“In the spring of 1868, less than a month before his 30th birthday, a wild-haired itinerant college-dropout by the name of John Muir, “with incredibly little money,” and no guidebook, stepped off a Panama steamer at the Port of San Francisco.

“The western margin of this continent is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon whose seaward base beat the mild, small breakers of the Pacific.

“It is a fact of much significance with reference to the temper and spirit which ruled loyal people of the United States during the war of the great rebellion, that a livelier susceptibility to the influence of art was apparent, and greater progress in the manifestations of artistic talent was made, than in any similar period before in the history of the country.