In this moving memoir of an unusual childhood, John Muir recalls his younger days in East Lothian with a startling clarity, depicting a wild boy whose quiet individuality and determination were already emerging. Born in mid nineteenth-century Scotland, Muir was eleven when his fanatically religious father took the family to build a new life in America's vast wilderness. Muir charts their pioneering years in Wisconsin, where his battles for survival powerfully anticipate the extraordinary career which was to follow. They reveal a free spirit who perceived bonds between man and nature that were subtle and far reaching for both.

Relatively unknown in his native Scotland, John Muir is renowned in the United States as the father of conservation. A friend of presidents and founder of National Parks, Muir was inspired by a love and a vision of nature as remarkable today as it was last century.