir's earliest works, this book traces his travels from Indiana to Florida, continuing on to Cuba, and ending up in California. At times, it is fascinating stuff. As he left in 1867, just after the American Civil War, he encounters many suspicious Southerners, although most are cordial to him. Muir wrote this as a journal of discovery, I think, to document the different flora and fauna he encounters in a part of the country with which he was not familiar. But this book is just as interesting as a social study - in other words, what was life like in America in 1867? How did the people act? How did they treat him? What were his impressions? If you have ever wondered about what America was like 150 years ago, you will find some answers here.
Additionally, Muir has some fine moments of nature writing. Sometimes he delights in just stopping and observing: "I used to lie on my back for whole days beneath the ample arms of these great trees, listening to the winds..." He calls the birds he observes "feathered people from the woods and reedy isles." And despite being a God-fearing man, he disagrees with those who take a fundamentalist view of nature, ridiculing the claim that the world was made especially for man..."a presumption not supported by the facts," says Muir.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. At times there is a little too much discussion on botany for my tastes, but that was OK. Muir's journal is rich with interesting anecdotes. With this journey, the founder of the Sierra Club was well on his way to making his mark in the world.
Four stars.
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