I went to the woods to make a lot of money

The story of Joseph Knowles, the Maine survivalist who made most of it up

200,000 people reportedly greeted Joseph Knowles when he arrived in Boston in October 1913, eager to see the man who’d spent more than eight weeks alone and mostly naked in the Maine wilderness, living off whatever he could hunt and forage in the woods.

When Knowles disappeared into the woods near Spencer Lake in far northern Somerset County in August of…