The First Naked Reality Star

On August 4, 1913, 44-year-old Joseph Knowles smoked a final cigarette in the rain, stripped down to a jockstrap, said goodbye to civilization, and disappeared into the Maine wilderness. He set out to prove that modern man could still survive on nothing but his wits and what he could hunt and gather.

For two months, avid readers of the Boston Post followed his story. When he emerged, he was tan, bearded, and wearing the smelly hide of a bear he had clubbed to death. Wow.

A reported two hundred thousand people greeted him in Boston when he arrived by train a few days later. Men lined up to shake his hand, women swooned while touching his muscles, and everyone marveled at the modern day mountain man and his fantastic stories. Was any of it real? Or was this all an elaborate hoax created simply to sell newspapers?

For Science!

“I am not interested in money and my purpose is entirely scientific. I shall enter naked and take with me absolutely nothing. I shall see absolutely no one. I shall keep a birch-bark record with charcoal of my progress and place it each week under a stump where a trapper will get it and send it to the Sunday Post.“

Knowles claimed to have trained as a guide in his native Maine, so already possessed the skills needed to survive in the wilderness. He vowed to enter the woods without clothing or tools of any kind. Whatever he needed to survive he would simply fashion from what he could find in the forest.

On the eve of his trip, Knowles was examined by Dr. Dudley Sargent of Harvard (who would re-examine him later) who summed up Knowles as being a bit out of shape, but that the extra fat should help in in the cold.

The Maine Fish and Game Commission had refused to give him a special off-season permit to kill any game, so his food choices would be slim. He would forage, fish, and eat animals that didn’t violate his agreement with the wardens. For fire, he would rub sticks together like the Boy Scouts. Man was growing soft, but not Knowles.

Survival Skills

Near King and Bartlett Lake, he started his self-imposed exile. It’s unclear if and when he removed the jockstrap, but from here on, all of his stories mention him being fully naked. His time in the woods started out a bit rough but he quickly adjusted. He had begun in a driving rain which made it hard to start a fire for a few days. So to stay alive and warm he paced and walked around all night. His first food was berries but he was finally able to catch some trout in a pool.

“The wilderness is the great teacher; it strips away all that is false and leaves only what is true” – Joseph Knowles

Bear Clubbing and Deer Neck Breaking

He eventually settled into a routine of building shelter, starting fires, and exploring to finding food. He smoked trout, made rudimentary shoes and leg covers out of bark, and shot partridges with a handmade bow. And he dutifully wrote with charcoal on birchbark and sketched – that he placed at the arranged spot to find its way to the newspaper.

Over two months, Knowles’ stories led to a circulation increase of over 30,000 for the Boston Post. Some twenty newspapers around the country bought the syndicated story of his adventures.

By the third week, Joe needed more substantial food and some sort of covering for the cold nights. But the only way to meet those needs would be to break the law and kill an animal. After much internal debate, he decided to try to catch a bear. He dug a 4 foot hole, covered it, and baited it with fish. Sure enough, he caught a small bear in the trap the next day and proceeded to beat it to death with a burl wood club he had fashioned. Then, for the next few days, using just a sharpened stone and his sheer will, he made the hide wearable. He removed the skin, cleaned it up, and fashioned it into a jacket that became a huge part of his later public appearances.

As if the bear clubbing wasn’t manly enough, he also claimed that he somehow managed to tackle a young buck and snapped its neck with a quick twist. The only things he said he missed were conversation and salt for his food.

“The first taste of meat that I had won with my own hands was sweeter than any banquet.”

Return to Society via Quebec

On October 4th, Joseph Knowles emerged from the woods, escorted by game wardens. But he didn’t emerge near where he had entered two months earlier. He re-entered society in Canada, 40 miles Northwest at Lake Megantic, Quebec.

“Knowles, clad in skins, comes out of the forest” – headline in the Post

Knowles claimed that he went to Canada solely because he had hunted the deer and bear out of season. He feared the Maine game wardens and possible punishment and fines. So around October 2nd, he left a note in birch bark on a stump, and began his hike to Canada wearing his trusty bear skin. Once in Canada, he found a train track and followed it. He ran into a 14 year old French speaking girl who gave him directions towards Megantic. A while later, a freight train came by and the engineer, recognizing Naked Joe, jumped off saying:

“You’re Mr. Knowles, aren’t you? All of Megantic is waiting for you. Your friends are there, together with the game wardens of Maine and Canada, and they have planned a big welcome for you.”

Upon his arrival in Megantic, he was welcomed by an bubbly crowd, including the mayor, a priest, brass bands, British and American officials, and 4 Maine wardens. They brought him to the Queen’s Hotel where the “half-man, half-bear with matted hair and skin dark as an Indian’s” was brought to a room, stripped out of his bear skin, and laid on a comfortable bed for the first time in 2 months. Locals pushed into the hotel room to get a glimpse of this oddity. He was given a cigarette and asked what he wanted to eat for his first meal back in civilization. A local doctor warned him to be careful after such a prolonged limited diet, but when the locals pressed him, Joseph proclaimed:

“Fried salt pork, potatoes, and tea!”

The birch bark note he had left announcing his Megantic plans hadn’t quite spread to everyone. On the day he was supposed to emerge at King and Bartlett Lake, eager onlookers in canoes dotted the lake, scanning the shoreline for signs of him. When he didn’t emerge, they feared he had died of starvation or by animal mauling. Instead, he was drinking Canadian whiskey in a Quebec hotel.

One Slow, Pungent Train Ride

He left the next morning with the wardens, making his way via trail and then train towards civilization. He was the guest at various feasts in camps and towns, and visited his parents in Wilton. Then he headed towards Portland via train. The Post ran daily stories detailing his every step, converting him into a bonafide star. The folks who rode with him were horrified at the smell of the bear skin. He was given proper clothes and the bear skin was relegated to the baggage car. It took 5 days to make the trip because so many towns wanted the train to stop so they could see the “Nature Man.” Bigger towns held banquets and receptions, and newspapers everywhere covered his movements. 8,000 met the train in Augusta, and another 10,000 in Portland. For each appearance, he would dutifully don the bear skin which became a huge part of his public persona. He was driven in a car to the Augusta offices of the Fish and Game Commission where the Post paid his $205 in fines for hunting out of season.

“Knowles Proves Equal of the Cave Man”

By the time the train rolled slowly into North Station in Boston on October 11th, a huge crowd was impatiently waiting. Men stood on top of railroad cars, reporters pushed forward, and the thousands were barely held back by dozens of police. A woman repeatedly yelled “let me touch him!” before falling unconscious. It was a circus. It was reported that 200,000 were there (certainly an exaggeration).

“Great work, Joe!…You’re all right!…You’re my bet!”

The Curiosity

Knowles, in his ever present bearskin, made his way with the parade crowds to Boston Common where another huge crowd had gathered to hear him speak. He wasn’t much of a public speaker, but said a few words.

While in Boston, he spent time at Harvard, getting re-examined by his old buddy Dr. Dudley Sargent, their head of physical education. Dudley pronounced him fit as a fiddle. Comparing his pre- and post-woods measurements, Joseph supposedly lost weight, gained lung capacity, and even grew a little! Sargent reported that Knowles was in better shape than any of the college’s “football men,” and stated that “with his legs alone he lifted more than a thousand pounds.” He had perfect skin that was so healthy that his pores can close and shield him from sudden chills. In the doctor’s female training school in Cambridge, 400 women gathered around him and sang they they had written for him. Knowles stood on a platform in the middle of the gym taking questions. Dr. Sargent had him dramatically remove his bearskin and the women were allowed to approach him and gently stroke his skin.

That same day, he was brought to Filene’s where there was a hearty meal of “Brook Trout Knowles” and partridge. That was followed by a “makeover” where he dropped the bearskin to he floor and was barbered, manicured, and then outfit in a suit with a a soft black hat and walking stick.

Later, he was feted at a black tie banquet at the Copley Plaza Hotel, attended by “a host of New England physicians, sportsmen, and professional men.” Dignitaries sat at white linen tables covered in forest leaves while an eagle ice sculpture looked on. A well known psychologist spoke comparing Knowles to Christopher Columbus because he had silenced the skeptics. Naturalist James H. Thornton was commissioned to write and read a poem:

“He goes into the woods, naked and bare; He goes through the woods with trouble and care; He comes out of the woods, God only knows where.”

Fame and Glory

For the next few months, Knowles cashed in on his fame. The Post continued to publish stories, including full pages of his illustrations. Circulation swelled by 37,000. They also announced the imminent publication of the “profusely illustrated” book by Knowles himself called “Alone in the Wilderness” by Small, Maynard and Company. The Post arranged with all of the Mayors of the Maine towns he had passed through to give him receptions.

He was booked at B.F. Keith’s Theatre which was a famous Boston vaudeville house to appear as the “Nature Man.” In his woods clothing, he demonstrated how he made tools and described his killing of the bear in great detail. Ticket buyers ate it up.

Knowles also screened footage that had been made of him after his return where he demonstrated his various survival skills. This would later be put together as sort of a documentary, though it doesn’t seem to exist on the internet.

His Boston vaudeville appearance led to further weeks of bookings in vaudeville theaters around the country. He was on the road for a total of 20 weeks, earning $1,200 a week.

Knowles also spoke of creating a wilderness school to teach people how to be survive in the woods.

“I think I have a great mission, one that will lead the people choked in city smoke back to a saner life.”

Hoax?

In early December, just when the initial excitement of the Nature Man was beginning to die down, The Boston American, a Hearst-owned rival to the Post, began a lengthy expose. Each day for two weeks, it printed front-page stories where it pronounced Knowles to be a fake and the Post’s stories to be completely fabricated. They even dared Joe to sue them for libel. The reporter, Bert Ford, detailed what he believed actually happened in the North woods.

Joe denied the accusations – and actually held to his story for the rest of his life. In fact, he filed a $50,000 lawsuit against the American. But here is what actually happened.

The Truth

The story that Bert Ford laid out in the American in the late Fall of 1913 was awkwardly written, but most damning. Then the New Yorker resurrected the story in June 1938 in a piece called “Where are they now? The Nature Man.”

New Yorker writer Richard O. Boyer interviewed Michael McKeogh himself where he confirmed the previous rumors and American accusations and also added a whole lot of color to the tale.

Bars and Bears

In the summer of 1913, in a humid Boston bar, Joe Knowles was holding court. He was drunkenly boasting to everyone about his strength and his unmatched woodsman skills with a booming voice. Knowles, then a part-time artist at the Boston Post, was proclaiming to his fellow bar denizens that he was so talented that he could enter the woods unclothed and weaponless and survive indefinitely. With his gold tooth shining in the bar light, he said his strength and cunning came from his time as both a trapper and wild-animal painter in his native Maine. Though he was drunk, pale, and had a beer gut, he must have been pretty convincing.

This scene would likely have been forgotten, just like most booze-fueled bar bragging. But on that hot day, a freelance journalist named Michael McKeogh just happened to be drinking in the same bar.

McKeogh had an idea. He called Knowles over, and with the help of a few pints, McKeogh concocted the basic story that would later vault Knowles to the front page. “We’ll make a million” he told Joe. McKeogh had been reading Robinson Crusoe and was enamored at the idea of man living primitively. The country was also caught up in the fictional story of Tarzan, made famous a few years earlier in a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. So when he heard Joe tell his stories, the brainstorm came to him.

At a table in the bar, McKeogh wrote out a day-by-day, two month wilderness schedule for Joe. He labelled it “A Modern Robinson Crusoe” and the plan was to ultimately turn it into a book which would make them rich. McKeogh goaded Joe for more stories and Joe had plenty. McKeogh would jot down something like “Tuesday: kills bear,” and he’d ask Joe “are you sure you can do it?” Joe would take a drink, pause, and describe five or six ways of killing a bear without a rifle.

McKeogh sold the story to the Boston Post.

A Desperate Newspaper looking for Gimmicks

It turns out that in 1913, the Boston Post was failing. Circulation was down to 20,000 and the paper was near bankruptcy. Boston’s newspaper market was notoriously dense and competitive, and Hearst’s rival Boston American was selling more papers. The Post had tried various promotions and gimmicks to prop up circulation and some of them successful. It introduced the “Boston Post cane” which gave ebony canes topped with engraved gold caps to 700 small New England towns to be awarded to the oldest male resident (still followed today in some towns).

It also had success when it got kids to send their pennies into the newspaper to help buy 3 Vaudeville elephants to put in the Franklin Park Zoo. The kids got their names in the paper, the elephants were paraded through Boston, and 60,000 attended a celebration at newly built Fenway Park (there is a plaque commemorating the event). Another promotions involved giving $100 to the first person on the street each day who said “Good morning, have you read the Post today?”

So when McKeogh pitched the wilderness idea, it was not out-of-character for the Post to agree to it.

Onward to Maine

Because of Joe’s familiarity with the Maine woods, Joe and McKeogh decided he should spend this time in the woods of Maine. So a few weeks later, while Joe was getting naked for reporters and trudging into the woods, McKeogh was already settled into a cabin 2 miles away from the trailhead with his trusty typewriter.

McKeogh hired a Maine guide named Fred Allen to do the cooking and to retrieve Joe’s weekly messages from the woods. McKeogh would then rewrite Joe’s short messages into something worthy of the paper and have Fred mail them to the Post from town.

Though he had scripted it, McKeogh intended Joe to actually perform the various feats and be the nature man he claimed he was. He intended to doctor the letters for the paper, but he expected Joe to go through with the agreed upon plan. But it turns out Joe had other ideas.

After he stripped down to his jockstrap and waved goodbye to the small crowd, Joe walked straight to McKeogh’s cabin, surprising of McKeogh and Allen. Plans had changed.

Please Go Outside

McKeogh pleaded with Knowles. “Be a Man!” he cried. But Joe wouldn’t budge. For the next 3 weeks, Joe spent his time in and around the cabin, eating their cooking. McKeogh was able to at least convince Joe to let his beard grow and to lay naked in the sun for a few hours so that his pale body wasn’t a dead giveaway.

Joe did spend some time in the woods, and spent a few nights sleeping in deserted camps, but certainly did not accomplish what McKeogh was reporting to the paper. It turns out that while Joe maybe could have done most of the things he claimed, he simply didn’t want to unless he really had to.

The Stolen Pie

One day, McKeogh had a sweet craving. So he walked 12 miles to the village of Eustis, bought himself an apple pie, and carried it all the way back to the cabin. Too tired to eat when he returned, he placed it on the windowsill to keep it cool overnight. But the next morning, he heard footsteps and turned to see Joe swipe the pie and run into the woods with it. McKeogh was already not happy with Joe, and this did not help.

A Necessary Bribe

One day, while McKeogh was crafting fantastic nature fiction on the typewriter and Joe was lazily lounging in the sun, McKeogh heard footsteps approaching the cabin. Joe scrambled inside and hid under the bed. A local trapper named Allie Demin appeared at the door and asked “where’s Joe?” When McKeogh responded with “what do you mean?”, Demin told him that he had been watching the cabin for 3 days and knew what they were up to. Before McKeogh could try to wriggle out of it, Joe emerged and said “Let him in, Mac. Maybe we can come to an understanding.”

So they decided to pay Demin a $2.50 a day bribe, doubling that later when he demanded. They wanted to fire Allen, since they didn’t need two people on the payroll. Allen threatened to expose them, so they had to pay both bribes, though Allen went home to Farmington.

Half-Hearted Attempts

Now that they had been caught once, they decided they needed to be more cautious. McKeogh banished Joe to the woods, but Joe didn’t even move out of earshot of the cabin. McKeogh would try to implore him to action, saying he was wasting a chance to make a lot of money, but Joe didn’t appear to care. McKeogh would deliver him lunch each day and tell him about the invented stories he was writing to try to rouse Joe into duplicating some of them. But Joe was unmoved.

One day, McKeogh told Joe that the citizens of Boston were so moved by his tales that they were erecting a statue of Joe wearing bearskins on the Boston Common. This seemed to actually register with Joe, so he went out to dig a rudimentary bear trap so there was something to show reporters later. He also went out into the woods and found an already dead deer that he skinned.

More Visitors

One day, 5 game wardens showed up at the cabin with newspaper in hand, eager to grab Joe for killing the bear without a permit. While the wardens were still there, Bert Ford, a reporter for Mr. Hearst’s rival Boston American, also showed up. Ford was certain that the stories that the Post was publishing were fake. He had decided to prove it by catching them in the act.

He must have done some detective work because after he travelled to Maine, he found his way to McKeogh’s cabin. When the wardens and reporter set out to find Joe, McKeogh also headed out directly to Joe’s usual hang out spot. He implored Joe to go deeper into the woods to evade capture: “You’ll be put in prison, Joe, you’ll be put in prison!” Joe didn’t seem to care until he finally heard the wardens’ footsteps and he ran off into the woods.

Hide and Seek

For 10 days, Joe lived like a fugitive, hiding and living off food found in abandoned camps. He finally made it back to McKeogh’s cabin after the coast was clear. Only 3 days were left until Joe was supposed to end the experiment he had to steer clear of trouble. McKeogh decided that Joe should head to Canada to evade the Maine wardens so would need to leave soon.

We Need a Bear Suit, Right Now

There was a problem. Joe still didn’t have a bearskin. McKeogh had made it a big part of the Joe Knowles’ stories so there was no way he could walk out of the woods without one. Desperate, their trapper-on-the-payroll Deming was able to bail them out. His friend Bill Hall shot a bear and Deming bought the hide for $12. They draped it over Joe’s shoulders and the smell was dreadful. Joe also did not want to head to Canada to avoid arrest because he was afraid he’d get lost in the woods trying to find Megantic. So to guarantee his arrival, McKeogh hired an Indian to lead him to Megantic and they set off, with a sullen Knowles trudging behind his guide. McKeogh planned to meet him there.

Canada Bound

The Indian abandoned Joe about 10 miles from Megantic, assuming he could find the rest of the way on his own. As he neared his destination, some locals found him and detained him, hoping the attention would bring crowds and subsequent money. For some reason, a Canadian warden with a warrant charged Joe with building a fire without a permit.

Drunken Escape

Joe rented a room in a hotel, invited the Warden, and promptly got him drunk on whiskey. When the Warden passed out, Joe unsteadily walked out, and got lost. He was trying to find a way to Megantic when he heard a train approaching. The train stopped, he borrowed 50 cents from the conductor, and travelled the rest of the way to Megantic by train. He met up with McKeogh and together, they made their way to Boston.

The rest of the story really did happen.

Was Joe a Complete Fraud?

History is a bit divided on this. There seems to be no question that Joe had plenty of woodsman skills, as his later ventures proved. Much of what was published was invented and inflated, but he could hold his own.

After Maine

The rest of this is really a postscript – it describes what happened to Joe after the Maine experiment concluded.

Westward

Rumors of the Maine hoax and the publication of the expose in didn’t kill public interest. In the following Spring (1914), Knowles headed out on a long lecture tour, which was to end on the West Coast. By mid June, he was in Kansas City and visited the offices of the Star, where he told the staff about his plans to do a 2nd nature experiment, this time in the California woods. He promised to use natural pigments from berries to paint pictures.

What exactly happened next isn’t clear, but newspaper magnate Hearst, whose Boston newspaper had previously published the expose and was in fact getting sued by Knowles, miraculously changed tune. One of his magazines, Hearst International, called Knowle’s previous experiment a “noble piece of poetry.” Then the flagship Hearst paper the San Francisco Examiner picked up the story he had told in Kansas City about how he was on his way West to embark on a 2nd wilderness experiment. Insults and jokes started turning into mellower observations once Knowles had signed on with Hearst.

The California Experiment

Supposedly, Hearst agreed to a 2nd wilderness trip with various conditions. That Knowles would enter a forest he had never seen and that he would not be alone, but would start with a team that could verify his time and approach there. That team included a reporter and an anthropology professor from UC Berkeley, later joined by a nature professor. The plan was for Knowles to spend a couple of days getting acquainted with the western wilderness so he could get a sense of the animals and herbs found in the Sierras and be observed by the team. Joe pronounced that he would kill a mountain lion and perhaps another bear. Then he would strip naked yet again and head into the woods alone – this time for a month. As soon as the experiment was over, the team would examine Joe’s camp to confirm that he had done what he claimed.

Knowles boarded a train for Oregon looking for an appropriate place for the experiment. On the train, he spent time speaking with various adventurers who just happened to be there – and the Examiner covered it all.

By mid-July, the newspaper reported that Knowles had found virgin territory that had “never been explored to any extend by white man.” Jack London, the famous author of Call of the Wild, supposedly convinced Knowles via that he should avoid the Rockies and head into the Siskiyou Mountains near the California/Oregon border due to available food. That story point, though incredible, was never proven.

Knowles dove into the Rogue River and came up with a three pound salmon in his bare hands, impressing the team he was sent with. He proclaimed himself ready to once again live in nature. He set off into the woods and his team stayed at a campsite. Things didn’t go very well for Joe. He found that the woods he was in were full of prospectors and ranchers and he wasn’t able to find much food. He made another pair of shoes and a grass blanket, but his feet were horribly swollen. Daily articles were published in the Examiner based on notes Joe left for his team, but they were just a few paragraphs. The onset of World War I had all the attention and it seems the readers didn’t care that much about Joe’s experiment.

In the third week, he ensnared a deer so was finally able to eat some meat and fashion clothing. He emerged after the appointed month, a “bronzed, soot-blackened figure, clothed in deer skin, his flesh scarred, his hair matted, his beard half grown, his eyes dazed, his legs almost too weary to carry him another step.” Joe had accomplished most of what he set out to do.

Subdued Parties

After the California experiment, the homecoming was tiny compared to his Boston festivities. Knowles was celebrated, first in Oregon, then in San Francisco. A lot of the coverage both then and later summed up his California time as being mostly a bust due to the lack of public interest. Knowles supposedly proclaimed:

“What does the public care about a naked man in the wilderness when Belgian babies are having their hands cut off?”

A Failed Movie

While he was in San Francisco, Joe signed on to make a silent movie. And in the Spring of 1915, filming started on “Alone in the Wilderness” – which was the same title as his book. It was shot in the Feather River Canyon in northern California. The story was set in Canada, with the plot being that Joe’s character was accused by the mounted police of killing his former partner so he flees to the woods with his daughter where he could showcase his wilderness skill. I couldn’t find much information about the movie, since it seems like it was quite a dud and mostly forgotten. Joe and his co-star were paid $50/week for their work. Supposedly, Joe got seriously hurt when he fell into a river during filming and was dashed on the rocks.

This was not the first time Joe had appeared in film, as footage taken after his Maine experiment was cobbled together into a sort of documentary called “The Nature Man.” IMDB has very little info on that one, and doesn’t even list “Alone in the Wilderness.”

Joe the Screenwriter

Somehow, Joe’s failed movie actually gave him motivation to make more movies. While still in San Francisco, he proposed a new nature film to the Golden Gate Film Company. This time, it would be filmed on a private island off Mexico but set on a South Seas island and the plot was basically a shipwreck followed by more survival on the island. Joe arranged for a cameraman to travel with him, got permission from the owners of an actual Mexican island, and even wrote his own screenplay. The movie was supposed to end with Joe, sailing on a ship that he built, along with monkeys for passengers that he had befriended. The film company surprisingly didn’t agree that it was a good idea and the monkey island movie was never made.

The Co-ed Adirondack Experiment

Even though the California experiment didn’t sell that many papers (the onset of WW1 certainly didn’t help), one of Heart’s employees thought he could milk the Joseph Knowles story a bit more. An executive at the New York Journal, Hearst’s most sensationalist publication, came up with the brilliant idea to send Knowles into the woods once again – but this time with a woman which would certainly get the attention of the public.

So Joe was shipped East and in the summer of 1916, the “Dawn Man and Dawn Woman” experiment in the Adirondacks began. They had hired the beautiful actress Elaine Hammerstein, granddaughter of Oscar, to be his co-star.

Two days into the experiment, Hammerstein walked out of the woods saying she couldn’t stand the mosquitos and the conditions. Joe followed her out and the “Dawn Man and Dawn Woman” experiment died a quick death.

The Artist

After the Adirondack failure, Joe headed West again, settling in the state of Washington. He built a “house out of driftwood” and for the rest of his life, he mostly made a living as an artist. He was a prolific artist, and his did etchings, watercolors, and oils that found their way into hotels, theaters, homes, and galleries. A 12 foot mural he painted was exhibited n 1933 at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. The Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum has a display of some of his work.

He died in 1942 and was buried in Washington, far from his beloved Maine home. A biography was published in 2008 called Naked in the Woods, by Jim Motavalli.

Legacy

The tale of Joe Knowles is certainly a complicated one. He was a hard drinking, lying fellow who somehow managed to become a celebrity. He got famous at a time when America was infatuated with a “return to land.” Books and movies were creating heroes out of characters like Robinson Crusoe and Tarzan. Urbanites were eager to hear about the rugged landscape and wild forests that were out of their reach. Knowles and McKeogh were just two more people who were more than happy to profit.

Joe may have actually inspired some folks to get out into the woods, to experience a bit of nature themselves. He certainly loved nature himself. He might even have inspired the famous “North Pond Hermit” Christoper Knight who lived in the Maine woods from 1986-2013 without human contact, surviving off food he stole from camps.

In Joe’s unpublished memoirs, he wrote:

“Life is a queer game. Cheat a little here, bluff a little there, smile when it hurts, hide the truth, grab what you can while the grabbing is good, hold what you have. If you play the game according to these rules, you will win materially.”