BOOKS" 'Natural Man' was partly a fraud but inspired with his frontier spirit

"Naked in the Woods" (Da Capo Press. 306 pages. $26.95), by Jim Motavalli.

Joe Knowles stripped to the skin and hiked into the Maine woods for two months in 1913 to make a point. The frontier was gone, and the rush to industrialization was changing life as we knew it, eroding our self-reliant, westward-fueled sense of identity.

But, Knowles insisted, modern man could live off the land as his ancestors did.

America, writes Jim Motavalli in his thorough and readable study of Knowles, had "lost the confident swagger that characterized its westward expansion."

Knowles was "a perfectly timed salve" to a nation's waning orientation. When he marched out of the woods, in fine shape and dressed in a bearskin, he was a national hero, helped along by noisy promotion from the Boston Herald and cheered through the streets in parades that drew tens of thousands.

Readers eagerly awaited the Sunday paper and the next chapter of Knowles' saga, which he recorded on birch bark with charcoal and left for a trapper to pick up at a prearranged place.

That he was partly a fraud, Motavalli writes in "Naked in the Woods," is at least likely.

But our ideal of the backwoodsman as the natural man dates to a long line of American folk heroes. While decades of outrageous dime novels made it " and make it " impossible to separate the men from their statues, romanticism persisted and Knowles rekindled it.

Then the rival Boston American, owned by William Randolph Hearst, hollered "tilt."

It claimed Knowles didn't relieve the bear of its skin as he claimed, but bought it, and that it had bullet holes in it. The paper said he spent much of his time snug in a cabin with food and maybe more was delivered to him. He had grown up in those woods and knew they were full of hunting camps.

There were denials and threats of lawsuits, but his book "Alone in the Wilderness," almost certainly ghostwritten, challenged the then-popular "Tarzan of the Apes" in sales. Lucrative vaudeville contracts followed.

Hearst eventually eased off, but ever alert for a circulation-builder, offered Knowles a chance to do it again, this time for a month along the Oregon-California border in woods he didn't know, with a measure of supervision to keep him honest. He stumbled, disheveled, out of the woods, having done what he said he could do.

As he marched out, the Kaiser's troops were marching into Brussels, and the "Natural Man" found himself well off of Page One.

In his waning celebrity, "Dawn Man" was set to try it again in 1916 in upstate New York, this time with "Dawn Woman," Elaine Hammerstein, a Broadway beauty of THE Hammerstein stock. But after a trial run she bailed.

"With Dawn Woman back in her sissy boudoir there wasn't any use sticking around," wrote historian Stewart Holbrook, who knew Knowles. "So Joe came out of the woods himself and put on his pants."

Other attempts in changing times found little traction.

Knowles spent his last decades more or less quietly in a cabin on the south Washington coast, but didn't lose his touch ("Mother Ocean provides all my needs") and supported himself as an artist whose paintings were, and remain, well-regarded.

Motavalli takes us through a history of the back to nature movement, with its phonies and firm believers that extend to today's "reality" television.

While Knowles, who died at 73 in 1942, may have fudged on some of his claims, he knew the woods. Motavalli writes that he could have done those things. He said, often, that his god was the wilderness, the forest his church.

He prided himself in killing wildlife only when necessary to survive. Unlike some chest-pounders, he would not have gladly wrestled a bear for its liver.

While Knowles may have embellished some of his experiences, Motavalli leaves is with a lingering thought.

"As he entered the American home via its daily newspapers, he popularized the school of the woods as much as did any of his contemporaries. Who among us would not have been enthralled and inspired by one of his vaudeville turns? Who among us wouldn't want to see him in his bearskin even now?"