Happy Hunting Ground

One autumn day last week in Seton Village, N. Mex., death came to a man who, in an age of sweeping mechanization, had loved the natural earth, its seasons and its creatures, with rare intensity and an unusual power to communicate his vision to others. To three generations of children whom his stories of wild life had introduced to the life of woods and fields, to naturalists indebted to the scope and minute fidelity of his discernments, Ernest Thompson Seton's death was something like the falling of a forest tree.

He was born (1860) in a city--bleak South Shields, in Britain, the twelfth child of a family of 14 children. The trail (he seldom used the words "road" or "path") that led him to the woods was long and hard. It led him first to Canada, where his study of nature was hampered by frontier chores, poverty, parental obstruction and poor health. Audubon's bird paintings inspired his drawing.

On $3 a week, he studied art in London, where he lived chiefly on bread & milk. Later he changed his venue (to Manhattan), but not his diet. His animal drawings began to catch on. St. Nicholas magazine published some of his first output of animal stories.

Mighty Hunter. On the plains of Manitoba, the sickly youth grew to be a young giant. His normal walking pace was a killing five miles an hour. Then, on the high plains of New Mexico, he became a celebrated wolf hunter--in the tradition of one of his ancestors, Evan Cameron, whom he called "The mighty wolf hunter of the North." His first popular books (Wild Animals I Have Known and The Biography of a Grizzly) sold hundreds of thousands of copies among captivated readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The writer was established, but the naturalist was not. Naturalist John Burroughs called Naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton a nature faker. So the younger man wrote his learned, monumental (eight volumes) Lives of Game Animals (sales: a piddling 2,650 copies). Later the John Burroughs Memorial Association made amends by giving the still-living naturalist a medal.

Then Ernest Thompson Seton had a vision that would restore all the youth of the world to nature. He blueprinted the organization of the Boy Scouts (with whose high command he later quarreled). Almost inevitably, the life and nature worship of the Indians obsessed him more & more. There seemed no other way out of civilization's ills.

In 1930, he moved to New Mexico, established a cult devoted to nature, Indian lore and Indian dancing. In tribal dress, he lectured daily, worked on unfinished books, built an adobe castle as a museum shrine. When he died, he was planning a 10,000-mile lecture tour.

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