How many of us wish we had seen the Maine woods in its pre-industrial condition? It’s too late for that, of course, but the next best thing is to read “Manly Hardy: The Life and Writing of a Maine Fur-Buyer, Hunter, and Naturalist” (Maine Folklife Center, 2005, $19.95). The book features Hardy’s lively but understated accounts of adventures afield, detailed notes of advanced woodcraft and, best of all, a clear-eyed look at Maine’s native fauna in the mid-1800s.

Hardy was a Brewer entrepreneur whose primary occupation, like his father’s, was the buying and selling of furs brought down from the hinterlands. He was also an avid hunter and trapper. The book is a compilation of Hardy’s articles, many first published in Forest and Stream magazine.

Hardy knew an almost unimaginable amount about the behavior and distribution of Maine’s animals. For example, he gives detailed descriptions of the many color variants of mink then extant, and the already extinct sea mink. Hardy also discusses the status of large predators such as wolves (plenty, but diminishing to bounties and strychnine), and mountain lions and wolverines. Regarding the latter two, Hardy wrote, “I have read scores of stories of both being taken, but unfortunately they either have no skins or else they get lost on their way to market.” Hardy’s observation counters the popular belief that mountain lions were abundant hereabouts 150 years ago.

Hardy punctures another persistent myth: that of Maine’s woods as an untraveled wilderness. Describing a visit to a friend trapping at Desolation Pond at the headwaters of the St. John River, still as remote an area as any in the state, Hardy criticizes those who claimed in sporting journals to have discovered this area, or any other in Maine: “I will say that fifty years ago all this country had been accurately mapped … There is not a square mile in the state that has not been hunted over a great many times.”

Indeed Hardy describes an area both wild and settled. While epic adventures among uncertain ice and crusty snow are frequent, the lumbermen’s shanties seem never to be farther than a good day’s walk, if you know where to find them. But then a good day’s walk for Hardy, often clad in moose moccasins and hauling a large pack and heavy rifle, could be significant. One April day in 1861, despite a grotesquely swollen ankle and tough traveling through soft snow, Hardy managed 30 miles from Allagash Lake to the Chesuncook House, at times traversing unfamiliar terrain by dead reckoning.

Birders will doubtless be interested in Hardy’s careful observations, some of which are surprising. Recounting one trip to the woods, Hardy wrote, “It is singular how little bird life we have seen. In nine weeks I do not remember seeing a single chickadee or nuthatch – we rarely have any but the red-bellied – not a pileated woodpecker nor a woodpecker of any kind, nor a crossbill. … We did not see a single eagle, hawk, raven, crow or heron.” (He did see many owls, barred and great horned, and blasted them without hesitation.)

Hardy was also familiar with the Maine coast, and there’s an account of hunting porpoises from a birchbark canoe in Penobscot Bay with Louis Ketchum (“much more difficult than any kind of wing shooting, and just as good sport.”) It’s too bad that Hardy did not write more about his relationships with Penobscots, his companions on numerous hunting and trapping trips, like Ketchum did. Fortunately his daughter, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, wrote extensively of the tribe.

In his business and travels, Hardy kept some interesting company. Hiram Leonard, the famed fly rod maker (and, it turns out, a fine and creative gunsmith), was a childhood friend, as was Joshua Chamberlain. In later years, Hardy corresponded frequently with early conservationist George Bird Grinnell, then editing Forest and Stream, where many of Hardy’s accounts appeared.

Some of Hardy’s articles responded to those calling for game limits on Maine hunters. Sounding still-familiar themes, Hardy felt that Maine hunters were noble and sportsmanlike, but out-of-state sports, seeking trophies rather than sustenance, were the ones who needed to be regulated.

William Krohn, a USGS wildlife research biologist stationed at the University of Maine, has done a thorough job of compiling this carefully edited volume, complete with an annotated bibliography. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Maine woods and its denizens in the 19th century.

Tracking Manly Hardy

The collection of Manly Hardy’s writings grew out of wildlife biologist William Krohn’s research on Canada lynx. Krohn was looking into the historical distribution of lynx when the species was being considered for the Endangered Species Act listing it received in 2000. As Krohn and his students researched lynx in Maine, he said, “the name that kept coming up was Manly Hardy.”

In order to trust the veracity of Hardy’s extensive lynx observations, Krohn said, it was important to know something about the observer. Hardy, it turns out, “was an extremely good observer and a good recorder of fact.”

As Krohn followed historical leads, he found Hardy everywhere.

“I think what surprised me was how much information I could find,” said Krohn. “I mean, every rock I turned, I found something. You go to the Brewer Public Library and there on the wall is a painting by Walter Hardy, Manly’s son. And you look in the stacks and there are books in there with Manly’s bookplate on them. You go into the Bangor Public Library and there is a painting of Molly Molasses – who was a friend of Manly’s and gave him a basket for his wedding – painted by Manly’s uncle, Jeremiah Pearson Hardy. And you can go to the Abbe Museum down in Bar Harbor today and see the basket that Molly Molasses gave Manly Hardy. All these kinds of connections to today’s world, I think that surprised me more than the biology.”

Hardy’s house and the adjacent barn where he traded fur still stand at 159 Wilson St., just across the bridge from Bangor. (They are now divided into apartments.) And the ocean-going birchbark canoe Hardy used for hunting porpoises is on display in the Maine State Museum.

“I think that made it kind of fun,” said Krohn, “that you could actually see and touch things that he touched, that he knew about.”

Krohn is still on Hardy’s trail, and it has not yet grown cold. In addition to the book, Krohn has written an article about Hardy’s journal entries for Northeastern Naturalist. And he recently discovered a treasure trove of letters from Hardy to noted ornithologist William Brewster in a collection at Harvard University. Krohn also has written a book chapter on Hardy’s collection of North American birds, which peaked at 3,300 mounted specimens.