The pantheon of conservation leaders through American history is familiar; John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and David Brower most prominent. George Bird Grinnell deserves to be among them, but his name and his contributions are not as well known or appreciated. John Taliaferro has written the first comprehensive biography of Grinnell, which is a step toward recognizing the scope and significance of his long career.

Why is Grinnell not as well-known as these as these other luminaires? Taliaferro’s telling of his life suggests several reasons: he was a prolific writer, but his prose did not soar and inspire like Muir’s; he worked in the political arena, but was not the adept politician and self-promoter that Pinchot was; he did not lead highly public fights like Brower did. He of course did not have the power of Theodore Roosevelt.

President Calvin Coolidge, presenting Grinnell with the Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service in 1925, said to him, “I am glad to have a part in the public recognition which your self-effacing and effective life has won.” Taliaferro remarks of this, “By nature a reserved man himself, Coolidge had invoked George Bird Grinnell’s essence precisely.” Grinnell seems to have lived by a code against self-promotion and during his life was eclipsed in the public eye by Muir, Pinchot, and Roosevelt.

Grinnell was not only a conservationist, but very engaged through most of his career with research and writing about American Indians. He knew the Southern Piegan Blackfeet and Northern Cheyenne people very well, and the greatest body of his written work and his greatest achievements as a writer dealt with these people. He was a prolific writer, using his journal Forest and Stream to report on and advocate for conservation issues, editing and writing for Boone and Crockett Club books, publishing often on Indians in the journal American Anthropologist, writing young adult adventure stories, and publishing major books like The Fighting Cheyennes and his two-volume magnum opus The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. He was accomplished as a journalist, anthropologist, historian, and naturalist.

Grinnell lived from 1849 to 1938, and the story of those 89 years is remarkable in many ways, not least for the cast of characters he knew in his long life. As a child he was taught by Lucy Bakewell Audubon, widow of John James Audubon, and living in Audubon Park, surrounded by the Audubon mystique and bird-filled woods, he developed a lifelong interest in nature.  Despite being a poor student lacking focus, he graduated from Yale in 1870 and his romantic yen for adventure led him to volunteer to go west with a fossil-hunting expedition led by the pioneering Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh.

An upper crust Easterner  who lived most of his life in New York City, Grinnell fell in love with the West, and would make more than 40 trips there. One of those trips was with George Armstrong Custer’s 1874 Black Hills expedition, and though invited, he fortunately was unable to travel with Custer to his disastrous end at the Little Bighorn in 1875, traveling instead to his first national park, Yellowstone. Over the years his conservation work connected him to Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, C. Hart Merriam, Gifford Pinchot, Charles Sheldon, William T. Hornaday, and Stephen Mather, among others. His research, writing, and advocacy of Indians led to relationships with many of them, including several who had been in the Little Bighorn fight.

Grinnell earned a doctorate in osteology with his mentor Marsh, but as an outdoorsman, sportsman, and hunter he found his career path when he became natural history editor and then owner and editor of Forest and Stream, a “sportsman’s journal.” In the first issue in 1873 the publisher wrote that the publication aimed “to merit and secure the patronage and countenance of that portion of the community whose refined intelligence enables them to properly appreciate and enjoy all that is beautiful in nature.”

The appreciators to whom the journal was dedicated were of course “refined sportsmen” who practiced “legitimate sports of land and water,” primarily hunters and fishermen. After a spell of writing and editing for the journal Grinnell, fed up after a few years at his father’s firm on Wall Street and not hurting for funds, purchased the journal and would publish it for decades, losing money but using it to advocate as well as report on conservation issues of the time.

The two conservation campaigns for which Grinnell is best known are his effort to form the Audubon Society and his advocacy for a Glacier National Park. Inspired by widespread outrage at extensive use of wild bird feathers for the millenary trade – women’s hats – which was decimating bird populations, Grinnell launched a campaign in Forest and Stream against the practice, in concert with the American Ornithological Union among others.

He “grasped that the solution lay in educating and mobilizing the public,” which would be the mission of the Audubon Society. In 1887 he began publishing Audubon Magazine for the 19,830 members of the Society, and by December of 1888 the Society had 48,862 members. This was too much – “with membership free and the magazine nearly so, Forest and Stream’s losses were directly proportionate to the movement’s success” and Audubon Magazine stopped publication. But the seed had been planted, and in 1896 two women founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

“Other states soon followed their lead,” writes Taliaferro, “and in 1905 Grinnell’s original idea of a confederation of bird defenders was reborn as the National Association of Audubon Societies, which continues today as the National Audubon Society, one of the most respected and effective forces for conservation and education in the country, if not the world.”

Grinnell’s second campaign was to advocate for a Glacier National Park. When he first traveled to the St. Mary Lake region east of the continental divide in northwestern Montana in 1887, he literally fell in love with the spectacular mountain landscape and would return many times in ensuing years. This was the country of the Southern Piegan Blackfeet, and he became intensely interested in them and their plight as well as that of other tribes in the Northern Great Plains and Rockies.

He explored the heights above St. Mary Lake, considered it “his” country, naming lakes and peaks after himself and his friends and fellow explorers (one of his few indulgences of ego, according to Taliaferro). Inspired by the example of Yellowstone and later national parks, he nurtured the idea of establishing a Glacier National Park for decades, advocated for it in Field and Stream, lobbied Congress, marshalled his considerable allies until, in 1910, Congress established the park. National park issues continued to occupy him – he encouraged and supported his friend Charles Sheldon’s successful campaign for a Mt. McKinley National Park (now Denali) and lobbied for creation of the National Park Service.

Grinnell was for much of his life a hunter, a “sportsman,” and his journal advocated for sportsman’s interests. He was not only concerned about the impact of market hunting and fashion on birds but even more about the fate of game animals in the West. Bison, elk, pronghorn, and other species were fast disappearing.

In 1887 he attended a dinner at Theodore Roosevelt’s sister’s New York home where he, along with Roosevelt and several others, formed the Boone and Crockett Club. Taliaferro quotes Grinnell from 1923: “We regretted the unnecessary destruction of game animals, but we did not know all it meant, nor had we the vision to look forward and imagine what it portended. So, though we discussed in a general way the preservation of game, it must be confessed – in light of later events – that we were talking about things about which we knew very little. We wanted the game preserved, but chiefly with the idea that there might be good hunting which should last for generations.”

What they “knew very little” about was the complexity of what would be required to protect game and other species: laws that would need to be passed and the politics necessary to do so; the fact that hunting regulations and law enforcement would only get them so far; the insights into the problem of extinction and the role of habitat that would come from ecology; the reality that efforts to protect only game animals would be insufficient – communities of plants and animals would need protection.

Grinnell’s big game hunting slowed later in life, but he remained convinced that hunting was fine and did not conflict with conservation. With Charles Sheldon, he wrote in the preface of the Boone and Crockett 1922 anthology, titled Hunting and Conservation ,“a credo that was pragmatic, high-minded, and unapologetic:”

We have on the one hand descriptions of hunting – of the killing of animals- on the other hand the advocacy of measures by which these animals may be preserved from being killed. There is no conflict between these two views. Animals are for man’s use, and one of those uses is recreation, of which hunting is a wholesome form. So long as it does not interfere with the maintenance of permanently breeding stocks of any species, this recreation is legitimate and worthy.

Grinnell was a product of his time whether this be reflected in such an anthropocentric characterization of animals as “for man’s use” (certainly still the view in many, if not most, circles) or in his characterization of Indians as being in a “savage” or “primitive” state. Taliaferro describes a complex man whose perceptions grew, whether his subject be sport, nature, or Indians.

Despite his categorical condescension – his paternalism, his embrace of contemporary evolutionary theory, his casual use of the word savage – he vouches for the humanity of the Blackfeet and Indians in general, and he condemns white civilization for its conduct toward them. The very first paragraph of Blackfoot Lodge Tales [1892] reads: “The most shameful chapter of American history is that in which is recorded the account of our dealings with the Indians. The story of our government’s intercourse with this race is an unbroken narrative of injustice, fraud, and robbery. Our people have disregarded honesty and truth whenever they have come in contact with the Indian, and he has no rights because he has never had to power to enforce any.”

Grinnell was a campaigner both for conservation and social justice. In some things a man of his time, in others ahead of his time.

Biographer Taliaferro, in summarizing his impressions of his subject, notes that – Grinnell “toggled restlessly between two worlds: East and West, the nineteenth century and the twentieth, the wild and the tame, the entitled and the dispossessed, the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage.’”

Taliaferro admits that despite a trove of materials to work from; 40,000 pages of correspondence, 50 diaries and notebooks, 35e years of Forest and Stream articles and editorials, and more, he found it hard to penetrate the inner Grinnell. “For all his curiosity about the external world, there was one realm he hesitated to explore let alone share: He guarded his inner self.”

Despite this, Taliaferro has given us a long-overdue comprehensive biography of a major player in the history of conservation and of the American West.