George Bird Grinnell: The Journalist Who Built a Park
Near Going To The Sun Road, Montana
He arrived in eighteen eighty-five, an editor from New York, and the mountains of what is now the Many Glacier area made an impression that twenty-five years of effort could not exhaust. George Bird Grinnell edited Forest and Stream magazine, which in the late nineteenth century was the most influential conservation publication in the United States, and he used it to argue, column after column, that these specific mountains deserved federal protection before the mining companies and the homesteaders finished their work.
Grinnell was not a pure idealist. He was a complicated figure, a man of his era, who wrote extensively about Blackfeet culture for a white eastern readership in ways that reflected genuine curiosity and real paternalism in equal measure. His relationship with the Blackfeet was long and complicated, and his ethnographic writing is both the most detailed early account of Blackfeet life and an account shaped by the assumptions of someone who never questioned that Euro-American civilization was the endpoint toward which everything else was moving. Historians hold both things at once, and so should we.
What is not in dispute is the scale of his effort. Grinnell lobbied Congress for twenty-five years. He returned to the Montana mountains every year he could. He guided other influential people through the terrain, showing them what he saw. He wrote about the region so consistently and so specifically that when Congress finally acted, in nineteen ten under President Taft, Grinnell was among the people most responsible for the outcome. The glacier that carries his name, reached by a ten-and-a-half mile round-trip trail from the Many Glacier trailhead, was a monument to that effort.
The glacier has retreated substantially since Grinnell first photographed it. Its current terminus sits on ground that would have been under significant ice when he first arrived in eighteen eighty-five. He spent twenty-five years fighting to protect it. It is melting on a timeline that no amount of lobbying can alter.
