“I boarded with Mr. Hutchings’ family, but occupied a cabin that I built for myself near the Hutchings’ winter home. This cabin, I think, was the handsomest building in the Valley, and the most useful and convenient for a mountaineer. From the Yosemite Creek, near where it first gathers its beaten waters at the foot of the fall, I dug a small ditch and brought a stream into the cabin, entering at one end and flowing out the other with just current enough to allow it to sing and warble in low, sweet tones, delightful at night while I lay in bed. The floor was made of rough slabs, nicely joined and embedded in the ground. In the spring the common pteris ferns pushed up between the joints of the slabs, two of which, growing slender like climbing ferns on account of the subdued light, I trained on threads up the sides and over my window in front of my writing desk in an ornamental arch. Dainty little tree frogs occasionally climbed the ferns and made fine music in the night, and common frogs came in with the stream and helped to sing with the Hylas and the warbling, tinkling water. My bed was suspended from the rafters and lined with libocedrus plumes, altogether forming a delightful home in the glorious Valley at a cost of only three or four dollars, and I was loath to leave it.” When he was not running Hutchings’ mill, he was making lonely trips of discovery or guiding visitors above the valley walls. Perhaps Muir knew of the use he would make of the natural history data he was gathering, but few of his associates sensed the fact that he would soon make the nation quicken with new views of Yosemite values. He first made his influence felt in the early ’seventies, when he began publishing on Yosemite in journals and periodicals. His material awakened responses everywhere. On February 5, 1876, he published an article in the _Sacramento Record Union_ which was one of the initial steps in his forceful appeal to America to save the Yosemite high country from the devastations of sheep and the incendiary fires of sheepherders. It is likely that few who today enjoy the Yosemite High Sierra realize that sheep, “hoofed locusts,” were responsible for the creation of Yosemite National Park. The people of California, awakened to the danger by the warnings of Muir and others, attempted to secure an enlargement of the state park. Selfish local interests frustrated the plan. In 1889, John Muir allied himself with the _Century Magazine_, and a plan was launched which was designed to arouse a public sentiment that could not be shunted. Muir produced the magic writings, and Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of the _Century_, secured the support of influential men in the East. On October 1, 1890, a law was enacted which set aside an area, larger than the present park, as “reserved forest lands.” Within this reserve were the state-controlled Yosemite and Mariposa Grove grants.