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

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.