George Bird Grinnell

Toole County Friends of the Library will host the Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau Program The Explorations and Discoveries of George Bird Grinnell, Father of Glacier National Park on August 30th, 2016 at 7 p.m. The Program will be presented in the Parish Hall in St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, 222 2nd Ave South, Shelby, Montana (across from the Toole County Library).  The presentation is free and open to the public. Partial funding for the Speakers Bureau Program is provided by a legislative grant from Montana’s Cultural Trust and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The speaker is Hugh Grinnell of Tuscon, Arizona. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona. He is a distant cousin of George Bird Grinnell and has thoroughly researched the historical legacy of the naturalist and explorer who would later be known as the father of Glacier National Park.

The great West that George Bird Grinnell first encountered in 1870 as a 21-year old man was shortly to disappear before his eyes. Nobody was quicker to sense the desecration or was more eloquent in crusading against the poachers, the hidehunters, and the disengaged U.S. Congress than George Bird Grinnell, the “Father of American Conservation”.  Grinnell founded the first Audubon Society, co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club with Teddy Roosevelt, and led the effort to establish Glacier National Park. Audiences will travel back in time to the 19th century, listening to Grinnell’s own words as taken from his field journals, memoirs, personal correspondence, and newspaper editorials.