Why you should care about Rosalie Edge
My case for an unfairly-forgotten conservationist
This month I’m publishing two major stories on Rosalie Edge. Here’s the story of how and why I came to write about her.
One of my articles, in The Montana Quarterly (pictured above, subscription required), is the story of Edge’s long-overlooked contributions to conservation in Montana, especially around pelicans. The other article, in Mountain Journal, is the story of how she did the same in Yellowstone National Park. The Quarterly story has more science and addresses the difficult tasks that today’s wildlife managers face. The Journal story has more historical intrigue and investigates the tension between activist outsiders and insiders.
The stories share an underappreciated hero. Edge (1877–1962) is well known among Pennsylvania bird enthusiasts for founding Hawk Mountain, the world’s first refuge for birds of prey. (I previously wrote about that here.) She’s known among Audubon history buffs as a major 1930s reform figure. But despite Dyana Furmansky’s very good biography Rosalie Edge Hawk of Mercy—and despite Edge’s contributions to ecology, national parks, and conservation nationwide—many of my friends have never heard of her.
Edge is not mentioned in any Montana history books. She’s not in Aubrey Haines’ comprehensive history The Yellowstone Story. Nor in Richard Bartlett’s Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged. She’s not one of the twelve profiles in Elizabeth Watry’s Women in Wonderland. Although the National Park Service website profiles her (“Rosalie Edge: The National Park Founding Mother You’ve Never Heard Of”), it only briefly mentions Yellowstone. Yet I believe she’s a major figure in Montana and Yellowstone history.
These are stories I love to tell.
I first learned about Edge as part of my research for Natural Rivals. Stephen Fox’s 1981 biography John Muir and his Legacy is subtitled The American Conservation Movement. (Actually, in my paperback copy, the title and subtitle are reversed.) Fox celebrates the 20th century legacy of Muir-like amateur activists, as opposed to professional conservationists—and he calls Edge one of the best of those activists.
Edge’s story wasn’t relevant to my Muir book, but it did ring a bell with me. I’d written a previous book, The Cowboy Girl, about a near-contemporary of Edge, Caroline Lockhart (1871–1962). Lockhart was a writer, publisher, rancher, and rodeo founder, not a conservationist. She lived in Wyoming, not New York. But she was similarly an outsider and is similarly forgotten today.
Much of the explanation is that both women lived in an incredibly sexist society. They were outsiders because many insider avenues were closed off to them: careers, education, influence. Their contemporaries too rarely took them seriously—and then they were later dismissed because nobody took them seriously. They also faced unfair scrutiny of their personal lives: Lockhart, who never married, faced scorn for her alleged promiscuity; Edge faced scorn because she spent decades separated from her husband but refused to give him a divorce.
Both were difficult women. That’s a loaded, dated, pejorative phrase, but a fascinating one. It’s true that neither woman was easy to get along with. Both had family members who disavowed them; both instigated feuds with close friends. Each collaborated with an LGBTQ+ person, and each ended that collaboration in apparent discomfort over how that sexuality was expressed (and because this stuff was so rarely talked about, it’s hard to know how to feel about those actions). Each had her own way of doing things, and might have better succeeded if she would have only listened to others. Yet all of these qualities are products of the world they lived in and the prejudice they faced.
Both boldly positioned themselves against powerful men. When a reviewer compared one of Lockhart’s novels to novelist Zane Grey at his best, for instance, she wrote, “that tooth-pulling ass! My worst is better than Zane Grey at his best.” And when famed ecologist Aldo Leopold criticized Edge in a letter, her response implied that she doubted his pluck. “In our opinion,” she said, “the failure of conservation is largely due to a want of courage in telling the truth.”
When you encounter these women, on some level, you don’t want them to change who they are to match what the world wants them to be. Yet on another level, you roll your eyes. “Oh Caroline! Oh Rosalie! You’ll be so much happier if you don’t go there!!”
After I finished writing Natural Rivals, I started researching Edge. I read Furmansky’s biography and Edge’s unpublished memoir. I read Michelle Nijhuis’ Beloved Beasts with its chapter on Edge. I read some of Edge’s correspondence at her archives in Denver. And because of where I live, I knew how to further investigate her stories in Montana and Yellowstone. That led to these articles, and I hope to write still more about her.
In her 1948 prime, The New Yorker called Edge “the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation.” In addition to sexism, I believe there’s another reason she’s both forgotten and important: the conservation movement has never been sure if it really wants more honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcats. In times of crisis, when we all admire pluck in telling the truth, that’s a question worth revisiting.
Discussion:
Thanks to several of you who converted to paying subscriptions after last week’s issue when I told you not to feel guilty about not paying. I should do that more often! 😊
Links to books in this post (and all my posts) go to bookshop.org, where I get a slight commission. But I’m just as happy if you order through your independent local bookseller!