Seton
Memorial Library
Open to the Public — Free Admission
Late May — Mid-August
Monday — Saturday | 8:00 am — 5:30 pm
Sunday | 8:00 am — 5:00 pm
Mid-August — Late May
Monday — Saturday | 8:00 am — 5:00 pm
Closed Some Holidays
If you’d like more information, please give us a call: (575) 376-1136.
About the Ernest Thompson Seton
Ernest Thompson Seton was born in England and moved with his family to Canada in 1866. As a young man, he became intrigued with the wild animals that lived in the woods outside his home. In 1882 he began systematic studies of animals while homesteading in Manitoba. An important part of his work was to draw and paint the animals he observed.
During his subsequent career as a naturalist, Seton wrote and illustrated hundreds of scholarly and popular articles, stories, and more than forty books about wild animals. The books include Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), Animal Heroes (1905), The Biography of a Silver Fox (1909), Life Histories of Northern Animals (1909), Wild Animals at Home (1913), and Lives of Game Animals (1925-1928).
Over the years, Americans have gained a greater understanding of wild animals through reading Seton’s work.
Want To Check Out A Book From The Library?
Many books are available for checkout by current Philmont Staff Members.
For details, please contact the Seton Memorial Library at (575) 376-1136 or email us at Philmont.museum@scouting.org.
Notable Collections Pieces of the Seton Memorial Library
The Seton Memorial Library houses Ernest Thompson Seton’s personal library due to the generous donation of Julia Seton in 1967. The library is available for visitors, participants, and staff to view books about the southwest, Philmont, and the areas surrounding Philmont.
The following collections pieces are proudly on display in the National Scouting Museum.
In January 1891, Ernest Thompson Seton traveled to Paris to study and paint at the L’Academie Julian, an art school made up of expatriate Canadian artists. While the other artists in the school concentrated on painting classical representations of landscapes and human forms, Seton chose to paint his favorite subjects: wild animals, particularly wolves. His first effort was a wolf painted like one at the Paris zoo that he titled Sleeping Wolf. The painting was accepted in the prestigious juried show at the Grand Salon.
The next year, Seton began work on a large genre, or storytelling, world painting. He had read an unsubstantiated report in a Paris newspaper about a Pyrenees woodsman who was known for hunting sheep-killing wolves. One evening, the Pyrenees woodsman failed to return to his cottage. The next morning he was found dead, apparently killed by wolves.
The unproven story intrigued Seton and, given his compassion for wolves, he set about to put it on canvas. He titled the resultant panting, Triumph of the Wolves, giving it the implied moral that man cannot conquer nature and that man should respect nature rather than attempt to dominate it. Later, he gave it a second title, Awaited in Vain, which allowed it to be contemplated by the viewer either in sympathy for the wolves or the hunter.
Despite Seton’s demonstrated technical ability in carrying out the painting, it was rejected by the jury for the 1892 Grand Salon show due to its gruesome subject matter. However, the painting was hung in 1893 as part of the Canadian exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair.
Ernest Thompson Seton began this painting in 1894. It depicts the view from a Russian trapper’s sled that is being pursued by wolves. Seton derived the scene from a story he later published in Forest & Stream titled, “The Baron and the Wolves.”
Although the painting’s meaning is ambiguous, one scholar has postulated that Seton “meant to show wicked men pursued by vengeful wolves retaliating against man’s destruction of nature”. Seton took great care in preparing elaborate studies of each of the twelve wolves in the pack. In addition, he did several other studies to work out the color scheme and arrangement of the finished painting.
The painting was completed in January of 1895 and was submitted for hanging in the Grand Salon of Paris. The painting was rejected, perhaps because the message was not easily understood. Nevertheless several of the studies were accepted and displayed.
President Theodore Roosevelt was so impressed with the painting that he commissioned Seton to paint a canvas of the lead wolf. The resulting painting hung in the Roosevelt Gallery for many years. It was also used as the frontispiece of Volume II of Seton’s Life Histories of Northern Animals.
Lobo (Spanish for “wolf”) was the leader of a wolfpack that roamed the Currumpaw River Valley of northeastern New Mexico in the early 1890s. He and his pack were notorious for preying on the vast cattle and sheep herds of the area.
For several years local ranchers tried to trap and kill the members of the pack. Lobo possessed such cunning, however, that he was able to detect their poisons and traps.
Due to his knowledge of wolf behavior, Ernest Thompson Seton, a naturalist and the author of the Boy Scout Handbook, was employed by the ranchers to rid them of Lobo’s pack. His first attempts at trapping and poisoning were to no avail. However, he learned that a small, white wolf called Blanca often ran ahead of the pack. Seton concluded that the wolf must be a female, for Lobo would have killed any male committing a similar act. Later he determined that the white wolf was, in fact, Lobo’s mate.
Having identified the big wolf’s mate, Seton set about to capture her. He killed a cow as bait, severed the head from the body and set traps around both. When Lobo and the pack came to inspect the kill, Blanca broke in front and was caught in one of the traps.
Seton killed Blanca and used her body and scent to lure Lobo into traps. He tried to keep Lobo alive, but the great wolf eventually died suffering from the loss of both his freedom and his mate.
Seton recounted the capture of Lobo in his most famous book, Wild Animals I have Known (1898).