So many Canadians have lived remarkable lives and made significant contributions, yet so many go unnoticed. True, Canadians are famous for being self-effacing and modest, and we sometimes eat our own out of jealousy or a skeptical sense that all praise masks feet of clay.
One such Canadian is Ernest Thompson Seton, born in England in 1860, who came to Canada from England with his family in 1866. For four years, his father farmed in the Lindsay area of Ontario and later moved his family to Toronto where Ernest went to art school. Ernest’s early experience of roaming the countryside near Lindsay stayed with him, and he began to paint rural landscapes. He was mentored in art in England before poor health forced him to return to Canada. He studied natural history and followed his brothers to their farm in Carberry, Manitoba, where he continue to paint landscapes, birds, and animals. Winters he spent in New York learning from wildlife artists.
He built an estate near Greenwich, Connecticut, and invited local youth to camp there, teaching them the outdoor skills that he learned from living with First Nations peoples in Manitoba. These he distilled into a series of articles and then a book in 1906, The Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians, a book read by Lord Baden Powell of Gilwell in England who was inspired to write Scouting For Boys, the foundation of the worldwide Scouting movement in 1908.
Seton deferred to Baden Powell in America and set aside the Woodcraft Indian idea in favour of Scouting, but Boy Scouts of America still look to Seton as their founder.
Years ago on a beautiful day in late April, I visited the Philmont Ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. We were greeted by a wonderful lady from Texas who was delighted to find I was Canadian and a Scouter. She showed us the room where American Scouts are oriented to the history of Boy Scouts of America. On the wall was a display of the story of Ernest Thompson Seton from Lindsay, Ontario, Canada, a boy who learned to love nature and who founded Boy Scouts of America.
In the basement archives, she showed us some of the Seton treasures few visitors get to see: cultural artifacts Seton collected from his time among the Plains peoples, delicate watercolours of prairie flowers painted in Carberry, and the very large painting of a bull elk emerging from the forest that President Teddy Roosevelt hung in the White House.
Later, one of my students spent a summer at the Seton Institute near Santa Fe, New Mexico, to take further training in Seton’s outdoor skills. He returned full of praise for the continuing tradition of the Woodcraft Indians.
Writer, painter, naturalist, Englishman, Canadian, American: Ernest Thompson Seton was a man of his time who refused to be bound by politics or convention and whose passionate commitment to nature and to youth founded the Scouting movement in America.
Odin the Wanderer 