LIBRARY
H. HAROLD HUME
GAINESVILLE, fLA.
Florida Agricultural Experiment Station Library
NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013
http://archive.org/details/naturalistsoffroOOgeis
r JACOBBO
NATURALISTS
of the
FRONTIER
By SAMUEL WOOD GEISER
With a Foreword by HERBERT SPENCER JENNINGS
4
X ^ h*lV,
SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY 1937
PUBLISHED ON THE SCHOELLKOPF FUND
Copyrighted, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1937
by The Southwest Review
Copyright, 1937, by
S. W. GEISER All Rights Reserved
To the Memory of JACOB BOLL
FOREWORD
Here is a book of interest to many types of readers. For those who love stories, of adventure and struggle, it narrates the lives and varying fates of men who lived under strange and difficult conditions, and who met those conditions, some with heroic resolution and resourcefulness, some with fainting and failure, many with a mixture of both. These lives are presented, not in the style of the popular semi-fiction of the day, but with such accuracy as only a thorough study of many sorts of records makes possible ; yet, too, with sympathy and insight into human nature throughout. For those interested in, frontier life and frontier stories this book presents an un- wonted aspect of that life: the struggle for culture and for science under frontier conditions: a struggle no less heroic than that of the fighting pioneer. It gives realistic pictures of the hard material conditions of frontier life, yet these are illumined by the ideals of the men who subdued those condi- tions. The student of the early history of the Southwest, and particularly of Texas, will find here presented unusual and significant aspects of that history. For the historian of science this book pictures the beginnings of science in a new country; it shows what science must be under frontier con- ditions— an examination of the resources of the region, rather than a study of underlying problems. To the experi- mentalist, at work on the fundamentals of his science with all the apparatus of modern research, it brings a realization of the nature of the work that had to be done before the condi- tions for present-day investigation could be supplied ; it shows him the type of work he himself would be doing had his lot fallen at a slightly earlier period in the history of his country. To readers of all these types — and others — the book will
7
8 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
furnish enjoyment and — more important — understanding and
appreciation of the heroic men who founded science on the
raw frontier.
Herbert Spencer Jennings
The Johns Hopkins University, October 11, 1937.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I The Naturalist on the Frontier 11
CHAPTER II Jacob Boll 22
CHAPTER III In Defense of Jean Louis Berlandier 38
CHAPTER IV Thomas Drummond 73
CHAPTER V Louis Cachand Ervendberg 106
CHAPTER VI Ferdinand Jakob Lindheimer 159
CHAPTER VII Ferdinand von Roemer, and His Travels in Texas 181
CHAPTER VIII Charles Wright 215
CHAPTER IX Gideon Lincecum 253
CHAPTER X
Julien Reverchon 275
10 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
CHAPTER XI
GUSTAF WlLHELM BELFRAGE 289
APPENDIX A Principal Sources of the Foregoing Chapters 309
APPENDIX B
A Partial List of Naturalists and Collectors in Texas, 1820-1880 317
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THE NATURALIST ON THE FRONTIER
ON a stifling, sultry July day ten years ago I trudged from the exit of the subway in lower New York to a second- hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue. There, I had been told, I could find some books by Kassowitz, Claus, Pallas, Wieder- sheim, Oppel, and Steindachner, priced within the reach of the slender purse of a college professor. Fresh from the plains of Texas, far removed from the great libraries of the world, I hoped to gain these for my own. At the foot of my list was a book whose purchase I could hardly justify in view of the state of my purse, Leonard Jenyns's Observations in Natural History. Jenyns is not a great figure in the history of science — he lived and died half -obscurely, a priest in the Church of England. But his life and work had always interested me, and I was filled with curiosity concerning the man.
One may expect any adventure to befall in a second-hand bookstore. My books secured, my arms filled with my pur- chases, already enjoying in anticipation my scientific classics, I turned to go. At that moment my eye fell upon a box of foxed and disordered pamphlets, which seemed to invite in- spection. Admonished by the clerk that these were but worth- less rejecta, still I would examine them, and lo ! among them was a pamphlet long desired. It was Cope's brochure, "The Zoological Position of Texas.' ' I paid the price asked, and with my augmented treasures, returned to my hotel. Hours later I emerged, half-famished, for dinner and a turn at ex- ercise. Then I set to work again at the books long denied me,
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12 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
noting with something like affection the browning pages, the loosened stitching, and the breaking covers bound in wretched German leather ; wondering, also, what hands, like mine, had thumbed those pages, and to what projects of investigation or research other men had been stimulated by the ideas, now somewhat out-moded, presented in these books.
The volume by Jenyns, especially, intrigued me, for I re- called vividly how its author had declined an offer to accom- pany the Beagle, as Naturalist, on its voyage around the world, and thus had opened to Charles Darwin the oppor- tunity to undertake those investigations whose purport has forever changed the face of the scientific world. What would have happened, I could not help asking, had Jenyns made the voyage instead of Darwin? How would he have reacted to the new world of phenomena which Darwin encountered? What, in general, is the effect of exploration — contact with raw frontier life, contact with the riches of unexplored land — on the man of science ?
Finally, I came upon Cope's thin pamphlet. As I glanced over its pages, I found numerous references to a Texan col- lector, Jacob Boll of Dallas, to me entirely unknown. Piqued with curiosity regarding an early naturalist who had collected so widely in north-central Texas, I determined to investigate Boll's antecedents and his life in Texas.
In the course of the following months I amassed a wealth of materials regarding Boll, and my interest was awakened to investigations that have absorbed my time for ten years and have involved correspondence with scientific investigators in the great museums in Europe and America. After learning that Boll's collections from Texas were distributed from St. Louis to Leningrad, I asked myself if there might not be other pioneer naturalists and collectors who worked in Texas. The answer came slowly, but today I know that more than one hundred and fifty men of science labored in Texas in the pioneer days.
THE NATURALIST ON THE FRONTIER 13
Moreover, as I looked into the lives of these men, through their letters, the comments of friends and acquaintances, the records of their work in publications and in great musea and herbaria, I found that the careers and investigations of these pioneer naturalists showed common features. Indeed, when for com- parison I came to investigate the lives of explorers and natur- alists in other parts of the world, I learned that the phenomena exhibited here were common to scientific explorations and investigations on every frontier. The history of scientific ex- ploration of frontier Texas becomes, in a sense, the history of scientific exploration anywhere on a border-line of cultures.
I have already spoken of the significance of Darwin's voy- age on the Beagle in the history of the development of science. In many other instances, too, explorations on the frontier have launched men of science upon new tasks, have broken down in their minds old views and old dogmas, have given new dis- coveries that have broadened our concepts and brought into being new techniques. The results of scientific expeditions have made possible the development of systematic zoology and botany. Such journeys have very often been the decisive fac- tor in a scientist's career. Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, perhaps the world's greatest botanical explorer, first reached full awareness of his calling as a botanist while he was surgeon with the Antarctic Expeditions of the Erebus and the Terror (1839-43). It was on an exploring voyage to the Torres Straits in 1846-50 that young Thomas Henry Huxley, serving as ship's surgeon of the Rattlesnake, made his final decision to desert medicine for natural science. And to mention two other great names, Henry W. Bates, author of The Naturalist on the River Amazons, and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-dis- coverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selection, laid the bases of their great work in the field of natural history when they went out together to the mouths of the Amazon in 1848.
14 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
If one cared to examine the history of science (still, alas! largely unwritten) he might easily compile a long list of men distinguished for their labors of exploration. In the first rank of scientists belong such explorers as Franqois Peron, the expert on mollusks, whose name, bracketed with that of Freycinet, is imperishably associated with Australasian zo- ology; Charles Alexandre Lesueur, naturalist on Nicholas Baudin's voyage around the world, and explorer in the United States from 1815 to 1837; Rene P. Lesson, the botanist, who accompanied Captain Duperrey on his voyage around the world on the corvette La Coquille in 1822-25; L. C. A. de Chamisso, zoologist with Captain von Kotzebue on the Rus- sian exploring ship Rurik during its voyage around the world (1815-18); and James D wight Dana, naturalist with Captain Charles Wilkes on the United States Exploring Expedition to the South Pacific (1838-42). Among explorers in South America alone one might name such eminent scientists as Don Felix de Azara, who traveled in the interior of the con- tinent in 1781-1801 ; Maximilian, Prince Wied-Neu Wied, who explored Brazil in 1815-17 before coming to North America for his work in the Upper Missouri country in 1832-34; Eduard F. Poppig, explorer in Chile, Peru, and the Amazon country in 1826-32; Johann J. von Tschudi, who worked especially in Peru and Brazil during the years 1838-43 and 1857-59; the Comte de Castelnau; and Sir Robert H. Schom- burgk. If one turns to other parts of the world, the list of scientists notable for their explorations is almost endless: it includes, among many others, John Gould, Sir Stamford Raffles, Coenraad J. Temminck, and Caspar G. K. Reinwardt in Australasia ; Alfred Grandidier in Madagascar ; Dr. Philip Franz von Siebold in Japan ; and Christian Gottfried Ehren- berg and W. P. E. S. Riippel in Egypt.
But the career of the scientific explorer, if it has its glories and its powerful stimulus to intellectual development, has also
THE NATURALIST ON THE FRONTIER 15
its dangers, psychological as well as physical. The frontier has broken scientists as well as made them. Isolation from the libraries and museums in the centers of scientific activity, and from both the appreciation and the criticism of fellow naturalists, in many cases has dampened the zeal of explorers who had earlier shown great promise. The case of Aime Bonpland, the South American explorer with Baron von Humboldt, who ended his miserable days in a small village in Brazil, at once comes to mind. Among naturalists who worked in early Texas, Jean Louis Berlandier and Julien Reverchon might have achieved a great deal more if they could have had a more positive stimulus from their environment. And the same might be said of Gustaf Belf rage.
Indeed, the psychological dangers of the frontier for the naturalist seem to be especially great when, as in Texas, the scientific frontier of exploration coincides with a geographic frontier. In Texas, as in the rest of the United States, the early settlers' suspicion of the scientist was a serious psycho- logical obstacle. Full realization of the attitude current on the frontier is essential to a proper understanding of the men dealt with in the present volume, both in their triumphs and in their failures. Especially did the scientists who, like Jacob Boll, came out to Texas in the early days to make their homes here, face a task more difficult in many ways than that under- taken by Darwin, say, in his voyage with the Beagle. The Naturalists of the Frontier, like Darwin, were repre- sentatives of an advanced civilization who undertook to explore an area for the most part unknown to science. But where Darwin was sustained both by the sense of belonging to a definite group of his colleagues, and by the realization that any privations he encountered were but temporary, a man like Boll inevitably had to take upon himself some of the burden of moving the whole of a non-intellectual frontier community along the path toward civilization. It was not
16 NATURALISTS OF THE. FRONTIER
merely that Boll had to work alone, or nearly so; he had no London to go back to. His destiny lay in Texas; and only one who appreciates the contrast between the Jena and the Cambridge Boll knew in his youth, on the one hand, and on the other the primitive conditions in North Texas immediately after the Civil War, can realize the courage of Boll's choice. In Darwin's travels with the Beagle in the Pacific, he was indeed working on a frontier of scientific exploration. But Boll and the other Texan naturalists were working on a social frontier as well. In fact, two distinct types of frontier are involved in the comparison — the social frontier, described in America by Turner and Paxson, which is a more or less definite boundary phase between an advancing social system and a relatively unoccupied area; and the frontier of scientific exploration, which marks the boundary between the known area of the earth and the areas that have not yet been scien- tifically explored. The significant fact for our purposes is that in Texas, during the period considered in this book, the two types of frontier tended to coincide.
This means that while the naturalists of the Texan frontier are of interest to the historian of science primarily because of their work in extending the bounds of knowledge in various fields of natural science, their careers must be considered always in the light of their social environment. I stress this fact because the historian of scientific exploration in frontier Texas is constantly tempted to deal at length with the social history of the region as well. I have not always resisted this temptation, which seems to spring from the nature of the ma- terials. Social conditions in early Texas offered many ob- stacles to the naturalists' work ; and for any but the narrowest view of the ten men I have selected for discussion, their fail- ures are of almost as much interest as their successes. While their achievements were due largely to traits of character inherent in the men themselves, their failures were due in
THE NATURALIST ON THE FRONTIER 17
almost every case to the environment. This is especially clear in the career of Louis Ervendberg, who, in a work devoted exclusively to the history of science, would hardly deserve as much space as I have devoted to him. As a naturalist he was not important, but he might have been; and the reasons for his failure to accomplish more for science are of great interest to anyone who wishes to understand the conditions under which all the Naturalists of the Frontier worked. Asa Gray's curious indifference to Ervendberg after he had encouraged the collector to work for him was of course a factor in Ervendberg's failure, but other factors inherent in the social conditions of frontier Texas were of equal or greater im- portance.
The tendency of the frontier of scientific exploration to coincide with the advancing social frontier was a determining factor in the work of pioneer naturalists throughout the United States in the nineteenth century. For as the geo- graphic and social frontier advances it naturally attracts men of science as well as actual settlers. The scientist who de- sires to discover new species of plants and animals seeks the frontier of scientific exploration. There, faced with dangers, with sufferings, with privations that a closet naturalist would find intolerable, he advances our knowledge of nature, urged on by an inner drive whose origin he but dimly comprehends. Such men have played a large part in the advancement of science, in America as in other parts of the world.
The list of pioneer naturalists who have explored the ad- vancing frontiers of America is imposing. Readers who are familiar with George Brown Goode's delightful essays on the history of biology in America (published in 1886-88 and still the only attempt to deal with the whole subject in its proper perspective) will recall his vivid account of the beginnings of natural history in this country, in the labors of such frontier naturalists as the Reverend John Banister of Virginia, and of
18 NATURALISTS OF THE .FRONTIER
those other Virginians, John Clayton, Dr. John Mitchell, ; nd Colonel William Byrd. Goode also mentions in the Colonial Period Cadwallader Colden, for many years Lieutenant- Governor of the Colony of New York; Dr. Alexander Garden of Charleston; and Mark Catesby (1679-1749) of Virginia and the Carolinas, America's first extensive scientific ex- plorer, who published in 1731-43 a magnificent work on his travels in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Bermuda, in two folio volumes illustrated with more than two hundred fine colored plates.
The most fruitful period of scientific exploration in this country, however, was the hundred years between the found- ing of the nation and the passing of the social frontier about 1880. By the close of this period the primary labor of dis- covery in the natural history of the new continent was nearing its end. The history of scientific exploration in Texas, which is the subject of the present work, belongs to this period, and the Texas naturalists should be thought of as co-laborers with such naturalists and men of science elsewhere on the American frontier as the Audubons, David Douglass the botanical explorer, the herpetologist Holbrook, the Michauxs, father and son, the naturalist Thomas Nuttall, the zoologist Charles Pickering, the botanist Frederick Pursh, the universal natur- alist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, the entomologist Thomas Say, the mycologist Lewis D. de Schweinitz, and that fine old ornithologist, Alexander Wilson.
Usually the collections of such men were sent back to closet naturalists in Europe and the eastern United States instead of being described and classified by the field workers them- selves. Thus but few among the devoted naturalists of the frontier attained immediate fame in their profession, even though their pioneer services are commemorated in names of animals and plants that will always awaken echoes in the minds of men of science : Raftnesqiiina, Carlowrightia, Bar-
THE NATURALIST ON THE FRONTIER 19
tramia, Pitchera, and so on. Despite such tributes from the scientists for whom they worked, the naturalists in the field could expect little reward beyond the joy of the day's work and the consciousness that they had wrought well for science. Too often the scientific explorer has borne the burden of the heat of the day, while the closet naturalist has reaped that whereon he bestowed relatively little labor.
It was natural that the wave of migration from the United States into Texas after 1820 should have been followed by scientific exploration on this new frontier. Texas had of course been a social frontier for three hundred years, subject to desultory efforts at colonization by the Spaniards; but conquistador and missionary seem to have had little inclination to botanize on their entradas. Although Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca explored Texas either shortly before or shortly after 1530, little information that can definitely be taken as refer- ring to Texas is included in his book of travels. None of the later Spanish expeditions into the region seems to have brought back any notes of interest to natural historians. Scientific exploration in Texas seems actually to have begun with the work of Dr. Edwin James, surgeon and naturalist with Major S. H. Long's first expedition to the Rocky Moun- tains in 1820. In the summer of that year, with Major Long and a part of the military escort, Dr. James came down the Canadian River in what is now the Texas Panhandle and col- lected numerous plants, which were described for science by Dr. John Torrey. Eight years later a Franco-Swiss botanist sent out by DeCandolle in Geneva, Jean Louis Berlandier, came into Texas with a Mexican Boundary Commission to make collections for his sponsors. In 1833-34 the Scots botanical collector Thomas Drummond worked in Texas ; and in 1837, the year after the Republic had won its independence at San Jacinto, John James Audubon visited the new nation in search of materials for his proposed work The Birds of
20 NATURALISTS OF THE .FRONTIER
North America. Actual settlers in Texas, in these early years absorbed in the struggle to gain the barest necessities of life, had little leisure for scientific interests; but among the many German intellectuals who came into Texas after 1831, many of them with university training in the sciences, were several men who did noteworthy work for science. As- sociated with the German settlements at New Braunfels and Fredericksburg were Ferdinand Lindheimer, who came to Texas in 1836, Louis Ervendberg, who came in 1839, and later the distinguished explorer Ferdinand von Roemer, who spent eighteen months in Texas in 1845-47.
Charles Wright, who had come to Texas in 1837, remained here until 1852; for eight years he collected plants for Asa Gray. After Wright's work ensued a period of inaction which lasted through the decade of the Civil War. But in the seventies there was a marked awakening of interest in natural history in Texas ; several scientists worked in the state whose collections and correspondence made important contributions to knowledge in diverse fields of investigation. This group included the botanist Julien Reverchon of Dallas, in whose honor the genus Reverchonia is named; Gustaf W. Belfrage of Clifton, Bosque County, whose magnificent collections of Texan insects made possible Cresson's fine work Hymenoptera Texana, and who contributed to several monographs of the well known naturalist, Professor A. S. Packard; and, last in point of time, the Swiss-American geologist and naturalist, Jacob Boll, of Dallas, a man who by his character and per- sonality as well as by his scientific achievements deserves to stand first among his fellows. In a sense his work includes theirs; he completes the succession of frontier naturalists in Texas ; and if he is not the most nearly typical, he is certainly the most versatile and the most admirable scientist of the group.
In the chapters which follow I shall describe the labors
THE NATURALIST ON THE FRONTIER 21
of these scientists and the environment in which they worked. The ten men selected as subjects of the biographical sketches are of course but a few of the many naturalists who worked in the region during the period under consideration, from 1820 to about 1880; a partial list of over one hundred and fifty others, with very brief biographical data, is included in an appendix. The sources for each chapter are indicated at the close of the volume.
II
JACOB BOLL
AT the end of the Civil War, North Texas was still frontier ^ country. The stirring events of the Texas Revolution, a generation before, had centered in the southern part of the region in the vicinity of San Antonio and Austin's colony, and along the lower reaches of the navigable rivers. Al- though the black waxy prairies of north-central Texas were destined to become the most populous area of the state, settle- ment in this region began late, and in the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction population was still relatively sparse. The railroads, building from the south and east, had not yet reached the town of Dallas with their great stimulus to trade and immigration ; and to the north and west, the country was even more thinly settled.
Into this region, in the year 1869, came Jacob Boll, one of the most admirable among the naturalists of the Texas fron- tier. Already an esteemed associate of Louis Agassiz, he was destined to play an important part in the development of the mineral resources of Texas, and to give to the world almost its first glimpse of the fossil animal life of the Texas region. All the other men to be dealt with in this book had preceded him to Texas, some by more than a generation. Berlandier had come and gone years before, as had Drummond, Wright, Ervendberg, and Roemer. More than fifteen years before Boll's arrival, Lindheimer, who had been working in Texas since 1836, had turned from scientific exploration to his highly
22
JACOB BOLL 23
respected work as editor of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung. The frontier doctor and naturalist Lincecum, still vigorous at seventy-five, after twenty years of residence in Texas had gone to Mexico in protest against the disturbances of Recon- struction. Reverchon, in whom Boll was to fan a sinking flame of interest in science, had worked a dozen years near Dallas in the very area where Boll chose to make his home. Even Belf rage, the Swedish entomologist, had been in Texas two years before Boll came on his first collecting trip.
Some of these men Boll knew ; of others he doubtless never so much as heard the names. But as the last in point of time among the naturalists who worked in Texas during the fron- tier period, he may well stand first in any account of the group. This place he deserves not only because of his delight- fully simple integrity as a man, but also because he worked in all the fields of investigation touched by his predecessors. In particular, he may almost be said to have begun geological investigation in this area. A curious alligator-like fossil skull which Boll discovered during an exploring trip into Archer County in 1876 was the first indication of the presence in the rocks of Texas of a wonderful series of hitherto un- known fossil fishes, reptiles, and amphibians. It was a chance meeting of Boll with Edward Drinker Cope at Dallas in 1877 that led to the first systematic exploration of the rocks of the Wichita region and the unearthing of the extraordinary fossil fauna they contained. And in addition to his work with fossils, Boll collected extensively for various naturalists all kinds of living animals — fishes, reptiles, batrachia, insects, birds, mammals. Altogether, he discovered probably two hundred species of animals new to science.
Jacob Boll was born in the Canton Aargau, Switzerland, May 29, 1828, the son of Henry and Magdalena Boll. His father, a man of moderate wealth, was able to send Jacob to
24 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
a Gymnasium in Switzerland — where, somehow, he seems to have met Professor Louis Agassiz, destined to attain inter- national renown as a scientist for his work at Harvard Col- lege, but then teaching in the College of Neuchatel. Later Boll went to the University of Jena, where he spent two years but left without a degree in 1853. Returning to Bremgarten, his native town in the Canton Aargau, he married Henriette Humbel and settled down as apothecary in a pharmacy he had bought with his wife's dowry. At Jena he had become very much interested in chemistry and the natural sciences; and during the seventeen years of his residence in Bremgarten he gave free rein to his scientific tastes, to such a degree that the year 1869 saw the publication of a thin duodecimo on the flora of the Bremgarten region — and the bankruptcy of the pharmacy. Troubles now came upon Boll thick and fast. His wife, who had borne him three children, suffered a nervous breakdown, and had to be confined in a sanitarium. Boll's parents and brothers had migrated to Texas in 1858 to join the ill-fated Fourieristic colony at La Reunion, and were now living at Dallas. He decided to follow them to America, hoping there to make a fresh start.
Boll came to the United States in the latter part of 1869, stopping first at Boston and Cambridge. Here he met again his friend Professor Agassiz, who for more than twenty years had held a professorship in zoology and geology in Harvard College. Agassiz received Boll with open arms, and intro- duced him to the circle of young Swiss and American stu- dents who had been attracted to Harvard by the radiant, kindly personality of the world's greatest teacher in the nat- ural sciences. Agassiz, who just then had an especial desire to obtain a large and comprehensive collection of the animals of Texas, proposed to Boll that he go to Texas and make such a collection for the famous Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
JACOB BOLL 25
Boll accepted the proposal, came out to Texas late in 1869, and during the year 1870 gathered an extraordinary collec- tion of specimens of all classes of animals, including many new species, for the Harvard Museum. There were in this collection numerous specimens of bird-skins, Crustacea, spiders, and reptiles, as well as numerous invertebrate fossils. The Swiss pharmacist showed himself, in fact, a most gifted collector. Just how admirable Boll's collection was is indi- cated by Agassiz's comment on it in the Annual Report to the Trustees of the Museum of Comparative Zoology for 1870, in which he ranks the Boll collection among the "accessions to the Museum during the year of great and surprising impor- tance." Dr. Hermann August Hagen, Curator of the Depart- ment of Entomology in the Museum, states that there were among the insects of Boll's collection "1600 species, in 15,000 specimens," and says further :
The purchase of Mr. J. Boll's collection of Texan insects is in every way an important addition to the Museum. ... As Mr. J. Boll is a very experienced collector, and a considerable part of his Lepidoptera were raised either from the caterpillar or from the chrysalis, the Museum possesses now a stock of unsurpassed beauty even for the Microlepidoptera. . . . The collection of Mr. Boll is a very important addition, giving beautiful specimens for species before badly represented. Mr. Boll has added some remarks about the plants on which the caterpillars were found, the time of transformation, and similar notes of scientific value. . . . The whole collection of Mr. Boll, made in a certain limited region and in the course of only one year, affords from its unsurpassed beauty of arrangement a very high testimonial to the collector's ability, and furnishes a model of the way in which insects should be handled and arranged for a collection.
During the late winter of 1870-71, Boll returned to Cam- bridge to be with Agassiz, and there was made a custodian in the Museum as an assistant to Dr. Hagen in the Department of Entomology. Upon Boll's shoulders was placed the re-
26 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
sponsibility of remounting all insects in the museum that needed attention, eliminating duplicates in the collection, and preparing duplicate specimens for exchange with other mu- seums. In the spring of 1871 he returned to Switzerland in order to look after some matters of personal business, and during the summer experimented with species of American wild silkworms he had taken over as cocoons. In the course of two generations, by feeding the silkworms on food different from that to which they were accustomed in Texas, Boll ob- tained adults showing marked differences from the parental generation.
In a letter dated May 9, 1871, Agassiz had offered Boll a regular appointment in the Museum, renewable yearly or half- yearly at Boll's option. Accepting this offer, Boll returned to Cambridge toward the end of October, and that winter col- lected several thousand specimens of the insects of New England for the Museum. In the Annual Report for 1871, the following comment is made on Boll's work :
The Texan Lepidoptera purchased from Mr. Boll were care- fully revised, . . . and a full set of all species sent to Prof. Zeller of Stettin, for a scientific monograph. All new or doubtful species of the Rhopalocera were sent to Mr. W. A. Edwards. . . . The Hemiptera from Dallas, Texas, have been in the same manner revised, and a full set sent to the well- known American monographer, Mr. P. R. Uhler, of Baltimore. The same work has been done with the greater part of the Texas Coleoptera, and a set sent to Prof. C. A. Dohrn at Stettin.
In the same report, Dr. Hagen states:
The collection of New England insects, I am sorry to say, is one of the weakest parts of the whole, particularly as the specimens are more or less badly set. Professor Agassiz, con- sidering this defect as one of the most important, invited Mr. J. Boll, an experienced collector, to come to Cambridge ; during the autumn [of 1871] Mr. Boll collected in and around Cam- bridge several thousand specimens. ... It seems beyond
JACOB BOLL 27
doubt that the superior manner in which Mr. Boll arranges the specimens will soon render the Museum of Comparative Zoology a pattern for every entomologist. The winter [of 1871] will be employed by Mr. Boll in spreading and setting in a new manner the whole collection of Lepidoptera, which will give it a two-fold value. . . .
This winter was the happiest period of Jacob Boll's life. At Cambridge he was thrown again into association with the brilliant company of young Swiss scientists who had followed Agassiz to Harvard. Although the great teacher was near- ing the end of life (he died in 1873), he was still moved by the old enthusiasms and still had the same overflowing kindli- ness that had won for him scores of friends and disciples. Boll was on terms of intimacy with Agassiz, and was a wel- come visitor at his home in Cambridge, where Boll met the charming American wife of the scientist, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, as well as many of the distinguished guests. A din- ner party at Agassiz's might include such professorial col- leagues as Felton, the Greek scholar ; Henry W. Longfellow ; Pierce, the mathematician; Asa Gray, the botanist; and Jef- fries Wyman, the anatomist, together with such famous figures from outside the College as Channing, Emerson, Whittier, Ticknor, Motley, and Lowell. Such men as these furnished an enormous stimulus to intellectual life. Nowhere else in America could a man with Boll's scholarly impulses have found more congenial company. Then, too, the rich and growing collections of the Harvard Museum — what a wealth of material was there !
In the Boston Society of Natural History, too, Boll found many congenial spirits. On October 25 and November 22, 1871, he exhibited mounted specimens and collections before this group, by invitation, and on January 3, 1872, he was elected to membership. The manuscript proceedings of the Society record that "Mr. James Boll" exhibited a beautifully
28 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
prepared winter collection of insects from the neighborhood of Boston and Cambridge before the entomological section on February 28, 1872. It should be added that Boll maintained friendly relations with the members of the Society until his death.
In March of 1872 Boll was recalled to Switzerland by the serious illness of his wife. During the five months of his stay in Cambridge he had been able, according to the Annual Report for 1872,
to collect several thousand of insects around Cambridge and Boston, to form a biological set, an entomological herbarium, to spread one-sixth of the butterflies in the collections of the Museum, and to arrange a nursery for raising insects. Besides a lot especially selected and raised in his room in glass jars and boxes, he established in the Museum four closets filled with dry leaves and branches of wood to raise insects con- tained as larvae on these plants.
Surely a remarkable winter's work! Boll took the greater part of the cocoons to Europe with him and there raised about six hundred specimens. He was beginning to receive en- thusiastic recognition for the work done during his stay in Europe the year before, and for his collections, especially of minute butterflies, which were distributed to most of the great museums of the Continent. In March of 1873, approxi- mately a year after his arrival in Europe on this second visit, he was elected to membership in the Academia Csesarsea Leopoldino-Carolina Naturae Curiosorum of Germany, a great order (founded in 1670) that included all the eminent German students of natural history. Professor Moritz Wagner of the University of Munich praised Boll's scientific achieve- ments both in a cordial personal letter of October 11, 1873, and in papers published in Kosmos and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitnng.
During the years 1872-73, Boll was busily engaged in
JACOB BOLL 29
scientific study and publication with a friend of twenty years, Heinrich Frey, professor in the University of Zurich. The two of them studied the collections Boll had brought from America, and published together upon them. Boll spent all of his free time in natural history observations ; and Boll and Frey together made a botanical exploration of the Albula Pass in Switzerland — a locality noted for the richness of its flora. Boll also prepared some alcoholic collections of mol- lusks for the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which were acknowledged in the Annual Report for 1874. During this period Mrs. Boll was acutely ill: she died in August, 1873. After her death Boll wrote to Agassiz, asking whether he might renew his connection with the Museum. In a char- acteristic letter dated October 15, 1873, Agassiz, although the hand of death lay upon him, welcomed Boll back to Cam- bridge. But when Boll arrived in Cambridge early in January of 1874, he learned in detail of the death of his beloved pre- ceptor and friend.
Recalling the happy days in the Museum with Agassiz and Hagen, Crotch and Harger, Boll knew that the past was gone forever. Here in Cambridge were still appreciative friends who knew worth and appreciated scholarship. Europe ended with the Allegheny Mountains ; there in Texas were ignorant people to whom the "little old Swiss naturalist,'' with his feathered Alpenhut, yellow linen duster, tin collecting case, and forked reptile-stick was an object of mistrust, if not of derision. Yet with Agassiz gone, Cambridge hardly seemed like home. Feeling himself drawn back to Texas by family ties, Boll returned to Dallas. Again his letters, which he so carefully marked "J. Boll, Naturalist, Box 71, Dallas, Texas, U. S. A.," began to bridge the gap between frontier Texas and the intellectual world.
For seven years, from 1874 until the time of his death in 1880, Boll investigated the mineral resources of Texas and
30
NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
studied its natural history. By his work he gained the con- fidence and esteem of governors and legislators, and at the time of his death a movement was on foot to establish a geological survey of Texas, with Boll at its head. In this same period he was appointed Special Assistant, in charge of the Texas area, with the United States Entomological Com- mission for the study of the Rocky Mountain locust — headed by the distinguished entomologist Dr. C. V. Riley, with whom Boll had previously corresponded. Boll's report to the Com- mission, twenty pages in length, was printed in 1878 as an appendix to the First Report of the investigators.
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In these years Boll had ranged far and wide in his studies of the natural history of Texas. In a covered wagon he had gone out in 1876 into the wilds of Northwest Texas, and on another trip had collected some curious heads of fossil animals from the rocks in Archer County. He gathered other remains of vertebrate animals on Onion Creek, a small tributary of the Little Wichita River, a few miles east of present Archer City. These he brought back to Dallas, along with other col- lections. In 1877 Edward Drinker Cope, a brilliant young- paleontologist who during the preceding six years had been investigating the fossil vertebrates of the western United States, came to Texas, and in the course of his field work encountered Boll at Dallas. When Boll showed him some of the fossils he had collected in Archer County, Cope saw at once that here was something absolutely new, a world of primitive reptiles and amphibians whose very existence had been hitherto unsuspected. Cope spoke enthusiastically of Boll's specimens in a letter to his wife written in San Antonio in 1877:
At Fort Worth I collected fossils and living reptiles and fishes. At Dallas I met a German naturalist named Boll, from whom I am procuring some very fine objects of the same kind. In fact, I learned of wonderful things from him, which I will use in future.
What the "wonderful things" were are hinted at in a sentence from a letter written by Cope in Houston the same month, and reproduced by Persifor Frazer in his biography of Cope in the American Geologist: "I obtained a nearly complete skull at Dallas, and a wonderful saurian."
The two specimens which Cope carried back to Houston from Dallas were the type-specimens of two species of fossil batrachia common in the Permian rocks of Texas, and known to paleontologists as Eryops megalocephala and Trimero- rhachis insignis. Cope might very well have been pleased with
32 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
his experience at Dallas. The upshot of the matter was that Boll received an appointment from Cope to collect for him in the Wichita country of Texas, and for three seasons, from 1878 to the day of his death in 1880, he was Cope's paid col- lector.
Not that Cope ever mentioned him as such during Boll's lifetime. One may search in vain for any reference to Boll in the series of papers in which Cope described the fossil vertebrates from the Permian rocks of Texas. Those were strenuous days in vertebrate paleontology, and Cope was engaged in a Titanic contest with Professor Othniel C. Marsh of Yale College to see who should describe first the fossil vertebrates of the West. Charles H. Sternberg in his Life of a Fossil Hunter has told amusingly of the secrecy with which the moves of collectors for these two men were made. Thus Cope thought it advisable to conceal even the name of the collector who had unearthed the strange and wonderful fossil fauna of the Texas Permian. But when Boll had passed from scenes of warring paleontologists, Cope wrote in an obituary published in a journal he edited :
For two years previous to his death [Boll] was engaged in explorations for Professor Cope in the Permian region of Texas. He discovered numerous remarkable extinct verte- brates, which formed the subject of various papers. These number thirty-two species, and they have thrown great light on the nature of vertebrate life at that early period.
This includes practically all the new species described by Cope in his first two contributions to the history of the verte- brates of the Permian formation of Texas (published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in 1878 and 1880). Years after Boll's death, the fellow who suc- ceeded him as collector for Cope, in a paper published in the sixteenth volume of the Journal of Geology, said with char- acteristic modesty : "The vertebrate fossils from the Permian
JACOB BOLL 33
formation in Texas described by Professor E. D. Cope were
collected by myself and others " An examination of
Cope's papers, however, will reveal that thirty-two out of the fifty-seven new species and genera of Permian vertebrates described by him from Texas were discovered to science by the labors of Jacob Boll. Boll also, in a paper published in the American Naturalist in September, 1880, first intelligibly identified the Permian rocks of Texas. And Boll was the first man to discover and report the occurrence of various mineral deposits in northern and western Texas.
The work of a fossil collector calls for physical bravery, unswerving devotion to science, and the highest degree of re- sourcefulness in the field. As Henry Fairfield Osborn has said:
The fossil hunter must first of all be a scientific enthusiast. He must be willing to endure all kinds of hardships, to suffer cold in the early spring and the late autumn and early winter months, to suffer intense heat and the glare of the sun in summer months, and he must be prepared to drink alkali water, and in some regions to fight off the attacks of the mosquito and other pests. He must be something of an engineer in order to be able to handle large masses of stone and to transport them over roadless wastes of desert to the nearest shipping point; he must have a delicate and skillful touch to preserve the least fragment of bone when fractured; he must be content with very plain living; ... he must find his chief reward and stimulus in the sense of discovery and in the dispatching of specimens to museums which he has never seen for the benefit of a public which has little knowledge or appreciation of the self-sacrifices which the fossil hunter has made.
In order to evaluate Boll's achievement, one must keep in mind the conditions under which he worked — and must re- member that, in addition to the hardships described by Pro- fessor Osborn, he had to endure the unsympathetic attitude of a frontier society that had little understanding of the aims of science.
34 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
In Boll's first trip out into the Wichita country for Cope, in 1878, he reached the field January 10: the last entry of collection in the memorandum sent in to Cope, which reached him April 1, 1878, bears the date of March 18. It would be useless to list in detail all the finds that made this trip fruitful. Yet it may not be pedantic to point out that in one month, February, Boll and his companion, J. C. Isaac (an old col- lector who had worked for Cope in Wyoming), found stego- cephalian amphibians, ancestrally allied to the reptiles, and cotylosaurian and theromorph reptiles. These discoveries were of extraordinary value. The animals were all land forms which had died and had been buried in what evidently were delta-formations along Texas rivers in Permian times. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York may be seen many of these early specimens unearthed by Boll — some of them skeletons of a high degree of completeness, and beautifully collected.
Boll's original collection lists sent to Professor Cope have a peculiar interest. Their titles are often quaintly spelled: "List of fossils sendt May 24 from Seymour in 3 boxes, by J. Boll" (containing, incidentally, bones of Eryops, Dimetro- don obtusidens, Naosaurus cruciger — "Sceleton of a Reptile in clay with very long spines — Beaver Creek" — and Dimetro- don gigas). And sometimes the English of the collector in the field failed him altogether, so that lists which had bravely started out in quaint English ended in still quainter German. Mr. Nathaniel A. Taylor, in an obituary notice published in the Galveston Daily News of October 10, 1880, speaks of Boll's linguistic handicap as a deterrent to publication, saying :
Prof. Boll did not write much. There were two reasons for this. He was naturally very modest and unobtrusive, as all men of great merit are. . . . Although a fine writer in his own language, he was distrustful of himself in English. He wrote in English with remarkable clearness, but in a singularly
JACOB BOLL
35
idiomatic way, so much so that his manuscript required revision by a good writer for publication. This was a great stumbling block to him.
As a sample of what could happen when manuscripts slipped past the reviser, the following passage from Boll's report on the Rocky Mountain Locust in Texas in 1877 may serve :
After my own minute observation, the un winged locusts moved from southwest to northeast; fences, creeks, etc., changed somewhat in that direction. The very young ones assembled already in very thick masses. After they consumed the scarcely developed leaves of the lower plants, I saw them eat also dry leaves on the bottom; then they climbed the dry stalks and consumed the old leaves. They migrate nearly always after each transformation, and the more they grow, the more they travel. . . .
When Boll was filled with enthusiasm in the field, writing to Cope of his discoveries, he forgot in the light of his divine fire even the conventions of his mother tongue. The sheerest, purest genius ! Witness the following passage, from a report sent to Cope on August 25, 1880, only a month before his death :
Ein Box enthalt 4 Jars mit Thieren in Alcohol. . . . Das eine ist von dem grossen gelben catfish & das andere von einer Percoider Art, dieser Fish wird hier Proms genant, & hat drayerlay Zahne im Munde & in der Hohle des Gehirns finden sich zway freie, abgeflachte runde Knochen. . . . Vom Volke werden diese zwey Knochen "Diamonds" genant. Ist Ihnen dieser Fish bekant? und wie heisst er? . . . Es sind zway verschiedene Arten & sind auffaland fast rothgelb, wahrend dieselben Arten hier im Trinity ganz griinlichgrau sind.
This was the gentle-spirited, soft-spoken Swiss naturalist who by the sheer force of his integrity and the purity of his devotion to science had won the affectionate regard of Louis Agassiz, Moritz Wagner, Philip R. Uhler, Henrich Frey, August Weismann, Philip C. Zeller, and H. A. Hagen, and also had merited election to the Leopoldina ! Of his singular
36 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
modesty and lovableness there is universal testimony. Cope has spoken of it in print, saying that "Mr. Boll was a most amiable man, and his death is a serious loss to Science," and this statement is borne out in the words of humble acquaint- ances of sixty years ago, still resident in Dallas. "I can re- member him so plainly riding upon his little yellow pony 'Gypsy' to his home at the corner of Swiss and Germania avenues," said one. "We thought him peculiar because he caught butterflies and snakes. And yet he was very good to us." "He was so kind to us little children," said a white- haired woman, "and used to let us feed his silkworms, and look at the Mastodon skeleton when we had found insects for him. I never knew him to speak unkindly of anyone. His one passion was music, which affected him deeply."
After a summary of Boll's work in the Permian beds of Texas, any account of the splendid collections made for Cope of living Texas reptiles, amphibians, and fishes would be in the nature of an anticlimax. Even the early collecting done by Boll for the Harvard Museum, admirable as it was, cannot be compared with his last work, his fossil collecting. Finis coronavit opus. When one considers the all but insuperable difficulties under which Boll worked, the wildness of the country, the roads — hardly passable even at the most favor- able times of the year — and his distance from his base, one realizes the stuff of which the man was made.
Death came to the explorer in the dug-out hut of a collect- ing camp on the Pease River near its confluence with the Red River, on September 29, 1880. Here, surrounded by the fossils he had gathered in the last few days of his work, and attended only by his teamster — a mere boy terrified by the sufferings of the scientist — Boll succumbed to peritonitis after an illness of ten days.
Without the applause of the crowd, his merit unknown to
JACOB BOLL 37
many workers even in his own field, lacking the academic recognition that would have been dear to his soul, with only the memories of Zurich and Jena and the unforgettable days at Cambridge, he died alone in the wilderness. And yet who of us would not have his reckoning for the advancement of science ?
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III IN DEFENSE OF JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER
MANKIND must have its heroes. It must exalt the successful man — recount his talents and his virtues, weave legends about him, and build up a tradition of venera- tion, sometimes to the point of worship. Thus does human nature proclaim the worth of its own poor humanity. And mankind must also have its scapegoats, upon whose shoulders can be loaded the censure for its own sins. Scientific men and historians of science are no exceptions. We recount with something like exaltation the glorious, independent career of a Vesalius : immediately afterwards with hardly less zest, we descant upon the villainy and plagiarism of his renegade student, Realdus Columbus. Again, at the same time that we celebrate the productive life of Marcello Malpighi, who by his inspired work laid the foundations for much of modern bi- ology, we dip our pen into corrosive ink in order to describe Borelli's ingratitude to him. And thus we at once glorify our humanity and compensate for our own lapses from the mores of our tribe.
Jean Louis Berlandier is a scapegoat in the history of botanical exploration in the Southwest. No less a man than Auguste-Pyrame DeCandolle,* the famous Genevese author of the gigantic Prodromus of the botany of the world, in his memoirs stigmatized Berlandier as a malcontent and an in- grate ; and Asa Gray, in his obituary of Dr. Charles W. Short,
* The orthography of this name varies in the sources ; I have for convenience normalized the spelling even in quoted passages.
38
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 39
has lent the weight of his great name to the defamation of Berlandier's character. What appears to be almost a con- spiracy of silence entered into by later botanists has prevented any adequate account of Berlandier's work from getting into the history of scientific exploration in America. Then, too, the dispersion among several libraries of the materials dealing with his life and work, making it difficult to study and evaluate them, has further obscured the facts of his career. In con- nection with Berlandier, students of American botany have a confused notion of a Swiss botanical explorer sent to Mexico by the elder DeCandolle at the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, who is supposed to have ill requited the favors which (according to DeCandolle's ac- count) were showered upon him. Berlandier's subsequent career is usually dismissed with a brief statement to the effect that he set up as a physician and pharmacist in Matamoros and died near there in 1851.
There is, however, something to be said in Berlandier's de- fense, and a few facts can be added to what is generally known of his career. The collections he sent to DeCandolle, for instance, contain several thousand species of plants, many of them represented by several specimens ; and an understanding of the conditions under which Berlandier worked suggests some qualification of the harsh judgments that have been passed on his achievement. It is my purpose to present here, as fully as the still fragmentary state of the materials will allow, an account of the inner life and the outer works of Jean Louis Berlandier.
The city of Geneva, which was for long the center of French Protestant culture, has occupied a unique position in the history of the learned world. The famous Academy was founded there as early as 1559; in the next year was estab- lished the public library, which later grew to great propor-
40 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
tions, and at one time had as its librarian the distinguished naturalist, Abraham Trembley. The nineteenth century saw the founding of the Museum of Natural History (1811), the Botanical Garden (1817), and the Conservatory (1824). The old Academy, which through the centuries had maintained unbroken the tradition of sound scholarship, took on new life, and in 1873 assumed the rank of a university.
The great alpine scholar, W. A. B. Coolidge, perhaps the leading authority on Switzerland in the last half of the nine- teenth century, never wearied of speaking of the unique status of Geneva among the cities of the world.
Considering the small size of Geneva, till recently [he wrote], it is surprising how many celebrated persons have been con- nected with it as natives or as residents. ... In the sixteenth century, besides Calvin and Bonivard, we have Isaac Casaubon, the scholar ; Robert and Henri Estienne, the printers ; and, from 1572 to 1574, Joseph Scaliger himself, though but for a short time. J. J. Rousseau is, of course, the great Genevese of the eighteenth century. At that period, and in the nine- teenth century, Geneva was a center of light, especially in the case of various of the physical sciences. Among the scientific celebrities were de Saussure, the most many-sided of all ; DeCandolle and Boissier, the botanists ; Alphonse Favre and Necker, the geologists; Marignac, the chemist; DeLuc, the physicist, and Plantamour, the astronomer. Charles Bonnet was both a scientific man and a philosopher, while Amiel be- longed to the latter class only. . . .
Amid this distinguished group of Genevese scientists of the nineteenth century, the outstanding naturalist was Auguste-Pyrame DeCandolle. Nordenskiold, the Swedish historian of biology, in writing of the progress of botany after Linnaeus calls DeCandolle "one of the foremost pio- neers" in that science, and says of him :
He was born in 1778 at Geneva, where his family had for generations enjoyed a great reputation. At an early age he began to study the natural sciences, which at that time — the age
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER
41
of Bonnet and Saussure — stood in high favour in his native town. After preliminary studies there, he betook himself to Paris in order to continue his education as a botanist. In the company of Lamarck, Cuvier, and Geoff roy he spent ten years there, during which his reputation increased year by year and public commissions were entrusted to him; amongst other things he was sent, with the financial assistance of the State, on scientific expeditions in different parts of France; Lamarck handed over to him the editing of his French flora and he was finally elected professor at Montpellier. In 1816, however, he returned to Geneva, which during the Revolution had become incorporated with France, but after the fall of Napoleon was again united to Switzerland. He then lived in his native town as professor of botany and member of the high council, hon- oured and respected, until his death, in 1841.
DeCandolle mastered the whole field of botany better than anyone else in his time; he was at once systematist, morphol- ogist, and physiologist. He started a gigantic work, Prodro- mus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis, which was to describe all known plants, but which for obvious reasons was never completed in his lifetime; his son and many others worked at it after his death. The principles on which he classified the vegetable kingdom he laid down in a work published in 1813 entitled Theorie elementaire de la botanique, which he revised several times and which is without doubt his finest work, worthy to be associated with, and at the same time representing a great advance on Linnaeus's Philosophia botanica, which doubtless gave him the idea.
In such an age as this, and only a few miles from the home of such a master, Berlandier was born. Regarding his early life little is known. Even the time of his birth is uncertain, although it was probably before 1805. Berlandier is known to have been born in France near Fort de l'Ecluse, a now- abandoned boundary-fortress only a short distance from Geneva. DeCandolle, who was in a position to know all the facts, states that Berlandier came of impoverished parents ("d'une famille fort paitvre"), and that as a youth he went to Geneva to make his way in the world, apprenticing himself to a pharmaceutical house. Young, active, and eager, Ber-
42 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
landier set himself to learn Latin and Greek in his spare time by his own efforts. On coming into contact with the boy, DeCandolle was touched by his energy and ambition. He admitted the young apprentice to his classes, and as Berlandier made progress in botanical knowledge, opened up the her- barium of the Academy to the youth and took him with him on his field trips.
In many other ways did DeCandolle show his good will to the young student, and Berlandier reacted well to responsi- bility. For instance, when a living ostrich was presented to the newly-founded Museum of Natural History, DeCandolle caused Berlandier to be sent to Marseilles to receive the bird and transport it to Geneva, a commission which he executed successfully. Berlandier spent two or three years at Geneva in most profitable obscurity under DeCandolle's patronage, presumably at the same time serving his apprenticeship at the druggist's trade.
Under this admirable master of botany, comparable with Agassiz as a productive teacher, and in surroundings remark- ably stimulating, Berlandier prepared himself for a career as a botanist. The whole atmosphere of Geneva was favorable to scholarly activity. In Mrs. Humphrey Ward's introduction to Amiel's Journal is presented a vivid picture of the city at the time when Berlandier was in his Lehrjahre as a botanist :
. . . the prosperity of Geneva was at its height, the little state was administered by men of European reputation, and Genevese society had power to attract distinguished visitors and admirers from all parts. The veteran Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Gray and the associate of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying life in his appartement overlooking the woods of La Bdtie. Rossi and Sismondi were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese legislation; an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist Auguste Pyrame DeCandolle, kept the country abreast of European thought and speculation, while the mixed
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 43
nationality of the place — the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and Protestant solidity — was be- ginning to receive inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of TopfTer. The country was governed by an aris- tocracy, which was not so much an aristocracy of birth as one of merit and intellect, and the moderate constitutional ideas which represented the liberalism of the post- Waterloo period were nowhere more warmly embraced or more intelligently carried out than in Geneva.
At the Academy, Berlandier had frequent association with DeCandolle's students, a polyglot group, among whom were Philippe Dunant, Jacques Denys Choisy, Franqois Marcet, and the younger DeCandolle, Alphonse : all of them destined to become productive botanists. When Berlandier was study- ing with DeCandolle, the master was in his prime — his middle forties — and was just beginning the publication of his magis- terial Prodromits. Upon this great work, of which seven volumes appeared during the author's lifetime, Berlandier collaborated in a slight way by contributing a monograph on the gooseberries, or Grossulariece. "This work," said De- Candolle, "without being distinguished, still for a beginner was not without merit" — an obvious understatement. The work on the gooseberries was first published in the Memoires of the Society of Natural History of Geneva in 1824, and was revised for publication in the Prodromits two years later. In DeCandolle's laboratory Berlandier also learned the sketching, drawing, and painting of natural-history objects from Jean- Christophe Heyland, botanical artist and illustrator for De- Candolle. This ability was to be of use to him later.
The impression the young student had made upon his superiors may be gauged by the fact that when DeCandolle, together with fitienne Moricand, Philippe Dunant, and Philippe Mercier, conceived the idea of sending a botanical collector to Mexico (then largely terra incognita with respect to its botany and zoology), Berlandier was chosen for the
44 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
task. He was so responsible, so vigorous, so eager, and so in- telligent! Arrangements for sending him to Mexico were made, some time in 1824 or '25, with Lucas Alaman, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the newly established Republic of Mexico, who was a former student of DeCandolle. Alaman had decided to send a Boundary Commission to sur- vey and establish the boundary between the Mexican Republic and the United States, and he agreed to attach Berlandier to this Commission in the capacity of botanist. Late in 1826, accordingly, Berlandier left Europe for Mexico. Before his departure from Geneva an unpleasantness occurred which, according to DeCandolle, completely altered Berlandier's at- titude toward the four Genevese botanists who were sending him to Mexico. Some teasing on the part of those charged with the details of the voyage irritated Berlandier, says De- Candolle, and as his disposition, "greedy of applause, unstable, foolishly ambitious and independent," could not accommodate itself to the circumstances, he "departed maldisposed.', Thus closed the European chapter in the life of Berlandier. He was but little more than twenty years old.
Berlandier's manuscript account of his journey to Mexico indicates that he left Le Havre on the American brig Hannah Elizabeth, Captain Reling, on October 14, 1826, and on De- cember IS landed at Panuco, near Tampico, on the Mexican coast. Here Berlandier lived and collected for a short time, and then proceeded along the road from Huasteca to Pachuca, Tacubaya, and Chapultepec. After collecting in the valley of Toluca and Cuernavaca, he arrived in the City of Mexico.
The scientific expedition into Texas which Berlandier was to accompany was the outgrowth of a long series of events. In 1819 the United States, in spite of the clamor of a group in Congress who demanded a line farther west, had made a treaty with Spain establishing the western boundary of
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 45
Louisiana at the Sabine River. The imperialists in Congress could base a vague claim to some territory west of the Sabine on the fact that LaSalle, the explorer of Louisiana, had in 1685 landed with his men at Matagorda Bay and had estab- lished the French fort and village of St. Louis near the mouth of the Lavaca. In taking over French rights in the region, argued the expansionists, the United States had acquired a right to the territory at least as far west as the Lavaca. They strenuously objected to the treaty of 1819 which established the Sabine as the boundary, declaring that "alienation of national territory" was beyond the power of Congress. Fortunately for the expansionists, before ratifications could be exchanged the Mexicans had secured their independence of Spain, and it became necessary to reopen the question of the western boundary, this time with the new government of Mexico.
The United States had given early recognition to Mexican independence, and in 1825 Joel R. Poinsett of South Carolina had been appointed first Minister of the United States to Mexico. His task, as set forth in his instructions, was to seek from the Mexican Government a revision of the terms of the Treaty of 1819 that would fix the boundary of Louisiana at a point west of the Sabine.
Before Poinsett's arrival in Mexico in 1825, Alaman, who had become Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs after the fall of the "Emperor" Iturbide, had instructed Torrens, Mexican charge at Washington, to inform the American Government that Mexico desired to fix the western limits of Louisiana in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of 1819. Poinsett arrived in Mexico in midsummer of 1825, six months after the arrival of the British charge, H. G. Ward. British jealousy of American interests in Spanish America, especially strong after the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine toward the end of 1823, had found an effi-
46 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
cient tool in Ward. During his six months in Mexico before Poinsett's arrival he had succeeded in sowing the seeds of distrust of America in the minds of Mexican statesmen, and had persuaded Alaman, LaLhave, and other officials of the danger of American aggression, particularly in the Mexican province of Texas. Ward assured Mexico of the steadfast desire of Britain that Mexican independence be maintained, and tactfully suggested to Alaman, ripe for such an idea, that Mexico establish a monarchy.
When Poinsett arrived in Mexico he at once took up the boundary question with Alaman, but soon reached an impasse. As a compromise, on August 7, 1825, Alaman proposed a treaty of commerce between the United States and Mexico, and suggested that commissioners be appointed by both coun- tries to examine "the country within a given latitude, from one sea to the other," in order to secure "exact information upon which limits might be established."
Ward thereupon suggested to the Mexican president, Guadalupe Victoria, that he appoint as the Mexican commis- sioner a young artillery officer who was head of the Artillery School in the City of Mexico, General Manuel de Mier y Teran. Teran was unquestionably the best officer of the army for such an appointment, with excellent training in military and topographic science, but Ward favored him for the post primarily because he was known to be deeply distrustful of American influence in Texas. The appointment was made in July, 1826, and General Teran planned to leave Mexico that autumn on the work of delimitation.
But the departure of the Commission was repeatedly post- poned. A shortage of funds in the national treasury made provision for the expedition extremely difficult. In 1823, under Alaman's management, the Mexican Government had borrowed sixteen million dollars from a Quaker banking house in London, the Barclays. As a sequel to the British
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 47
banking disaster of September, 1825, the Barclays had failed, and by their failure deprived the Mexican Government of a balance of two and a quarter million dollars still in their hands. Thus even after the Mexican Congress, early in the autumn of 1827, had appropriated the sum of fifteen thousand dollars for the expenses of the Commission, the departure of the expedition was still delayed because of an actual lack of money in the national treasury.
Poinsett had in the meantime remonstrated with Alaman and Teran against sending a Commission to eastern Texas to examine the question of delimitation while the problem of the boundary was still, as far as the United States was con- cerned, unsettled.* But the money appropriated by the Mexi- can Congress having at last been made available, the Boundary Commission left the City of Mexico on November 10, 1827. As the Commission was constituted, it consisted of General Mier y Teran, the head; two Commissioners, Lieutenant- Colonel Jose Batres, and Lieutenant-Colonel Constantino Tarnava, both medical officers ; Rafael Chovell, mineralogist ; Second-Lieutenant Jose Maria Sanchez, cartographer; and Berlandier, who had been waiting in Mexico for almost a year. Colonel Jose Maria Diaz Noriega accompanied the expedition as secretary to Teran. The expedition was furnished with a small military escort, and took along in a special instrument wagon the indispensable books and instru- ments. Following the familiar road of the early days from Mexico to Texas — passing through Queretaro, San Miguel, Guanajuato, Saltillo, Monterrey, and Carrizal — the expedition reached Laredo exactly thirteen weeks after its departure from the capital.
At Laredo, then "one of the most desolate presidios in the
* In the following January, when the Commission was already on its journey, Poinsett signed a treaty with Mexico which recognized the Sabine as the boundary.
48
NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
Mexican eastern states," the Commission remained from the second to the nineteenth of February, 1828, and Berlandier made botanical collections. The route from Laredo to Bexar followed the Old Bexar Road (not the Presidio Road, which crossed the Rio Grande farther up), through present Webb, McMullen, Atascosa, and Bexar counties. At the Medina the party were met by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Elosua, commander of the presidio of Bexar; they reached the pre- sidio on the first of March and spent all of March and the first half of April there. This prolonged stay accounts for the rich collection of plants Berlandier made in the environs of San Antonio. On the twelfth of April, accompanied by a
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military escort furnished them by Elosua, Teran and the Commission left Bexar for the capital of Austin's Colony, San Felipe on the Brazos. The route followed the so-called Middle Road, which led from present San Antonio to Gon- zales, then a newly-organized settlement still in the painful process of being born as the capital of Green DeWitt's Colony on the Guadalupe. To the eastward of Gonzales the road, after crossing the LaBahia road, continued to the Colorado River. Here it joined the Atascosito road leading to San Felipe. The Commission reached San Felipe on April 27. Because of recent very heavy rains, the Brazos was so high that an enforced stay was made in San Felipe until the ninth of May. On that day the river receded enough to permit the Commission to cross, and on May 11 the expedition started up the east-of-the-Brazos road toward Jared Groce's planta- tion, "Bernardo," near present Hempstead in Waller County; enjoyed Groce's equivocal hospitality ; and made camp on the night of May 13 not far from present Hempstead. At this place the road they had been following joined the Magdalena road and led them approximately up the route of the present Hempstead-Navasota highway.
Incessant rains made going all but impossible through the swampy places, and the wooded hills offered obstructions almost as serious. Added to these difficulties were the in- credibly great hordes of mosquitoes encountered after the Commission left San Felipe. On the night of May 14 they encamped not far from Groce's "Second House," near present Courtney. On May 16, after two days of very difficult going through heavy, boggy ground, they reached Holland's Place, near present Anderson. Here, on May 17, Berlandier fell ill with malarial fever, and on the next day General Teran came down with the same disease. Berlandier continued seriously ill until the party reached the Sertuche Crossing, where the road from Bexar to Nacogdoches (the old C amino Real or
50 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
Upper Road) crossed the Trinity. At this place, between the twenty-fifth and the twenty-eighth of May, more of the men fell sick. The illness of the men, the scarcity of provisions, and the exhaustion of animals and men alike persuaded Teran to send Berlandier and the other members of the Commission back to Bexar by the Upper Road. As they left, Teran directed the scientific staff of the Commission to meet him at Matamoros at the end of the summer; he also sent back to Bexar the troops assigned to him by Elosua, and, retaining only Sanchez and seven soldiers, pressed on toward Nacog- doches, which he reached on June 3.
In the meantime, the scientific staff set out down the Upper Road to Bexar. They left the Trinity River on May 30, with Berlandier still a sick man ; camped during incessant rains on the Brazos, June 3-6; passed the Colorado on the twelfth, narrowly escaping drowning in a sudden rise of water after a cloudburst in that region ; crossed the San Marcos River on the fifteenth, and reached Bexar on the eighteenth of June. Here they remained about a month, delayed in their departure for Matamoros, as Berlandier said, "by much and continued rain." On the fourteenth day of July, however, the staff finally left Bexar for Laredo; passed the Medina on the sixteenth ; and camped the night of the twentieth on the Frio. They reached the Nueces on the twenty-fourth. Four days later, after riding through a country possessing some very beautiful vegetation, they entered Laredo.
The party remained in Laredo from July 28 to August 11 in order to repair the General's coach, which had been broken at the crossing of the Frio. All things having been duly set in order, they crossed to the right bank of the Rio Grande, and proceeding by way of Mier, Camargo, and Reinosa, reached Matamoros on August 20, 1828.
Here the staff waited in constant expectation of the arrival of General Teran, who (as it turned out) had been forced to
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 51
change his plans and remain in East Texas waiting for the appointment of Dr. John Sibley of Natchitoches as Boundary Commissioner for the United States. Teran took advantage of the enforced delay to consider military dispositions for the protection of the boundary against possible American aggres- sion.
After some weeks spent in Matamoros, Berlandier returned to Bexar, presumably with General Anastasio Bustamente, Comandante-General of the Eastern Mexican States.
In August the Comanche captain Barbaquista, accompanied by many of his braves, had come to Bexar to ratify and renew a treaty made with Bustamente at Bexar in the early summer of 1827. In the absence of Bustamente the Comanches had been cordially received by the authorities, both civil and mili- tary, and had been given many proofs of friendship. As some of the Bejarefios desired to see the nature of the country to the northwest of San Antonio and to investigate the reported silver mines on the San Saba, an excursion was arranged. Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Ruiz, the popular "Pancho" Ruiz who had been in command at Tenoxtitlan before the presidial companies were recalled from Texas, planned to ride with a number of Comanches at least as far as the head of the Guadalupe River to hunt bear and buffalo. Some sixty or eighty Comanches were left at Bexar under orders of their captains, Reyuna (Queyunes) and El Ronco. Berlandier, who had by this time arrived at Bexar, accompanied Ruiz and the Indians on the expedition.
The party left Bexar on November 19, escorted by thirty dragoons, and returned on December 18. Their route led up the course of present Helotes Creek, and included Leon Creek, Comanche Springs, and Balcones Creek, south of present Boerne, where they passed the night of November 21. From this point they proceeded to the banks of the Guadalupe, near present Comfort, and on the night of the twenty-third camped
52 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
somewhere between present Comfort and Kerrville. The next morning the Mexicans parted from the Comanches and turned westward into present Kerr County, where buffalo and bear were to be found in the oak woods.
The next few days were for the most part cloudy and stormy ; the party, after several exploratory side-trips, decided to remain in camp until they had got bear and bison, of which there was an abundance of sign. On the morning of Novem- ber 28, Berlandier, in company with Ruiz and the others, set out in a northeasterly direction from their camp near an unidentified arroyo on the east bank of the Guadalupe. They finally reached some rocky hillocks, generally known to the Mexicans as the "Pedernales," and struck an arroyo of per- manent water which can with certainty be identified as Town Creek, at present Kerrville. Here Ruiz shot a buffalo.
On December 2, the party resumed its march to the head- waters of the Guadalupe, up a stream which the hunters called the "Arroyo de Teran," but which can be identified as the Bear Creek of the north fork of the Guadalupe. In this gen- eral neighborhood they stayed five days. On December 6 the party broke camp and, directing their course to the southwest, set out for the head of the Canon de Don Juan de Ugalde. The country was beautiful. By midday of December 7 they had reached the throat of Ugalde Canyon, and entered the canyon by a steep and very difficult descent. Its immense meadows, of a brilliant green even in December, served as pasturage for numerous deer, while extensive oak woods in the canyon concealed many black bear, once common in all the woods of Texas.
The party spent eight days in traversing the canyon, and left it on December 14 at a point near present Knippa, in Uvalde County. They then turned eastward, crossing the Seco and Hondo on December IS and the Medina on the seventeenth; and on the eighteenth, after crossing Hondo
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 53
Creek and the Leon and San Antonio rivers, returned to the presidio from which they had set out a month before.
On this trip Berlandier seems to have made few or no botanical collections, and but few botanical observations.
During the winter of 1828-29 Berlandier apparently re- mained for some time in the vicinity of Bexar. He struck up a firm friendship with both Ruiz and Elosua. On February 3, 1829, he went with Elosua from Bexar to Goliad, to quell a popular uprising against the Comandante at the presidio there. Berlandier'' s delightful account of the trip (rilling some twenty pages of manuscript) gives a good view of the country. They seem to have returned to Bexar about Febru- ary 14. On the twenty-fifth of the same month, Berlandier left Bexar for Aransas Bay with a party of Mexicans. They camped that night about ten miles south of Bexar ; during the night, their horses were stolen, and they had to return to Bexar on foot. On the twenty-eighth, remounted, they set out again. The time appears to have been one of Indian activity, for Berlandier in his journal speaks also of an attack made upon Goliad by the Indians.
Arriving at Goliad after five days on the road, Berlandier met there the captain of the galette Pomona, and decided to accompany him to New Orleans. On March 7 they set out for the port of Aransas Bay, about five leagues south-south- east of Goliad. On March 12 they embarked, but calms re- tarded their progress, contrary winds drove them back, and it was not until the twenty-third of the month that they sailed past the port Barataria. The twenty-fifth to the twenty- seventh of March were also hard days, with head winds and contrary currents. They arrived at the Belize on April 1.
The notes describing Berlandier's stay in New Orleans are missing. The manuscripts contain only his meteorological ob- servations made on board the Pomona in the port of New Orleans, April 25-May 5. It is evident, however, that Ber-
54 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
landier loved the French people of Louisiana, and parted from them with profound regret. "Fatigued by the monotony of a semi-savage life, of prejudices cultivated and spread by ignorance and superstition," he wrote in his journal, "I found among the descendants of our ancestors the urbanity, the soins prevenances, the benevolence, the freedom, and the gay- ety which will always be the permanent characteristics of this unhappy nation, by all men considered the most civilized on our planet."
The naturalist left New Orleans for Texas on the eighth of May. He noted in his journal the numerous steamboats on the Mississippi, and made some acute observations con- cerning New Orleans and the causes of its prosperity. The ship remained two entire days on the bar at the mouth of the river. About the eleventh of May it finally managed to sail into the open Gulf; Berlandier reached Texas on the thir- teenth, and the next day was safe in Aransas Bay. On the seventeenth he reached Goliad, which, after his visit in New Orleans, impressed him very unfavorably — "a miserable presidio," he called it, "without industry and without re- sources, today being pompously called 'Goliad' to the end of still further involving the geographic nomenclature." In less than three days he rejoined his companions on the Commis- sion in Bexar.
The group, it will be recalled, had been ordered to meet Teran at Matamoros, but constant rains prevented their de- parture. We accordingly have among Berlandier's papers weather records made at Bexar for the interval of June 6- July 4, 1829. Leaving Bexar at last on July 14, the party stopped the first night at the mission San Jose, about six or eight miles to the south ; on the twentieth of July they reached the Rio Frio, where they were forced to camp until the twenty- third, waiting for the swollen waters to recede ; on the twenty- fifth they passed the Nueces, and finally reached the presidio
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 55
of Laredo on the twenty-eighth. When they arrived at Matamoros, some time before the thirtieth of August, Ber- landier's work with the Commission was virtually over; the Commission itself seems to have been dissolved in November. For reasons which will be explained later, Berlandier de- termined at this time to take up residence at Matamoros, and he was to live there until his death in 1851.
Although in later years Berlandier made other excursions for botanical collecting, notably a journey to Goliad and Bexar in the spring of 1834, his place among the Naturalists of the Frontier depends primarily upon the fact that his work with the Boundary Commission was the first extensive collecting done in Texas, antedating by five or six years Drummond's important work in the vicinity of San Felipe and Gonzales. For this reason, some particular account of Berlandier's scientific activities seems desirable, in extension of the brief narrative already presented. Fuller discussion may be of value also in determining whether DeCandolle's criticism of the naturalist's work with the expedition was justified.
Berlandier's experience with Texas botany began when the Commission, on February 2, 1828, crossed the Rio Grande at Laredo and set foot on Texas soil. As far as his activities as a member of the Commission are concerned, it practically closed at Robbins's Crossing of the Trinity River on May 28 of that year.
The time spent at Laredo (February 2-20, 1828) was so much time lost, for, as Berlandier says in his journal, the vicinity was "a very desert place." At this time events of the first importance were occurring in Texas. On the third and fourth of February the first elections were being held in all the seven old alcalde districts of Austin's Colony. In those weeks, too, Stephen F. Austin was struggling with the Polit- ical Chief at Bexar, Ramon Musquiz, and with Representa-
56 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
tives Jose Antonio Navarro and Miguel Arciniega for a stabilizing law with respect to slavery in Texas. Austin was also campaigning for open ports and for legislation facilitating domestic and foreign trade in the Colony. But no news of these events reached the members of the Commission at the deadly-dull presidial town on the Rio Grande, the character of whose life and morals Lieutenant Sanchez of the Commission portrayed in lurid colors.
The Commission left Laredo, it will be recalled, on the twentieth of February. Two days later, on a small stream called La Parida, Berlandier first began to collect Texan plants; and here, for the first time, he heard the cry of the bullfrog — a circumstance which so impressed the members of the Commission that three of them mentioned it in their reports. The crossing of the Nueces offered some difficulty, as it was necessary to carry over all the instruments, baggage, and supplies by hand, and to swim the horses. The waters of the stream had an abundance of catfish, and the woods bordering it were full of turkeys. These were easily hunted with success at night, and were a welcome addition to the fare of the soldiers. Berlandier saw many deer, mustangs, and bison in the region. As the Commission proceeded from point to point, Teran made nightly observations of the satellites of Jupiter to determine the party's position; and in this work Berlandier helped as far as possible.
The vegetation became more abundant as the Commission approached Canada Verde (Green Branch, in present Mc- Mullen County), and by the time they had reached the Rio Frio (February 25), it showed the richness and and variety that make Texas the wild-flower garden of the world. From this point until they reached Bexar (March 1) the members of the party traversed a succession of flower-strewn plains and rolling hills sprinkled with live-oaks and walnuts.
The six weeks (March 1 -April 13) that the Commission
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 57
spent at Bexar were full of interest for all members of the scientific staff. Berlandier was impressed with the beautiful surroundings of the old capital of Texas (its cathedral was at that time nearly a hundred years old), and bewailed the fact that the Spanish and Mexican governments had so inade- quately protected the citizens against Indian attacks in the past. Lieutenant Sanchez sought on every hand information concerning the Indians of Texas, especially the Comanches, thus extending the knowledge he had gained at Saltillo from Juan Antonio de Padilla. Teran conferred regarding confi- dential matters with Musquiz ; with Erasmo Seguin, who had met Stephen F. Austin upon his arrival in Texas in 1821, and who deserved well at the hands of the Texans; with Busta- mente, a warm personal and political friend ; and with Elosua. Berlandier made rich collections to be sent to DeCandolle, and the writings of the Genevese botanists show many Texas species originally collected in the neighborhood of Bexar.
Leaving Bexar on April 16, the Commission (diminished, apparently, by the loss of Colonels Tarnava and Noriega, whose names from this point cease to appear in the records) reached Gonzales on the Guadalupe after a leisurely march of four days "along verdant hills covered with spring flowers,, and "rolling hills, woods, and small valleys bedecked with beautiful flowers, where numerous butterflies flitted about making the solitary regions all the more charming.', Ber- landier found the Guadalupe country near Gonzales attractive, botanically, although the town was insignificant, consisting of but six log cabins. The Commission camped at Gonzales on the sixteenth of April and left next day; and although Ber- landier had but a short stay (from two o'clock of one after- noon to ten o'clock of the next morning) he made excellent use of his time. Six years later, in June of 1834, Thomas Drummond was to explore extensively in the region of Gonzales.
58 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
The route now taken by the Commission carried them over Peach Creek and through the high country of the Lavaca, where, near present Schulenburg at the Loma Grande, they enjoyed the magnificent prospect that was the culminating ex- perience of every early traveler from San Felipe to Bexar. Thence they passed on to the site of present Columbus on the Colorado River. Here, at Beeson's Ferry, the cavalcade halted to mend one of the wagons, and received a most cordial welcome which included good lodgings and excellent food. At this prosperous settlement Judge Cummins could show them with pride his young peach orchard, well set to ripen peaches for the first time that year. A grist mill, a saw mill, and a blacksmith shop gave an almost metropolitan air to the place, which was graced by the presence of the two daughters of Judge Cummins and the two Beeson girls. The Alley brothers, Missourians, also had very prosperous farms in the vicinity.
Heavy rains at Beeson's and in the upper Colorado basin on the eighteenth and twenty-second of April caused the river to rise, and delayed the advance of the expedition. On Satur- day, the twenty-sixth, however, the river had subsided to such an extent that the Commission could set out for the San Bernard and Austin's capital. The road led through very dense woods and over wet and muddy hills. About twelve miles from San Felipe the party was met by Samuel May Williams, Austin's confidential secretary, who, in the tempo- rary absence of Austin from San Felipe, did the honors to the Commission and lodged the staff in "a house prepared for the purpose," which was probably the hall of the newly-established Ayuntamiento. When Austin returned, Teran presented to him formal letters of introduction from Musquiz and from Seguin, who begged Austin to be especially cordial to his old friend. The members of the Commission were detained in the village to make extensive repairs on the wagons. Since the
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 59
Brazos was rising, "seeking," as Austin remarked, "to emu- late the Mississippi," the party was forced to remain at San Felipe for two weeks (April 27-May 9, 1828).
The members of the staff amused themselves variously. Colonel Batres became intimate with Williams and visited him at Austin's house on the bank of the Arroyo Duke, in the "West End" of San Felipe. Here he saw Austin's extensive library, and noted with something like amazement Rees's En- cyclopaedia in forty-seven volumes, containing admirably il- lustrated articles on natural history by several eminent American naturalists, such as Alexander Wilson, Thomas Say, and George Ord. The articles on botany and Say's epoch-making articles on entomology and conchology pro- foundly impressed Batres. Yet that such a work of learning could be found far from the borders of civilization, in Texas, was only a seeming incongruity on the frontier, as will become evident in the course of later chapters. It was precisely what should have been expected.
The soldiers who had been assigned to Teran as a body- guard enjoyed themselves in Vicente Padilla's faro game in Cheeves's saloon. Berlandier employed his time in making botanical collections. This locality was later to be very care- fully explored for plants by Thomas Drummond (1833-4) and Ferdinand Lindheimer (1839 and 1844). Of the collec- tions made here on this journey in 1828 by Berlandier, rela- tively few, apparently, ever reached DeCandolle and the other Genevese botanists. Most of the species that were collected by Drummond and Lindheimer were described as new by the British botanist, Sir William Hooker, and by Asa Gray. The loss of the specimens destined for DeCandolle is doubtless to be ascribed to the conditions under which the Commission worked, to Berlandier's serious illness, and to the inclement weather that prevailed at the time, which must have jeopard-
60 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
ized very seriously the collections he had made. But more of that later.
Teran, a reticent though polite man, with his own reserva- tions in respect of Americans, made friends with Austin, and apparently was sincere in his friendship, though not always ingenuous. Gaspar Flores, the Mexican land commissioner at San Felipe, a friend of both, cemented the relation.
Sanchez, the cartographer of the expedition, left an account of the town of San Felipe which throws interesting sidelights on the social life of early Texas, viewed through critical Mexican eyes.
This village [he wrote] has been settled by Mr. Stephen Austin, a native of the United States of the North. It consists, at present, of forty or fifty wooden houses on the western bank of the large river known as Rio de los Brazos de Dios, but the houses are not arranged systematically so as to form streets; but on the contrary, lie in an irregular and desultory manner. Its population is nearly two hundred persons, of which only ten are Mexicans, for the balance are all Americans from the North with an occasional European. Two wretched little stores supply the inhabitants of the colony : one sells only whiskey, rum, sugar, and coffee ; the other, rice, flour, lard, and cheap cloth. It may seem that these items are too few for the needs of the inhabitants, but they are not, because the Amer- icans from the North, at least the greater part of those I have seen, eat only salted meat, bread made by themselves out of corn meal, coffee, and home-made cheese. To these the greater part of those who live in the village add strong liquor, for they are in general, in my opinion, lazy people of vicious character. Some of them cultivate their small farms by planting corn ; but this task they usually entrust to their Negro slaves, whom they treat with considerable harshness. Beyond the village in an immense stretch of land formed by rolling hills are scattered the families brought by Stephen Austin, which today number more than two thousand persons. The diplomatic policy of this empresario, evident in all his actions, has, as one may say, lulled the authorities into a sense of security, while he works diligently for his own ends. In my judgment, the spark that will start the conflagration that will deprive us of Texas, will
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 61
start from this colony. All because the government does not take vigorous measures to prevent it. Perhaps it does not realize the value of what it is about to lose.
More informative concerning San Felipe, and certainly more objective in its graphic description of this mother-town of American settlements in Texas, is Smithwick's account :
The town was still in its swaddling clothes when the writer made his advent therein in 1827. Twenty-five or perhaps thirty log cabins strung along the west bank of the Brazos River was all there was of it, while the whole human population . . . could not have exceeded 200. Men were largely in the majority, coming from every state in the Union, and every walk of life. . . . The buildings all being of unhewn logs with clapboard roofs, presented few distinguishing features. Stephen F. Austin had established his headquarters something like half a mile back from the river on the west bank of a little creek . . . that ran into the Brazos just above the main village. . . . Austin's house was a double log cabin with a wide "pas- sage" through the center, a porch with dirt floor on the front with windows opening upon it, and chimney at each end of the building. . . .
Going down to the town proper . . . the first house on the left was my bachelor abode, and near it, on the same side, stood the "village smithy" over which I presided. Then came the Peyton tavern, operated by Johnthan [sic] C. Peyton and wife; the house was the regulation double log cabin. The saloon and billiard hall of Cooper and Chieves [Cheeves], the only frame building in the place, was next below the Peyton's. The first house on the right as you entered the town from above was Dinsmore's store, and next to it the store of Walter C. White. The office of the "Cotton Plant," the first newspaper in the colonies, and near it the residence of the genial proprietor, Godwin B. Cotton, filled the space between White's store and the Whiteside Hotel, which differed from its companion build- ings only in point of elevation, it being only a story and a half in height; through the center ran the regulation "passage," and at either end rose a huge stick and mud chimney.
It must not be understood that these rows of buildings pre- sented an unbroken or even regular line of front; every fellow built to suit himself, only taking care to give himself plenty
62 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
of room, so that the town was strung along on either side of the road something like half a mile. . . . Professional men, as a rule, did not affect offices.
The alcalde's office was in a large double log house standing back some distance from the main thoroughfare almost imme- diately in the rear of the Whiteside Hotel, which building it much resembled. By whom it was built, or for what purpose, I do not now remember, but my impression is that it was designed for a hotel. The walls of hewn logs were roofed in and abandoned at that stage. It was here the ayuntamiento held its sittings, and this windowless, floorless pen, through the unchinked cracks of which the wild winds wandered and whistled at will, was presumably the Faneuil Hall of Texas.
As the second week of their stay in San Felipe drew to an end, the members of the Commission, with their food supply daily becoming more and more depleted, planned to set out for Nacogdoches and the Sabine country. At least three routes were possible. Teran chose to cross the Brazos at the Atas- cosito Crossing at San Felipe, to continue on this road for two or three miles to Donahue's where it crossed the road leading from Groce's to Harrisburg, and then to continue up this road until he reached the Magdalena road at present Hempstead. This he planned to follow until it joined the LaBahia road, and so on to Nacogdoches. Ample food sup- plies could be got on the way at Colonel Jared Groce's planta- tion of "Bernardo," for a round price, of course.
And so, with some misgivings, the party prepared to cross a much-swollen Brazos; on May 9 the mules and carriages, with the horses, were taken over to await the arrival of the scientific staff of the Commission next day. The expedition was now in the last lap of its journey. Berlandier's oppor- tunities for botanical collecting would soon be past; the suc- cess of his mission depended on securing a large number of specimens to be sent of his patrons in Geneva. How well he performed his duties has been made a matter of controversy.
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 63
It is therefore of interest to examine the conditions under which the young naturalist had to work.
DeCandolle, in his broadcast censure of Berlandier, has the following to say as the gravamen of his complaint. Speaking of the interest of a coterie of Genevese botanists in Middle- American botany, even after the poor success of Wydler, one of their collectors, in Puerto Rico, he remarks :
We had thought of Mexico because of its natural riches, then but little known, and because I had made an arrangement with M. Alaman, Minister of the Interior, who promised protection for my employee. He did not fail to fulfil every promise ; and, among other favors, he attached him to a great government expedition for the delimitation of the northern frontier. But Berlandier profited little from these advantages. He sent some dried plants in small number, badly chosen, and badly prepared; he neglected completely the sending of animals and seeds, and the communication of notes on the country. At the end of some time he neglected even to write, so that for a long interval we did not know whether he was living or dead. We then found that we had spent some sixteen thousand francs for some dried plants that were not worth a quarter of that amount. This result, together with [the experience with Wydler], completely disgusted us with expeditions of this sort. . . .
And Asa Gray, in his obituary note on Dr. Charles Short (who, after Berlandier 's death, came into possession of his herbarium), speaks with scorn of Berlandier, who "through apparent dishonesty, had failed to make any adequate return to the Swiss botanists who had sent him to Mexico/'
But there is something else to be said in the matter. Dr. John Briquet, DeCandolle's successor in the directorship of the Botanical Garden at Geneva, wrote these just and wise words in comment on DeCandolle's complaint :
Without wishing to excuse Berlandier for his negligence and the shortcomings which his work presented as far as it
64 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
concerned animals, seeds, and manuscript notes, one ought nevertheless to observe that botanical explorations in Mexico were carried on at that time under very difficult material con- ditions, which it was hard to conceive of in Europe. Then again ... it should be remembered that the collections of Ber- landier aggregated several thousands of species, many of which are represented by a considerable number of specimens. . . . The collections of Berlandier have furnished . . . materials for the description of a great number of new species; it is by no means rash to affirm that the importance of the herborizations of this naturalist has gradually increased in the course of the last eighty years, and that the outlay of the little coterie of botanists at Geneva was not made in vain.
Early explorers have described with quiet eloquence the hazards of collecting in Texas: the swift "northers" which effect a drop of thirty degrees of temperature in as many minutes; the torrential rains which seem like an opening up of the windows of heaven ; the torments of droves of gadflies by day, and incredible swarms of mosquitoes by night. Let the botanist, with unflagging diligence, gather hundreds of specimens by a hard day's work : at night there might come a rainstorm that despite every precaution would completely wet not only the specimens in the driers, but all the botanical drying- paper as well. Or floods might carry away the drying-paper and leave the naturalist stranded a thousand miles from any source of supply, as once happened to August Fendler on an expedition from St. Louis to Santa Fe. Elsewhere in this book (pp. 243-44) is reprinted a letter of Charles Wright showing how the fruits of the labors of weeks might be swept away by storms. The field-naturalist in Texas has ample rea- son to know that Sanchez's description of a storm encountered at San Felipe was not mere Latin, exuberance :
At about five in the afternoon the sky was covered by black clouds, and a little after it seemed as if all the winds blew furiously at the same time, impelled by the pressure of the clouds. By about six the most terrible storm I have ever seen
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 65
was raging. The rain was so heavy that it seemed as if the entire sky, converted to rain, was falling on our heads. The woods were afire with the vivid flashes of lightning, and nothing but a continuous rumbling of thunder was heard, louder or softer as the distance where the numberless thunder- bolts from the heavy clouds fell was [greater or less]. The shock of the shrill howling winds was horrible and it continued until eight o'clock next morning, when only the northwest wind that had triumphed in the struggle was blowing and a slight rain remained. I gave thanks to the Almighty for having come out unharmed from such a furious storm.
I doubt whether DeCandolle ever experienced such difficulties in his botanical travels.
In what way do these facts affect Berlandier's responsibility for non-performance of his duties to his Genevese patrons? The answer lies in several considerations. First of all, collec- tions faithfully made were ruined by conditions of weather for which Berlandier could hardly be held responsible. Here is an example : At Gonzales, at two o'clock on the morning of April 18, 1828, the expedition encountered a "furious" thun- derstorm. The afternoon before, Berlandier had spent several hours in extensive collection of plants. The storm was a tropical thunderstorm lasting until four o'clock, fol- lowed by a light rain that did not cease until eight o'cock. Berlandier's plants were wet through, and this necessitated shifting them into new driers, an operation that delayed the departure until ten o'clock. Tents were no protection against such deluges ; even in the General's tent, protection was to be had only by covering the bed with buffalo robes. Subse- quently, the weather was hot and moist, proper drying was impossible, and spoiling was imminent. Thus may be ex- plained in part the poor preservation of the Gonzales speci- mens.
Again, when Teran's train was halted by a broken wheel on Scull Creek, west of the Colorado (April 22), and Ber-
66 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
landier again had time to collect intensively, his efforts were brought to naught by rains that fell during a considerable part of the afternoon. In addition, the difficulties of transporta- tion and shipping to the seacoast were an obstacle that mate- rially reduced the effectiveness of the botanical explorer.
But the hardships encountered west of the Brazos were as nothing compared to those met with between San Felipe and the Trinity. Sanchez, no special pleader for Berlandier, can present the case without comment of our own :
May 10 [leaving San Felipe de Austin]. — It must have been three in the afternoon when all the baggage was placed in the ferry boat, and, boarding it, we started down the river in search of a landing agreed upon because it was thought, and rightly, that on the opposite side of the village the landing would be very difficult. . . . We traveled this way for about two leagues, and then we entered, still on the same boat, through the midst of the flooded woods until we reached the road we were to follow afterward. We landed after the sun had disappeared completely, and we were trying to decide what to do, being ignorant of the whereabouts of the carriages [which had been sent on the day before], when we heard someone calling from the opposite bank of the bayou where we were. We at once made our way to the spot where the voice was heard. We found a soldier of our escort who told us that the carriages had not been able to pull out of the mudholes, and that they would not arrive until next morning. . . . Having heard this, . . . the General [Teran] ordered his cot to be placed in the woods, and Mr. Berlandier and I remained in the boat lying on the cargo. To the unbearable heat were added the continuous croaking of frogs . . . and a numberless legion of mosquitoes that bit us everywhere, all of which kept us from sleeping a wink. When the longed-for dawn broke we saw the terrible onslaught that these cursed insects had made upon us, leaving us full of swollen spots, especially on the face of the General, which was so raw that it seemed as if it had been flayed. . . .
May 14 [Between present Hempstead and Courtney]. — We continued our march along hills covered chiefly with live-oak and walnuts, and some only with grass. The ground was so full of water, and there were so many mudholes, that it was necessary for the soldiers and the drivers to pull out the car-
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 67
riages, and even the mules at times by hand. For this reason we were barely able to travel more than four leagues during the entire morning and part of the afternoon. . . .
May 15 [Near present Navasota]. — The road continued along hilly and wooded country with low marches and such serious mudholes that it was necessary to pull out the carriages and horses by hand almost at every step because they sank so deep in the mud. With terrible fatigue we traveled about three leagues, and then the axle of one of the baggage wagons broke and we were obliged to halt at twelve o'clock in the midst of a very heavy thicket. There a soldier was almost [sunstricken] as the result of having lain down in the sun for about ten minutes. ... In the afternoon, a furious rain came down that lasted until midnight, after which it continued to drizzle all the rest of the night, the ground being turned into a lake on account of its location, while we were in the most pitiable condition imaginable.
May 16 [Navasota to William Burney's]. — In spite of the rain we continued our painful march through the flooded woods and after seven hours of fatigue, during which we advanced but one league because of mudholes, we camped near the house of [William Burney]. . . .
Holland's Place, May 17. — In the morning Mr. Berlandier and John, the cook, were sick with fever ... in the afternoon we advanced about a quarter of a league in order to reach the house of [Francis Holland]. We carried the sick men in the [General's] carriage, and at the house we were provided with milk and chickens to feed them.
May 18. — Near the aforesaid house there was a great mud- hole, and, in order to cross it, it was necessary to unload the baggage and take it across on mules, a task that lasted until midday. ... As we were crossing a small creek, the shaft of the instrument wagon was broken [three times previously, since crossing the Rio Grande, the cavalcade had been halted by the breaking down of the instrument wagon, and it would be halted twice again before the party reached Robbins's Ferry on the Trinity] and it became imperative to remain on the spot. . . . Our patients continued to grow worse. ... It was decided to make a bed in the carriage for Mr. Berlandier. . . . Mr. Chovell took charge of the sick, and Mr. Batres and I took charge of the kitchen, about which neither he nor I understood a thing. ... In the afternoon the General fell ill with the
68 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
same fever as the others, and he would have been as bad off as Mr. Berlandier had not an accident saved him. At midnight the sky became overcast with heavy clouds and a furious storm broke out which lasted until dawn. As the water that fell in torrents came through the tents, the General ordered that a buffalo skin be thrown over his bed to protect him, and with this weight over him, he perspired so freely that the following day he had no fever.
May 19 and 20. — We remained in the same place and the sick men became worse, their condition being serious. . . .
May 21. — . . . By persistent efforts on the part of the troops and drivers we succeeded in crossing [a swollen creek] after losing three hours in this task, during which time we suffered considerably because of the mosquitoes that attacked us without pity. Hardly had we overcome this obstacle when we came across others of the same nature, for these thick woods have numerous creeks and marshes that make traveling through them very difficult. Finally, the instrument wagon broke down [for the fifth time], and we had to halt, much to our displeasure.
May 22. — . . . food is scarce, even now. The patients have become better.
May 23. — Although we traveled for eight hours in the morn- ing and afternoon on the 23rd, we hardly covered more than three or four leagues because we had to cross five creeks . . . covered by thick clouds of mosquitoes that bothered us con- siderably.
May 24. — The following day we had to cross many creeks like the previous ones, and we were obliged to halt at about three because the instrument wagon broke again [for the sixth time] . The patients were better in the morning, although still very weak. There was no other food but rice, half spoiled, all that remained of our provisions.
By the time they had reached the Trinity, the malaria had so weakened Berlandier that he could collect hardly any plants on the return trip to Bexar over the Upper Road; and the great botanical expedition that DeCandolle had set so much store by was jover, with results that, to the sponsors back in Geneva at least, were to seem entirely inadequate. Disasters at the Brazos and the Colorado on the way back still further damaged such specimens as Berlandier had preserved.
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 69
DeCandolle, as we have seen, expressed the opinion that Berlandier had failed in the mission assigned him. Our judg- ment in the matter must take into account the difficulties under which the collector labored, and these were clearly so great as to make it impossible for Berlandier to do all that was ex- pected of him. But another question concerns the actual number and value of the specimens that finally reached De- Candolle and his associates in Geneva. Here, too, some quali- fication should be made of DeCandolle's estimate. Among the archives in the Library of the United States National Museum is a little volume in Berlandier's handwriting labeled "Expedition. " It is a list of shipments of plants, seeds, and animals sent to DeCandolle and to Moricand in Geneva. The list gives a full invoice of all items included; and from it I learn that between April 25, 1827, and November 15, 1830 (the approximate date when the Commission was dissolved), Berlandier sent in all 188 packets of dried plants totaling some 55,077 specimens; 198 packets of plant seeds; 935 insects; 72 birds; 55 jars and bottles of material in alcohol; and more than seven hundred specimens of land and fresh-water mol- lusks, mostly from Texas. These are but the chief collections sent.
It may be thought that for some reason DeCandolle did not receive all the items dispatched to him. I know only that Ber- landier's manuscript lists 2320 "numbers" ; and in a catalogue sent by Alphonse DeCandolle to Asa Gray, giving the names of plants collected by Berlandier, received by his sponsors in Geneva, and by them distributed, there are 2351 numbers. The manuscript catalogue in the Gray Herbarium Library and the covering letter from Alphonse DeCandolle, dated April 24, 1855, are all the evidence needed to show that the shipments entered by Berlandier in his private book, for his eye only, reached their destination.
Berlandier went out specifically to collect for the Geneva
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group during the life of the Boundary Commission. He ful- filled, or nearly fulfilled, his task. If it seems odd that he apparently made no effort to defend himself against De- Candolle's criticism, we must try to understand the mental processes of the collector, remembering that men are often impelled by behavior complexes to do that which is inwardly repugnant to them. Berlandier soon became aware of De- Candolle's outspoken dissatisfaction with his work in Texas. He alone knew at what cost of health and spirit he had made those fragmentary and imperfect, but nevertheless respectable collections. Had he felt equal to a presentation of his case before DeCandolle such as Charles Wright made in the face of Asa Gray's petulance (to Gray's lasting good), he might have vindicated himself and continued with his explorations. But he was a mere boy, while DeCandolle was a mature man with a continental and more than continental reputation. Ber- landier had known him at Geneva, and had observed how the whole world came to DeCandolle. What defense could this twenty-two-year-old youth make that would be satisfying to the great scientist? There was only one thing Berlandier could do: run away from the undeserved censure and build up within himself a compensating sense of injury and of his own rectitude. Had he been able to talk over matters with Teran, whom he ardently admired, things might have been well. But Teran was a busy man, called to the highest re- sponsibilities of state. And six years after Berlandier's arrival in Mexico, Teran died, under tragic circumstances, at Padilla.
So Berlandier remained in America even after the conclu- sion of the labors of the Commission. He settled in Mata- moros, married a Mexican woman, engaged in the pharma- ceutical business, and continued to indulge his interests in natural history. Between 1830 and 1851 he made frequent botanical explorations into various parts of Mexico; and in
JEAN LOUIS BERLANDIER 71
the spring and early summer of 1834, with his old friend Chovell, who had been mineralogist with the Boundary Com- mission and was then living at Goliad, Berlandier made a collecting trip as far as Bexar. He set himself up as a physician to the Matamorerios, upon his own recognizance; and, by the admission of the younger DeCandolle, practiced medicine "in a manner equally honorable and disinterested. " Lieutenant (later General) D. N. Couch, who visited Mata- moros and bought Berlandier's collection, wrote to Professor Spencer F. Baird in the 'fifties that "Berlandier . . . was universally beloved for his kind, amiable manners, and regard for the sick poor of that city; being always ready to give advice and medicine to such without pay." He became a man of influence in Matamoros, and when General Zachary Taylor, at the outbreak of the Mexican War, marched from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande, Berlandier was the bearer of a message from General Mexia, at Matamoros, to General Taylor demanding that the Americans refrain from crossing the Arroyo Colorado. He was in charge of the hospitals at Matamoros during the early part of the War. And at the Worth-Vega conference in that city, Berlandier served as interpreter for the Mexican general.
Berlandier met death by drowning in an attempt to cross the San Fernando River, south of Matamoros, in 1851. In 1853 his extensive collections of Mexican animals, his ample herbarium, his books, papers, publications, unpublished draw- ings, and political pamphlets dealing with events of the time in Mexico — all were purchased by Lieutenant D. N. Couch, and have been dispersed. In the portions of Berlandier's collections preserved in various libraries there are manu- scripts on the topography of Texas and Mexico, and on the Indians of Texas ; Teran's notes on Texas ; and a host of other materials. But of the man himself, very little is known. Neither Kew, Geneva, nor Stockholm (although the Icono-
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thcque at the Botanical Garden in Stockholm is one of the finest in the world), nor the Gray Herbarium at Cambridge, possesses a portrait of Berlandier. The man's work, however, is memorialized in scores and scores of scientific names of botanical species named in his honor. In Mexico, and also in Texas, the epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren is most appro- priate for Berlandier: "Si monumentum requiris, circutn- spice."
Berlandier was born of a very poor family. He acquired for himself a sort of classical education: Latin, Greek, sur- veying, drawing. He did monumental work for botany in early Texas and in Mexico. Before he died he had become a person of substance in his adopted city in Mexico, a man genuinely respected in a day when such men were conspicu- ously rare. Had he not been handicapped by the psycho- logical effects of struggle and privation in his youth and by a sense of poverty, had he had in his later years the stimula- tion of his Genevese home and his early associates, he might have become one of the lights of botanical science in his day. s Quien sabef
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IV THOMAS DRUMMOND
TO set the stage for the entrance of Thomas Drummond into the Texas of the eighteen-thirties, one must paint a backdrop of pestilence, flood, and social disorganization in that remote province, which was then a barely planted colony.
The plague had begun far away — in India. Early in 1826, cholera, always endemic there, was on the increase through- out lower Bengal. In the spring it reached Benares, and the next year Nahin, in the Himalayas. It broke out in Teheran, near the Caspian Sea, in 1829, and reached Moscow the next year. In April of 1831 the plague reached Warsaw, and in the autumn Hamburg. A ship carried it to Sunderland, near Newcastle, in October. On June 3, 1832, the brig Carricks, of Dublin, arrived at Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence with a passenger-list of 145 immigrants, of whom forty-two had died of cholera. On June 24, the first case of cholera appeared in New York City, with the first death two days later. Thence the plague spread to Erie, Pennsylvania, on June 26 ; Cleveland, July 22 ; and St. Louis, September 10. At the end of October it had reached New Orleans, where it wrought terrible havoc. Thus by the routes of trade did the dread disease spread itself throughout the world. Europe and North and Central America bore the brunt of a progressive epidemic that carried to death hundreds of thousands of vic- tims.
Austin's struggling colony in Texas did not escape. At this time it had been ten years in the making. In December, 1822, Stephen F. Austin, with his band of twenty families, had
73
74 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
arrived on the banks of the Brazos, "in the center of a wilderness, surrounded by hostile Indians, and far remote from all resources." In the intervening years the twenty families had grown to many thousands; a score of thriving towns had sprung up and a rudimentary culture was begin- ning to be evident. Austin had laid the foundations of his enterprise with foresight. His ideal, as he outlined it in a letter, was to "take from my native land and from every other country the best that they contain and plant it in my adopted land — that is to say, their best inhabitants, their industry and their enlightenment. " In spite of the difficulties that sur- rounded the colony, in spite of weather conditions that year after year brought bad crops ("this year has been bad — unusually wet, and filled with trouble, but next year will be better," Austin wrote to his sister at the close of 1832), the Empresario saw his dreams for Texas slowly being realized. Then came the cholera.
It is difficult to learn how the plague reached Texas. Be- tween the first and the twelfth of April, 1833, the disease suddenly broke out in the village of Velasco at the mouth of the Brazos River; as Austin stated in a report to the Political Chief at Bexar, about a dozen of the American settlers there were attacked by the disease, and several died. Later the epidemic spread to the town of Brazoria, thirty miles distant, where it carried off a number of victims, the disease being generally fatal. The history of Texas might have been very different had not this epidemic deprived the colony of that military genius, Captain John Austin of Brazoria. At Guadalupe Victoria the cholera took off Don Martin de Leon, the empresario, and at Bexar it raged in a highly fatal form. Later the cholera spread to Mexico; in the capital more than ten thousand persons died of the disease. Stephen F. Austin himself, in the City of Mexico, was attacked by the cholera, but recovered.
THOMAS DRUMMOND 75
Following the epidemic, which took its toll of the best in Texas, came the Great Overflow of 1833. The whole season was an abnormal one. At San Felipe, on the Brazos River, the last part of January had been unusually cold. In March, throughout a considerable part of Texas there had been heavy rains and extreme high water. The Brazos rose out of its banks, so that boats arriving at Velasco were compelled to wait a week before coming up the river to Brazoria, then the most important shipping point in Texas. Fields of cotton and corn, planted usually at Brazoria between the first and fifteenth of March, were completely inundated; in fact, all crops subject to overflow were lost. Not until late June did the water recede enough to permit the replanting of cotton. Corn, which was the chief staple of food, was not raised this year in sufficient quantities to feed the people; sometimes families went for days without meal. Even as late as May 9, Austin, then at Bexar, speaks of the country as flooded by excessive rains. To cap it all, an early frost, occurring at Brazoria on the twenty-first of October, injured much of the cotton, then just opening, which had been planted during the last week of June. After a very wet spring and summer, from the middle of September on the weather had been very dry. It was in general a "year of misfortune/' as Mrs. Holley said, "which threw the colony back some say seven years."
Added to all this were difficulties of a civil and political nature. The original settlers brought in by Austin, "The Three Hundred," were remarkably law-abiding citizens. Austin wrote in December, 1824, to Baron de Bastrop that during the preceding eighteen months there had been only one theft. In the ensuing decade, however, great changes had taken place in the composition of the population of Texas. The frequent revolutions in Mexico and the resulting admin- istrative changes in Texas induced a condition of anarchy which gave to all good men grave concern. Administration
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of justice almost ceased. Overflow and cholera had wrought their havoc, but here was a canker at the heart of the body politic. The situation is forcefully described in a letter writ- ten by Jonas Harrison, a cultivated citizen of Tenaha district (in present Shelby County), to Stephen F. Austin:
Look at our situation under the present constitution and the state's laws as organized among us. To say nothing of assaults and battery, Slander, Libels, Larcenies in every sense of the word, and there have been about twelve men killed among us in a few years and not a person judicially punished for any of these offenses.
Austin himself, in the Address of the Central Committee to the Convention of April 1, 1833, at San Felipe, said:
A total interregnum in the administration of justice in crim- inal cases may be said to exist. A total disregard of the laws has become so prevalent, both amongst the officers of justice, and the people at large, that reverence for laws or for those who administer them has almost intirely [sic] disappeared and contempt is fast assuming its place, so that the protection of our property our persons and lives is circumscribed almost ex- clusively to the moral honesty or virtue of our Neighbor.
And in a report to the Mexican Minister of Relations Austin wrote :
Texas is today exposed to being the sport of ambitious men, of speculators and reckless money changers, of seditious and wicked men, of wandering Indians who are devastating the country, of adventurers, of revolution, of the lack of adminis- tration of justice and of confidence and moral strength in the government. In short, for the want of government that country is already at the verge of anarchy. ... If crime is punished, it has to be done extra- judicially. . . .
Thomas Drummond, the Scottish naturalist, came into this distracted country in the spring of 1833, from New Orleans, where he had been collecting specimens of plants and birds. His stay in Texas was to extend over but a short period of time — from March, 1833, to the middle of December, 1834 —
THOMAS DRUMMOND 77
but during this interval he was able to make remarkable col- lections of plants and thus stimulate the later studies of such botanical collectors as Lindheimer and Wright. Drummond himself had become interested in the plant and animal life of Texas while visiting in Missouri in 1831 and 1832. There he had learned of the collections Berlandier had made in Texas, and as a result had resolved that at the earliest oppor- tunity he would himself collect in that area.
He was enabled to make the trip under the patronage of Sir William Jackson Hooker, then Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Glasgow, and later to become the Keeper of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Working for Hooker, Drummond made extensive collections of plants and birds in Texas — embracing seven hundred and fifty species of plants, and about a hundred and fifty speci- mens of birds. His explorations coincided with the time of the cholera epidemic and the Great Overflow, the growing unrest over the encroachments of the Mexican Government in Texan affairs, and the increasing social strain. In spite of difficulties, however, Drummond's collections were the first made in Texas that were extensively distributed among the museums and scientific institutions of the world.
This pioneer botanical collector's experiences in Texas are best described in his letters to his patron, Professor Hooker. These are five in number: a sixth, written in October, 1834, apparently never reached Hooker. The first letter, written from Velasco about two months after Drummond arrived in Texas, is reproduced below (technical botanical matters being omitted) :
Town of Velasco, mouth of the Rio Brazos, Texas,
[May 14, 1833.] . . . We had a favourable passage from New Orleans to this place, and on our arrival found the river so high [about March 14?] that it occasioned a delay of a week before we
78 NATURALISTS OF THE FRONTIER
could reach the town of Brazoria, which is only about twenty miles up the river. The country, in general, is low and swampy, and ever since we came here, it has been flooded by the river : it consists almost entirely of prairies, except that the watercourses are bordered by woods, consisting chiefly of Live Oak and Poplar, with an undergrowth of Carolina Cherry. I remained a few days at Brazoria, and having an opportunity of sending by vessel to New Orleans, I dispatched the speci- mens which I collected without delay. Never having seen any part of the sea-coast in this neighborhood, I determined on returning to the mouth of the Rio Brazos, and commencing my operations there. I accordingly came back [about April 2] to this place, which nearly proved fatal to me, for when I had been here about ten days, and completed a collection of the few plants then in flower, and made arrangements for going to Galveston Bay in the same vessel that brought me hither, I was suddenly seized with cholera. Though ignorant of the nature of the disease and the proper remedies, I fortunately took what was proper for me, and in a few hours the violent cramps in my legs gave way to the opium with which I dosed myself. In the course of the same day the Captain [of the boat on which Drummond had come to Velasco some days before] and his sister were taken ill and died, and seven other persons died in two or three days — a large number for this small place, where there are only four houses, one of which was unvisited by the disease. All the cases terminated fatally, except mine, and always in ten or twelve hours, save one person, who lin- gered a few days. The weather was particularly cold and disagreeable for more than a week before the cholera appeared ; indeed the air here is constantly saturated with moisture, so as to render the proper preservation of specimens a work of absolute impossibility. I am almost afraid that the accom- panying collections, which I have taken the utmost pains to dry sufficiently, may not reach you in good order. My recovery from cholera was very slow. When my appetite returned, I was nearly starved for lack of food, the few individuals who remained alive being too much exhausted with anxiety and fatigue to offer to procure me anything. I am now, thank God, nearly well again, though my face and legs continue much swollen, a symptom which was very violent when I first began to recover, and is gradually wearing off. As far as possible, I am endeavoring to replace the specimens which were spoiled
THOMAS DRUMMOND
79
DRUMMON D
1833 - 1834
"•; INTENSIVELY EXPLORED AREA
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during my illness, and have just packed up the whole, con- sisting of about a hundred species of plants, and as many specimens of birds, consisting of about sixty species, some snakes, and several land-shells. . . . Among the plants are several which I would particularly recommend as deserving of notice for their beauty : two are species of Coreopsis, one . . . extremely handsome. There is also ... [a beautiful variety of Gaillardia] — the blossoms are copper-coloured, and the whole rises to about a foot high, and covers a diameter of three or four feet; I may safely say that I have seen more than a hundred flowers open on it at the same time. ... I trust that my collection of bird-skins from Louisiana has reached you safely. ... The want of my tent and the chief part of my ammunition, which I was obliged to leave at St. Louis, proves a serious inconvenience to me. Tomorrow I intend making an
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attempt to reach Brazoria again, but the greater part of the journey is waist-deep in mud and water; thence I shall go to San Felipe, whither my baggage is already sent, sixty miles beyond Brazoria. Above the latter place, the river is not navi- gable for boats so that my luggage must go in waggons. I feel anxious about my collections, which I leave here, to await a vessel going to New Orleans; but there is no help for it, and from the interior of the country it is still more difficult to obtain conveyances, the charge for freight being so enormous as to exceed the value of the collections. The cost from Brazo- ria to New Orleans is forty cents per [cubic] foot, and the amount of my passage and luggage hither was fifty dollars. Boarding averages six dollars a- week, and that of the roughest kind. It is, however, so long since my hope of being able to realize any thing more than will cover my expenses has been dispelled, that I am not disappointed, and my only desire is to remunerate those who have contributed to my outfit, and by the collections of Natural History specimens which I shall send home, to give a good general idea of the productions of this part of the world. ... I could ask a thousand questions about my plants, for I am shut out from all information; though Pursh's American Flora is among my luggage, I hardly get a sight of it. You may form an idea of the difficulties I have to encounter in this miserable country (more miserable, however, as to its inhabitants than in any other respect) when I tell you that all the bird-skins I sent you were removed with a common old penknife, not worth two cents, and that even this shabby article I could not have kept had the natives seen anything to covet in it; and that I am obliged to leave behind my blanket and the few clothes that I have brought, because of the difficulty of carrying them, though I feel pretty sure that I shall never see them again. These trifles I only mention to give you some idea of my present situation; they do not affect me much, except as preventing me from pursuing the objects of my jour- ney with the success that I could wish. I have not yet posi- tively fixed my future plans, but I wish to go westward from San Felipe. . . .
Velasco, at the time of Drummond's arrival, was but a small village, having been laid out the year before. In the spring of 1833, according to Major George W. Erath in his Memoirs, Velasco had about fifty inhabitants. This figure
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is probably an overstatement, for Stephen F. Austin places the population at about twenty. The houses were mere shanties, with one unfinished building of two storeys and a small salt works maintained by the Porter brothers near the beach. A keel-boat ran from Velasco to Columbia, but here travel by water ended, and the remainder of the journey to San Felipe, the "town of Austin/' had to be made by ox team. Brazoria was fifteen miles distant by land from Velasco, and thirty miles if one followed the meanders of the Brazos. Its citizens had made more progress than had those of Velasco, although the town was surrounded by the Brazos bottom and subject to overflow. In 1833 more than a score of houses had been completed there, and it was the most important shipping point in Texas. It had two streets paralleling the river, with intersecting cross streets. San Felipe, the capital of Austin's colony, had been laid out in 1824 by Austin and the Baron de Bastrop at a distance from Velasco of eighty miles by land or one hundred and eighty miles by the Brazos River. In 1832 it was a settlement of about thirty families, with several stores and two taverns where travelers, such as Drummond, might stay as guests, living on the very simple fare to which Texans were accustomed.
Other travelers have left descriptions of the hardships that the wayfarer in early Texas had to endure. Olmsted, who visited the country twenty years later, complained of the cornbread-and-bacon diet that was still the constant fare, and Dr. Martin Ruter, the Methodist Missionary in Texas, de- scribed living conditions in 1838 as follows :
The accommodations, of course, are often poor. Many of the houses are cabins, without glass windows, and with but little furniture. The chief food is corn bread, sweet potatoes, and meat. Butter, cheese, and milk are scarce [where he was, at Egypt in Wharton county].
Too, the Overflow of 1833 was unprecedentedly high: Erath,
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in his memoirs, states that Indians at San Felipe who were a hundred years old declared they had never seen the Brazos as high as it was in early May.
During the summer of 1833, nevertheless, as occasion offered, Drummond continued his botanical explorations in the Austin Colony. His activities are described in two letters written to Hooker during the summer and autumn of that year:
San Felipe de Austin, Aug. 3, 1833. . . . Early in May last, I put up a box of specimens for you, while I was staying at Velasco, at the mouth of the Rio Brazos ; and I then stated my intention of going to Brazoria, and pro- ceeding higher up in the country. This plan I accomplished, though in an unexpected manner, for the river had risen to a height so unprecedented, that a boat brought me across the prairies, which were flooded to a depth of from nine to fifteen feet ! On arriving at Brazoria, I found the whole town over- flowed, and the boarding-house floor was covered with water a foot deep. I determined, therefore, that my stay should be as short as possible, and took the first opportunity of a boat to Bells [Landing], where I was so happy as to see some dry land; a commencement of the prairie country, which extends uninterruptedly to the West. I had been very uneasy about my luggage, which preceded me, and I feared it had been de- posited in the stowage, where the water stood six or eight feet deep, and much property had been consequently destroyed : but all was safe, and after remaining a few days at Bells, to recruit my strength for the journey, I commenced my walk to this place, collecting what plants I could find by the way. As it would be impossible to give you a detailed account of my adventures in this letter, I will endeavor rather to convey to you some idea of the botanical produce of the country. The collection which I left at the mouth of the river, amounted to one hundred species, and my list now contains three hundred and twenty, which are packed in excellent order : also, seeds, roots, and bulbs, with some bottles of reptiles. I hope these may reach Europe safely; but I am not without fears on that score, as the cholera is raging in this neighborhood and has nearly depopulated Brazoria. My health continues to be good, since I recovered from that disease, although I am necessarily
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much exposed from the nature of my pursuits ; the weather, too, is extremely hot, probably near 100° of Farenheit [sic]. From this place, I intend to proceed immediately to a distance of about forty miles, near the source of the Brazos, when I shall be nearly half way to the Colorado river; but I have no prospect of carrying the requisite stock of botanical drying- paper myself, together with a change or two of linen, which this warm climate renders absolutely necessary. . . .
About one-third of the plants collected on my route, were destroyed by the overflowing of the river. Vegetation is now recommencing, but I never witnessed such devastation; it has extended even two hundred miles [farther] up the river than this place. You will perceive that it is impossible for me to collect anything like a given number of species in a certain time, even during the winter, in this climate. . . .
During the summer Drummond collected plants west of the Brazos, as the following letter shows :
San Felipe de Austin, Oct. 28, 1833. ... I have this day forwarded a box of specimens, together with some growing plants, and several bottles, containing the fruit of a shrub, and some curious lizards and snakes. Amongst . . . the packets of seeds, are several very choice plants, not excelled in beauty by any species now in cultivation. The in- tention of pursuing my way westwardly, which I mentioned in my last, was carried into effect, and I returned here [from present Austin and Colorado counties] about ten days ago. The journey has produced about one hundred and fifty species of plants, bringing up my list to nearly five hundred ; and I have sent numerous samples of nearly every kind. This collection may give you some idea of what might be expected, if I could reach the mountains ; my prospect of effecting this would be, however, very precarious, even if ample means were within my reach, as the Indians have been very troublesome on the fron- tiers, and have killed several Americans on the Colorado river this autumn. During the approaching winter, I think of vis- iting the sea-coast; probably Harrisburg, near Galveston Bay, whence I may forward such things as I can collect, to New Orleans. I do not expect to make a very great addition to my number of plants, but rather anticipate that they will be of a different class.- . . . After spending next summer in Texas, I should wish before returning to Scotland, to visit the extreme
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western parts of Florida. . . . Since commencing this letter, two or three nights of frost have destroyed every vestige of vegetation. . . .
According to his plan, Drummond spent the winter and spring months of 1834 on Galveston Island and the shores of the bay, hoping there to collect for the museum of the Zoolog- ical Society of London and for Hooker as complete a set as possible of the birds and mammals of that region. His efforts, however, met with comparatively slight success, as for some unknown reason scarcely any migratory birds visited the bay during the winter. In April he returned to San Felipe, in- tending to explore the Brazos in its upper reaches and to make a journey to the Colorado, and to the hills of the Edwards Plateau. He describes his difficulties vividly :
... It is my desire this summer to advance as far into the interior as possible; but several difficulties lie in the way. The Indians are becoming very dangerous, and news has just arrived of the murder of a surveying party, consisting of Captain [Francis W.] Johnston and nine men, at one hundred and fifty miles above this place. [The report was incorrect.] This is another instance of the mercy of Providence in sparing my life, as I had designed to join this very party, if I could have arrived from the coast in time. The necessity of having all the luggage carried, is another great hindrance to my movements ; I may state that I had to navigate an old canoe from Galveston Bay to Harrisburg, a distance of from eighty to one hundred miles, all by myself, and with hardly any provisions ; for, owing to the failure of last year's crops, famine is threatening the in- habitants of this district: and when [I] arrived there, I was obliged to hire a cart and oxen to come to this place, for which I paid sixteen dollars. But amidst all these difficulties, there is one blessing, for which I cannot be too thankful — I enjoy excellent health; and, I can assure you, that it has been tried with such fatigue that would have broken down thousands. I have added a few plants, lately, to my stores, some of them very handsome. . . . This is the worst country for insects that I ever saw ; the custom of burning the prairies probably accounts for it. I have procured many specimens of a curious Lizard
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[perhaps Scelopoms spinosus] found about Galveston, but I detain them to go with the others from New Orleans. . . .
Some months later, after returning to San Felipe from collecting journeys to Tenoxtitlan and Gonzales, Drummond writes to his patron as follows :
San Felipe de Austin, Sept. 26, 1834. . . . You are, doubtless, anxious to hear from me, no oppor- tunity of forwarding any letters to you having offered since April last, when I stated my intention of proceeding to the Upper Colony [of Austin], as soon as possible. This I did, and had reached the Garrison [or Tenoxtitlan], one hundred miles above this place; and made arrangements for joining a band of friendly Indians, who were going to hunt near the sources of Little River [in present Bell County], one of the tributaries of the Rio Brazos, when the news that a packet of letters was here, which might contain instructions for my move- ments, reached me, and I returned hither to take them up, and, consequently, lost the chance of accompanying the Indians. ... I am sorry to say that I have found no insects, as they are very scarce in these and all prairie countries, owing to the frequent burning [over] of these lands. The whole country, from the Rio Colorado to the Guadaloup [sic], a distance of eighty or ninety miles, is as destitute of verdure as the streets of Glasgow, except some small patches along the creeks. After returning to San Felipe [from Tenoxtitlan], for my letters, as I before stated, I joined a waggon which was bound for Gon- zales, in Guadaloup, one hundred miles distant; but having exposed myself to the burning sun, in the middle of several days, I was seized with bilious fever, which was nigh proving fatal, and has been followed by violent boils and a disease, here called Felon [paronychia] in my thumb. The latter rendered my hand useless for about two months, and I caused the place to be opened, and several bits of bone to be removed ; and some other pieces have since worked out, so that I have been threat- ened with the loss of my thumb; but I hope to escape this disaster. Were it possible for me to reach the mountains, I could easily double the seven hundred species, which is the number of what I have collected in Texas. . . .
Evidently a letter written in October, 1834, miscarried, for although Drummond refers to it in his next letter to Hooker,
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it is not to be found among the letters published in Hooker's account of Drummond's journeys in the Southwest.
Drummond left Texas about the fifteenth of December, 1834, and arrived in New Orleans the nineteenth of that month. His last weeks in Texas had not been pleasant. "My last opportunity of writing you was from San Felipe, in October, " Drummond wrote to Hooker the day after his arrival in New Orleans.
I am sorry to say [he continued] that I have had a violent attack of diarrhoea, accompanied by such a breaking out of ulcers, that I am almost like Job, smitten with boils from head to foot, and have been unable to lie down for seven nights : but as I am a little better, I hope to be well in a short time.
Altogether, during his explorations in Texas Drummond had conceived a highly unfavorable view of the country and its inhabitants. His sojourn, what with the Overflow, and the cholera, and the shortage of food, undoubtedly entitled him to entertain such an opinion. Yet in his next letter to Hooker we find Drummond making plans to bring his family to Texas, where, as he said, "a few years would soon make me more independent than I can ever hope to be in Britain." This letter, which he wrote on Christmas Day, 1834, from New Orleans, outlined plans to Professor Hooker that if carried out would have been of the greatest importance in the scientific exploration of Texas :
The question naturally arises as to what I shall do at home, and as I do not think it would be advisable for me to remain there, I have determined, if sufficient funds can be obtained, to return with my family to Texas, where I can buy a league of land for one hundred and fifty dollars, and if I can add the purchase of a dozen cows and calves, which cost ten dollars each (that is, the cow and calf) [my fortune is made.] . . . I should then have an opportunity of exploring the country from Texas to the city of Mexico, and west to the Pacific, which would occupy me seven years at least. I am perfectly satisfied of the novelty which such a plan would afford. I have
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been given to understand that the Mexican Government wishes particularly to have the Natural History of its territories ex- amined, and would liberally reward the person who did it. Now I am not vain enough to expect much remuneration for what I could do, still, with your assistance, I think I might, in the course of two or three years, publish a tolerably complete catalogue of the plants of that country, and, were proper application made, a grant of land would certainly be given me. ... I find it would be absolutely necessary for me to return to Britain, in order to purchase a stock of necessaries, clothing, instruments for collecting insects, &c. Upon such articles as knives and forceps a person who could afford to lay out two or three hundred dollars would make cent, per cent, here, and a thousand per cent, on many things, so that the journey would cost nothing.
But Drummond was not destined to carry out this exciting plan for the exploration of the botanical resources of Texas. From New Orleans he went to Apalachicola, Florida, and from there, on February 9, 1835, he sailed for Havana, whence he intended to make a short collecting tour of the island of Cuba. It was his intention then to go to Charleston, where he would take passage for Britain. The particulars of Drum- mond's last days are not completely known, but in June, 1835, Professor Hooker received a communication from the British Consul at Havana enclosing a certificate of Drummond's death in that city early in March. Thus, far from home and kindred, after surviving a thousand perils in his career as a botanical collector, including the dread cholera in Texas, he met death, alone. If we would seek an epitaph, let it be that of Albrecht Durer, Emigravit.
Thus much regarding the work of Thomas Drummond in Texas. I must confess that the record of his life here is all too meager. One follows with a feeling akin to dismay an account that proceeds from discouragement to the promise of more ambitious achievements and then — the finality of death.
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This proposal of Drummond's to make a complete botanical survey of Texas — was it merely the grandiose scheme of a visionary? If he had lived, should we have had any tangible results from his proposed survey, or would his work have fallen short of his anticipations? How might his further labors have affected the development of science in Texas? Useless thoughts, these, the balancing of might-have-beens !
As Drummond is revealed in the letters to Hooker, he does not wear the habiliments of heroism. We demand a hero with the strength of a Hercules, the will of a Loyola, and the impetuousness and zeal of a Vesalius. In the Texas episode Drummond seems almost entirely lacking in these qualities. His bitter complaints against country and people left as ill an opinion of him in Texas as he had formed of his surroundings. His letters, published after being edited by Hooker, evoked from Mary Austin Holley a rejoinder which, as the only con- temporary record of Drummond in Texas, I quote in its entirety :
Mr. Thomas Drummond of Glasgow has done more than any other man toward exploring the botany of Texas. He sent home many plants and seeds which have been successfully cul- tivated there, and drawings of them have been given in late numbers of Curtis's Botanical Magazine. He had made ar- rangements to settle his family in Texas, where he could have devoted himself with ardor to his favorite science, and where with his land and his cows, to use his own language, he could have been more independent in a few years than he could ever have hoped to be in Great Britain. Unfortunately for science, as for himself, Mr. Drummond took the year of flood and cholera, 1833, to make his first, and only visit, to his adopted land ; and in common with every body else, suffered much incon- venience and consequent sickness. Hence his views of the country are partial and drawn from present personal experience. He saw through jaundiced eyes — and not with the eyes of a philosopher. Notwithstanding he liked nothing, and nobody, he sent home seven hundred new specimens [species] of plants; and a hundred and fifty preparations of birds, obtained in a
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very few excursions; and resolved there to live and die; no poor compliment, surely, to any place, however we may, for the time being, abuse it.
However he may have fared in Texas, Drummond was a gifted naturalist having a distinguished record as an explorer and collector in Canada with Sir John Franklin's Second Overland Expedition (1825-27). Too, his sets of mounted mosses of Scotland (Musci Scotici) and of Canada (Musci American!), issued in the late 'twenties, had been well re- ceived by botanists; and in 1830 he had been elected an Asso- ciate of the Linnasan Society of London. Both during his lifetime and after his death, new species of plants were named in his honor by such substantial botanists as Arnott, Bentham, David Don, Douglas, Asa Gray, Greville, Hooker, Lindley, Meyer, Nees, Richardson, Torrey, and Trinius. One does not receive such recognition unmerited. Yet so short a thing is fame that botanists of the present day have almost completely forgotten Drummond. His own contemporaries knew nothing of his parentage, birth, early life, or education; and with the passing of the years his botanical explorations in Canada — truly heroic work — have been to a large extent forgotten. I shall endeavor to do partial justice to the personality and career of this great but almost forgotten naturalist.
Of Thomas Drummond's parentage, and the place and date of his birth, we can say nothing certain. He was born probably in the county of Perth, Scotland, about the year 1790. His family was a most distinguished one, having lived from time immemorial in Perthshire; the earls of Perth had been members of the family from the creation of the earldom. The family takes its name from the village of Drymen in Perthshire, and is descended from a Hungarian immigrant who came there in 1068.
It is not known where Thomas Drummond studied botany; perhaps he was encouraged in his scientific interests by his
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older brother James, Director of the Botanical Garden at Cork, who in 1810, when Thomas was about twenty years old, was elected an Associate of the Linnaean Society of London. Dr. Perley Spaulding states that Thomas Drummond in his youth worked in the nursery-garden of George Don the elder at Dog Hillock, near Forfar in the county adjoining Perth- shire. This would have been a valuable experience, for Don was a botanist of parts who had retired to the management of the nursery garden at Dog Hillock after service as Director of the Botanical Garden at Edinburgh. George Don, it might be remarked parenthetically, was the father of fifteen chil- dren, two among whom later did distinguished work in bot- any: Professor David Don (1800-41), of King's College, London; and George Don the younger (1799-1856), who served as a botanical collector.
Drummond's first opportunity for important collecting in the field came in 182S with his appointment as Assistant Naturalist with Sir John Franklin's Second Overland Expe- dition, on the recommendation of Sir William Jackson Hooker, the eminent botanist. Hooker, who was, as Charles Darwin once said, "of a remarkably cordial, courteous, and frank bearing," had been since 1820 Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow, and during Drum- mond's early years had probably had a hand in the develop- ment of his botanical interests.
It was a great honor to be chosen a member of the second expedition that Sir John Franklin was leading to Arctic America; and when the chance of an appointment came to Drummond, he seized upon it eagerly. Sir John was known not only as a remarkably gifted Arctic explorer, who com- bined to a rare degree all the qualities requisite to investiga- tion in the high latitudes, but also as a most humane man, one for whom his helpers, even the humblest, felt a warm personal affection. It was an incalculable privilege to work with such
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a leader. Then, too, very little had been done on the botany of western Canada. David Douglas, a former assistant in the Botanical Garden of the University of Glasgow (of which Drummond's patron, Professor Hooker, was Director), in 1824 had visited Oregon and California as a botanical col- lector for the Horticultural Society of London. Douglas was a Perthshire man, and it is certain that he and Drummond had early become acquainted. No doubt his accounts of the botanical riches awaiting the collector in the northern part of North America increased Drummond's eagerness to go with Franklin.
The personnel of the Second Overland Expedition was largely that of the First, of 1819-22. There was, of course, Franklin himself, no longer Captain Franklin, but Sir John, F.R.S., knighted and made a member of the Royal Society for his gallantry and his scientific achievements on the First Expedition. At this time he was thirty-nine years old. He was seconded by Dr. John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist to the expedition, the author in later years of the splendid volumes of the Fauna Boreali Americana covering the zo- ological findings of the two expeditions. Gruff though he was, and brusque to the point of insolence, Richardson was yet extremely kind to his men. Thomas H. Huxley's letters give several glimpses of this extraordinary man in later life. Huxley once said, for instance, that he "owed what he had to show in the way of scientific work or repute to the start in life given him by Richardson." In the 'forties he had been a pupil of Richardson at the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar, and the teacher, seeing that Huxley's real interest was not in medicine but in natural history, had secured his appointment to H.M.S. Rattlesnake, then off to the explorations in Torres Strait. Huxley speaks of "Old John" in one of his letters as "an old hero . . . not a feather of him is altered, and he is as gray, as really kind, and as seemingly abrupt and grim, as
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ever he was. Such a fine old polar bear !" In another place he reiterates, "I always look upon him as the founder of my fortunes." At the time of the Second Overland Expedition, Richardson was thirty-eight years old, and had already proved his abilities in Arctic exploration with Franklin.
Another member of the party was Lieutenant (later Sir) George Back, who was then just twenty-nine. He had been with the earlier expedition and had shown dauntless determi- nation. By incredible exertions and sufferings during the passage through the "Barren Grounds" of the Northwest Territory he had once saved Franklin from starvation. Later he was to become an admiral in the British navy, for "in bravery, intelligence, and love of adventure he was the very model of an English sailor." No danger or hardship on the two expeditions with Franklin was too great for Back. As another writer has declared, "It may be safely said that few sailors survived more terrible perils and hardships than Back did in the two expeditions under Franklin, and the two which he commanded himself."
These three were the chief members of the expedition; Drummond, appointed assistant to Richardson, made the fourth. They all were cast in heroic mold.
To Drummond was assigned the task of making a botanical exploration of the mountains of western Canada, while the rest of the expedition, under Franklin, Richardson, and Back, explored the Mackenzie and Coppermine rivers, and surveyed the coast of the Arctic Sea. The expedition set sail from Liverpool, February 16, 1825, on the American packet boat Columbia, and landed at New York on the fifteenth of March. The members of the party spent eight days in New York, where they were feted by officials of city and state. On March 23 they proceeded to Albany by boat, and thence by coach to Lewiston, through Utica, Rochester, and Geneva. They crossed the Niagara River, entered Canada, and viewed the
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Niagara Falls. Their itinerary took them finally to Penetan- guishene on Lake Huron, whence in two large canoes they set out for the Northwest on April 23. On May 10 they reached Fort William on Lake Superior, and thence, by river, lake, and portage, they proceeded to Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan, fifteen hundred miles away as the crow flies. Their route led them up the Rainy River and Lake, Lake of the Woods, Lake Winnipeg, and the Saskatchewan River. They arrived at Cumberland House on June 15, and on the following day Drummond parted from other members of the expedition to botanize in the Rocky Mountains. From Cum- berland House, Franklin led the rest of the party to Fort Chipewyan, the Great Slave Lake, and the Mackenzie River, and after a fruitful period of exploration in the far north, brought them back again to Cumberland House in the spring of 1827.
Drummond spent the summer of 1825 (June 28 to August 20) botanizing near Cumberland House and on the plains bordering the Saskatchewan River. On the twentieth of August, the boats of the Hudson's Bay Company arrived at Cumberland House. These were part of a "brigade" that was going from York Factory on Hudson's Bay to the Columbia River country in Washington and Oregon, in search of furs. Every spring such parties set out for all parts of Canada, and either returned that summer to their bases, or wintered in the wilderness, returning the following year. With the brigades traveled armed men. The journeys were made in long canoes, the use of which was made possible by the numerous streams and lakes of the Canadian northwest, and the shortness of the portages between them. Joining the brigade which was headed for the Columbia River country, Drummond set forth in one of the canoes, and arrived at Carlton House on the Saskatchewan the first of September.
It had been a part of Drummond's plan to stay here for some
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time, making collections in the neighborhood; but as the Indians at that time were menacing, he continued with the brigade to Edmonton House, also on the Saskatchewan. It was an unusual trip for Drummond, heretofore accustomed only to the hilly country of Perth, Stirling, and Forfarshire. It was, at the same time, work that called for the best in a man — for industry, persistence, and devotion to science. In the account of his Canadian explorations, Drummond de- scribes his method of work during the trip up the Saskatche- wan and other rivers to the Rocky Mountains, in present Saskatchewan and Alberta :
The plan I pursued for collecting was as follows. When the boats stopped for breakfast, I immediately went on shore with my vasculum, proceeding along the banks of the river, and making short excursions into the interior, taking care, however, to join the boats, if possible, at their encampment for the night. After supper, I commenced laying down the plants gathered in the day's excursion, changed and dried the papers of those col- lected previously ; which occupation generally occupied me until daybreak, when the boats started. I then went on board and slept till the breakfast hour, when I landed and proceeded as before. Thus I continued daily until we reached Edmonton House, a distance of about 400 miles, the vegetation having pre- served much the same character all the way.
On this journey Drummond made many observations con- cerning the birds and mammals of the prairie, some of them extended, and all of them evidencing powers of accurate and discriminating judgment. At Edmonton House the brigade left the river for a portage of a hundred miles — which they made in six days — to the Athabaska River. Because of the lack of proper facilities for carrying luggage, Drummond was obliged to leave most of his equipment at Edmonton, for later forwarding. The brigade reached Fort Assiniboine on the Athabaska, where they spent three days preparing the canoes — this time smaller ones, as the river in places was
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shallower than the Saskatchewan had been — for the ascent of the Athabaska to the mountains, a distance estimated at two hundred miles. They quitted the Fort on the first or second of October, 1825, some of the party, because of the heavy loading of the canoes, being obliged to travel by land. Drum- mond, as he says in one of the rare bursts of enthusiasm in his narrative, "gladly agreed" to be one of these. I quote from his account of the trip :
We quitted the Fort accordingly . . . and started in high spirits for a journey on horseback [the horses being furnished from the Hudson's Bay post at the Fort]. A heavy fall of snow, however, which took place on the 4th, put a final period to collecting for this season; it also rendered our progress through these trackless woods very unpleasant, our horses be- coming soon jaded, when the only alternative was to walk, and drive these before us. To add to these misfortunes, the poor animals were continually sinking in the swamps, from which we found it no easy task to extricate them. . . . The weather during this part of our journey, proved very unfavourable ; snow and a thick fog prevented my making much observation on the vegetation, which, however, appeared to bear the same character until we approached the mountains.
They reached Jasper House, in present Jasper National Park of western Alberta, on the eleventh day (October 12 or 13, 1825) and the canoes arrived the following day. Henry House, where the portage began, was some fifty miles farther up the Athabaska River, and the traveling distance of the portage was about fifty-four miles. They stopped a day or two at Henry House to unload the canoes and pack the horses for the portage. The brigade departed on October 18, and Drummond was left alone with the Indians. "Everything was so new to me," he wrote, "and I had such agreeable anticipations as to the results of my next summer's occupa- tions, that I scarcely felt the solitariness of my situation." An Iroquois Indian hunter named Baptiste had been assigned to Drummond by MacMillen, one of the Hudson's Bay of-
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ficials ; and in late October Drummond, Baptiste, Baptiste's sister, and her husband set out down the Athabaska for the Little Smoky, one of the eastern tributaries of the Peace, where Baptiste had proposed they should spend the winter. They never reached their destination. It appears that Bap- tiste's sister was on their journey taken in labor ; that accord- ing to the customs of the Iroquois, she had to quit their tent until labor was over; and that, "owing to the extreme severity of the weather, the ground being covered with snow, and the mercury indicating 38 degrees below zero, both the mother and her infant perished." The surviving brother and husband were paralyzed by grief, and became so despondent that it was ten or fifteen days before they could be induced to quit the spot. They then went eastward to the Berland River, which they reached on January 1, 1826. In this locality Drummond remained until April.
Drummond has left an account of his first winter in the Canadian northwest, a narrative which is of value in showing the stuff of which the man was made. In his record of his travels, he says :
As we were now likely to remain stationary for a short time, I set about building myself a brushwood tent, formed of the boughs of the White Spruce, and soon completed it. ... A slight shower of rain fell about the 10th of January, which is a very rare phenomenon at this time of the year; and it caused us great inconvenience ... it became almost impossible to get near any animal [desired for food], owing to the noise made in walking, by the breaking of the [snow] crust. At this time, . . . the snow was about two feet deep, and it gradually in- creased till the 27th of March, its greatest average depth being from five to six feet. . . . The animals of all kinds were be- coming more and more scarce, so that my hunter resolved upon leaving this spot, and accordingly removed 80 or 100 miles farther down the river, but I preferred remaining where I was, though my situation became very lonely, being deprived of books or any source of amusement. When the weather per- mitted, I generally took a walk, to habituate myself to the use
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of snow shoes, but I added very little to my collections. The hunter returned about the beginning of March, bringing with him some venison.
On April 1 Drummond set out for Jasper House, more than a hundred and fifty miles away as the crow flies. Here he hoped to receive letters from Sir John Franklin, who with all his company had been passing the winter at Fort Franklin on Great Bear Lake. Drummond hoped also to have word from home ; and he was eager to collect specimens of the many migrant birds that stopped on the lakes near Jasper House — Brule, Jasper, Maligne, and smaller lakes along the Atha- baska. He made the trip, "the greatest journey [he] had ever yet performed in snow shoes," in six days, arriving at Jasper House on April 7, 1826. Two days later an official of the Hudson's Bay Company arrived from Edmonton House with Drummond's luggage, and more paper for pressing plants. From April 9 to May 6 Drummond collected birds on a small lake fifty miles away near Henry House, subsisting largely on whiten sh, which he found abundant in the lake. The fur brigade returning from the Columbia River country came over the portage the sixth of May, and found Drum- mond at Henry House. He yielded to their importunities to accompany them as far as Jasper House. On the way he had an adventure which threatened to end his botanical career then and there. I quote from his account :
I went on before [the brigade] for a few miles, to procure specimens of a [moss], which I had previously observed in a small rivulet on our track. On this occasion I had a narrow escape from the jaws of a grisly [sic] bear; for, while passing through a small open glade, intent upon discovering the moss of which I was in search, I was surprised by hearing a sudden rush and then a harsh growl, just behind me; and on looking round, I beheld a large bear approaching towards me, and two young ones making off in a contrary direction as fast as pos- sible. . . . This was the first I had met with. She halted within two or three yards of me, growling and rearing herself
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on her hind feet, then suddenly wheeled about, and went off in the direction the young ones had taken, probably to ascertain whether they were safe. During this momentary absence, I drew from my gun the small shot with which I had been firing at ducks during the morning, and which, I was well aware, would avail me nothing against so large and powerful a crea- ture, and replaced it with ball. The bear, meanwhile, had ad- vanced and retreated two or three times, apparently more furi- ous than ever; halting at each interval within a shorter and shorter distance from me, always raising herself on her hind legs, and growling a horrible defiance, and at length approach- ing to within the length of my gun from me. Now was my time to fire : but judge of my alarm and mortification, when I found that my gun would not go off! The morning had been wet, and the damp had been communicated to the powder. My only resource was to plant myself firm and stationary, in the hope of disabling the bear by a blow on her head with the butt end of my gun, when she should throw herself on me to seize me. She had gone and returned a dozen times, her rage appar- ently increasing with her additional confidence, and I momen- tarily expected to find myself in her gripe, when the dogs be- longing to the brigade made their appearance, but on beholding the bear they fled with all possible speed. The horsemen were just behind, but such was the surprise and alarm of the whole party, that though there were several hunters and at least half- a-dozen guns among them, the bear made her escape unhurt. . . . For the future, I took care to keep my gun in better order, but I found, by future experience, that the best mode of getting rid of the bears when attacked by them, was to rattle my vasculum, or specimen box, when they immediately decamp. . . . My adventure with the bear did not, however, prevent my accomplishing the collecting of the Jungermannia [moss].
The summer and autumn of 1826 were filled with incessant travel and collecting, in spite of the plagues of mosquitoes caused by unusually heavy rains in the spring. After remain- ing at Jasper House from May 17 to June 15 collecting plants, Drummond spent the last half of June and nearly all of July near Lac-la-Pierre in the mountains to the north, returning to Jasper House before the end of July. In early August he again set out for Lac-la-Pierre, and later continued his
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journey to Providence on the Smoky River. This trip (August 4-24) was rather unproductive. In late September Drummond was still on the Smoky making pemmican from buffalo flesh in preparation for a return to the Columbia Portage. The return journey to the portage, which he reached October 17, was made by way of Edmonton House on the Saskatchewan. Joining a party of fur-traders that were making the portage, he went to its west end, the Boat En- campment of the Columbia. On the way he fell in with Finan McDonald, a man of twenty years' service with the North- west Company in western Canada. McDonald, who was quitting the country which he had long made his home, was setting out for the east, accompanied by his wife and family. The party reached Jasper House on October 30, and taking a boat to carry their belongings, started on November 12 to descend the Athabaska River to Fort Assiniboine. When they were about halfway to their destination, the stage of the water being very low and the weather being cold, with heavy snow, they stuck fast in the ice, and had to continue their trip by land. To quote Drummond:
As Mr. M'Donald's family were incapable of travelling, he agreed to encamp and remain with the luggage, . . . [while Drummond went on foot to Fort Assiniboine] whence we were to send horses to his assistance. We had calculated on reaching this place in three days, but it was the fifth evening before we arrived, having, however, met with no other hindrance than the unavoidable hardships of such a journey. . . . We received much kindness, on our arrival, from . . . the gentleman who has charge of the Fort, who also sent horses ... to the relief of Mr. M' Donald who had suffered great anxiety . . . and whose provisions were nearly exhausted. He reached us, hap- pily, about tht 1st of December, bringing with him the whole of the luggage in good order.
On December 15, 1826, Drummond reached Edmonton House, and he remained there until mid-March preparing his
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specimens for shipment to England in the spring. Edmonton, which had been founded as a post of the Northwest Company about 1778, was now a small settlement of employees of the united Hudson's Bay and Northwest Company. It was the northwest center for the Company, and offered a convenient wintering-place for the naturalist. In early February Drum- mond received a letter from Richardson telling him of the success of the northern expeditions, and asking Drummond to meet him at Carlton House, two hundred miles up the Saskatchewan, as soon as was convenient. On March 15, 1827, accompanied by an Indian guide, Drummond set out for his destination, but fearing hostile Indians, they took a course that led them greatly out of their way. Snow-blindness retarded their progress and made it impossible for them to shoot game. As a result, their provisions gave' out, and they were driven to the ultimate necessity of devouring the dried skins of animals which Drummond had taken for the Zo- ological Society of London. "Our dogs became [excessively] fatigued," Drummond relates, "and so we were under the necessity of cutting up our sledge and carrying our luggage ourselves." Furthermore:
The provisions were wholly spent, and I was compelled to destroy a fine specimen of the Jumping Deer, . . . although it was the only one that we had been able to procure, and I had carried it all the way from the Columbia River, where I had procured it. As I had not been very particular in divesting this skin of the flesh, it proved the more valuable on that account. . . . Within about a day's journey of the Fort, . . . we had the good fortune to kill a Skunk, . . . which afforded us a comfortable meal. This creature, when hunted, discharges an intolerably fetid liquor upon its pursuers, and few dogs will afterward attempt to destroy it. The one we killed on the evening before we reached the Fort, proved tolerable eating, though it had a strong flavour of this obnoxious liquid.
At Carlton House they found that Richardson had become
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anxious about them. From April 5 until July 14 Drummond remained in the neighborhood of Carlton House, or engaged in explorations on the South Branch of the Saskatchewan River, probably getting as far south as present Saskatoon. He joined the rest of the party at Cumberland House on July 19, and with them went down the Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers, by portages, to York Factory on Hudson's Bay, whence they set sail for England. On October 15, 1827, two years and eight months from the time of their departure from Liverpool, they arrived in London.
The rest of the story is soon told. In 1828-29 Drummond was curator of the Botanical Garden at Belfast. In the years immediately following his return to Britain, he issued exsic- cati of American mosses under the title Musci Americani in two quarto volumes, which included specimens collected chiefly on his journey with the Franklin Expedition. "The number of distinct species, thus procured," says Professor Hooker, "exceeds two hundred and forty, which, with the well-marked varieties, amount to two hundred and eighty-six kinds . . . the whole of the continent of North America has not been known to possess so many Mosses as Mr. Drummond has detected in this single journey." It was notable work. Many new species of flowering plants were also added to the known flora of America, some of which are so rare as to have escaped the ken of naturalists since Drummond's day.
In 1830-31 Drummond made another journey to America to collect plants in the western and southern parts of the United States. From New York he went successively to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and then on foot followed the pike to Wheeling, collecting by the way. He planned to reach St. Louis in time to accompany Kenneth MacKenzie, a fellow-Scot of distinguished family who was in charge of the Upper Missouri Outfit of the American Fur Company, on his journey up into the Blackfoot and Assini-
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boine country of the upper Missouri Valley, in present Mon- tana. But as Drummond arrived too late to join MacKenzie, he remained at St. Louis until winter, making large collections of plants for Hooker in the vicinity. In Hooker's papers on Drummond's collections he lists numerous species collected in the Alleghenies, in Ohio, and at St. Louis, Jacksonville, Covington, and New Orleans. Drummond's best collecting during the years 1831-32 appears to have been done in the vicinity of New Orleans. In the spring of 1833 he left for Texas, on the journey which has already been described.
And now we come back to the central questions of Thomas Drummond's life. What was his essential character, and what would have been his influence on the development of botany in Texas had he lived and carried into effect the plans sketched for Hooker in his letter of Christmas Day, 1834? I confess to a sense of inadequacy in forming a judgment con- cerning a man of Drummond's cast of mind. Racial char- acteristics are so marked that only a Scot can judge a Scot. An admirable people, indeed, of brusque tenderness and grim kindness !
Yet the personality of the man emerges from his writings, however he may avoid the personal note. He was innately modest, but still he had a wholesome self-respect and a habit of self -appraisal of his work. The experiences recorded in the account of the Canadian explorations are narrated objec- tively. There is neither strutting nor mock heroics. Running through the whole is an undercurrent of conviction that the tasks were all in the day's work, duties that must be done without praise and without clamor. The descriptions of hardship, privation, severe exertion, and even of mortal' danger merge into a tale of quiet brevity that runs along without break, highlight, or straining for dramatic effect. In Drummond's description of the country he explored in the
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vicinity of the Portage, he shows the greatest moderation. Few who have been in the territory he explored, and have gazed at Mount Robson, or Lake Maligne, or the Athabaska as it winds through the mountains to the east of the Great Divide between walls of snow-capped mountains, have been so restrained. An alpine region of incredible beauty — the finest on the Continent, and among the finest in the world — prompted Drummond to only brief comment. One is almost reminded of Herbert Spencer, who gazed on Niagara (was it from the American side?) and remarked: "Much what I ex- pected !"
As a rule men easily bear exceptional hardships and dan- gers, only to sink under common and long-continued burdens. Every traveler in the Arctic regions, even Sir John Franklin, has mentioned as chief among the burdens to be borne, the incredible clouds of mosquitoes that make life in high latitudes a misery. Such pests Drummond dismisses with a shrug — "the mosquitoes are much more plentiful here than I saw them anywhere else" — until one gets almost the sense of profanity when later he ejaculates, "The mosquitoes are also dreadfully numerous !"
There are a few touches of beauty in Drummond's account which reveal the hidden poet : descriptions of the fragrance of a flower, or the courtship or song of a bird — but these matters, also, are treated with restraint. Of a range of mountains whose beauty could hardly be suggested by a rainbow of words, he said, "They gratified me extremely." A few pages later, describing another sierra, he wrote with true Spartan frugality, "a fine range of mountains." This is the highland Scot, feeling dimly and massively the beauty and grandeur of nature, yet burying the current of his emotion deep beneath the surface.
The privations that Drummond underwent in the mountains of Canada far surpassed those he suffered in Texas. Yet in
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the one account we find a quiet Scottish song of jubilation; in the other, a succession of jeremiads. It must be recalled, how- ever, that during his sojourn in Texas Drummond was suf- fering the cumulative effect of past privations and exposures. During a good share of the time that he had spent at St. Louis in 1831, he had been ill. Seven years had passed since he had done his best work in the Canadian Rockies. For two years and more he had been separated from his family, without the bracing stimulation of association, in spirit at least, with the heroic men of the Franklin Expedition. Too, he was work- ing in a territory which might have been called American, instead of British, and that made a vast difference. And finally, not to speak of the personal afflictions that beset him, it must have been hard for the scientist from Glasgow to endure the social conditions of frontier Texas. Accustomed to a civilization where intellectual pursuits were respected for their own sake, where that fine aphorism of John Knox had worked itself into the inner consciousness of the people — "Every scholar is so much added to the riches of the Com- monwealth"— Drummond must have found it disheartening to see how little attention was paid to education and intellec- tual pursuits generally in the Texas of the early 'thirties. Reared as he had been with an ingrained respect for law and order, Drummond must also have viewed with sharp distaste the looseness of administration of justice in early Texas. One does not need to share the attitude, but one can comprehend it. When all is said, the fact remains that law and order, as we conceive them, were in the Texas of Drummond's day ideals to be sought after rather than possessions to be enjoyed.
Yet Drummond saw potentialities in Texas. For him Texas was indeed the opportunity of a lifetime. Had he made his permanent home here, the botanical history of Texas would have been written very differently. There would have been no Lindheimer, no Wright, no Reverchon, no S. B. Buckley,
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no Lincecum, collecting plants for Asa Gray and Elias Durand and George Engelmann. Before their day the flora of Texas would have been described by Hooker, Bentham, Lindley, David Don, and other British botanists. By the time that Charles Wright and John James Audubon came to Texas, the botany of all that part of Texas which had been wrested from the Indians would have been open to the world. And the work in Mexico, begun by Berlandier, would have been greatly advanced. For where Berlandier was weak, there Drummond was strong.
A man of tremendous physical energy, of persistence, of unsuspected idealism, of complete devotion to science ^forget- ful of self, pursuing his unreasoning love for botany without any recking or calculating of the end — such was Thomas Drummond. It seems an unnecessarily cruel fate that kept him from bringing to completion his work in Texas.
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V
LOUIS CACHAND ERVENDBERG
NE GOES to the little town of New Braunfels in South Texas with a recurrent sense of renewal in spirit — that is, if he is of German descent, and if his heart responds to German song, German literature, German Sittlichkeit, Ger- man Massigkeit. There one hears the German tongue still spoken with remarkable purity and finds German customs still observed, so that now, as in the closing days of the Republic of Texas, a visit to New Braunfels is like entering into the life of a little German city. The landscape is beautiful, with the Missionsberg to the north, forest-crowned ; the Guadalupe and the Comal rivers, clear, swift, with rapids in their courses ; and the magnificent cypresses along the Guadalupe. In the town, itself stand old houses with an enduring charm. To be sure, many of the landmarks mentioned by early Texas travelers are gone. The ferry across the Guadalupe, at the point where the Comal flows into it, has not been in use since the iron bridge was built across the river near the old San Antonio Road in the 'eighties. Torrey's Mill was torn down three-quarters of a century ago. Seele's Sdngerhalle is also gone. The old Sophienburg, long in ruins, has been replaced by a fine modern museum devoted to the history of the town. But there are still many precious reminders of the past. The old Camino Real, in "Nacogdoches Street," can yet be traced going down to the ford of the Guadalupe where the mill pond of the textile mill is now; and the Comal Springs, "Las Fon- tanas" of Mexican days, retain the beauty that evoked com-
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ment a century ago. The old Waisenhaus, or orphan's home, still stands also, a grim reminder of the terrible days of 1846, and on the high ground on Zink Street, near the Comal Creek, can be seen the place where the immigrants of 1845 camped until huts and houses could be built. The forest on the east bank of the Guadalupe at the ferry-site holds memories of the ghastly sufferings of the later immigrants in the summer of 1846. But to me, at any rate, the most interesting spot in New Braunfels is the bit of ground under an oak tree — the only one remaining of three that formerly marked the place — where Louis Ervendberg, the Protestant pastor of the Ger- man settlers, held the first religious services in New Braun- fels, and where Hermann Seele held the first school.
Ervendberg was one of the most enigmatic and tragic char- acters that ever lived in New Braunfels. The town, for that matter, could claim its full quota of remarkable inhabitants — men like Carl Jonas Love Almquist, the Swedish man of letters, who worked on the Neu-Brannfelser Zeitung with Lindheimer for a couple of months in the summer of 1853; or the Polish Franciscan, Father Moczygeba, pastor of the Catholic church in Almquist's day; like barefooted Otto Friedrich, a lepidopterist and entomologist of no mean ability, who in antebellum days was sending insects to H. A. Hagen before Agassiz called Hagen to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge; or like Ottomar von Behr, an old friend of Alexander von Humboldt and Bettina von Arnim, and Dr. Julius Froebel, who in the late 'fifties was publishing in the Reports of the Smithsonian Institution notable articles on the physiography of America while he engaged in trade be- tween Texas and Chihuahua.
But even in such a company, Ervendberg is a notable char- acter. His own descendants freely acknowledge that the name Ervendberg is assumed. Although he claimed to have studied at Heidelberg, no German university records him as a student ;
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the Central Bureau for personal genealogy knows nothing of Ervendberg's family ; even the parish church of Rhoden in the old Principality of Waldeck, where he said he was born, has no record of him or his family.* Out of obscurity he came, and into obscurity he went. And a tragic destiny seemed to pursue him. He deserved enduring honor among all that bear the German name in Texas for his labors as first German pastor in Texas, as the progressive and liberal leader in the formation of "The Christian Church of the Germans in Texas" in 1841, as the first teacher in the German communi- ties of Colorado and Austin counties in the early 'forties, and as the heroic pastor of his flock in 1846, the terrible second year of the German migration, as1 well as during the cholera epidemic of 1849. But whatever Ervendberg may have de- served, his sun went down in clouds of shame in New Braun- f els, where he had carried on the best labors of his life ; and in the memorials set up in honor of German pioneers in South- west Texas, his name is absent.
Perhaps it may seem a disservice to Ervendberg to bring out into the light of day the facts of his life, now that three- quarters of a century have passed since his murder in a little Mexican town. Yet his life was bound up with movements of great import in Texas, and the history of those movements cannot be written without taking Ervendberg into account. Moreover, his life vividly illustrates the play of forces in- volved in human behavior ; it is a familiar if pitiful tale, with moments of heroism as well as of sordidness. Though
* As these pages go to the printer, my three-year search for the true name and antecedents of Ervendberg (unknown even to his own de- scendants) has been rewarded, and I will probably be able, in a later publication, to clear up the mystery surrounding this tragic figure. I am now instituting a check of the records at German universities in an effort to confirm the newly discovered facts, and to obtain additional light on the life of Ervendberg before he left Germany.
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Ervendberg was not highly trained in science when he came to Texas, and, as we shall see presently, was seriously handi- capped in his efforts to acquire a fuller knowledge of botany, still he deserves an honorable place in the company of the Naturalists of the Frontier. Furthermore, he was a leader in the movement toward scientific and experimental agricul- ture among the Germans of Southwest Texas; and, perhaps most important of all, his life throws much light on the condi- tions under which all the Naturalists of the Frontier worked. If the record in the Church Book of the First Protestant Church at New Braunfels is indeed true, Ervendberg was born on the third day of May, 1809, at the village of Rhoden in the former Principality of Waldeck in west-central Ger- many. It is a town of some five hundred inhabitants, for the most part belonging to the Evangelical confession, situated some twenty-five miles southwest of Paderborn. There are no records of Ervendberg's childhood or of his education, but he almost certainly received some formal theological train- ing— probably at an Evangelical seminary, of which Germany has a number, some of great distinction. As a young man Ervendberg seems to have held an ecclesiastical post at Ank- lam in Pomerania, where he made friends with Baron Ottf ried Hans von Meusebach (who later became Commissioner Gen- eral of the Mainzer Adelsverein at New Braunfels), and Georg Klappenbach, Burgomaster of Anklam and later Mayor of New Braunfels. Subsequently Ervendberg lived for a time at Her ford, a considerable town at the junction of the Werre and the Aa in the county of Ravensburg in Prussia. Herford had been a member of the Hanseatic League, and was rich in historical associations dating back to the ninth century; in Ervendberg's day, the Gymnasium of the town was nearly three hundred years old. The fine old Romanesque cathedral and a Gothic church of the Virgin date back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. To the south and west
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of Herford lies the Teutoberg forest, where the Germans under Hermann defeated the Roman legions under Varus in 9 a.d. In addition to its well-established textile industry, Herford was notable in Ervendberg's day for its agricultural school and for two Orphans' Homes established on the plan of the famous institution of August Hermann Francke at Halle. I have not been able to unearth any particulars of Ervend- berg's life at Herford and Anklam, but apparently he was highly regarded. That Ervendberg stood well in Germany before his departure for America is indicated by the fact that when Georg Klappenbach was sent out by the Adelsverein in July of 1846 to be mayor of New Braunfels, he was intro- duced, according to Viktor Bracht, as "a friend of Mr. Meusebach and of Reverend Ervendberg."
I have mentioned the great uncertainty concerning Ervend- berg's name. One of Ervendberg's grandsons by his first wife tells of overhearing a conversation between his mother (a daughter of Ervendberg) and another person, in which it was stated that the name was assumed, and that the father came to Germany originally as a French refugee. The chil- dren of the second wife of Ervendberg spontaneously reported to me the same tradition. But the matter is at best obscure. Ervendberg himself wrote his name variously. In early portions of the Church Books of the First Protestant Church at New Braunfels he hyphenated it, "Cachand-Ervendberg," but this was soon changed to Louis Cachand Ervendberg, the name under which he went while he was pastor at Houston and in Colorado and Austin counties. Pastor Schuchard of New Braunfels, in completing the parish church-record for the Ervendberg family, wrote the name in full as "Christian Friedrich Ludwig Cachand Ervendberg." Captain Friedrich Wilhelm von Wrede, in his Lebensbilder (1844), spells Ervendberg's name "Ervensberg," and Pastor Gustav Eisen- lohr, in letters to his father in Germany, consistently spells it
LOUIS CACHAND ERVENDBERG 111
"Erwendberg." These are no doubt minutiae, but some scholar more fortunate than I may find them clues to the man's real name. I should add that directories of American cities having a large German population — metropolitan New York, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis— list no persons of the name Ervendberg. Moreover, the archives, of the library of the University of Berlin and, as stated above, the Central Bureau at Leipzig can give no help in the matter. On the whole, it seems justifiable to conclude that family tradition is correct in stating that "Ervendberg" is an assumed name.
The question of where Ervendberg studied theology is equally difficult. The period was one of much strife among the sects of German Protestantism, dating back to the time of Luther's death, which had helped to increase the disaster wrought by the Thirty Years' War, and which was finally "healed" only by the interposition of the civil authorities in the period 1817-27. Ervendberg belonged to the Evangelical or Philippist group of German Protestants — the group that founded in 1820 the General Synod of the Evangelical Church of the United States.
From a study of the traits of mind shown by Ervendberg, I suspect that he either studied theology at the Francke Foundation in Halle, or in some other way came deeply under the influence of the Francke tradition. He was essentially Pietistic, but showed also, as did Francke, a strongly humani- tarian tendency. As will be seen later, in his work at New Braunfels Ervendberg tried unsuccessfully to imitate several of Francke's institutions that came to such glorious fruition at Halle. But however it was obtained, Ervendberg's the- ological training seems to have been substantial, as was that of every German Protestant clergyman of that day — Her- mann Seele, who was in a position to know, speaks of Ervend- berg's "theological and philological training gained at German universities." This would imply mastery of the Greek New
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Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament, as well as the usual classical and scientific training of the German Gym- nasium. A thesis of some hundred and forty-six pages on "Die Erklarung des Evangelii Johannis nach dem Verbangen [?] des Presbyter Matthaus," written in the best exegetical style of the time, is in the Sophienburg Museum at New Braunf els : it is ascribed to Ervendberg, but I have my doubts. It is, of course, replete with parallel readings in Greek from the gospel of Matthew. Whether the document is an original study by Ervendberg, or a copied thesis in which he was interested (as I suspect), makes little difference, for in any case it evidences the interest and competence of the man in the substantial scholarship demanded of German clergymen of his day.
One familiar with the thought of Ervendberg's time can easily visualize the scanty library the young minister probably collected. Besides the Bible, it would contain August Her- mann Francke's Segensvolle Fusstapfen, with an account of the famous orphan-house at Halle; Spener's two volumes of Theologische Bedenken; Johann Arndt's Seeks Biicher vom wahren Christ enthum, edited by G. A. Franck, and published at Halle in 1830; Count von Zinzendorf's Herrenhuts Gesang- buch; Schleiermacher's Der Christliche Glaube; von Mo- sheim's works on ecclesiastical and Christian history, some in Latin and some in German; Thomas von Kempen's Vier Bucher von der Nachfolge Christi; and Krummacher's and Hofacker's sermons. Of these books, Johann Arndt's Trite Christianity was doubtless Ervendberg's most constant and unfailing companion in the early days.
Ervendberg seems to have come to America in the early part of 1837, or a short time before; for in that year we find him an Evangelical pastor among the Germans in northern Illinois. According to a somewhat garbled (and, it is to be feared, embellished) account of himself that Ervendberg gave
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Frederick Law Olmsted in 1854, he had landed in New York, and had come to the West by the common route of all immi- grants: up the Hudson River by steamboat, and then across New York State by way of the Erie Canal. It must have been a wonderful experience for the young German clergyman to view this new canal, more than three hundred and fifty miles long, with its eighty-four locks and its feeder canals entering the main channel at Troy, Utica, and other points along the route. The aqueducts carrying the canal across rivers, the turning-basins and docks — here was cause for admiration! The New York State canals were then in the heyday of their prosperity; in 1837 the combined Erie and Champlain Canals netted a round million dollars over all expenses.
Ervendberg probably traveled by one of the "line boats," which made three miles an hour, and paid for his passage at the rate of a cent a mile, with the privilege of buying and cooking his food aboard the boat. Arriving at Buffalo, he no doubt took deck-passage on a lake steamer to Detroit, paying three dollars for the trip, and from Detroit traveled across Michigan to the raw town of Chicago at the foot of Lake Michigan.
Chicago, of course, was still in its infancy. In the year before Ervendberg's arrival, the first schoolhouse had been built. In March of 1837, the town, then boasting some four thousand inhabitants, had been incorporated. The Illinois & Michigan Canal, designed to connect Lake Michigan with the Desplaines River, was under construction; the Rush Medical College had just been incorporated; and the continued pros- perity of Chicago seemed assured. In 1837, however, came the Panic, which for two years stopped all increase in the town's population, and caused a cessation of work on the Illinois & Michigan Canal. The price of flour went up to twenty-eight dollars a barrel ; the financial situation in Illinois became desperate, and was to grow worse after the passage of
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the Internal Improvement Act. By 1839 the debt of Illinois had mounted to fourteen million dollars, with an annual in- terest charge of $800,000. Repudiation of the debt followed — the beginning of an inglorious chapter in the history of state finance in the United States.
Upon his arrival in Chicago in these distressed times, Ervendberg seems to have entered at once upon his pastoral functions. Working among the German settlers who were just then beginning their migration into the Middle West, he established Protestant Evangelical congregations in Chicago, in the German settlement of Teuto on Salt Creek in DuPage County, at East Prairie on the Desplaines River, and at Schwemm's Grove. Altogether, he seems to have had a total of fifty-six church members and 221 associates in his com- bined charges. But his aggregate income was fantastically small — probably not more than a hundred and fifty dollars a year.
Among the younger members of his congregation at Teuto, Ervendberg found an attractive Hanoverian lass, fair-haired and blue-eyed, named Maria Sophie Dorothea Muench. She lived with her uncle. With him she had left her home at Landesburg, near Nienburg; upon their arrival in America in 1836, they had settled in Chicago, but in 1837 had removed fifteen miles west to Teuto in order to escape the malarial marshes along the lake shore. On the tenth of September, 1838, Ervendberg and Maria were married in Chicago by Ervendberg's friend, the Reverend John Blatchf ord, a Presby- terian minister.
Although Ervendberg was in a sense isolated at his home parish on Salt Creek, still he had many pleasant associations. In the congregations he served were many compatriots of his wife, some of whom had even been close neighbors in the old home, so that life, in spite of financial stringencies, had its pleasant side. Their first-born, a son, came to the couple in
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Teuto in July of 1839. The child died on the twelfth of the following September, plunging the family into deep grief. Ervendberg, disconsolate and harassed by economic difficul- ties, began to consider migrating to the Republic of Texas, the goal of so many persons in the United States who had been ruined by the financial crash of 1837.
It was not an easy thing to leave home and friends. Be- sides his parishioners in Cook and DuPage counties, Ervend- berg had many congenial acquaintances in Chicago. Three of his ministerial colleagues, in particular, were close friends. Dr. John Blatchford, fifteen years Ervendberg's senior, a graduate of Union College and Princeton Theological Semi- nary and pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Chicago, stood in the place of mentor and confidant, and of course the two men shared similar theological views. Another friend was the Methodist minister, the Reverend Peter Ruble Borein, of an age with Ervendberg — one of the most beloved pastors in Chicago. Most amiable as a man, and an eloquent preacher, he read his Hebrew Bible easily in a day when scholarship was rare on the raw frontier. The Methodist presiding elder, the Reverend John Clark, later to become prominent in the church in Texas, was a third member of the trio of colleagues whom Ervendberg found congenial.
Many years later, Hermann Seele, in an extended obituary notice of Mrs. Ervendberg (published in the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung on January 12, 1888), leaves the impression that a certain worldly love of ease and gain sent Ervendberg to Texas. This suggestion is far from the truth. Understand- ing of Ervendberg's decision to migrate must begin with a realization of his intense financial distress in Illinois. Church dues had dwindled to almost nothing, and prices of food and other necessities were soaring. Moreover, the prospect of an increasing family naturally turned Ervendberg's attention to the wider opportunities of Texas, which were an interesting
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topic of discussion among his friends. John Clark, for in- stance, was also planning to go to Texas, and did so a year later.
In the autumn of 1839 the Ervendbergs, having laid away their first-born son in the German graveyard at Teuto, packed up the possessions of a humble and impecunious German pastor and took boat down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, bound for New Orleans and Houston. When they arrived in Houston, probably in December of 1839, the settlement was but two years old. It had been "founded" in 1836, but had taken shape only in 1837, when it became capital of the new republic* In 1839 Houston was still a town of shanties, with a population of less than two thousand. The town served as a port of entry for immigrants, and here numerous Germans on their way to the interior stopped for counsel with their compatriots. Ervendberg, securing a small plot of ground just outside the town, engaged in market gardening while he looked about for an opportunity to resume his ministerial labors. It is quite possible that at this time he made the acquaintance of two other Naturalists of the Frontier, Lind- heimer and Fendler, who were also working as market garden- ers near Houston.
These German gardeners were recognized as an asset in early Texas. The British consul William Kennedy wrote in 1844 in a diplomatic dispatch to the Earl of Aberdeen :
Among the European settlers, the Germans have the reputation of being the most successful. They are generally laborious, persevering, and eager to accumulate — orderly for the most part — and they keep well together. They have formed thriving Communities at different points of the interior, and they con- stitute a considerable proportion of the trading and working population of the towns adjacent to the Coast. In common with the French, they become Market-gardeners. And they
* In 1839 the seat of the government was moved to the newly laid out town of Austin.
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divide with the Irish the profits of drayage and cartage, which are pretty large during the business season.
Ervendberg lost no time in beginning work as a pastor ; on December 22, 1839, he preached to a congregation of German immigrants in