Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West

by John Taliaferro

Overview

Winner • National Outdoor Book Award (History/Biography)
Longlisted • PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell—the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America’s conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten—an omission that John Taliaferro’s commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair.

Grinnell was born in Brooklyn in 1849 and grew up on the estate of ornithologist John James Audubon. Upon graduation from Yale, he dug for dinosaurs on the Great Plains with eminent paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh—an expedition that fanned his romantic notion of wilderness and taught him a graphic lesson in evolution and extinction. Soon he joined George A. Custer in the Black Hills, helped to map Yellowstone, and scaled the peaks and glaciers that, through his labors, would become Glacier National Park. Along the way, he became one of America’s most respected ethnologists; seasons spent among the Plains Indians produced numerous articles and books, including his tour de force, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life.

More than a chronicler of natural history and indigenous culture, Grinnell became their tenacious advocate. He turned the sportsmen’s journal Forest and Stream into a bully pulpit for wildlife protection, forest reserves, and national parks. In 1886, his distress over the loss of bird species prompted him to found the first Audubon Society. Next, he and Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club to promote “fair chase” of big game. His influence among the rich and the patrician provided leverage for the first federal legislation to protect migratory birds—a precedent that ultimately paved the way for the Endangered Species Act. And in an era when too many white Americans regarded Native Americans as backwards, Grinnell’s cries for reform carried from the reservation, through the halls of Congress, all the way to the White House.

Drawing on forty thousand pages of Grinnell’s correspondence and dozens of his diaries, Taliaferro reveals a man whose deeds and high-mindedness earned him a lustrous peerage, from presidents to chiefs, Audubon to Aldo Leopold, John Muir to Gifford Pinchot, Edward S. Curtis to Edward H. Harriman. Throughout his long life, Grinnell was bound by family and sustained by intimate friendships, toggling between the East and the West. As Taliaferro’s enthralling portrait demonstrates, it was this tension that wound Grinnell’s nearly inexhaustible spring and honed his vision—a vision that still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631490132
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/04/2019
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	421,944
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

John Taliaferro is a graduate of Harvard College, a former senior editor at Newsweek, and the author of five previous books, including All the Great Prizes, winner of the Douglas Dillon Award. He lives in Texas and Montana.

Table of Contents

Maps xiv

A Note on Names xv

Introduction: Evolution and Extinction 1

Part 1 Boy Hunter (1849-1876)

Chapter 1 Audubon Park 17

Chapter 2 Member of the Class 38

Chapter 3 The Yale Expedition 43

Chapter 4 A Wild Gallop 59

Chapter 5 The Black Hills 75

Chapter 6 A Nation's Park 84

Part 2 Natural Historian (1876-1886)

Chapter 7 Age of Surprises 103

Chapter 8 Thorough Sportsman 112

Chapter 9 No Tenderfoot He 123

Chapter 10 Dear Partner 137

Part 3 Preservation, Reservation (1886-1807)

Chapter 11 The Audubon Society 149

Chapter 12 The Rock Climbers 156

Chapter 13 Fair Chase 167

Chapter 14 Ghost Dance 180

Chapter 15 Sacred Range 190

Chapter 16 Standing Menace 196

Chapter 17 The Ceded Strip 211

Chapter 18 A Plank 228

Chapter 19 Diverse Voices 242

Part 4 American Anthropologist (1897-1902)

Chapter 20 Eclipse of Memory 255

Chapter 21 The Alaska Expedition 269

Chapter 22 Indians of To-day 286

Chapter 23 Winning of the West 295

Part 5 Mr. and Mrs. Grinnell (1902-1911)

Chapter 24 The Captured Woman 309

Chapter 25 Temporary Sojourners 327

Chapter 26 Pulverizing Engine 348

Chapter 27 Stuyvesant Square 370

Part 6 Principled Pragmatist (1911-1919)

Chapter 28 Break the Old Habit 385

Chapter 29 Undue Destruction 402

Chapter 30 Fighting Cheyennes 413

Chapter 31 The National Park Service 430

Part 7 Gray Guardian (1919-1938)

Chapter 32 All This Better Work 455

Chapter 33 A Complex Life 478

Chapter 34 Melting Rapidly 496

Chapter 35 A Strong Strand 513

Epilogue: Do More Good 517

Acknowledgments 521

Notes 525

Bibliography 559

Illustration Credits 583

Index 587

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/18/2019

Taliaferro (Great White Fathers), a former senior editor at Newsweek, delivers an impressive, eminently readable biography of the great conservationist George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938). In rendering a life that was “a study in romanticism, evolution, and progressivism,” Taliaferro meticulously draws from 40,000 pages of correspondence, about 50 diaries and notebooks covering Grinnell’s travels, 35 years of articles and editorials from his magazine, Forest and Stream, and Grinnell’s many books, including the history The Fighting Cheyennes, seven novels for boys, and an unfinished autobiography. Grinnell lived on the East Coast, in New York State and Connecticut, but he lived for the West. In addition to bestowing his name, “in a rare breach of modesty,” on a glacier and a lake in Montana, Grinnell formed the Audubon Society, cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club with Theodore Roosevelt, and “midwifed” Glacier National Park, while helping protect Yosemite and Yellowstone from developers. He just missed being among the dead at Little Big Horn, yet listened intently to Native Americans throughout his life and lobbied for them in Washington, D.C. Anyone who’s ever set foot in a national park and wondered how it came to be will find an important part of the answer in this expansive look at an equally expansive life. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"George Bird Grinnell, one of the great visionaries in American environmentalism, has long deserved to have his story told. Among our ablest biographers, John Taliaferro has given us a smartly crafted and richly detailed portrait of a sage life that speaks to our often reckless but sometimes responsible ways, past and present."

Jack E. Davis

"A meticulous, indelible, and exhilarating portrait of George Bird Grinnell, in which John Taliaferro returns the ardent conservationist and ethnographer to full life. And what a life it was. A steadfast friend to North American wildlands and wildlife—and to its native peoples—Grinnell strides across the pages of this fine biography alive with the same passions that impelled him to roam and to write about the vanishing frontier."

William Souder

"The best book I read this decade was: Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer by John Taliaferro."

Jeff Ament

"In Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, the first full-length biography of the man, John Taliaferro seeks to restore [Grinnell] to his rightful place among the giants of the early conservation movement in the United States. . . . Alas, our current environmental crises reach well beyond the problems that Grinnell and his clique aimed to solve. Even so, his life and work offer valuable lessons."

Wall Street Journal - Andrew Graybill

"Without a doubt, the United States is a better place because of George Bird Grinnell.... [We] finally have an exhaustively detailed biography of an inexhaustible man who deserves his place in the pantheon of environmental founders.... Grinnell’s memory lives on in the wild. And with this book, he is given the fresh look that he deserves."

Timothy Egan

"George Bird Grinnell is one of fascinating characters of the nineteenth century—a participant in events both heroic and tragic—and so it is good news that we have a full biography. Conservation traces many of its roots to Grinnell, so we need to understand him!"

Bill McKibben

05/01/2019

Brooklyn-born George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938) was an ethnographer, explorer, entrepreneur, and editor of Forest and Stream magazine, along with being a naturalist and, for a short time, a rancher. Taliaferro (All the Great Prizes) explains Grinnell's early influences, including teacher "Minnie" Audubon (widow of John James) and George Armstrong Custer. As a naturalist, Grinnell made several trips west, with Montana a favorite destination. His many involvements and successes in conservation include founding the first national Audubon Club, partnering with Theodore Roosevelt to create the Boone and Crockett Club, rallying support for protection of Yellowstone's wildlife, and advocating for the creation of Glacier National Park. Taliaferro masterfully attends to the long, busy arc of his subject's life, scouring some 40,000 pages of Grinnell's letters, numerous diaries, and travelogs, years of Forest and Stream articles, plus his monographs to create a satisfying portrait. The reader's reward is a sense of nature, native culture, and landscapes as viewed through an observant explorer's eyes, at the moment when Westward expansion was irrevocably changing it. VERDICT This richly detailed biography will engage students of environmental history and general readers alike.—Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.

Library Journal

2019-03-03

A biography of a 19th-century naturalist who worked tirelessly on behalf of America's wilderness and Native American rights.

Beginning in 1870, with his first trip west, George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) evolved into one of the most prominent conservationists in America, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and many native tribal leaders. He campaigned to establish national parks, the Audubon Society, and the New York Zoological Society; edited the long-running journal Forest and Stream; founded the Boone and Crockett Club, whose mission it was to preserve large game; and published many ethnographies of Plains tribes. Drawing on 40,000 pages of correspondence, 50 diaries and notebooks, and an unfinished autobiography, Taliaferro (All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, 2013, etc.) thoroughly—and with due admiration—documents the life of "a man of worthy causes." He acknowledges, however, the limitations of his sources: "Possibly Grinnell was simply too busy and proper to indulge in self-reflection. Or was there something he wanted to avoid reflecting upon?" Although the author hints at "secrets," he reveals little about Grinnell's intimate relationships with friends and family, including his wife, whom he suddenly married in 1902. A photographer, she energetically accompanied him on his trips west, where he exulted in freedom from the commercial world of New York and experienced the "magnificent drama" of events such as the Pawnee buffalo hunt: "the most momentous, the most defining experience" of Grinnell's life. "There is something rather horrible in the wild and savage excitement that one feels under such circumstances," he said of another hunt. Taliaferro portrays Grinnell evenhandedly as a man of his time: Seeing the oppression suffered by Native Americans, Grinnell urged recognition that they "are humans like ourselves"; still, he "hewed to the prevailing anthropological wisdom that Indians were only midway up the ladder from savagery to civilization." Grinnell's life, Taliaferro aptly concludes, "was a study in romanticism, evolution, and progressivism."

A fine biography of a significant environmental champion.

Kirkus Reviews

In a deep, gravelly voice, narrator Joe Barrett ably presents this account of the life of George Bird Grinnell, who is arguably the impetus behind the creation of the American conservation movement. A Yale-educated New Yorker, Grinnell was a scholar who excavated dinosaurs on the Great Plains, accompanied Custer in the Black Hills, assisted in mapping Yellowstone, and became a respected scholar of the Plains Indians, especially the Cheyenne. Barrett’s voice has the quality of one who has been in the wilderness for many years—gravelly and somewhat careworn. He is easy to understand and expressive. He effects a slightly different voice for quotes—but only enough for the listener to note the shift from the narrative. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile