John Muir · 1916 · road

In September 1867 John Muir walked out of Indianapolis with tea and bread in a sack and a plant press, intending to reach the Gulf of Mexico by the wildest, leafiest, least trodden way he could find - through a South two years out of the Civil War. Malaria at Cedar Key stopped him going on to South America, so he went to California instead.

1. 1
   Indianapolis

   1 September 1867, and a machinist of twenty-nine who has just spent a month blind in a dark room sets out - joyful and free, he writes, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf, with tea and bread in a sack and a plant press.

2. 2
   Louisville

   He crosses the Ohio and steers through the city by compass without speaking a word to anyone - then spreads a pocket map under a tree and decides only to go south by the wildest, leafiest, least trodden way he can find.

3. 3
   Mammoth Cave

   Through the Kentucky knobs and the cave country at twenty-five miles a day - and the first of the botanising that fills the journal, a man who is walking a thousand miles largely in order to look at plants.

4. 4
   Burkesville

   A hundred and seventy miles from Louisville and his feet are sore, but he is paid for it a thousand times over - written from a hilltop with his back against a moss-clad log, which is about as close as Muir gets to complaining.

5. 5
   The Cumberlands

   Into Tennessee across country two years out of a civil war, full of discharged men and no law - and Muir walks through it alone and unarmed, recording the mountains rather than the danger.

6. 6
   Kingston

   Through Kingston and Madisonville, the towns he named in advance in a letter home - and one of only twenty-two places in the whole journal, because he was avoiding roads and towns on purpose.

7. 7
   Murphy

   North Carolina, briefly, and 18 September on the mountain at the state line - an ocean of wooded, waving, swelling mountain beauty, he writes, not to be described, taking in five thousand square miles.

8. 8
   Gainesville

   Down through Blairsville into the Georgia river country, where he has asked his brother to write to him - I am terribly letter-hungry, he had said, and hardly dare think of home and friends.

9. 9
   Augusta

   Across Georgia through Athens and Augusta on the last of the walking - a thousand miles done, and the man who will found the Sierra Club still six years from seeing California.

10. 10
    Savannah

    Out of money and waiting for a draft, he sleeps six nights among the tombs in Bonaventure cemetery rather than pay for a bed - and writes some of the best pages in the book about being happy there.

11. 11
    Fernandina

    By boat to Florida, and into a country he finds nothing like the tropical paradise he expected - flat, wet, snake-ridden and hostile, and he wades most of the way to the Gulf through it.

12. 12
    Cedar Key

    He reaches the Gulf and is felled by malaria, and spends three months recovering with the Hodgson family who take him in - which ends the walk, and changes the plan from South America to somewhere else.

13. 13
    Havana

    A month in Cuba botanising round the harbour while still too weak to go inland - and then, unable to find a ship to South America, he takes one to New York and another to California, and finds Yosemite instead.