Mar., 191,3 
ALLAN BROOKvS— AN APPRECIATION 
71 
was given carte blanche with these brushes, although his father would give him 
no advice, and he painted — nothing but birds — painted day and night, until ev- 
ery species represented in his collection was reproduced in color. 
In 1887, namely when Allan v/as eighteen, the family, then consisting of the 
father, two older brothers, and a younger sister, and himself, removed to British 
Columbia and settled on a farm in Chilliwack Valley, on the lower Fraser River. 
This little-explored region was quite to our subject’s liking, and while he hated 
farm work, he found in bird-study a constant relief which made farm-life endur- 
able. 
In 1890 the Brooks home with the outbuildings, including a rude museum, 
was destroyed by fire. The young man succeeded in saving most of his bird- 
skins — would have saved them all but for a murderous fusillade of exploding 
cartridges — but he lost ten years’ notes and all his paintings. 
Disheartened by this disaster and yet enthralled by the charm of the wilds, 
the ornithologist practically abandoned both his museum work and his painting, 
and gave himself over to hunting, trapping- and exploring. For ten years he 
threshed out the mountainous section of southern British Columbia, until he 
knew it as a man knows his door-yard. As a result he recorded stuff from the 
general vicinity of Chilliwack which we didn't realize existed in the Northwest 
— had the skins to back it too — Bobolink, McCown Longspur, Flarris Sparrow, 
Black-headed Jay, Stilt Sandpiper, Gray Gyrfalcon, and a .score of others the 
mere mention of which thrills the nerves of a working ornithologist. To prose- 
cute his studies and to carry on his field work after the family had again aban- 
doned the farm and gone East, Mr. Brooks began to sacrifice his accumulated 
collections and the cream of his annual take as well. 
The career of a collecting naturalist is seldom a prosperous one, and Brooks’s 
was no exception. It is difficult for a distant patron to understand the hardships 
of the man in the field or to realize the acuteness of his necessities. Collecting 
for pay, indeed, is endurable only in the case of one who has a consuming- passion 
for the wilds, and who is able to turn to final account the intimate knowledge cf 
nature afforded by those hard-earned opportunities. Brooks had at least this to 
show for the ten years spent in enriching others, even though he himself would 
have prized more than most the choice things he had to pass on. He had, of 
course, himself to thank for habitual under-estimation of his own worth and op- 
portunities. But it was hardly his fault when a wealthy English collector of in- 
ternational reputation offered him a bonus of sixpence for every new species of 
flea he should discover, and surrender. The savant made good too, and sent our 
supposed humble provincial a cheque for a shilling for tzvo such new species. 
Brooks has it framed as “Exhibit A’’ of plutocratic munificence. 
Toward the close of this decade Brooks resumed the brush in answer to re- 
peated demands for detailed studies of “soft parts’’ of birds and big game. This 
led to more pretentious efforts, and sketches from life were submitted to one and 
another of those eastern customers who had bought skins or eggs of him. His 
black-and-white work began to appear in Recreation, Rarest and Stream, St. 
Nicholas and other magazines, and he came to look upon sketching- as a subsid- 
iary means to a livelihood. 
When “The Birds of Washington” was proposed in the fall of 1904, I wrote 
up to neighbor Brooks, whom I had never met, thinking to get a contribution of 
notes. In replying he enclosed a black-and-white, a sketch of a Black-throated 
Gray Warbler, asking me if I could use anything like that. My blood leaped at 
sight of it, for I had not known that anything of that quality was being produced 
