Since his boyhood on the then-rural shore of Manhattan Island, George Bird Grinnell had wanted to be an explorer, another John James Audubon, whose estate his father had purchased in 1856. He was not so fortunate as to meet the renowned bird-stalker and portraitist, but from Audubon's widow and sons he received a strong draft of the man's spirit—a mix of wanderlust and purposefulness. It was only fitting that Grinnell chose to name his society of bird lovers after the eminence whose feathery ghost still lingered on the banks of the Hudson.
The aim of exploration is discovery. Yet by the time Grinnell came of age, most of the continental United States (the territory of Alaska, purchased in 1867, was another matter) had been trod by at least one white man, from the depth of the Grand Canyon (1869) to the summit of Mount Whitney (1873). As the century neared its end, there was little, if any, frontier left to cross, much less to define; it had been smudged to irrelevance by the wheels of eastern enterprise and the footfalls of westward ambition. Hence Grinnell's exhilaration in 1885, when, after strenuous, perilous perseverance, he stumbled upon something that, as best he could tell, was absolutely undiscovered. Virgin land after all. Perhaps the map still held blank spots not yet filled in. He vowed that he would return another year and reach the actual ice.
He kept his promise, revisiting the region again and again, taking the liberty of naming dozens of the peaks and glaciers he came upon during his concerted surveys. The glacier he "discovered" in 1885 became Grinnell Glacier—"my glacier," he allowed in a rare breach with modesty. The lake below became Grinnell Lake; the mountain on its north flank, Mount Grinnell.
The idea of creating a national park first came to Grinnell in 1891, during yet another fall hunting trip to his now-familiar stomping grounds. For years he promoted his dream—the "Crown of the Continent"—tirelessly in the pages of his paper, Forest and Stream. Finally, in 1910, a million acres of majestic mountains, forest, lakes, and the largest concentration of glaciers in the continental United States—an alpine Valhalla straddling the Continental Divide and framed by the Canadian border, the Blackfeet reservation, and the Middle and North forks of the Flathead River—were dedicated by Congress as Glacier National Park.