Manuscript letters, 1861-1914

These 30 letters, totaling more than 100 pages, were written by Muir to five correspondents. Twenty are to his old friend Emily Pelton, with whose family he boarded in Prairie du Chien in 1860-61, or to her aunt Frances. Throughout all his travels and wilderness ramblings over the next 50 years he kept in touch with Emily, in later years writing an annual New Year's summary of his activities and circumstances. She moved to California in 1871, visited him in Yosemite in 1873, and from her home in December 1874 he went out to ride through a hurricane in the top of a Douglas spruce, an event memorialized in one of his most famous essays. Note that three letters to Emily Pelton dated in July of 1863 were actually written in February 1864 but intentionally pre-dated. Four other letters are to childhood friends from Wisconsin, James Whitehead and Milton Griswold. Whitehead wrote to protest the portrait of his family given in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, which prompted Muir to