Ernest Thompson Seton - 2

I hope I'm not boring you with this man's work. He's dated of course but in his day he was the popular naturalist of his time. If you take the time to look at what he did and read what he wrote, you wonder how did he get it all done in one lifetime. He was prodigious. Remember that for every piece of his that was in print there must have been twice as much material that was never published!

Click on images to enlarge them.

Twenty years ago when we lived in bountiful Sonoma County, California, I was up on an ordinary six-foot aluminum step ladder picking persimmons to ship to friends back East, when all of a sudden I was flung backwards onto our asphalt driveway as one leg of the ladder sunk into the ground and propelled me into the air. The ladder leg had broken into one of the many underground gopher tunnels that were part and parcel of the local landscape.

Sure enough, Ernest Thompson Seton had published an article about these critters in the June 1904 issue of The Century Magazine entitled The Master Plowman of the West. Had I read that piece I would not have entrusted my personal safety to a home-handymans' ladder instead of a traditional sturdy arbor ladder. We had under our land, I believe, a colony of gophers and their homes the size of Petaluma.

Here he draws and writes about crows, complete with his own musical score of crow calls.

It's from Silverspot, the Story of a Crow, that appeared in the February 1898 issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine.

The Century Magazine published Seton's Fable & Woodmyth as a continuing feature. This appeared as one of four in the December 1903 issue.

Here are more from November 1903 issue. They are remarkable for the obvious influence that the discovery and popularity of Japanese woodcuts had on the arts and crafts of the time.