Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,572

This is the grave of John Burroughs.

Born in 1827 on a farm in the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs would be a boy rooted in the Catskills his whole life, at least emotionally. His parents were not wealthy; probably no one really was who farmed that mountainous land. But it was a weird time and place. New York was changing rapidly. A lot of money was opening up to those who took it. This is a way to get at a weird coincidence in American history–Burroughs was a classmate and childhood friend of Jay Gould. They remained friends too, despite everything Gould did to the world, much of which Burroughs was fine with anyway.

Burroughs had to struggle to make it big though. His father was not supportive of education. The local schools were fine, but anything else? Waste of time for a farmer. Burroughs though wanted bigger things for himself. So he spent the 1850s teaching school to earn money to pay for whatever college he could work out. He ended up out in Illinois for awhile, but missed New York and returned in 1857. I don’t know how he got out of Civil War service. Maybe he had the money to pay someone. At the moment the Civil War started, Burroughs was starting to get attention for his nature writing. He got an essay published in Atlantic Monthly in 1860. He worked for the Treasury Department during the Civil War (maybe this was the exemption to not fight) and made his money as a federal bank examiner after the war. All the while, he was getting to know the nation’s literary elite. Walt Whitman became a particular mentor, urging Burroughs to really work on the nature writing. He did, but he also wrote the first biography of Whitman (which Walt mostly supervised, being concerned about his own self-image).

Burroughs decided to come back to New York in 1873. He was well off enough, but still had to work. Writing was a piece of his income. But he continued to work his federal bank examiner job for most of his working life. However, he had enough money to buy a 9-acre farm in the Catskill Mountains. There, he mostly grew grapes and experimented with other crops. Combined, it all allowed him to live a pretty good lifestyle, but he wasn’t crazy wealth like his corrupt buddy Gould or anything like that.

It would take Burroughs a good long time to be able to support himself as a writer. But by the 1880s, he was one of the leading nature writers in the country, publishing regularly about his New York home in major magazines. His first book was that Whitman thing, and he in fact would return to Whitman later in his life for a second book. But by the 1890s, Burroughs was churning out about a book a year. Some of them were animal studies, mostly about smaller wildlife like bees and squirrels. Others were about the joys of camping, or farming, or exploring. He published Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt in 1906 to take advantage of his famous friend’s proclivities to the outdoor. There were also lots and lots of articles on fishing and he became of the great writers on the subject in American history, really helping to found the activity as a fun hobby rather than the need for food.

As the first environmental movement developed in the late 19th century, Burroughs was one of the people who really influenced men like Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. This was very much an elite environmentalism of wealthy men spending time in nature to rejuvenate themselves and, for many of them, the Anglo-Saxon race. Burroughs was comfortable around very rich men, including Gould. Over the years, as that movement grew, Burroughs made friends with many American elites and they would come visit him in New York and play at the rural life for awhile. This included Roosevelt of course, but also Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone. John Muir visited too, but that’s more expected, for they shared a different kind of vision about rural America. Ford and he were close enough friends that Ford gave him a car, though if it was a Model T, not sure how much Burroughs would have been excited by it…In any case, Burroughs was the guy that industrialists could visit and he would take them camping as men and all that stuff. One advantage for Burroughs in all of this–and I think he genuinely liked these rich guys so I don’t want to play it as if they were taking advantage of him–is that they were interested in funding expeditions and so Burroughs could go along as a naturalist. That included an expedition to explore Alaska that the industrialist E.H. Harriman, another friend of Burroughs, funded. I am sure that was exciting for a guy like Burroughs who knew and understood so well one part of the world to explore a completely new thing.

Burroughs at least showed some lack of patience for the emerging discourse on wildlife. In 1905, he published “Real and Sham Natural History” in the Atlantic Monthly. This went hard after the so-called “nature fakers,” the writers who used overly purple prose to describe encounters with wildlife. He compared people like E.T. Seton and William J. Long to the yellow journalists of the Spanish-American War in anthropomorphizing animals in ways that were unhealthy and created false impressions of the natural world. Roosevelt lent Burroughs his significant support in a debate that would remain in the media until about 1911, as those writers defended themselves vociferously. In fact, it was TR who coined the term “nature fakers.”

Burroughs was in great health most of his life. Maybe it was all that time outdoors. He worked until almost the very end. He published two books in the last year of his life, one a memoir of his boyhood that wasn’t quite completed upon his death, but his son wrote an afterword for the nearly finished manuscript. That was in 1922. It was only in the last few months that he began to suffer some serious physical illnesses and some of the mental decline that often happens in advanced age. He had what is described as an abcess in his chest removed in 1921; not quite sure what is meant there but it couldn’t have been good. He never really recovered from that. But he kept working. In fact, when he died, it was evidently of a heart attack while on a train in Ohio on some trip related to his life and work. He was 83 years old.

John Burroughs is buried at Boyhood Rock, a favorite spot of his on his Catskills land, outside of Roxbury, New York. Jay Gould has a church named for him in that town, which was extremely exciting for me as I did not know this.

If you would like this series to visit other American nature writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The Library of America published an anthology titled American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau several years ago. It’s good. Of course Burroughs is in it. Other people included in it are Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Gene Stratton-Porter, buried in Rome City, Indiana. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.