George Bird Grinnell - Exploration and conservation, Ethnology of the Plains Cultures

Naturalist and author, born in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He studied at Yale, and worked as a banker for four years before joining a Black Hills expedition as a naturalist. In 1876 he became an editor with Forest and Stream magazine, and as editor-in-chief (1880–1911) made it the country's leading natural history journal. A founder of the Audubon Society (1886) and the New York Zoological Society, he promoted national parks and wildlife preserves. He published several books on Indian lore, hunting, and natural history, as well as a series for boys about the outdoors.

George Bird Grinnell (September 20, 1849 – April 11, 1938) was an American anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and writer. Grinnell was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Yale University with a B.A.

Exploration and conservation

Grinnell had extensive contact with the terrain, animals and Native Americans of the northern plains, starting with his participation in the last great hunt of the Pawnee in 1872.

In 1885, Grinnell discovered the glacier in Montana that now bears his name and he was later influential in establishing Glacier National Park in 1910.

Grinnell was prominent in movements focusing on preservation of wildlife and conservation. In 1887, Grinnell was a founding member, with Theodore Roosevelt, of the Boone and Crockett Club, dedicated to the restoration of America's wildlands. Grinnell and Roosevelt published the Club's first book in 1895. Grinnell also organized the first Audubon Society and was an organizer of the New York Zoological Society.

Grinnell was editor of "Forest and Stream Magazine" from 1876 to 1911 and contributed many articles and essays to magazines and professional publications, including:

"In Buffalo Days", a long essay, published in "American Big-Game Hunting", edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New York, 1893. "The Bison," a long essay, published in "Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat", edited by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New York, 1904.

Ethnology of the Plains Cultures

Grinnell’s books and publications reflect his lifelong study of the northern American plains and the Plains tribes. Hornaday, Grinnell was a historian of the buffalo and their relationship with Plains tribal culture.

Grinnell’s best known works are on the Cheyenne, including "The Fighting Cheyennes", published in 1915, and a two-volume work on "The Cheyenne Indians" (1923). In 1928, he presented the story of Frank Joshua North and Luther North in "Two Great Scouts and their Pawnee Battalion." Other works on the Plains culture area focusing on the Pawnee and Blackfeet people include "Pawnee Hero Stories" (1889), and "The Story of the Indian" (1895).

Selected papers by Grinnell were edited by J. the story of a prairie people, by George Bird Grinnell (1892) Blackfeet Indian Stories, by George Bird Grinnell (1915) When Buffalo Ran by George Bird Grinnell (1920) Hunting on Three Continents, by George Bird Grinnell, Kermit Roosevelt, W. 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. Among the most noteworthy contributions are "The Vanished Game of Yesterday" by Madison Grant, "An Epic of the Polar Air Lanes" by Lincoln Ellsworth, "Aeluropus Melanoleucus" by Kermit Roosevelt, "Taps for the Great Selous" by Frederick R. Putnam's Sons, New York (1931) -- Essays include: "A Tobacco Trade" by George Bird Grinnell, "Scouting Against the Apache" by Frederick R.