Robert Burcher in his John Muir costume
I am a retired newspaper photographer who has had an interest in John Muir for decades. I live close to Meaford Ontario Canada where Muir spent the years from 1864 to 1866. During that time period the Civil War in the USA was raging. During the 1990’s I was a member of a group called the Canadian Friends of John Muir who worked to promote the fact that in fact Muir had lived and worked in this early pioneer village.
More recently I have spent the last three years doing some sleuthing to figure out where Muir was in the summer of 1864; what he called “My Summer of Glorious Freedom”. This was the lost summer that there was no record of where he travelled. He had left Wisconsin USA in March and arrived in Meaford in October. Through some new information released in 2008 that Muir was a dedicated botanist who collected plants everywhere he went. I was able to follow his trail of plant specimens from the summer of 1864 as he sauntered around our province.
Robert Burcher