America has produced a long line of conservation heroes. Theodore Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Jimmy Carter. Most of them stood on a foundation laid by a man whose name they would have recognized but whom most Americans today have never heard of.
His name was George Bird Grinnell. Working from an editor’s desk in New York, decades before Roosevelt could wield the powers of the presidency, Grinnell founded the first Audubon Society, helped save Yellowstone, fought the destruction of the bison, and willed Glacier National Park into being. He did most of it through a single magazine and a refusal to be credited for any of it.
This is the story of America’s first conservation activist, and why his fight is not finished.
The Greatest Conservationist You Have Never Heard Of
Grinnell was born in 1849 into wealth. His father, George Blake Grinnell, was a New York financier whose business circle included the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. The son grew up with the best tutors and a place at Yale, on track for a comfortable life in business.
117 public lands destinations are under threat. Get the free briefing that 27,000+ people use to stay informed and take action.
He chose a different road. The turn came in his final year at Yale, on a trip west to collect fossils. The American West he saw on that expedition would reshape his life, and through him, the country.
Expedition to the American West
Othniel C. Marsh, Yale’s first professor of vertebrate paleontology, recruited Grinnell for an 1870 fossil-collecting expedition to the West. The trip carried him through some of the most extraordinary country on the continent and opened his eyes to what was at stake.
Back east, Grinnell worked for his father while serving as Marsh’s unofficial assistant, helping build the specimen collection at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. What started as a partnership in natural science would steer him away from a life as a financier and toward a career as a naturalist and a fighter for conservation.
From Author To Crusader
While traveling for Marsh, Grinnell began writing about what he saw, publishing in Forest and Stream, a popular magazine of hunting, fishing, and the outdoors founded by Charles Hallock in 1873.
In 1880, Grinnell took over the magazine, and he would run it as editor and president until 1911. Around the same time he finished his doctorate at Yale in osteology and vertebrate paleontology. He turned Forest and Stream from a sportsman’s weekly into the loudest voice of the young conservation movement.
The national park is founded on sentiment. It is a legislative recognition of the existence in human nature of something higher than the sordid love of gain, than the mere question of dollars and cents.
To all that class who unblushingly place their little interests above a great public interest, who without scruple would inaugurate measures which must lead to the ruin of the National Park, Congress should oppose but one answer, and that should be written in distinct and permanent characters on every border of the Park: “Thus far thou shalt come and no further.”
George Bird Grinnell
Founding The First Audubon Society
Grinnell turned Forest and Stream against the plume trade, an industry that slaughtered birds by the millions so their feathers could decorate women’s hats. In a run of crusading editorials he argued that “the public are awakening to see that the fashion of wearing the feathers and skins of birds is abominable.”
In 1886, he went further and founded a society for the protection of birds and their eggs, naming it for John James Audubon, the most famous ornithologist and bird painter of the century, whose widow had once tutored a young Grinnell. The response stunned him. Within two years the first Audubon Society had drawn more than 50,000 members, so many that Forest and Stream could no longer manage it and the original society folded in 1888. But the idea had taken hold. State Audubon societies sprang up across the country and joined in 1905 to form what is today the National Audubon Society.
Grinnell called for an end to killing of any wild bird not used for food; an end to the destruction of nests and eggs of all wild birds; and an end to the wearing of feathers for ornaments or trimming for dress.
John Taliaferro, author of Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West
Rescuing America’s First National Park
Yellowstone National Park was established by an act of Congress signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. A decade later, the country’s first national park was at risk of becoming a cautionary tale.
A contract between the Department of the Interior and the Yellowstone Park Improvement Company handed a private firm sweeping rights to develop and profit from the park. Poachers were gutting its wildlife. Picture the country’s first national park run as a private concession, its animals shot for the market and its wonders fenced off for paying guests.
To Grinnell, the looting of Yellowstone signaled the eventual ruin of the country’s wildest places. Proving once more that the pen could outmatch the rifle, he sounded the alarm in a series of blistering editorials in Forest and Stream that were picked up by the nation’s leading newspapers. In defending Yellowstone against commercial interests, he made himself the leading voice of an emerging movement, and he did it long before Theodore Roosevelt held the office that could protect these places.
An Inflection Point In The Age of Industry
Grinnell saw that the country had reached a turning point. The industrial boom that had vaulted the United States to the front of the world economy was now capable of pursuing profit in reckless ways, and the American West was the obvious target.
He ran weekly editorials pressing for legislation to keep Yellowstone under federal control, and he recruited powerful allies to carry the fight in Washington, among them Theodore Roosevelt, then a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, and Speaker of the House Thomas Reed.
His campaign paid off. In 1894 Congress passed the Yellowstone Park Protection Act, also known as the Lacey Act of 1894 after its sponsor, Representative John Lacey. The law made it a crime to harm wildlife or property inside the park and gave teeth to enforcement, building toward the system of rangers who would eventually guard the parks. Grinnell had long argued that troops should be stationed in Yellowstone to defend it, and his pressure helped make protection real. Just as important, it put commercial interests on notice that the cost of plunder could be paid in the court of public opinion.
Founding The Boone and Crockett Club
In 1887, Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club, the oldest wildlife conservation organization in North America. Its mission was to promote the conservation of wildlife and habitat, defend ethical hunting under the rule of fair chase, and put the weight of influential sportsmen behind conservation law.
With the club behind it, Congress passed the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife protection law in the country. It banned interstate trafficking in illegally taken game and curbed the importation of harmful species, and it remains a cornerstone of American wildlife law more than a century later.
On March 14, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt established Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, the first unit of what became the National Wildlife Refuge System. By the end of his presidency Roosevelt had created more than fifty such refuges, finally putting federal muscle behind the protections Grinnell had championed for two decades.
Here is this Yellowstone Park. The large game of the West may be preserved from extermination.
George Bird Grinnell
From Hunter To Protector
Grinnell was himself a hunter and a sportsman. As he grew older he came to see that the survival of the game depended on restraining the hunter, and he became a tireless advocate for laws that did exactly that.
Under one editorial heading, “Loose Moose Morals,” he scolded the lawbreakers of his day, insisting that the time had come for offenders against the game laws to be held to account. He had watched poachers and commercial outfits hollow out the wildlife of the West, and he meant to write the ground rules that would protect what remained.
Two Men, One Movement: Grinnell and Roosevelt
Grinnell’s campaign to stop the commercial slaughter of wildlife foreshadowed the work of later groups fighting to protect endangered species worldwide. Roosevelt’s wildlife refuges pointed the way toward the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
Together, the two men showed what organized public pressure could do against private industry when the long-term interest of the country, including the people not yet born, was on the line.
We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.
Theodore Roosevelt
Speaking Out On Behalf Of Native Americans
Grinnell did not only love the land. He grew close to its original stewards, the Native peoples of the West, and he spent much of his life learning and recording their histories at a time when most of white America dismissed them.
The caricature of Native Americans as savages was a convenient excuse for seizing their land and erasing their cultures. Grinnell pushed back with his pen, writing, “We are too apt to forget that these people are humans like ourselves. That they are fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters; men and women with emotions and passions like our own.” His record on this score was not free of the paternalism of his era, but his insistence on the basic humanity of Native peoples set him apart from most of his contemporaries.
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 had no rights because he has never had the power to enforce any.
George Bird Grinnell
On his travels west, Grinnell made time to sit with Native communities and learn their customs, traditions, and histories. He believed those histories deserved to be told, and he wanted to be the one to tell them. The result was a substantial body of scholarship that, like much of his work, ran generations ahead of its time.
The Prize He Most Wanted: Glacier National Park
As Grinnell’s biographer John Taliaferro writes, “Glacier National Park was the prize which George Bird Grinnell most desired.” He first set foot in the high country of northwest Montana in 1885 and fell hard for it.
Six years later, in Forest and Stream, he gave it the name that stuck: the crown of the continent. As one of the first Americans to explore and describe the region, Grinnell would later have a glacier, a lake, and a mountain named in his honor.
From the moment he first imagined it as a national park in 1891, he worked to build support, writing editorials and lobbying leaders including Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. In 1910, nearly twenty years later, Congress passed and President Taft signed the bill creating Glacier National Park.
More than a century on, millions of visitors a year travel to see the same country Grinnell saw in 1885 when he lost his heart to the crown of the continent.
Laying The Groundwork For The National Park Service
Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, is rightly remembered as the force behind a unified system of national parks. But the idea did not start with Mather.
Years earlier, it was Grinnell who called for troops to guard the parks and who lent his influential voice to the idea of a single, federally protected park system. That vision became law in 1916, when Congress passed and President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation creating the National Park Service.
What mattered to Grinnell was never the credit, only the result. In his own words: “I think that one reason why preservation matters have gone so slowly in this country is because a lot of us have been continually squabbling over who should get the credit of having done something or started something. My view for a good many years has been to try and get results.” And get results he did.
You and I and the rest of our generation are now getting within range of the rifle pits. We, all of us, have to face the same fate a few years earlier or a few years later, and I think what really matters is that, according to our lights, we shall have borne ourselves well and rendered what service we were able as long as we could do so.
Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to George Bird Grinnell (via John Taliaferro)
A Life Of Service
Before Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, before Theodore Roosevelt and the Antiquities Act, there was George Bird Grinnell. He used his wealth and his standing to acquire a magazine and turn it into a megaphone for conservation that he kept blowing for the rest of his life.
He shaped public policy and pushed political leaders to act. He pursued a relentless agenda to protect the country’s wild places, its rivers, its glaciers, its mountains, its forests, and its parks. He founded the first Audubon Society to end the slaughter of birds for fashion. He co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club to set limits on hunting and to drive the first federal wildlife laws through Congress.
The Conscience Of A Movement
Through his editorials, Grinnell fixed his attention on a single goal: that the country’s public lands be preserved and protected for the people who would come after. He became the midwife of a young environmental movement and, for decades, its conscience.
That movement produced its own leaders. Stephen Mather, inspired by Grinnell’s example, left his own life of privilege to build and run the national park system, working alongside his deputy Horace Albright.
The Legacy Of George Bird Grinnell
What Grinnell, Mather, and Roosevelt shared was a belief that privilege carried an obligation, and that the obligation was to leave a better country behind. Where others chased wealth for its own sake, these men moved from a life of privilege to a life of purpose, and the legacy they built is one the rest of us still get to enjoy.
Their example also leaves us a charge. The dangers facing these places did not end in Grinnell’s lifetime, and the work of defending them falls to each generation in turn.
The conservation ethic Grinnell and Roosevelt forged carried into the next generation and produced a different Roosevelt, from a different party, who understood that protecting the country’s natural wonders was not a partisan cause but an American one. Franklin Roosevelt stood on the shoulders of these conservation giants. His Civilian Conservation Corps put unemployed young men to work conserving forests, fighting erosion, and building the infrastructure of state and national parks during the depths of the Great Depression, planting an estimated three billion trees and reshaping the public lands we use today.
Keep reading: America’s Greatest Conservation President and Historic Landmarks in America.
The Lesson Of America’s First Conservation Activist
The lesson of Grinnell’s life is that the work belongs to all of us, whatever our means or our politics. There was a time when preserving the country’s natural treasures was a cause championed by leaders of both parties. It should be again.
These places belong to every American, and keeping them whole for the people who come after is a shared responsibility. Greed is as old as history, but so is the impulse to serve and to leave the world better than we found it. George Bird Grinnell answered that call. Whether the lands he gave his life to protect survive and flourish now depends on whether we answer it too.
As Theodore Roosevelt once wrote to his fellow conservationist: “I think what really matters is that, according to our lights, we shall have borne ourselves well and rendered what service we were able as long as we could do so.”
Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the “game belongs to the people.”
So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction.
Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.
Theodore Roosevelt
