The 100th anniversary of Joe Knowles’ famous odyssey into the wilds

By Paul Mills

The recent revelation that a 47-year-old Rome man had spent some 27 years alone in the woods near North Pond has brought to mind other solitary wilderness adventures in Maine. Among the most celebrated was that of Wilton’s Joe Knowles. Part of his story is portrayed in this column by Paul Mills.

One hundred years ago this summer millions of Americans were affixed by the adventures of Wilton native Joe Knowles. For it was Aug. 4 of that year that Knowles threw aside a last cigarette near Eustis and calmly told an assembled crowd of reporters and photographers he would see them in another two months.

The occasion for the attention was not Knowles forsaking tobacco.

It was instead his plan to prove that “modern man” could sustain himself without the accoutrements of any civilized amenities: a cross between Tarzan and Thoreau with neither shelter, ax, saw, tools, nor matches. Once out of the camera’s eyes, Knowles would shed even his athletic supporter. Naked into the woods he went.

Knowles’ vision was propelled by a major publicity build-up from the Boston Post, which held exclusive rights to Knowles’ story. It promised to monitor Knowles by retrieving birch bark messages that Knowles would drop along the way. This it did over the next 61 days. Killing a deer with his hands and a bear with a club were among his exploits. Cooking deer, bear and fish were accomplished by friction making fire techniques.

Public fascination was so strong the Post’s circulation doubled from 200,000 to more than 400,000 during the Knowles adventure.

Besides nature’s challenges, the 44-year-old Knowles also confronted legal obstacles. When word reached Knowles that Maine game wardens were pursuing him for killing animals without a license he sought sanctuary in the nearby Canadian wilderness. (Wandering across an international border then was a more casual experience than it is today.)

In early October, Knowles encountered what he claimed to have been “the first human being I had spoken to in two months,” 14-year-old Canadian teenager, Frieme Gerard. To Gerard, the by now bear-skinned clad and bearded Knowles equipped with homemade bow and arrows reminded her of a Stone Age creature out of one of her school history books. Their meeting occurred on the Canadian Pacific Railroad tracks just outside of Lac Megantic, to which Knowles soon repaired. Knowles’ showdown with nature was over.

Spurred by an apprehension that local authorities might arrest Knowles for starting a fire in the Canadian woods, Knowles soon boarded a train back to Maine. Despite having to pay fines of over $200 to Maine Fish and Game authorities, Knowles was in effect given the keys to several of the state’s largest cities, greeted by crowds of 10,000 in Portland and 8,000 in Augusta to name a few. Knowles also found time to pay homage to his parents, still residing in his native Wilton, where children were let out of school to attend a town square celebration. This featured the accolades of town lawyer Cyrus Blanchard. He would be among many in Maine and elsewhere who would praise Knowles for the “discoveries he has made along scientific lines.”

After five days of celebratory receptions in central and southern Maine, Knowles and his media entourage converged on Boston, where crowds estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 greeted the “Nature Man” in New England’s largest city.

Soon to follow were bookings for Knowles’ personal appearance supported by motion picture footage – for which he made the princely sum of $1,200 per week – in public venues throughout the country.

Before the cheering stopped, however, the authenticity of Knowles’ story came under attack in an exposé by the Boston American, an arch rival of Knowles’ Boston Post sponsor. The American charged that Knowles had snuck in regular provisions from the outside world during his supposedly self-sufficient sojourn.

Though under the threat of a $50,000 libel suit the American didn’t pursue its charges further at that time, recurrent investigations including a 1938 New Yorker magazine profile, a 1973 Maine Sunday Telegram write-up and a credible 2007 book by Jim Motavelli have sustained the controversy over Knowles’ 1913 nature man excursion.

An often overlooked sequel to Knowles’ 1913 Maine wilderness mission is one that occurred the next year on the California/Oregon border. This one, sponsored by the San Francisco Examiner, sought to put Knowles’ prowess to a greater test than it had been in Maine. This it did first by plunging him into an environment unfamiliar to him and secondly by providing closer verification of his experiences. For Knowles, who had never been to the Pacific Coast, would confront the threat of such deadly predators as mountain lions. He would now also face periodic examination by two well-known academic experts including a U-Cal Berkeley anthropology professor along with an Examiner reporter.

Knowles’ success in this second episode is often overlooked as it never received the overpowering publicity of the first, the startling events of the opening days of World War I throwing Knowles off the front page of the Examiner’s coverage.

Knowles’ return to the limelight would have to wait until 1916. That’s when two New York newspapers spiced up an Adirondack adventure by giving Knowles a female protégé: Elaine Hammerstein, a 20-year-old member of a renown family of Broadway performers. Hammerstein, who lived in separate quarters from Knowles, would be counseled and trained by him so that both could live off the land. The experiment lasted only a week, however, before the Manhattan-based starlet expressed revulsion at the thought of wiping off the blood from her fingers when killing an untamed animal with her bare hands.

There’s a lot more to the Knowles story and the legacy of wilderness adventures with which it is associated. More in a future column. Stay tuned.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.