The Simple Delights of Childhood: “Days Afield on Staten Island” by William T. Davis (1892)

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Oct 062022
 

These Spring days, when we hear the bluebirds carol, and mark the revivifying influence of the season, we are sure to be affected thereby, and my companion smiles to see me dance beneath the pine tree. ” You seem happy,” he says, and yet I notice the light kindle in his own eyes, for the sunshine, the bluebirds and the robins have not come in vain to him.

What a blessing are the balmy hours of Spring! The warm sun distills a fragrance from the earth, and in the waste pastures, where there is a thick mat of vegetation, this odor is particularly strong. Nature is stirring straw- berries and crickets into life. The air is full of little flies, beetles run along the roadway, dogs lie asleep on the grass and the yellow flicker sounds his rattle in the trees. Then does the light within burn brightest, and our hearts seem to beat more joyously than they have all Winter long, and we are happy and at least transiently well under the sun. Old Sol smiles at our ways; we are flies on the sunny side of a pumpkin to him, and to ourselves we know not what we are.

It is a blessing to retain the simple delights of childhood, to be easily pleased, and it is well to be affected by the greening of the earth, even though we cannot exactly mention the charm or tell why we should be glad. It is no wonder that there have been May-poles, no wonder that the shepherds of old danced about the straws in the field at the feasts of Pales, and no wonder again that my companion and I become joyous in the hopeful days of Spring.

A child-like wonder infuses William T. Davis’ work, Days Afield on Staten Island (1892). With curiosity, wonder, and delight he explores the scruffy landscapes of a long-inhabited place, from its vacant lots and old orchards to its tidal marshes and its tumbledown farmhouses. He ventures afield through the seasons, describing both the remains of past inhabitation and the plants and animals that have taken over now that the human occupants are gone. In a time when much of Staten Island was still somewhat rural, he provided a series of charming vignettes of places that are now largely (though not completely) gone. I suspect he saw what was coming, though. In his second essay, “South Beach”, he observed that “not only do the land animals fall year by year before advancing civilization, but the life that ocean would seem to hold so securely, is also being gradually stolen away.”

Throughout his book, there is a haunting presence of the past. At one point, he explores an abandoned farmhouse, finding old ledgers and other artifacts strewn about the home. The dead are never far away; they linger at the edges of our sight. In the passage below, the Revolutionary War is remembered in the landscape.

In April the blood-root blossoms, and its single leat often closely clasps the flower stem, forming a sort of green collar. It is a dainty flower but none too choice to deck the steep hill sides of the crooked and shaded ravine where it grows in greatest profusion. This is Blood-root Valley and Blood-root Valley Brook, along the course of which, it is said, a British messenger, in Revolutionary days, travelled on his way from camp to camp. This stream, which is often dry in summer, also rises near the highest point, and goes to form the Richmond brook. The drainage of the district was formerly collected in a pond, used by a saw-mill, of which there is now only a few beams left, and the dam is broken. About 1870, the boys bathed in this pond, and a little lame boy with crutches and a board for support, used to enjoy himself as much as his companions.

A number of skirmishes occurred along Richmond or Stony brook, in the years of the Revolution, particularly on the day of the fight at St. Andrew’s Church. But it is more pleasing to think of it in the times of peace, to see the water snakes glide in so smoothly, the turtles scuttle with much haste and the wayward frogs jump recklessly off the bank frightening the black-nosed dace below. When these little fish are disturbed, they will scatter in all directions, coming together shortly, if they imagine the danger is past. At other times they will sink to the deepest places in the stream, and remain on the sand or pebbles, not moving a fin, and as their backs are sand colored, they are not easily seen from above. Occasionally when there is nothing to fear, one will be seen lying motionless for a long time between two pebbles, and thus can they rest and sleep when they desire.

And here, in this passage, the Indian presence is evoked by scattered potsherds:

To the east of the Bohman mansion, near Bohman’s Point, there is a little brook, that flows through a sandy semi pasture and woodland region. It is bordered in part by willows and old orchard trees, and the land has that unmistakable air of an ancient farming spot. On the high sand dune, nearby, about which this brook bends in bow fashion, the Indians lived in old time, and their implements and little heaps of flint chips, where the arrows were made, may still be discovered. The spring, where they got water, is on the hill-side, though now filled up with sand and grass grown, but the stones that formed its sides mark the site, and a tiny rill issues from among them in very wet weather.

They had an eye for beauty, as evinced by the patterns on the broken pieces of pottery lying about, and no doubt they thought the warblers very gay, that congregate in spring-time about a moist place near the brook. The warblers come every year, just the same, but the Indians are gone, and probably in the large factory across the Kill with its thousands of employes, only one or two would recognize their implements scattered among the other stones on the sand.

Finally, here is one last passage from the book, a charming vignette from the autumn time:

It is good to ramble in the autumn fields, in one of the barren sandy nooks where the sweet-fern grows, and where a sad pleasant flavored joy, seems to pervade all about you. With dextrous throws you bring down the apples, and though they may be gnarled and puny, you eat them with a relish, for they seem such free gifts from nature. They come without the asking or the toil, like the persimmons, or the strawberries in the field.

Autumn colors the barren ground vegetation very early with the deepest dye, and as we are taller than most of the plants that grow on the sand, we may look over them, and thus get a wide and varied view. The Virginia creeper runs flaming red along the ground, and the sumachs, the cat-briers and the poison ivy vines, are most vividly colored.

Perhaps the most curious tint of all the autumnal show is the greenish-white leaves of the bittersweet vine, that are speckled with yellow. They have an odd appearance, for all about them the leaves have turned to most vivid colors, while they alone have assumed so white and ghostly a shade. In the chestnuts and some of the oaks, the green color remains longest near the mid-rib, and in the oaks it is often a deep olive shade, and greatly adds to the beauty of the turning leaf. The wild cherry trees color an orange red, and the seedling cultivated cherries are flushed with red and look to be in a fever. The chestnut-oaks turn a light yellow, as do the chestnut trees and the hickories.

There is a vividness of color in many of the leaves that seems almost supernatural, and it is plain that we, who live and grow old on the Earth, can never cease to wonder at the yearly display. ” Look,” says the little boy, “at that Virginia creeper,” and in manhood he points again in wonderment at the flaming red vine in the cedar tree.

A few words about this book and its author are in order. I confess that I broke down and purchased a modern-day paperback copy; the originals are far outside f my price range, even though the book contains no illustrations whatsoever. At the time, I had assumed the author is unknown. In fact, William Thompson Davis (1862-1945) has a National Wildlife Refuge on Staten Island named after him. The property is now only 30 acres smaller than Central Park. Working with the Audobon Society, Davis helped secure the original 52-acre parcel back in 1928. Davis himself was a naturalist, entomologist, and historian. This was his only nature volume for a general audience, although he also published some scientific work on cicadas (ironically, cicadas are not mentioned in this book). Much later in his life, in 1930, he co-authored a five-volume history of Staten Island.

All One to a Mountain Stream: “A World of Green Hills” by Bradford Torrey (1898)

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Oct 062022
 

Stewart’s Pond, on the Hamburg road a mile or so from the village of Highlands, served me, a visiting bird-gazer, more than one good turn: selfishly considered, it was something to he thankful for; but I never passed it, for all that, without feeling that it was a defacement of the landscape. The Cullasajah River is here only four or five miles from its source, near the summit of Whiteside Mountain; and already a land- owner, taking advantage of a level space and what passes among men as a legal title, has dammed it (the reader may spell the word as he chooses — “ dammed ” or “ damned,” it is all one to a mountain stream) for uses of his own. The water backs up between a wooded hill on one side and a rounded grassy knoll on the other, narrows where the road crosses it by a rude bridge, and immediately broadens again, as best it can, against the base of a steeper, forest-covered hill just beyond. The shapelessness of the pond and its romantic surroundings will in the course of years give it beauty, but for the present everything is unpleasantly new. The tall old trees and the ancient rhododendron bushes, which have been drowned by the brook they meant only to drink from, are too recently dead. Nature must have time to trim the ragged edges of man’s work and fit it into her own plan. And she will do it, though it may take her longer than to absorb the man himself.

When I came in sight of the pond for the first time, in the midst of my second day’s explorations, my first thought, it must be confessed, was not of its beauty or want of beauty, but of sandpipers, and in a minute more I was leaning over the fence to sweep the water-line with my opera-glass. Yes, there they were, five or six in number, one here, another there; solitary sandpipers, so called with only a moderate degree of appropriateness, breaking their long northward journey beside this mountain lake, which might have been made for their express convenience. I was glad to see them.

Bradford Torrey was a master at the “ramble”, a genre of nature essay that, as the name suggests, rambled about. It had no particular objective beyond relating what Torrey saw and experienced on his outings into the natural world. Torrey’s world was dominated by what passed for a birding life-list in his day — he was constantly seeking out new species. He rarely observed them closely — identification was his primary goal. When birds were scarce, he noticed plants, particularly flowering ones. Very occasionally he mentioned some other other animal — for instance, a box turtle:

On Buck Hill, in the comparative absence of birds, I amused myself with a “dry land tarrapin,” as my West Virginia acquaintance had called it (otherwise known as a box turtle), a creature which I had seen several times in my wanderings, and had asked him about; a new species to me, of a peculiarly humpbacked appearance, and curious for its habit of shutting itself up in its case when disturbed, the anterior third of the lower shell being jointed for that purpose. A phlegmatic customer, it seemed to be; looking at me with dull, unspeculative eyes, and sometimes responding to a pretty violent nudge with only a partial closing of its lid. It is very fond of may apples (mandrake), I was told, and is really one of the “features” of the dry hill woods. I ran upon it continually.

While Torrey’s earliest essays explored familar haunts in Massachusetts (Torrey lived in Weymouth for most of his life), many of his later books feature his travels (by train, stagecoach, and foot) through various parts of the country that were beginning to find renown as touristed areas. Indeed, his accounts of his visits likely encouraged others to follow suit and take to the open road. A World of Green Hills was one of these accounts, based upon trips to the mountains of North Carolina and to Virginia (southwestern and the Natural Bridge area). In these later works, Torrey infused his nature observations with some of his notes on and conversations with the rural folk he chanced to meet along the way. They add a note of entertainment to what is otherwise a rather dry text — despite the “exotic” (for him) locales.

I have come to the conclusion that the ramble was very much a genre for its day, and its day has long passed. When Torrey published his book in 1898, reading was still one of the chief forms of entertainment for the urban and suburban middle and upper classes. In a time before radio and television, I can imagine a family gathering around a fireplace in the evening to listen to Torrey’s writings. They flow well and do not overly challenge the intellect. For all that I suspect he saw of changes in the land, Torrey rarely rebelled against the status quo. The opening passage of this blog post is a rare exception indeed. At another spot in this book, Torrey does observe how bird species appear to be changing in response to the clearing of forests, but here he offers no critique (if anything, I suspect that he welcomed what he perceived as an increase in avian biodiversity). Specifically, in comparing birds observed in North Carolina by William Brewster (a renowned ornithologist) many years previous, Torrey noted that

A few birds, too familiar to have attracted any particular notice on their own account, became interesting because of the fact that they were not included among those found here by Mr. Brewster. One of these was the Maryland yellow-throat, of which Mr. Brewster saw no signs above a level of 2100 feet… Probably the species had come in since Mr. Brewster’s day (eleven years before), with some change of local conditions, — the cutting down of a piece of forest, perhaps, and the formation of a bushy swamp in its place. A villager closely observant of such things, and well acquainted with the bird, assured me from his own recollection of the matter (and he remembered Mr. Brewster’s visit well) that such was pretty certainly the case.

Otherwise, I confess that I found little to share in this book. The ramble simply does not allow for in-depth explorations of ideas, issues, or even animal behaviors. Everything is cursory, in passing. The result may be ideal for a winter evening off-grid, but does not leave the reader much enriched in new insights. Still, may more Torrey volumes still await reading, and I will continue to seek out the few moments (like his dammed and damned passage above) where his observations and reflections shine.

The Woods and Fields Are Poem-Full: “The Face of the Fields” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1911)

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Oct 052022
 
“Dallas Lore Sharp”, 2012-06-11, https://hdl.handle.net/1912/17140

We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found ourselves descending the woods toward the garden-patch below. Halfway down we came to a great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the road of the mice. That was the end of it. There was not a single straying footprint beyond the tree.

I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop ! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round ? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods, small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution, is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating.

It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints ? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why? a hundred times!

But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species Mus they make no record of the fact that

The present only toucheth thee.

But that is a poem. Burns discovered that Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what

root and all, and all in all, / the humblest flower is.

The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world.

The more I read the works of Dallas Lore Sharp, the more I appreciate his flair for seeing both the scientific and the poetic elements in nature. The marriage of the two, as I have observed in many past blogs, was a common theme in American nature writing of this period. Sometimes the combinations were forced, like an arranged marriage between polar opposites, enforced by an author who is either a poet or a scientist, but rarely both at once. And sometimes a lovely description is marred by bad poetry, or a poetic account is marred by poor science. But in Sharp’s finest work, the two seem supremely natural when joined together. Neither alone can capture the complexity, majesty, wonder, and magic of nature, either in our own backyard or in the remote wilds. (In Sharp’s case, mostly rural nature, close at hand.)

This volume of Sharp’s essays is a trove of delightful writing. If I had to single out a few for praise, I would certainly highlight “Turtle Eggs for Aggasiz”, a somewhat humorous second-hand account of a naturalist’s frantic effort to secure turtle eggs for the renowned scientist Louis Agassiz, under the stipulation that the eggs had to have been laid no more than four hours previously. This essay, which is about as close to a page-turner as nature writers from this era ever achieve, is frequently anthologized. (Frequently, that is, relative to practically anything else I have read for the blog thus far.) Another essay celebrates John Burroughs; however, he borrowed heavily from it for his eulogy to Burroughs, The Seer of Slabsides, after the author’s death. The title essay, “The Face of the Fields”, celebrates the childlike quality of nature, in contrast to adults’ feelings of fear and dread we feel as we confront death in its many guises:

We cannot go far into the fields without sight-ing the hawk and the snake, the very shapes of Death. The dread Thing, in one form or another, moves everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane, through the black close waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of the winter sky, night and day, and every day, the four seasons through. I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows leap from the jaws of the pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike, twisting and bending in the beak of the kingfisher. The killer is killed; but at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sandbank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs the black snake, the third killer, and the belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off with a cry. I have been afield at times when one tragedy has followed another in such rapid and continuous succession as to put a whole shining, singing, blossoming world under a pall. Everything has seemed to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no peace, no stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face an instant as he halted, winding me.

Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the absence of peace and joy except within my own breast. There is struggle and pain and death in the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow and terrify; it has no being, no substance, no continu- ance. The shadow of the swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this shadow in the woods, this Fear. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling it; yet the very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it; for them Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.

The present only toucheth thee!

It does more, it throngs him our fellow mortal of the stubble field, the cliff, and the green sea. Into the present is lived the whole of his life — none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of fear in an animal’s life are moments of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature, from the shining stars that sing together, to the roar of a bitter northeast storm across these wintry fields.

We shall get little rest and healing out of nature until we have chased this phantom Fear into the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive. The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases us back into our burrows, where there is nothing but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain, or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet, we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if it were at our own heels, then we shall never get farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra, the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bun- galow floor. We shall always creep around by the wall, whimpering.

But there is no such thing as fear out of doors. There was, there will be; you may see it for an instant on your walk to-day, or think you see it; but there are the birds singing as before, and as before the red squirrel, under cover of large words, is prying into your purposes. The universal chorus of nature is never stilled. This part, or that, may cease for a moment, for a season it may be, only to let some other part take up the strain; as the winter’s deep bass voices take it from the soft lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder, until the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of the song.

As nature lives only in the moment, fear and dread are largely absent. The predator strikes and kills, then death departs again — its presence a fleeting shadow, quickly forgotten again. At the close of the essay, Sharp reprises this theme in a haunting, poetic passage that explains the meaning of the essay title:

Life, like Law and Matter, is all of one piece. The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, and I together with them all, come out of the same divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine breath; we have our beings under the same divine law; only they do not know that the law, the breath, and the dust are divine. If I do know, and yet can so readily forget such knowledge, can so hardly cease from being, can so eternally find the purpose, the hope, the joy of life within me, how soon for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear, all memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience what joy!

The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are so many emotions reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come, they pass utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child, asleep in winter, awake in summer, a face of life and health always, if we will but see what pushes the falling leaves off, what lies in slumber under the covers of the snow; if we will but feel the strength of the north wind, and the wild fierce joy of the fox and hound as they course the turning, tangling paths of the woodlands in their race with one another against the record set by Life.

One other particularly noteworthy essay in this volume is “The Nature-Writer”, which sheds light upon the character of the Nature Writing Movement of the time. Early in the essay, Sharp observes that “the nature-writer has now evolved into a distinct, although undescribed, literary species.” Sharp goes on to attempt to elucidate what characterizes him (or her, though usually him):

…the nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a scientist, is never mere scientist — zoologist or botanist. Animals are not his theme; flowers are not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant boundaries of his immediate neighborhood.

His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view; a literary, not a scientific, approach; which means that he is the axis of his world, its great circumference, rather than any fact any flower, or star, or tortoise. Now to the scientist the tortoise is the thing: the particular species Tbalassochelys kempi; of the family Testudinidse; of the order Chelonia; of the class Reptilia; of the branch Vertebrata. But the nature-writer never pauses over this matter to capitalize it. His tortoise may or may not come tagged with this string of distinguishing titles. A tortoise is a tortoise for a’ that, particularly if it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise which has been kept for thirty years in a yard by the nature-writer’s friend, and which [quoting Gibert White] “On the 1st November began to dig the ground in order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of hepaticas.”

The nature-writer also becomes deeply familiar with a particular spot of Earth, inhabiting it deeply and sharing its lessons with readers.

It is characteristic of the nature-writer… to bring home his outdoors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to himself. His is a dooryard universe, his earth a flat little planet turning about a hop-pole in his garden — a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neighbor townships, beyond whose shores he neither goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the road, nor votes appropriations for the schools.

He is limited to his parish because he writes about only so much of the world as he lives in, as touches him, as makes for him his home…

It is a large love for the earth as a dwelling-place, a large faith in the entire reasonableness of its economy, a large joy in all its manifold life, that moves the nature-writer. He finds the earth most marvelously good to live in — himself its very dust; a place beautiful beyond his imagination, and interesting past his power to realize — a mystery every way he turns. He comes into it as a settler into a new land, to clear up so much of the wilderness as he shall need for a home.

Alas, Sharp’s examples of nature writers are mostly the familars — Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, and John Burroughs. (“In none of our nature-writers… is this love for the earth more manifest than in John Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in him, an expression of his religion.”) Later in the essay, Sharp does make brief reference to Dr. C. C. Abbott and Maruice Maeterlinck (Belgian playwright and author of The Life of the Bee). But no others make the cut — not even Bradford Torrey. Alas, “the sad case with much nature-writing… is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.” Here, it would have been most helpful for Sharp to identify a few particular authors and their works, as a caution to the reader. Which of the many nature authors I have read, I wonder, would Sharp have placed in this category?

Sharp closes his essay with this poetic passage about good nature writing. Essentially, good nature writing is true to life, expressing an abiding love of the natural world.

Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too, and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest which is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars ; but for human beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.

The Gleeful Sense of Joy and Life In Nature: “A Woman Tenderfoot” by Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson (1900)

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Oct 052022
 

…the real fascination of hunting is not in the killing but in seeing the creature at home amid his glorious surroundings, and feeling the freely rushing blood, the health-giving air, the gleeful sense of joy and life in nature, both within and without.

Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson (a872-1959)was a turn-of-the-century adventurer and world traveler. After publishing this, her first book, she went on to produce nine more, chronicling her journeys to China, India, Southeast Asia, and South America. She was also the wife of the highly prolific author of wild animal accounts for young people, Ernest Thompson Seaton, whom she refers to as Nimrod in this volume. The appellation is ironic since the Biblical name has come to mean both a hunter and an idiot. I trust she had the former in mind in this case.

As a work of nature writing, this book probably isn’t, unless by association. While Ernest Seton Thompson (whose writings we will visit in future blog posts) wrote stories about the life experiences of North American wildlife (which eventually got him embroiled in the Nature Faker Controversy initiated by John Burroughs, also to be covered at a later date), his wife wrote mostly about the experience of being a woman roaming the wild West when the West was truly quite wild. The book is filled with advice to other tenderfoot wives, sometimes serious, other times more tongue-in-cheek. An entire early chapter is devoted to the best wardrobe choices for heading into the mountains on horseback. Her account leaves the reader thinking that the expedition she undertook with her husband was largely about hunting; however, there is a passage in which she reports on trapping a woodchuck which leads me to think it was mostly intended as a research opportunity.

Nimrod wanted some photographs of animals from life, and the energy which we put forth to obtain these was a constant surprise and disturbance to Uncle John and his co-loafers. They could understand why one might trap an animal, but to let it go again unhurt, after spending hours over it with a camera, was a problem that required many drinks and much quiet cogitation in the shade of the office.

For days we tried to get a woodchuck. At last we succeeded, and I find this note written in my journal for that date: “Oct. 15th: Nimrod caught a woodchuck to-day, a baby one, and we called him Johnny. Johnny stayed with us all day in his cage, while Nimrod made a sketch of him and I took his picture. Then, in the late afternoon, we took him back to his home in the stone-clad hill, and put him among his brothers and sisters, who peeped cautiously at us from various rocky niches, higher up the hill.

Little Johnny must have had a great deal to say of the strange ways and food of the big white animal. It must have been hard, too, for him to have found suitable woodchuck language to express his sensations when he was carried, oh! such a long way, in a big sack that grew on the side of his captor; and of the taste of peppermint candy, which he ate in his prettiest style, sitting on his haunches and clutching the morsel in both forepaws like any well-bred baby woodchuck. And then those delicious sugar cookies that Mrs. Spiker had just baked ! How could he make his ignorant brother chuckies appreciate those cookies ! Poor little Johnny is a marked woodchuck. He has seen the world.”

Apparently, neither she nor her husband was an expert in woodchuck nutrition.

In her charming, whimsical way, Grace then proceeds to share about her husband’s efforts to trap a skunk for photographs:

When Nimrod went hunting skunks, the group at the office gave us up. ” Locoed, plumb locoed,” was the verdict.

Have you ever been on a skunk hunt? But perhaps you have no prejudices. I had. My code of action for a skunk was, if you see a black and white animal, don’t stop to admire its beautiful bushy tail, but give a good imitation of a young woman running for her life.

This did not suit Nimrod. He assured me that there was no danger if we treated his skunkship respectfully, and, as I was the photographer, I put on my old clothes and meekly fell in line. Nimrod set several box traps in places where skunks had been. These traps were merely soap boxes raised at one end by a figure four arrangement of sticks, so that when the animal goes inside and touches the bait the sticks fall apart, down comes the box, and the animal is caged unhurt. The next morning we went the rounds. The first trap was unsprung. The second one was down. Of course we could not see inside. Was it empty? Was the occupant a rat or a skunk, and if so, what was he going to do?

Nimrod approached the trap. Just then a big tree chanced to get between me and it. I stopped, thinking that as good a place as any to await developments.

” It’s a skunk all right,” Nimrod announced gleefully.

The box was rather heavy, so Nimrod went to Yeddar’s, which was not far away, to see if he could get one of the loungers to help carry the captive to a large wire cage that we had rigged up near our shack.

There were six men near the office, bronzed mountaineers, men of guns and grit, men who had spent their lives facing danger; but, when it came to facing a skunk, each looked at Nimrod as one would at a crazy man and had important business elsewhere. For once I thoroughly appreciated their point of view, but as there was no one else I took one end of the box, and we started.

It was a precarious pilgrimage, but we moved gently and managed not to outrage the little animal’s feelings.

When the men saw us coming across the creek, with one accord they all went in and took a drink.

We gingerly urged Mr. Skunk into the big cage, and with the greatest caution, never making a sudden move, I took his picture. All was as merry as a marriage bell, and might have continued so but for that puppy Sim. That is the trouble with skunks; they will lose their manners if startled, and dogs startle skunks.

Of course the puppy barked; of course the skunk did not like it. He ruffled up his cold black nose, and elevated his bushy tail his beautiful, plumy tail. I opened the door of his cage and, snatching the puppy, fled.

The skunk was a wise and good animal, really a gentleman, if treated politely. He appreciated my efforts on his behalf. He forbearingly lowered his tail, composed his fur, and walked out of the cage and into the near-by woods as tamely as a house tabby out for a stroll.

Grace’s work opens with the observation that “This book is a tribute to the West”. Ultimately, as a semi-comedic Western adventure, it is a charming read. She does in fact go hunting with her husband, killing first an elk and then an antelope. She reminds readers, however, that having bagged these two, she hunted from that point on only with a camera.

Elsewhere in the book, she shares a delightful story about getting lost with her husband. She also describes scenes of ducks swimming, does prancing, coyotes calling, and pikas gathering hay in the high Rockies. Throughout the book, the author conveys a fortitude that contradicts her fairly frequent self-deprecating remarks. As she notes by the end of the book, her adventures turned her into a seasoned traveler, and she was no longer able to claim the title of Woman Tenderfoot.