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John Burroughs
John Burroughs
Born	April 3, 1837(1837-04-03) Roxbury, New York
Died	March 29, 1921 (aged 83) on a train near Kingsville, Ohio
Occupation	writer, essayist, naturalist

John Burroughs (April 3, 1837 – March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement. According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the century he had become a virtual cultural institution in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.

In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.

Early Life & Marriage

Burroughs was the seventh child of Chauncy and Amy Kelly Burroughs' ten children. He was born on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains, near Roxbury, New York in Delaware County. As a child he spent many hours on the slopes of Old Clump Mountain, looking off to the east and the higher peaks of the Catskills, especially Slide Mountain, which he would later write about. As he labored on the family farm he was captivated by the return of the birds each spring and other wildlife around the family farm including frogs and bumblebees. In his later years he credited his life as a farm boy for his subsequent love of nature and feeling of kinship with all rural things.^[1]

During his teen years Burroughs showed a keen interest in learning. He read whatever books he could get his hands on and was fascinated by new words or known words applied in new ways.^[2] His interest in arithmetic was equally keen. Burroughs’ father was unsupportive of his son’s interest in learning – he believed the basic education provided by the local school was enough - and refused to support the young Burroughs when he asked for money to pay for the books or the higher education he longed for. At the age of 17 Burroughs left home to earn the money he needed for higher education by teaching at a school in Olive, New York.

From 1854 to 1856 Burroughs alternated periods of teaching with periods of study at higher education institutions including Cooperstown Seminary. There he first read the works of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom would become lifelong influences through their focus on nature and its effect on the spirit. He left Cooperstown Seminary in 1856 and with this departure came the end to his days as a student. Burroughs continued to teach until 1863.

In 1857 Burroughs left a teaching position in the small village of Buffalo Grove in Illinois to seek employment closer to home, drawn back by "the girl I left behind me."^[1] On September 12, 1857, Burroughs married Ursula North (1836-1917).

Career

John Burroughs in 1914

Burroughs got his first break as a writer in the summer of 1860 when the Atlantic Monthly, then a fairly new publication, accepted his essay Expression. Editor James Russell Lowell found the essay so similar to Emerson's work that he initially thought Burroughs had plagiarized his longtime acquaintance. Poole's Index and Hill's Rhetoric, both periodical indexes, even credited Emerson as the author of the essay.^[3]

In 1864, Burroughs accepted a position as a clerk at the Treasury; he would eventually become a federal bank examiner, continuing in that profession into the 1880s. All the while, he continued to publish essays, and grew interested in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Burroughs met Whitman during the Civil War in Washington, and the two became close friends.

Whitman encouraged Burroughs to develop his nature writing as well as his philosophical and literary essays. In 1867, Burroughs published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, the first biography and critical work on the poet, which was extensively (and anonymously) revised and edited by Whitman himself before publication. Four years later, the Boston house of Hurd & Houghton published Burroughs's first collection of nature essays, Wake-Robin.

Slabsides, Burroughs's cabin in West Park, NY, 2005

In 1874, Burroughs bought a nine acre farm in West Park, NY (now part of the Town of Esopus) where he constructed his Riverby estate. There he grew a host of crops before eventually focusing on fancy table grapes, and devoted himself to his writing while also continuing to labor, for several more years, as a federal bank examiner. In 1895 Burroughs bought additional land near Riverby where he and son Julian Burroughs constructed an Adirondack-style cabin that he would be call "Slabsides". At Slabsides he wrote, grew a large field of celery, and entertained visitors, including students from local Vassar College. After the turn of the century, Burroughs renovated an old farmhouse near his birthplace and called it "Woodchuck Lodge." This became his summer residence until his death.

Plaque quoting Burroughs near the summit of Slide Mountain.

Some of Burroughs' best essays came out of trips back to his native Catskills. In the late 1880s, in the essay "The Heart of the Southern Catskills," he chronicled an ascent of Slide Mountain, the highest peak of the Catskills range. Speaking of the view from the summit, he wrote: "The works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface. You discover with a feeling of surprise that the great thing is the earth itself, which stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken." Some of these words are now on a plaque commemorating Burroughs at the mountain's summit, on a rock outcrop known as Burroughs Ledge. Slide and neighboring Cornell and Wittenberg mountains, which he also climbed, have been collectively named the Burroughs Range.

Burroughs poses with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford at Mr. Edison's home, Ft. Myers, Florida, 1914

Other Catskill essays told, with as much wry humor as awestruck reverence, of fly fishing for trout, of hikes over Peekamoose Mountain and Mill Brook Ridge, and of rafting down the East Branch of the Delaware River. It is for these that he is still celebrated in the region today, and chiefly known, although he traveled extensively and wrote about many other regions and countries, as well as commenting on natural-science controversies of the day such as the relatively new theory of natural selection with which he disagreed ^[4]. He also entertained philosophical and literary questions as well, and wrote another book about Whitman in 1896, four years after the poet's death. Ultimately his writing helped persuade the literary establishment of Whitman's virtues.

Burroughs accompanied many personalities of the time in his later years, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford (who gave him an automobile, one of the first in the Hudson Valley), Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison. Most notably, in 1899, he participated in E. H. Harriman's expedition to Alaska.

In 1901, Burroughs met an admirer, Clara Barrus (1864-1931). She was a physician with the state psychiatric hospital in Middletown, N.Y. Clara was 37 and nearly half his age. She was the great love of his life^[5] and ultimately his literary executrix. She moved into his house after Ursula died in 1917.

Nature Fakers Controversy

In 1903, after publishing an article entitled "Real and Sham Natural History" in the Atlantic Monthly, Burroughs began a widely publicized literary debate known as the nature fakers controversy. Attacking popular writers of the day such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts and William J. Long for their fantastical representations of wildlife, he also denounced the booming genre of "naturalistic" animal stories as "yellow journalism of the woods". The controversy lasted for four years and included important American environmental and political figures of the day, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who was friends with Burroughs.^[6]

John Burroughs the Angler

John Burroughs’ Favorite Pastime

From his youth, Burroughs was an avid fly fisherman and well known among the more famous Catskill anglers.^[7] Although he never wrote any purely fishing books, he did contribute some notable fishing essays to angling literature. Most notable of these was Speckled Trout, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1870 and was later published in In The Catskills. In his essay Speckled Trout Burroughs highlights his experiences as an angler and celebrates the trout, streams and lakes of the Catskills.^[8]

Writing

Many of Burroughs' essays first appeared in popular magazines. He is best-known for his observations on birds, flowers and rural scenes, but his essay topics also range to religion, philosophy, and literature. Burroughs was a staunch defender of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but somewhat critical of Henry David Thoreau. His achievements as a writer were confirmed by his election as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[9]

The Complete Writings of John Burroughs totals 23 volumes. The first volume, Wake-Robin, was published in 1871 and subsequent volumes were published regularly until the final volume, The Last Harvest, was published in 1922. The final two volumes, Under the Maples and The Last Harvest, were published posthumously by Clarra Barrus. Burroughs also published a biography of John James Audubon, a memoir of his camping trip to Yellowstone with President Theodore Roosevelt, and one volume of poetry titled Bird and Bough.

Works by John Burroughs

• Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867)
• Wake Robin (1871)
• Winter Sunshine (1875)
• Birds and Poets (1877)
• Locusts and Wild Honey (1879)
• Pepacton (1881)
• Fresh Fields (1884)
• Signs and Seasons (1886)
• Birds and bees and other studies in nature (1896)
• Indoor Studies (1889)
• Riverby (1894)
• Whitman: A Study (1896)
• The Light of Day (1900)
• Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers (1900)
• Songs of Nature (Editor) (1901)
• John James Audubon (1902)
• Literary Values and other Papers (1902)
• Far and Near (1904)
• Ways of Nature (1905)
• Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (1906)
• Bird and Bough (1906)
• Afoot and Afloat (1907)
• Leaf and Tendril (1908)
• Time and Change (1912)
• The Summit of the Years (1913)
• The Breath of Life (1915)
• Under the Apple Trees (1916)
• Field and Study (1919)
• Accepting the Universe (1920)
• Under the Maples (1921)
• The Last Harvest (1922)
• My Boyhood, with a Conclusion by His Son Julian Burroughs (1922)

Works about John Burroughs

• Our Friend John Burroughs by Clara Barrus (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1914)
• John Burroughs Boy and Man by Clara Barrus (Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920)
• The Life and Letters of John Burroughs by Clara Barrus (Volume 1, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1925)
• John Burroughs: An American Naturalist by Edward J. Renehan Jr. (Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992; paperback - Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1998)
• John Burroughs and The Place of Nature by James Perrin Warren (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006)
• John Burroughs: An American Naturalist by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. (Black Dome Press)
• Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American Nature Writing edited by Charlotte Zoe Walker, ed. (Syracuse University Press)
• The Art Of Seeing Things by John Burroughs edited by Charlotte Zoe Walker, ed. (Syracuse University Press)
• John Burroughs: The Sage of Slabsides by Ginger Wadsworth (Clarion Books)

Death and Legacy

Burroughs gravesite today, Boyhood Rock with plaque on left

Burroughs enjoyed good physical and mental health during his later years until only a few months before his death when he began to experience lapses in memory and show general signs of advanced age including declining heart function. In February 1921 Burroughs underwent an operation to remove an abscess from his chest. Following this operation, his health steadily declined. Burroughs died the following month while on a train near Kingsville, Ohio. Burroughs was buried in Roxbury, New York on the anniversary of his 84th birthday, at the foot of a rock he had played on as a child and affectionately referred to as ‘’Boyhood Rock’’. Woodchuck Lodge was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962. Riverby and Slabsides were similarly designated in 1968. All three are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170 acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history".^[10]

Eleven U.S. schools have been named after Burroughs, including public middle schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California, a public high school in Burbank, California, Burroughs Elementary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a private secondary school, John Burroughs School, in St. Louis, Missouri.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Our Friend John Burroughs by Clara Barrus Retrieved on August 4, 2007
2. ^ Barrus, Clara (1968). The Life and Letters of John Burroughs. New York: Russell & Russell. pp. 28.  
3. ^ Barrus, Clara (1968). The Life and Letters of John Burroughs. New York: Russell & Russell. pp. 52.  
4. ^ New York Times 17 Dec. 1922: John Burroughs's last book by Hildegarde Hawthorne.
5. ^ Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia ed. J.R. LeMaster, p. 90 Burroughs and Ursula Carmine Sarracino, pub. Routledge, 1998
6. ^ Carson, Gerald. February 1971. "T.R. and the 'nature fakers'". American Heritage Magazine. Volume 22, Issue 2.
7. ^ Karas, Nick (1997). Brook Trout: a Thorough Look At North America's Great Native Trout - its History, Biology and Angling Possibilities. New York: Lyons & Burford. pp. 199–201. ISBN 1558214798.  
8. ^ Burroughs, John (1910). In the Catskills. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 187–219.  
9. ^ "Academy Honors John Burroughs; Naturalist Praised by Bliss Perry and Hamlin Garland at Memorial Meeting," New York Times. November 19, 1921.
10. ^ JBA Medal Award List Retrieved on December 11, 2009

External links

• Works by John Burroughs at Project Gutenberg
• The John Burroughs Association
• John Burroughs page at the Catskill Archive
• The Writings of John Burroughs
• American Memory In the Catskills
• Afterword to John Burroughs: An American Naturalist by Edward J. Renehan Jr.
• The Half More Satisfying Than the Whole: John Burroughs and the Hudson by Edward J. Renehan Jr.
• John Burroughs Postcard Collection
• Rediscovering John Burroughs' Catskills Retreat: Woodchuck Lodge by Edward J. Renehan Jr.
• Bird and Bough by John Burroughs. Complete text of his only book of published poems plus poems published in periodicals; also public domain recordings of his poems.
• Quotes by John Burroughs

From Wikiquote

John Burroughs was an American Naturalist.

The Light of Day

The Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1900

• "Goethe, as lately quoted by Matthew Arnold, said those who have science and art have religion; and added, let those who have not science and art have the popular faith; let them have this escape, because the others are closed to them. Without any hold upon the ideal, or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, the people turn from the tedium and the grossness and prosiness of daily life, to look for the divine, the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the miraculous, and in that which baffles reason. The disciples of Jesus thought of the kingdom of heaven as some external condition of splendor and pomp and power which was to be ushered in by hosts of trumpeting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, riding upon the clouds, and not for one moment as the still small voice within them. To find the divine and the helpful in the mean and familiar, to find religion without the aid of any supernatural machinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in and through the life that now is--in short, to see the rude, prosy earth as a star in the heavens, like the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the hardest to learn.

• "But we must learn it sooner or later. There surely comes a time when the mind perceives that this world is the work of God also and not of devils, and that in the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal; in fact, that God is here and now in the humblest and most familiar fact, as sleepless and active as ever he was in old Judea. This perception has come and is coming to more minds to-day than ever before--this perception of the modernness of God, of the modernness of inspiration, of the modernness of religion; that there was never any more revelation than there is now, never any more conversing of God with man, never any more Garden of Eden, or fall of Adam, or thunder of Sinai, or ministering angels, than there is now; in fact, that these things are not historical events, but inward experiences and perceptions perpetually renewed or typified in the growth of the race. This is the modern gospel; this is the one vital and formative religious thought of modern times." (p. 50-51)

• "Under the old dispensation, before the advent of science, when this little world was all, and the sun, moon, and stars were merely fixtures overhead to give light and warmth, the conception of a being adequate to create and control it all was easier. The storms were expressive of his displeasure, the heavens were his throne, and the earth was his footstool. But in the light of modern astronomy one finds himself looking in vain for the God of his fathers, the magnified man who ruled the ancient world. In his place we have an infinite and eternal Power whose expression is the visible universe, and to whom man is no more and no less than any other creature.

• "Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.

• “The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.”

• "When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed." (p.164-165)

Time and Change

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912

• "Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it." (p. 2)

Accepting the Universe

• "We are here to see and contemplate the great spectacle." (p.10)

• "Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe." (p.108)

• "In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human life endures on this planet." (p.111)

• "Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it." (p.261}

• "Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode." (p.263)

• "The truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature." (p.301)

Leaf and Tendrill

• "To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life."

From LoveToKnow 1911

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