Remembering Ernest Thompson Seton: Writer, Artist, Naturalist, and Cofounder of the Boy Scouts of America

October 23, 1946

On this day, the English-born Canadian-American writer, artist, naturalist, and one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), Ernest Thompson Seton, died. He had the soul of a poet.

When he was six, Ernest's family immigrated to Canada.

Ernest grew up in Toronto and found solace in the woods along the Don River. His father was abusive and cruel.

When Ernest turned 21, his dad handed him a bill for $537.50 - the grand total for every dime he had spent raising Ernest, including the fee from the delivery doctor for his birth in 1860. Ernest paid his father and then never spoke to him again.

To right the wrongs of his childhood, Ernest Thompson Seton helped found the Boy Scouts of America in 1910. Ernest even wrote the very first Boy Scout Handbook.

In 1924, Ernest starred in a newspaper article called Face to Face with Ernest Thompson Seton. The reporter met with him in a wooded setting and wrote this about Ernest:

Lithe as a cat, he jumped from limb to limb in the tree.

Picking up a beetle by the roadside, he began commenting: '

A man who does not love Nature and cannot see in a bird, tree, flower, or insect some kinship, does not seem to me altogether human.

[The naturalist] John Burroughs was [there collecting] some wildflowers.. and the woods rang with laughter like children as these two nature lovers talked of plants, trees and animals as if it were all to them an open book.

It was Ernest Thompson Seton who said,

The white spruce forest along the banks is most inspiring [and] magnificent here. Down the terraced slopes and right to the water's edge on the alluvial soil, it stands in ranks.