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Show 537. In 1894, the year Muir published The Mountains of California, Frederick Jackson Turner had wondered about the end of the f r o n t i e r . In h i s persuasive essay, Turner argued that American development exhibited a "return to primitive conditions on a c o n t i n u a l l y advancing frontier l i n e . " He claimed that "wilderness masters the colonist" and " s t r i p s off the garments of c i v i l i z a t i o n . " The sod-buster, trapper, gold-hunter: a l l were simply the products of t h i s peculiarly American phenomenon. At r o o t , Turner knew, at issue was the evolution of men. How did i t occur? And Muir's idea on this subject went a level deeper. Muir's idea - l i k e that which Clarence King put forth, and l i k e a similar theory suggested by a Nunamiut hunter in Of Wolves and Men - was that all species, be they wolves, Eskimos, mountaineers, or mountain sheep, go through a process which might be spoken of as convergent evolution. All animals, men included, were products of their environment, and most governed when they were wildest. "Who, at the end, knows more about the land - an old man or an old wolf?" "The same. They know the same," answered the old Nunamiut hunter. But c i v i l i z e d men, unlike the other beasts, could deceive themselves. They could not only choose their environment, thus creating themselves, but they could also choose to ignore t h e i r environment, like the sod-busters whom Muir remembered from his youth, who cut t h e i r straight furrows through the p r a i r i e , i n a t t e n t i v e to anything except the size and shape of t h e i r farms. Further, Muir, unlike the frontiersman Turner spoke of, |