Burroughs' noble legacy spans nation, generations

By H.R. Stoneback
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

Yet John Burroughs has a substantial claim to the title of ‘‘Most Neglected Major Literary Figure in American Literature.’’

In the Hudson Valley, when we say the words ‘‘environment’’ or ‘‘ecology’’ or even ‘‘nature,’’ we think — or we should think — of John Burroughs.

Given his reputation and influence at the beginning of this century, and the relative neglect of his work in the decades since his death in 1921, it is often forgotten that Burroughs thought of himself as a writer first, a naturalist second.

He is remembered most often as a kind of nature prophet, an important forerunner of environmentalism. When we consider Burroughs as an environmentalist, a word he would not recognize, we should remember his sense of place; that he was a farmer as well as a writer, and his vision was rooted in the Hudson Valley, specifically in West Park in Ulster County, where he lived and worked for nearly five decades.

Burroughs enthralled media

For decades from 1899 on, the charismatic Burroughs was front-page news. His camping trips and expeditions with Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and others made him one of our earliest media celebrities.

Thousands of pilgrims came to Riverby, his Hudson River farm in West Park, and to Slabsides, his bark-covered cabin in the woods, to pay homage to the man known worldwide as the ‘‘Sage of Slabsides.’’ Writers, students, naturalists, farmers, politicians and presidents came. Walt Whitman and yes, even Oscar Wilde and Theodore Dreiser came to the Hudson Valley to see Burroughs.

Henry Ford gave him a Model-T, which Burroughs promptly wrecked on a country road; it seems driving got in the way of his nature observation. Ford pronounced Burroughs the greatest writer in world history, a view that caused Burroughs to remark: ‘‘Ford’s taste in cars is better than his taste in literature.’’

It is arguable that no other American writer was ever so widely read and so beloved by such a broad public. Schools across the country were named after Burroughs; Burroughs Nature Clubs were the vogue everywhere. What other American writer was publicly and privately consulted at his cabin in the woods by presidential candidates? Did any other writer receive state visits from a president?

When I moved to West Park in 1970, old-timers were still talking about the day in 1903 when the presidential yacht brought Teddie Roosevelt and his party up the Hudson to West Park, and how the famous writer introduced every man, woman, child and dog in the village to the president by name.

Burroughs’ extraordinary fame did not fade immediately with his death. When ‘‘Men of Power,’’ a five-volume autobiographical study of 20 crucial figures in world history, was published in the 1930s, Volume 4 included photographs of Lincoln, Tolstoy and John Burroughs as the archetype of the man who ‘‘had learned what was essential and inessential to the art of living. ... Men and women who had been battered and bruised in the noisy scramble of American cities heard in Burroughs a call to the simple life. Here was a man who had kept his soul. They would seek him out.’’

Enjoyed the home life

At a time when the country was more industrialized and mechanized, and people were mobile and uprooted, Burroughs exemplified the person who stayed comfortably in nature, in one place.

Burroughs told us that we will see the world more truly if we ‘‘stay at home’’ and watch it pass. At home, ‘‘the great globe swings around ... like a revolving showcase; the change of the seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one’s door, and linger long in the passing.’’

Burroughs’ core is expressed in ‘‘Signs and Seasons:’’

‘‘Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also. One’s own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it.’’

What kind of an ecologist was he?

Consider the national parks. Burroughs influenced Teddy Roosevelt as much as anyone did, and Roosevelt ‘‘created’’ the national parks. Yet when Roosevelt invited Burroughs to accompany him on a 1903 trip to Yellowstone, Burroughs would have preferred to stay home and work in his garden. After the trip, he remarked: ‘‘The most interesting thing in that wonderful land was, of course, the president himself.’’

The trip in 1909 to the Grand Canyon may be best remembered for the anecdote told by one of their companions: ‘‘The last day at the Canyon, as we stood looking into the vast abyss ... I said to a companion: to think of our having the Grand Canyon, and John Burroughs, and John Muir thrown in!’’

‘‘I wish Muir was thrown in sometimes,’’ retorted Burroughs, reacting to the tension between his quiet, non-crusading self and the wilderness-manifesto-raving Muir.

In his 1908 essay, ‘‘The Grist of the Gods,’’ Burroughs laments: ‘‘One cannot but reflect what a sucked orange the earth will be in the course of a few more centuries. Our civilization is terribly expensive to all its natural resources; one hundred years of modern life doubtless exhausts its stores more than a millennium of the life of antiquity.’’

If Burroughs were alive today, he would probably live as he did then, teaching us how to root ourselves, to invest in the land, to see nature with quiet passion and exactitude. The rest, what we do with the sucked orange, is up to us.

H.R. Stoneback, professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of numerous essays and books on American literature and several volumes of poetry. He has served on the board of directors of the John Burroughs Association for several decades.