Tom Brown Jr., World-Renowned Survivalist, Is Dead at 74

Clay Risen

Tom Brown Jr., who was considered the country’s foremost authority on wilderness survival, and who taught thousands of people how to track deer, fletch arrows, forage for food and generally thrive in the great outdoors, died on Aug. 16 in Neptune, N.J. He was 74. His son Coty confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said his father had recently been in failing health.

Though Brown’s trim, sturdy build and neatly coifed mustache were more reminiscent of the media magnate Ted Turner than John Rambo, he was in every way the quintessential outdoorsman. His preferred wilderness was the Pine Barrens, a vast, unpeopled expanse of sandy forest that stretches across the middle of New Jersey. He would disappear into the woods for weeks at a time, often with nothing but the clothes on his back, and emerge ruddy in health and even a few pounds heavier.

“If you have clothes or a knife, then you aren’t really surviving,” he told The Maine Times in 1998. By way of income, Brown ran Tracker School, a series of weeklong courses in the intricacies of bare-bones wilderness living and what he referred to as “the wisdom of the track.” There is nothing cozy about Tracker School. Students sleep in tents on the ground, eat around a campfire and use field latrines, in between classroom instruction and hours of what Brown called “dirt time,” which they spend bent to the earth, looking for traces of woodland creatures.

Tracker School proved immensely popular: Brown and his instructors welcomed hundreds of people a year, including middle-school students, bored computer programmers and seasoned outdoor professionals from around the world. Though he could seem aloof and intense, Brown built a broad following; former students returned home to form tracker clubs, or even start schools of their own.

“He pretty much changed my life,” Jim Lowery, another Tracker School alumnus, said in an interview. Lowery left his job as a nonprofit fund-raiser to start Earth Skills, a wilderness school in Frazier Park, Calif., with his wife, Mary Brooks.

Among Brown’s fans was the director William Friedkin, who hired him as a technical adviser for his film “The Hunted” (2003), about a Brown-like survival coach, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who comes out of retirement to track down a murderous former student, played by Benicio Del Toro. Brown laid out his origin story in his first book, “The Tracker” (1978). When he was 7, he wrote, he befriended a boy named Ricky, whose grandfather Stalking Wolf was a Lipan Apache from New Mexico who had moved to New Jersey to be near his son. Over the next decade, Stalking Wolf taught the boys the ways of the forest.

“He taught me how to teach myself,” Brown wrote. “I have been using the tools he gave me ever since.” Stalking Wolf’s influence also led Brown to infuse his teaching and writing with an urgent environmentalism and an insistence that people need to relearn the Native Americans’ sense of balance with the land — or else.

“Mankind must reach a balance with nature and live in harmony where the quest for spirit is more important than the gods of the flesh,” he wrote in “The Journey” (1992). “Unless we can change, and change quickly on both a physical and spiritual level, we all soon must face the Final Winter.” Thomas Haughey Brown Jr. was born on Jan. 29, 1950, in Toms River, N.J., to Thomas and Janet (McLaughlin) Brown. His father, a Scottish immigrant, was an engineer.

Even before he met Ricky and Stalking Wolf, young Tom preferred sleeping in the woods to sleeping in his bedroom. He wore buckskins and outdoor gear to school. Both Ricky and Stalking Wolf died when Tom was 17, and he left home to wander the country for the better part of a decade, living mostly off the grid. He returned to New Jersey in the mid-1970s and began offering his tracking services to law enforcement and emergency rescue teams. At first no one was interested.

People asked “over and over why I wasn’t in college, why I didn’t have a permanent 9-to-5 job, why I wasted so much of my time running around in the Pine Barrens, and I had begun to wonder if perhaps my life really was a waste, after all,” he wrote in “The Tracker.” Finally, he was brought in to help locate a mentally disabled man who had gone missing for days in the Pine Barrens. When he found the man, they both sat down and cried.

In 1977 he helped police identify a man suspected of multiple sexual assaults, winning him national news attention and making him a go-to guy for search-and-rescue operations.

He wrote a total of 16 books on survival and tracking, selling some two million copies in total. He also put his name on a line of survival knives sold by the knife maker Tops. Brown’s career was not without controversy. Detractors called into question the story of Stalking Wolf, though they didn’t have evidence to disprove it. And the suspected rapist was later cleared for lack of evidence.

Brown’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his son Coty, from his second marriage, he is survived by his third wife, Celeste Brown; another son from his second marriage, River; a son from his first marriage, Tom Brown III; his brother, Jim; two stepchildren from his first marriage, Kerry and Paul; two stepchildren from his third marriage, Matt Sinclair and Shannon Brown; and three grandchildren.

Two of his children, Tom Brown III and River, followed their father into survival teaching. Tom Brown III has his own program in Oregon, and River will succeed his father at Tracker School.