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.
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