Green cloth binding with title and image on the front board. Black title on the spine.

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An animal fiction story

Ernest Thompson Seton (born Ernest Evan Thompson August 14, 1860 – October 23, 1946) was an author, wildlife artist, founder of the Woodcraft Indians in 1902 (renamed Woodcraft League of America), and one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) in 1910.

Seton also influenced Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of one of the first Scouting organizations. His writings were published in the United Kingdom, Canada, the US, and the USSR; his notable books related to Scouting include The Birch Bark Roll and the Boy Scout Handbook. He is responsible for incorporation of what he believed to be American Indian elements into the traditions of the BSA.

Seton was an early pioneer of the modern school of animal fiction writing, his most popular work being Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), which contains the story of his killing of the wolf Lobo. He later became involved in a literary debate known as the nature fakers controversy, after John Burroughs published an article in 1903 in the Atlantic Monthly attacking writers of sentimental animal stories. The controversy lasted for four years and included important American environmental and political figures of the day, including President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1907, Seton and the naturalist Edward Alexander Preble verified a claim from 10 years earlier by the frontiersman Charles “Buffalo” Jones that Jones and his hunting party had shot and fended off a hungry wolf pack near the Great Slave Lake in Canada. Seton and Preble discovered the remains of the animals near Jones’s long abandoned cabin.

For his work, Lives of Game Animals Volume 4, Seton was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1928 . In 1931, he became a United States citizen. Seton was associated with the Santa Fe arts and literary community during the mid-1930s and early 1940s, which was a group of artists and authors, including author and artist Alfred Morang, sculptor and potter Clem Hull, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, painter Randall Davey, painter Raymond Jonson, leader of the Transcendental Painters Group and artist Eliseo Rodriguez. He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

In 1933, Seton purchased 100 acres (0.4 km2) in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, United States. Seton ran training camps for youth leaders and had a small publisher named Seton Village Press that closed in 1943 due to World War II. The tract eventually grew to 2,500 acres (10 km²). Seton Village was established as an unincorporated community.

Seton designed and built his castle as a 32-room, 6,900 square foot (640 m²) multi-level building with a flat-roof and roughhewn stone wall exterior. The interior had oak floors and plaster walls with the ceilings supported by log rafters. The castle was built on a hill at an elevation of 7,000 feet (2100 m). It is designated a National Historic Landmark and a New Mexico State Cultural Property. The castle burned down while being restored in 2005. The Academy for the Love of Learning, which owns the property, has decided to preserve the castle ruins as a “contemplative garden.”

He died in Seton Village, New Mexico, at the age of 86. Seton was cremated in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1960, in honour of his 100th birthday and the 350th anniversary of Santa Fe, his daughter, Dee and his grandson, Seton Cottier (son of Anya), scattered the ashes over Seton Village from an airplane.

Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying people, events, or places in imaginary ways that are not strictly based on history or fact. In its most narrow usage, fiction applies to written narratives in prose and often specifically novels, as well as novellas and short stories. More broadly, however, fiction has come to encompass imaginary narratives expressed in any medium, including not just writings but also live theatrical performances, films, television programs, radio dramas, comics, role-playing games, and video games.