If he could have contented himself with his artistic triumphs — “Conquerers of the Trail” at the Hotel Monticello, the Venetian panels in the Liberty Theatre — then his fading image as the Nature Man might not have mattered as much. But it is apparent from Knowles’s writing that for him the wilderness, and his own part in it, was paramount.

But to succeed as a nature writer, Knowles would probably have had to get a bit more of the poetry of the woods into his work. The naturalists whose work resonated with the public — Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson later on — all wrote beautifully, and captured a bit of the transcendent in their work. Knowles was impatient with the majesty of the silent forest; he wanted to skip to the particulars. Rather than contemplate the grand designs in the animal kingdom, he chose to chronicle individual animal behavior. That’s valuable, too, of course, but Knowles would get so caught up in his observations that he’d lose the thread of the story.

~ Jim Motavalli