The naturalist John Muir, that great lover of flora and fauna, rock and ice, the natural world in all its grandeur, died a century ago on Christmas Eve. He had been admitted to California Hospital in Los Angeles the day before, wracked by pneumonia. Like many nature-lovers, Muir had courted countless opportunities to “die doing what he loved,” as the euphemism goes, whether by freezing on a mountaintop, falling off a cliff, or being eaten by a bear who shared his views on the interdependence of all living things. That he met his end in a hospital bed is not such a tragedy; Muir was, in fact, doing something he loved at the time, working on the manuscript of his memoir Travels in Alaska (1915).

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