1 Jan 1892 Jahr - John Muir founds Sierra Club

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As the rise of sports suggests, by the 1890s elite and middle-class Americans began to see Victorian culture as stuffy and claustrophobic. They rebelled by heading outdoors. A craze for bicycling swept the country; in 1890, at peak, U.S. manufacturers sold an astonishing ten million bikes. Women joined men in taking up athletics. By the 1890s, even elite women, long confined to corsets and heavy clothes that restricted their movement, donned lighter dresses and pursued archery and golf. Artist Charles Gibson became famous for his portraits of the Gibson Girl, an elite beauty depicted on the tennis court or swimming at the beach. The Gibson Girl personified the ideal of the “New Woman”: more educated, athletic, and independent.

Those with money and leisure used railroad networks to get to the national parks of the West, which, as one senator put it, became a “breathing-place for the national lungs.” People of more modest means began to take up camping. As early as 1904, California’s Coronado Beach offered tent rentals for $3 a week. A decade later, campgrounds and cottages in many parts of the country catered to a working-class clientele. In an industrial society, the outdoors became associated with leisure and renewal rather than danger and hard work. One journalist, reflecting on urban life from the vantage point of a western vacation, wrote, “How stupid it all seems: the mad eagerness of money-making men, the sham pleasures of conventional society.” In the wilderness, he wrote, “your blood clarifies; your brain becomes active. You get a new view of life.”
As Americans searched for such renewal in remnants of unexploited land, the nation’s first environmental movement arose. John Muir, who fell in love with the Yosemite Valley in 1869, became the most famous voice for wilderness. Raised in a stern Scots Presbyterian family on a Wisconsin farm, Muir knew much of the Bible by heart. He was a keen observer who developed a deeply spiritual relationship with the natural world. His contemporary Mary Austin, whose book Land of Little Rain (1905) celebrated the austere beauty of the California desert, called him “a devout man.” In cooperation with his editor at Century magazine, Muir founded the Sierra Club (An organization founded in 1892 that was dedicated to the enjoyment and preservation of America’s great mountains (including the Sierra Nevadas) and wilderness environments. Encouraged by such groups, national and state governments began to set aside more public lands for preservation and recreation.) in 1892. Like the earlier Appalachian Mountain Club, founded in Boston in 1876, the Sierra Club dedicated itself to preserving and enjoying America’s great mountains.

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