Having fathered his last child when he was 79 years old, and still doing daily chin-ups when he was 90, Howard Greene, it can be fairly said, enjoyed a remarkable life.
Yet virility might not have been the most noteworthy trait of this Milwaukee businessman turned adventurer, who was born during the Civil War and died in 1956 at age 93.
Rather, the wilderness canoe excursions Greene led into northern Minnesota border country, and into the far reaches of northern Wisconsin between 1906 and 1916, are perhaps his most enduring achievements _ not least because he kept detailed journals of the voyages, and because he toted along a cumbersome, large-format Graflex camera to record the expeditions photographically.
Now Martha Greene Phillips, his youngest descendant, in conjunction with the University of Minnesota Press, has published her father's hand-bound chronicles, in the process providing a unique rendering of the elder Greene's rough-and-tumble backwoods travels in a region that can at times seem impassable even now.
Greene's journeys predated those of Minnesota expeditioners and writers Sigurd Olson and Calvin Rutstrum, and present a rare glimpse into an era in which recreational travel in the region was both uncommon and arduous.
Titled "Border Country," the book records eight paddling exploits of Greene's, each of which demanded months of planning, and in many instances required passage by train, horses and wagons, and steamship simply to reach the voyages' jumping-off points.
The book includes 376 remarkable images captured by Greene with his Graflex, whose weight, bulk and slow shutter speed would have discouraged a less committed shutterbug.
"During that 10-year period, my dad traveled with a group he called 'The Gang,' " Phillips said. "There was no question the trips were one of the highlights of his life. He had served during the Spanish-American War, and he learned then, I think, that he loved being with men, adventuring."
Making up the gang on most of the excursions were three adult pals of Greene's and some combination of Greene's three sons and the sons' friends. The boys ranged in age from 10 to 13 when the outings began.
A college graduate with an intellectual bent and an explorer's curiosity, Howard Greene owned a successful wholesale drug business whose catalog featured a wide range of elixirs popular in the early 1900s, among them linseed oil and turpentine.
But come summer every year, he headed for the bush. Perhaps he was inspired by Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1909 at age 50, having already spent two terms as the nation's president, departed by steamer for a monthslong African safari.
Or perhaps he simply required respite from his otherwise work-a-day life; an interlude of challenge far from civilization.
"The journals themselves came about almost by accident," his daughter said. "A son of his by his first wife he called 'Howard T' was supposed to be on the first trip, which was down the Wisconsin River. But the boy had become hospitalized with blood poisoning and couldn't go, so Dad wrote daily letters to him, and partway through that trip had an 'a-ha' moment and realized that through the letters he had created a journal."
