Review by New York Times Review
WITHOUT A DOUBT, the United States is a better place because of George Bird Grinnell. Born into moderate wealth and raised in a still-rural oasis of Upper Manhattan, educated by implied entitlement at Yale, he could have moved into a predestined groove among the privileged and powerful of the Gilded Age. But Grinnell took up the cause of all that a hyper-expanding America was destroying: native people, untrammeled land, birds and bison and big bears. We have the vigorous avian lobby of the Audubon Society, some of the world's most iconic national parks and several encyclopedic studies of Native Americans largely because of Grinnell. And yet, he remains overlooked among the founders of American conservation. In John Taliaferro's book, we finally have an exhaustively detailed biography of an inexhaustible man who deserves his place in the pantheon of environmental founders. To the modern mind, Grinnell can seem an old-boy WASP throwback. But it's best to judge the man by the standards of his day, not ours. Born a dozen years before the start of the Civil War, he lived through nine decades and died just before the onset of World War II. He was among a handful of giants who experienced and helped to shape so much of the young nation's history, seeing airplanes fly over the empty plains where he'd once hunted bison with the Pawnee. His contemporaries and friends included Theodore Roosevelt, the forester Gifford Pinchot, the photographer Edward Curtis and leaders of the Blackfeet and Cheyenne. He just missed being among the casualties of the last ill-fated campaign of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, after accompanying Custer on an expedition to the Black Hills two years earlier. Grinnell is a lost breed - the Ivy League-educated gentleman sportsman, equally at home in the clubby air of New York's finest interiors as he was scrambling over glaciers in Montana. To his credit, he was more interested in protecting indigenous American wonders than in bringing home trophies. Grinnell grew up on the former estate of John James Audubon, in what is now the neighborhood of Washington Heights. Though the great American Birdman had died in 1851, two years after Grinnell's birth, his widow, Lucy Audubon, became a teacher of sorts to the boy who roamed the forested New York precinct. After he brought her a captive red crossbill, Grandma Audubon, as she was often known, set the bird free. He got his first pony at 10 and his first gun at 12. Pollowing the blue-blooded imperatives of his businessman father, he graduated from Yale College in 1870, and added a Ph.D. from the same school 10 years later, with a doctorate in the study of bones. Grinnell's introduction to a West he would champion for more than half a century was a Yale fossil-finding expedition under the tutelage of the paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, one of the first curators of the Peabody Museum. "I believed that now I was on the frontier," Grinnell wrote in 1870, outside Omaha, the kind of exclamation you would expect from an insular member of Yale's Scroll and Key Club upon a first trip "Out West." They dug up a great many bones on the Plains, including those from native people's sacred burial grounds. The person who would become best known as a great friend of American Indians got his start as an Indian grave robber. On a bison hunt with the Pawnee in 1872, Grinnell was lucky enough to see a world that would soon be gone. It stayed with him for the rest of his life. The Indians hunting these beasts, stripped to near-nakedness, using bows and arrows to kill, thrilled him. "Armed with these ancestral weapons, they had become once more the simple children of the plains," he wrote. "Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature." Custer showed him a different view of that "nature," on an excursion into land in the northern Plains that had been promised to the Sioux by treaty. Grinnell served as naturalist for that expedition in 1874, an apparent breach of sovereignty that led to a gold rush, and eventual loss of land that the Sioux considered "the heart of everything that is." Of Custer, killed two years later at the Little Bighorn, Grinnell would write that he "knew nothing about Indians and was anyhow a harum-scarum fellow." Grinnell's own knowledge of three tribes of the Plains - the Pawnee, the Blackfeet and the Cheyenne - would expand with every summer he spent out West. As an author, he was considered the premier ethnologist of these people. But his tone would have made his subjects wince. While advocating for the people of Indian country, while learning their languages, customs and religious ways, and explaining it to the rest of the world, he still sounded like a cultural interloper from Manhattan. He wrote that Indians had "the stature of a man with the experience and reasoning powers of a child." This sentiment was common among even the most progressive voices of the time. But when considering the alternative - the plunderers, robber barons and overt racists who tried to wipe the native imprint from the land - Grinnell was ahead of his time. "The story of our government's intercourse with this race is an unbroken narrative of injustice, fraud and robbery," he wrote in 1892. Taliaferro, an author of five previous books, does a good job defending his subject on this count, noting how Grinnell's attitude evolved from the romantic to the pragmatic. "The tendency is to lump men of his generation and class in one foul ball of bigotry," he writes. With his other great lifework, on behalf of the natural world, Grinnell accomplished much. As the longtime editor of Porest and Stream, he went after poachers, pushed politicians to protect the habitat of the creatures his readers loved to hunt, and tried to shame his fellow citizens for what they were doing in the name of civilization. He was largely responsible for the creation of Glacier National Park. And a glacier in those American Alps still bears his name, though it's shrinking rapidly under the duress of climate change. (Grinnell College, in Iowa, is not connected with him or his immediate family.) In giving Grinnell his due, Taliaferro, a former senior editor at Newsweek, could have put his manuscript on a diet. There is far too much detail about peripheral matters that do little to enhance the character or his passions. The story often lacks momentum. He is coy - annoyingly so - about whether Grinnell, who married late in life, might have been gay. There's much hinting of "Brokeback Mountain" intimacy in the great outdoors among manly men of means. It hurts me as a Westerner to say that Easterners like Grinnell were better stewards of the big land on the sunset side of the continent than many who lived there. Grinnell helped to block a plan by knuckleheads in Idaho to build a dam in Yellowstone National Park. And his fighting words kept the timber, mining and grazing interests from getting total control over our public lands. Grinnell's memory lives on in the wild. And with this book, he is given the fresh look that he deserves. He saw airplanes fly over the empty plains where he'd once hunted bison with the Pawnee. timothy EGAN'S latest book, "A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith," will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Although his fame was later eclipsed by that of such naturalists as John Muir and Aldo Leopold, Brooklyn native George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) had a tremendous influence on conservation in his time, almost single-handedly rescuing the American buffalo from extinction and protecting Yosemite and Yellowstone from meddlesome poachers and developers. Taliaferro (All the Great Prizes, 2013) proves equal to the challenge of singing Grinnell's long overdue praises in this sweeping account of his life and many lasting accomplishments. Although Grinnell barely completed his degree at Yale in 1870, a stray opportunity to go bone hunting with one of his palaeontology professors ignited a lifelong passion for wilderness pursuits, which led to his editing Forest and Stream magazine and spending time with Plains Indian tribes. Grinnell also played a huge role in establishing Glacier National Park, where a glacier bears his name. Taliaferro's work has all the earmarks of a first-rate biography: colorful anecdotes, cameos of the many famous people Grinnell rubbed elbows with, and absorbing prose that will inspire reader admiration for this often overlooked but important environmental hero.--Carl Hays Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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.) thoroughlyand with due admirationdocuments 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
