John Muir, a noted naturalist and conservation leader, spent several months in Florida in 1867 after arriving at Cedar Key in October, seven weeks after leaving Indiana on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf. His journal account of the journey, published in 1916 two years after his death, preserved glimpses of life in the post-Civil War South, where he observed that the traces of war were visible not only in broken fields, mills, and woods ruthlessly slaughtered, but also in the countenances of the people. Florida deeply impressed the twenty-nine year old Muir, who remembered the watery and vine-tied land and the young streams he had seen and sampled on his way from Fernandina. While recovering from malaria in Cedar Key, he first expressed his belief that nature was valuable for its own sake, not only because it was useful for man, a principle that guided him throughout his life. In early 1868, he left Cedar Key and eventually settled in California, where he helped establish Yosemite National Park and, in 1892, the Sierra Club, which became one of the nation's best known environmental organizations.