Black Wolf: The Life of Ernest Thompson Seton

Bill Waiser is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
and the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History of Prince
Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western
Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.  His

Black Wolf is the latest biography of the brilliant though temperamental Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946). Wanting to be recognised in life as a naturalist or artist, Seton ironically gained wide acclaim in the early twentieth century as a great writer of animal stories.

The third youngest of ten brothers, British-born Ernest Evan Thompson was six years old when he and his family emigrated to Canada West in 1866. It was here, while exploring the Lindsay backwoods and later the ravines north of Toronto, that young Ernest developed a keen interest in the natural world. This fascination, when combined with an intense persecution complex, resulted in an obsessive drive for fame and material well-being as a natural scientist. Adopting the ancient family name “Seton,” he studied for brief periods at art schools in London and then Paris, where he concentrated on animal painting — in particular, wolf scenes. He also spent several summers on his brother’s Manitoba homestead — what Seton referred to as his golden days — studying the habits of the local fauna and continuing to add to his specimen collection. This experience eventually secured him various commissions as an illustrator for some of America’s foremost naturalists.

Cutting his Canadian ties in 1896, Seton, or “Wolf,” as he was known, took up permanent residence in the United States and engaged in regular wildlife trips to the American West. He also published in 1898 the extremely popular Wild Animals I Have Known, a collection of stories that had previously appeared separately in magazines. Promoted by what would become annual lecture tours, it was the first of several similar books that finally brought to Seton the kind of recognition that he had sought. The suggestion, however, that his nature stories bore little resemblance to reality prompted Seton to carry out extensive field work over the next two decades to produce respected works on North American mammals. As well, he drew upon a life-long interest in Indians to develop a national boys’ group, the League of Woodcraft Indians. Although many of his ideas were subsequently plagiarized by Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, Seton continued to lecture on the Woodcraft ideal until his 1946 death at Seton Castle, his retirement home in New Mexico.

Because of the existence of other works dealing with his natural history work and animal stories, author Betty Keller decided to concentrate on Seton’s personal life. In parts of Black Wolf however, it would be instructive to know whether Seton’s evolving ideas about conservation or Indian culture were a reflection of the Progressive era. In other places, Keller relies quite heavily on Seton’s autobiography, an extremely biased source. Although Black Wolf is a revealing biography, a comprehensive study of Ernest Thompson Seton is still needed.