George Bird Grinnell

Mount Grinnell in Glacier National Park in Montana is named after him.

• Born — 20 September 1849 • Birthplace — Brooklyn, New York, U.S. • Died — 11 April 1938 • Place of death — New York City, U.S.

Grinnell was born on September 20, 1849, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of George Blake and Helen Lansing Grinnell. The family moved when he was seven to Audubon Park, the section of Washington Heights in Manhattan which was developed from the estate after noted ornithologist John James Audubon's death in 1851. Grinnell graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in 1870 and a Ph.D. in 1880.

Grinnell had extensive contact with the terrain, animals and Native Americans of the northern plains; after receiving his degree, Grinnell obtained a position in 1870 with an expedition of the Peabody Museum at New Haven to collect vertebrate fossils in the West for six months. He became friendly with, and was able to take part in the last great hunt of the Pawnee in 1872. He spent many years studying the natural history of the region. As a Yale graduate student, he accompanied Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 1874 Black Hills expedition as a naturalist. (He later declined a similar invitation for the ill-fated 1876 Little Big Horn expedition.) In 1875, Colonel William Ludlow, who had been part of Custer's gold exploration effort, invited Grinnell to serve as naturalist and mineralogist on an expedition to Montana and the newly established Yellowstone Park. He was also a member of the Edward Henry Harriman expedition of 1899, a two-month survey of the Alaskan coast by an elite group of scientists and artists.

• Illustration — The Salamander Glacier and Lake Josephine, Glacier National Park. The Salamander used to be part of Grinnell Glacier but was named in the mid-20th century after Grinnell dwindled and split in two. Lying immediately beneath the Salamander, Grinnell Glacier is not visible in this photograph. Grinnell made hunting trips to the St. Mary Lakes region of what is now Glacier National Park in 1885, 1887 and 1891 in the company of James Willard Schultz, the first professional guide in the region. During the 1885 visit, Grinnell and Schultz while traveling up the Swiftcurrent valley observed the glacier that now bears his name. Along with Schultz, Grinnell participated in the naming of many features in the Glacier region. He was later influential in establishing Glacier National Park in 1910.

Grinnell's books and publications reflect his lifelong learnings about the ways of northern American plains and the Plains tribes. Along with J. A. Allen and William T. Hornaday, Grinnell was a historian of the buffalo and their relationship to Plains tribal culture. In When Buffalo Ran (1920), he describes hunting and working buffalo from a buffalo horse. Grinnell's best-known works are on the Cheyenne, including The Fighting Cheyennes (1915), and a two-volume work, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Lifeways (1923). His principal translator (and also an informant) for both books was George Bent, a Cheyenne of mixed race who had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. George E. Hyde may have done much of the writing. In 1928, Grinnell explored the story of brothers Major Frank North and Captain Luther H. North, who led Pawnee Scouts for the US Army. In other works on the Plains culture area, he focused on the Pawnee and Blackfeet people: Pawnee Hero Stories (1889), Blackfoot Lodge Tales (1892), and The Story of the Indian (1895). Of his work, President Theodore Roosevelt said, "In his books… Mr. George Bird Grinnell has portrayed [the Indians] with a master hand; it is hard to see how his work can be bettered." Selected papers by Grinnell were edited and published in 1972 by J. F. Reiger, a professor of history at Ohio University-Chillicothe and the former executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society.

• Illustration — The tower of George Bird Grinnell's headstone in Woodlawn Cemetery A news service took a photo of him and his wife, Elizabeth Curtis Williams Grinnell, on Grinnell Glacier in 1925. He was still a traveler and explorer into his late seventies, but had a heart attack when he was 79 at home in New York in July 1929. Despite a poor prognosis he recovered, slowly. Other illnesses kept him in the East in his final years, and Grinnell died April 11, 1938, aged 88, in New York City. He was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

• Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales (1889) (Reprint: University of Nebraska Press, 1961) • Blackfoot Lodge Tales (1892) (Reprint: BiblioBazaar, 2006) • Hunting In Many Lands: The Book Of The Boone And Crockett Club (1895) (Reprint: Kessinger Publishing, 2007) • The Story of the Indian (1895) • The Indians of Today (1900) • American Duck Shooting (Classics of American Sport) (1901) (Reprint: Stackpole Books, 1991) • The Punishment of the Stingy (1901) • Alaska 1899: Essays from the Harriman Expedition (1902) (Reprint: University of Washington Press, 1995) • American Big Game in Its Haunts (1904) (Reprint: Dodo Press, 2007) • American Game-Bird Shooting (1910) • Trails of the Pathfinders (1911) • Beyond the Old Frontier (1913) • Blackfeet Indian Stories (1913) (Reprint: BiblioBazaar, 2007) • The Fighting Cheyennes (1915) (Reprint: Kessinger Publishing, 2007) • When Buffalo Ran (1920, 2008) • The Cheyenne Indians, Vol. 1: History and Society (1923) (Reprint: Bison Books, 1972) • The Cheyenne Indians, Vol. 2: War, Ceremonies, and Religion (1923) (Reprint: Bison Books, 1972) • By Cheyenne Campfires (1926) (Reprint: University of Nebraska Press, 1971) • Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee Battalion (1928) (Reprint: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) • The Boy Scout's Book of True Adventure: Fourteen Honorary Scouts. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1931. • Hunting on Three Continents, by George Bird Grinnell, Kermit Roosevelt, W. Redmond Cross, and Prentiss N. Gray (editors). New York: The Derrydale Press, 1933. -- The seventh book of the Boone and Crockett Club, this wide-ranging collection includes accounts of Expeditions toward the North Pole and to the south of the Equator, articles relating to wild animals, and other pieces that speak the perils of hunting game to the brink of extinction. • The Last of the Buffalo (American Environmental Studies), (Ayer Co Pub, 1970) • The Passing of the Great West, (Winchester Press, 1972) • The Whistling Skeleton: American Indian Tales of the Supernatural, (Four Winds Press, 1982) • Native American Ways: Four Paths to Enlightenment, (A & D Publishing, 2007)