Ernest Thompson Seton

Biography

The story goes that on his twenty-first birthday his father handed Ernest an invoice for everything he had spent on his son since birth, including the doctor’s fee for the delivery: $537.50. In his autobiography, “Trail of an Artist-Naturalist” (1940), Seton describes the episode in detail; he had no money, so he went to work and used what he earned to leave home.

He was born on 14 August 1860 in South Shields, County Durham, to Scottish parents, and was christened Ernest Evan Thompson. In 1866 the family emigrated to British North America, settling first in Lindsay and from 1870 living in Toronto. As a boy he retreated to the woods along the Don River to draw and watch animals, partly to keep out of the way of his abusive father. In 1879 he studied at the Ontario College of Art under John Colin Forbes, and in 1880 he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London. Later his name changed: first he became Seton-Thompson, then Thompson Seton, believing that Seton had been an important name in the family.

In 1882 he joined his brother on a homestead near Carberry, Manitoba, and began to write. His first book, “Mammals of Manitoba”, came out in 1886 and “The Birds of Manitoba” in 1891; that same year the provincial government appointed him Provincial Naturalist. In the 1890s he studied in Paris, at the Académie Julian. In 1893–94 he was elected an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and later became a full member. He illustrated his books himself.

The turning point was “Wild Animals I Have Known” (1898), which includes the story of his killing of the wolf Lobo. It was followed by “The Biography of a Grizzly” (1900), “Lives of the Hunted” (1901), “Two Little Savages” (1903) and “Rolf in the Woods” (1911). He was also drawn into the “nature fakers” controversy: in 1903 John Burroughs published an article in the Atlantic Monthly attacking writers of sentimental animal stories. The dispute lasted four years and even involved President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1907 Seton made a long journey through the northwest of Canada, and from it came “The Arctic Prairies” (1911), with his photographs and sketches.

Seton lived in New York and then at Wyndygoul, an estate he built in Cos Cob, a part of Greenwich, Connecticut. Local youths had been vandalizing the grounds; he invited them for a weekend and told them stories about American Indians and about nature. Out of this came the Woodcraft Indians (1902). The Ladies’ Home Journal printed his articles about it, and in 1906 they were collected as “The Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians”. Incidentally, its members were not Native Americans but ordinary boys and girls. It later grew into the Woodcraft Rangers, which have worked in Los Angeles since 1922.

In 1906 he met Robert Baden-Powell, who had read “The Birch Bark Roll” and been greatly interested in it. They exchanged ideas; Baden-Powell went on to found the Scouting movement, while Seton became president of the committee that created the Boy Scouts of America and was its first and only Chief Scout (1910–1915). He brought into the organization’s traditions what he believed to be American Indian customs. He had sharp clashes of temperament and principle with Daniel Carter Beard and James West. Besides the disputes over the text of the scouting handbook, there were objections to the suffragist activity of his wife, Grace Gallatin, and to his British citizenship: the federal charter that West was seeking required board members to be United States citizens. Seton drafted his resignation on 29 January 1915 and sent it in May; the post of Chief Scout was abolished. He became a United States citizen in 1931.

In 1928 the National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal for the fourth volume of “Lives of Game Animals”. From 1930 he lived in Santa Fe, and in 1933 he bought 100 acres (40 hectares) of land there, in New Mexico; the tract eventually grew to 2,500 acres (1,000 hectares). There he ran training camps for youth leaders, and a small publisher, Seton Village Press, closed in 1943 because of the war. He built himself a stone castle of thirty-two rooms. In the mid-1930s and early 1940s he belonged to the circle of artists and writers in Santa Fe, which included Georgia O’Keeffe and Randall Davey.

Seton died on 23 October 1946 in Seton Village, in his eighty-seventh year. He was cremated in Albuquerque. In 1960, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, his daughter Dee and his grandson Seton Cottier scattered his ashes from an airplane over Seton Village. The castle burned down in 2005 during restoration; by then the manuscripts and pictures had been removed to storage.