Sigurd Olson first corresponded with Aldo Leopold in October 1930, when Sigurd was beginning to think of earning a graduate degree in what we would today call wildlife ecology. Leopold was working for the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., at the time. As conductor of an annual game survey for the Sporting Arms and Ammunitions Manufacturers' Institute, Leopold had information about a fellowship sponsored by that organization.

Leopold wrote back to Olson three times over the next six months, offering advice and encouragement. He especially advised Olson to go to a school "where game management is the objective of research rather than game zoology."

Sigurd didn't take Leopold's advice. Instead, he followed the advice of an ecologist friend named Alvin Cahn, who was a professor at the University of Illinois, where game management was not the objective of research. Cahn enthusiastically promoted Olson among the zoology faculty, and Illinois offered Sigurd an assistantship. In the fall of 1931, Sigurd, Elizabeth, and their two sons moved to Urbana, and Sigurd spent the school year earning his master's degree. After completing the degree in June 1932 (with the first scientific study of the timber wolf), he returned to his job at the junior college in Ely.

Then, from out of the blue in the fall of 1933, came a letter from Aldo Leopold, who had just joined the University of Wisconsin in Madison as the nation's first titled professor of game management. Over a series of letters and telegrams, Leopold encouraged Sigurd to become his first doctoral student. Despite the fact that Sigurd hated doing the research and spending the time in class ("I hate the very sound of the word Ecology," he had written while at Illinois) he seriously considered the offer. Ultimately, it fell through, as you will see when you read the letters. Leopold tried to make it up to Olson with another offer, but Sigurd turned it down, and confessed in his journal that life as an ecologist was not the life for him anyway: "The secret of my discontent with all scientific research is that at heart I am not a scientist, although I am rated as one....It bores me to death and always will."

The collection of letters reproduced here is from these two periods in 1931 and 1933. Sigurd continued to correspond occasionally with Leopold over the final 15 years of Leopold's life, and in the late 1940s, when Sigurd began traveling back and forth to Chicago working on Quetico-Superior wilderness issues, he sometimes stopped in Madison and visited with Leopold. If Leopold was teaching, Sigurd would wait outside the door until class was over. Sigurd often told the story that the one time he did not wait to see Leopold after class was April 21, 1948, the day Leopold died of a heart attack while fighting a grass fire near his Sand County property. Sigurd said he believed that if he only would have waited, he and Leopold would have had a good visit and Leopold wouldn't have gone out to the property in time to discover and fight the fire. Although Sigurd genuinely seemed to believe this, he was mistaken: he could not have seen Leopold on that fateful day, for Leopold had been staying at his Sand County property for several days and had not been in Madison.

You may choose either of two formats to view the correspondence:

One letter to a page (short loading time, little scrolling, and use the "next" and "back" buttons to navigate); or

All the letters on one page (longer loading time, but you can scroll through the entire group at once).

For more insight into the 1933 correspondence, see Sigurd's journal entry of November 14, 1933.

Follow this link to find out more about Aldo Leopold.