One of the most famous environmentalists in American history was John Muir.

Born in Scotland in 1838, Muir came to America in 1849. His father was a Presbyterian minister who settled first in Wisconsin. His idea of living, for himself and his family, was to work hard as the long as the Sun was up.

Muir studied botany and geology in college. He was also good with his hands, crafting clocks that kept accurate time and other things from wood.

He was working in an Indianapolis factory when an accident left him blinded for a handful of months. When he recovered, he took to the road, walking from Indiana to Florida, along the way making sketches of the plant life he saw. This was the first of a series of life-changing events for Muir.

The next was a journey to California–by boat this time, after which he walked from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada, an area he called the "Range of Light." He found work herding sheep and then made the first of a series of famous connections, getting a job running the sawmill of James Hutchings in the Yosemite Valley.

When not working at the sawmill, Muir spent his time roaming the countryside. After a disagreement with Hutchings, Muir left and returned to the coast. (He kept in touch with Hutchings's daughter Florence, however.) He ended up in Oakland in 1873 and began writing for magazines, including well-known publications like Harper's and Scribner's. He wrote not only of the nature that he saw but also on subjects such as glacier formation.

Muir got married, to Louis Strentzel, whose family owned a farm in Martinez, Calif; they had two children. Muir turned his business acumen to the farm and made it a profitable orchard but, growing restless, returned to nature, this time to the Pacific Northwest, specifically Glacier Bay in Alaska and Mount Rainier in Washington.

He had become quite famous by this time, and he began to speak out for the need to have places of natural beauty prevented from settlement. He was instrumental in convincing the U.S. Congress to create Yosemite National Park in 1890 and then, in a 1903 camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt, convinced the President to shield the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove from any kind of interference by granting them federal protected area status.

Muir was the first president of the Sierra Club, a group he helped found in 1892. Known as the "Father of the National Park System," Muir was also influential in the creation of these other parks: Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Sequoia.

He hoped to protect Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley from California's state government's wanting to building a dam there, but he was unable to stop the project. He died in 1914.