Just finished "The Chief: Ernest Thompson Seton and the Changing West," by Anderson. I have always regarded Seton as among the pantheon of great nineteenth/early 20th century naturalists and conservationists that included such giants as Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, William Hornaday, John Muir and George Bird Grinnell. And I gained a much deeper appreciation for him as an artist and storyteller after making two visits to the National Scouting Museum and Ernest Thompson Seton Memorial Library at Philmont Ranch here in New Mexico. This biography filled in huge blanks in my knowledge of Seton: first, his critical role in the creation of the Boy Scouts of America and the Camp Fire Girls; and second, his profound admiration and respect for Native Americans, their culture and most of all their religion.
Seton conceived of what became the Boy Scouts shortly after 1900, when he created the Woodcraft movement dedicated to a vigorous outdoor life, mastery of natural and survival skills and an appreciation for the presence of the Great Spirit in all things. (He feared America's increasingly urban youth would degenerate into indolent "flat-chested cigarette smokers" with no appreciation or connection to nature and the earth.) He wrote the first manual for his new organization, "The Birchbark Roll," in 1906, and revised it almost annually for 15 editions. Prior to 1910, Seton, Daniel Carter Beard of "Sons of Daniel Boone" fame, and Robert Baden Powell began to collaborate on their different ideas for what became the Scouting movement. All three had large egos, and battled for the final shape the Scouts would take in the United States. Ultimately, Baden Powell won out, after having helped himself wholesale to most of Seton's "Book of Woodcraft" and published it as his "Handbook for Boys," with almost no credit to Seton. This, combined with Scouting's abandonment of the Native American spiritualism and individualism so important to Seton caused him to become estranged from the BSA's National Council hierarchy. Seton's deepest disappointment was Scouting's adoption of Baden Powell's essentially military organization, structure and purpose. Seton, whose mother had pacifist tendencies, despised the idea that "good little Scouts" would also make "good little soldiers." He resigned as chief scout at the outset of WWI, but always held a fondness for the boys and girls of Scouting and Camp Fire.
Seton's bitterness toward Baden Powell and the National Council of the BSA lingered for the rest of his days. It was good to learn the reasons for this, as I am named after Baden Powell.
While Seton was an early and tireless advocate for conservation, he also added his voice to the cause of women's rights, his first wife Grace being a strong champion for suffrage.
But it was his deep heart for Native Americans cultivated first in youthful experiences with Indians in Manitoba that became the most important thread of his life. Many, many times over the decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he went out of his way to visit reservations, pay long visits and cultivate friendships among the Crow, the Blackfoot and other tribes. It took him 20 years, but the dictionary of Indian sign language he produced is still an important resource; he got the idea for it after becoming a close friend of White Swan, badly wounded while scouting for George Armstrong Custer, who was deaf and could only communicate with signs.
Because of his reverence for wild creatures and the natural world, the Indians' pantheistic view that God is everywhere and in everything, animate and inanimate fit more and more closely with Seton's own views. He believed that the Indians were the final, perfect product of human evolution, living in simple harmony with the earth. For them, every day was the Sabbath, not just Sunday. And he summed up the substance of their culture as "What can I do for my community," versus the white culture's "what can I do to acquire things for myself" love of money.
Seton was horrified by the government's efforts to take Indian children from their families and send them off to distant schools such as Carlisle to be taught white culture and to despise their own, which he thought so close to human perfection. He and Grace, and many of their friends, became fierce critics of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and fought hard to encourage its reform.
He was not the only one to see the errors of American history regarding the Indians. In a conversation with William F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill" had this to say:
"I never led an expedition against the Indians but that I was ashamed of myself, ashamed of my government and ashamed of my flag; for they were always in the right and we were always in the wrong. They never broke a treaty and we never kept one."
A similar sentiment was shared by Neil Erickson, an old rancher that Seton interviews in 1935 in Douglas, Arizona. A Swede, Erickson came to the United States as a young man, became a soldier and fought in the Geronimo campaign in the 1880s before establishing his ranch in the Chiricahua Mountains near Wilcox. At the end of their interview, Erickson told Seton: "If I had known what I know now about Indian character, I would have deserted from the American Army and joined up with the Apaches."
In his long and productive life (1860-1946), Seton got to know many of the great personalities of his age --Roosevelt and his son Kermit, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, John Burroughs, Hamlin Garland, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair and so many others. Among his admirers was none other than Adolph Hitler, who invited Seton to come and give his thoughts on the "Hitler Youth." Seton declined.
Seton was a one of a kind, a man with an ego, tortured with doubts, gifted with an incredible vitality and work ethic to match his talents as a writer, artist and sought-after lecturer. His books on North American natural history and particularly its birds and mammals are still useful, his lively animal stories for children still beloved.
It is interesting that the three men in human history that he most disliked were Saint Paul, for what he thought of as subverting the message of Christ and making women second-class citizens; George Armstrong Custer as the symbol of everything the federal government did wrong to Native Americans; and his own father, who beat him so often and so mercilessly as a boy.

Anything by or about Seton is worth reading !
My brother still has the Seton I think his books are online now. book we had as kids .