Thomas Nuttall

Thomas Nuttall was one of the most adventurous of the early naturalists on the American frontier, and certainly one of most knowledgeable in the field. Gifted as a botanist and ornithologist, skilled as a printer, and a traveler with nerve, he came to the newly formed United States at a perfect time to explorer its expanding boundaries.

Early Years

Born on 5 January 1786 in the village of Long Preston near Craven, Yorkshire, England, he was destined to spend most of his professional life (33 of his 73 years) in America as a botanist, explorer and professor. Nuttall was always willing to take risks. As an example, his career in botany was sparked within a day of his arrival in Philadelphia in 1808 by Benjamin Smith Barton, who had given up on his previous protégé, Frederick Pursh, and was searching for another. He found one in Nuttall, who came inquiring about a plant he had found, a cat-brier, Smilax (SMY-laks) to be exact, and was curious about its name. After some formal instruction in botany from Barton, Nuttall was prepared.

Within months, he was engaged in field work for Barton, collecting plants in the salt marshes of Delaware and the Chesapeake Bay. This 1809 trip was a success, but a second to Lake Ontario in August resulted in illness, and mold destroyed his plants so that he was forced return to Philadelphia.

Nonetheless, Barton asked Nuttall to explore and botanize the Great Lakes region during the summer of 1810. Nuttall’s efforts this time were far more productive, and by mid-August he was at Mackinac Island on Lake Huron, visiting the headquarters of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. There he learned of a trip scheduled to go up the Missouri River the following year. Intrigued, he abandoned Barton’s instructions to return to Philadelphia, and went to St. Louis.

Nuttall was a printer by trade, and in St. Louis he applied his skills at a local newspaper, thereby gaining a small but adequate income. He met the Englishman John Bradbury, a fellow botanist, and the two collected locally. In the spring of 1811, they headed up the Missouri River, traveling with the “Overland Astorians” who were heading for Oregon with Wilson Hunt Price as their leader.^[2]The story of the “Overland Astorians” was told with considerable relish by Washington Irving in a two-volume 1836 book entitled Astoria. The party left St. Charles, Missouri, on 14 March … Continue reading

Nuttall’s adventures along the Missouri River were many, and the botany intriguing. Although the area had been botanized by Lewis and Clark in 1804, and to a much lesser degree in 1806, none of the plants had been described and thus all was new to him. Nuttall also collected at the perfect time, covering the whole of the river from the Mandan region to St. Louis throughout the growing season. Also, it is good to remember that Lewis and Clark lost their entire 1805 spring collection when a winter cache was destroyed by floodwater. As a result, many of the plants Nuttall (and Bradbury) found were destined to be new to science.

Unlike Bradbury, who returned to St. Louis in July, Nuttall apparently remained on the upper Missouri. It is unclear where he went or how he traveled. One new plant he obtained was the sego-lily, Calochortus nuttallii (kal-oh-COR-tus nut-TALL-ee-eye). Today that plant is found from extreme western North Dakota westward. It is possible Nuttall traveled up river a considerable distance, or that one of the trappers brought the specimen to him. It is likely that Nuttall returned to St. Louis with Manuel Lisa of the Missouri Fur Company, arriving there in late October 1811.

The result for Nuttall was a wealth of new plants, many times more than Barton could ever have expected. In the fall, however, when he got back to St. Louis, Nuttall learned of the possibility of war between England and America. He gave up all hopes of going back to Philadelphia and sailed for Europe from New Orleans, taking his dried plants and seeds with him.

In London, Nuttall prepared his collection, apparently with the intent of delivering a full set of his specimens to Barton. At the same time he published a small pamphlet in association with Fraser’s Nursery, wherein he validly published such new species as the cactus spinystar, Escobaria viviparia (Nutt.) Buxbaum (ess-coe-BAR-ee-ah vi-vi-PAIR-ree-ah,referring to the small, persistent fruits), the alpine golden wild buckwheat, Eriogonum flavum Nutt. (er-ee-AH-gon-um and FLAY-vum, referring to the golden yellow color of the flowers), the tufted evening-primrose, Oenothera cespitosa Nutt. (ee-NO-ther-ah ces-PIT-oh-sah, the matted or tufted habit) and big-fruit evening-primrose, Oenothera macrocarpa Nutt. (ma-crow-CAR-pah, big fruit), the large-flower beardtongue, Penstemon grandiflorum Nutt. (PEN-steh-mun gran-di-FLOOR-um, large flowers), and soapweed, Yucca glauca Nutt. (YUCK-ah and GLAW-cah, alluding to the bluish waxy covering on the leaves).

Suspicions about Pursh

Nuttall had gotten to know Frederick Pursh, and he was decidedly uncomfortable with the man. Nuttall showed some of his new plants to Pursh, who took a rather unprofessional desire to know much more about them. It was Pursh’s opinion that, since he was doing a flora of North America, and had found some (but by no means all) of the same species among the Lewis and Clark material, he should describe all of the new species no matter who found them. Apparently there was some kind of agreement that the two of them would propose Bartonia (bar-TONE-ee-ah) jointly, but Pursh did it without Nuttall, and without Nuttall’s knowledge. Still, Nuttall felt obligated to provide Pursh’s patron, Aylmer Bourke Lambert, with specimens, and thus Pursh had access to most of Nuttall’s new species anyway. This misunderstanding was to play a role in Pursh’s Flora americae septentrionalis.^[3]As was common for the day, the pages for Pursh’s Flora were printed in parts, with the printer’s type then reused to print another part. On page 327, or just over half way through the … Continue reading

Nuttall returned to the United States immediately after the conclusion of the War of 1812. From Philadelphia, in 1815, he set off for the field again, this time into the mountains of the Southeast, gathering more new species in areas not yet explored for botanical novelties. In 1817, he published a brief paper on the wild buckwheat genus Eriogonum (from the Greek “erios” and “gonos” meaning “wooly knees,” alluding to the hairs at the nodes in some species), suggesting the genus would be a large one when the American West was finally explored. From the four species he knew, the genus has grown to some 245 species! He also proposed a new genus of plants, Collinsia (cole-IN-zee-ah, named for Zaccheus Collins [1764-1831], a Philadelphia botanist), a genus that eventually would also have several species in the West.

Armed with this new material, Nuttall began to set the type for a new book on the flora of North America in 1817, and on 14 July 1818, the two small volumes of his Genera of North American plants were published in Philadelphia. By the end of the year, Nuttall was on the Mississippi River south of the Ohio heading for the Red River of the south. By boat and foot he made his way to Fort Smith along the Arkansas River, and then southward to the Red, collecting there mainly during the months of May and June of 1819. In July he was along the Verdigris River, and in August and September up the Arkansas well into what is now Oklahoma. In January of the following year he bid goodbye to the Arkansas headed for New Orleans, and from that city sailed back to Philadelphia. In 1821 he published A journal of travels into the Arkansa territory, during the year 1819. While a few of the new species would be named during this period, most were not published until the mid-1830s.

Along the Oregon Trail

In 1825, Nuttall became associated with Harvard University, and likely would have remained a quiet and reclusive professor had not a Boston merchant, Nathaniel Wyeth,^[4]Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1802 into a family of some note, and made his initial fortune by manufacturing ice. Well-liked in Boston, he longed for adventure in … Continue reading brought him a collection of plants in 1833 from the Rocky Mountains with a promise to take him West if he wished to join an expedition to the Columbia River the following year. Nuttall resigned his professorship, prepared the manuscript describing Wyeth’s new plants, and reached St. Louis in March 1834, months before his paper on Wyeth’s 1833 botanical discoveries would be published in Philadelphia.^[5]Essentially all of the plants gathered by Wyeth were collected on his return trip in 1833. He left Fort Vancouver, the outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in early February, heading up the … Continue reading

Nuttall’s second trip across the Missouri was his most successful. This time he was traveling in a large company so that transporting his growing collection of dried plants was less of a problem. In addition, he was traveling with a fellow naturalist, twenty-four-year-old John Kirk Townsend,^[6]John Kirk Townsend was born in 1809 and died in 1851. He kept an excellent journal and recorded much of the day-to-day activities of his adventure with Wyeth and Nuttall. Townsend re-collected … Continue reading who, like Nuttall, was a skilled ornithologist as well as physician and pharmacist.

From St. Louis, the party headed across Kansas via the Blue River to the Platte, and on into present-day Wyoming, crossing the Continental Divide at South Pass. Wyeth reached the fur trappers’ rendezvous on the Ham’s Fork of the Green River in midsummer. While the trappers traded furs for merchandise, Nuttall and Townsend headed south, collecting even more strange and curious plants on the gumbo-clay hills north of the Utah border. Leaving Wyoming, the party crossed into Idaho and followed the Snake River to the Columbia.

Everywhere Nuttall went he found new and curious plants. Unlike those who came before him, he collected even the unattractive plants—the ordinary things of everyday travel—so that from his collections science came to know sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata (are-tah-MEE-zee-a try-den-TAH-tah, alluding to the shallowly three-lobed leaf), for example, as well as many other nondescript plants of the West.

Nuttall left Oregon and sailed on for Hawaii (and more botanizing) in December 1834 only to return in the spring to continue his collecting efforts. There was not much new to be found, the region having been well collected by David Douglas. He remained in the Pacific Northwest until late in 1835, then caught a ship bound for Philadelphia. After collecting specimens at various California ports, he was found walking the beach in San Diego Bay, collecting shells, by Richard Henry Dana, a former Harvard student who was on his own adventure destined to be told in Two Years Before the Mast.

From 1836 until 1841 Nuttall worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, making short trips and writing up the hundreds of new species he had found. Articles appeared in the Academy’s journals detailing novelties in various families. Others he sent in manuscript form to John Torrey and Asa Gray for insertion into their newly proposed Flora of North America. Unfortunately, the sudden death of Nuttall’s uncle, and a stipulation in the will that Nuttall spend at least six months of each year in England, forced him to leave America. Except for a brief stay in late 1847 and early 1848, when Nuttall described the last of his American novelties, he remained in Europe.^[7]Nuttall published two major papers as a result of his 1834-1836 western trip to the Pacific Coast. His first, “Descriptions of new species and genera of plants in the natural order … Continue reading

Aside from a few matters left unresolved from his earlier travels, the primary reason for returning to the United States was to complete work on his latest project The North American Sylva. Unlike his previous efforts, this was to be a multi-volume, lavishly illustrated set of books that accounted for all of the trees in North America, with special reference to those along the Pacific Coast. Published in three volumes (in 1842, 1846 and 1849) in Philadelphia, the colored lithographs are even today of an excellent quality.

Nuttall’s contributions were many. He wrote papers in geology, botany and zoology—there is still an ornithological society named in his honor—and it is hard to travel anywhere in the American West without seeing a plant that was not named or collected by him.^[9]The Nuttall Ornithological Club, centered at Harvard University, began its main publication, Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, in 1876. Today, this journal is know simple as The Auk. … Continue reading He was the first to champion the use of a natural system of classification in the United States, he authored a textbook on botany, and his magnificent Silva is difficult to match even today. He was first and foremost a field botanist, and as such changed the direction of botany. After Nuttall, knowledge of the North American flora would come from a combination of field and museum work, not just from old, flat, dried things on a piece of paper collected by someone else.

References

A.M. Coats, 1970. The plant hunters: Being a history of the horticultural pioneers, their quests and their discoveries from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. McGraw-Hill, New York.

R.H. Dana. 1840. Two years before the mast: A personal narrative of life at sea. Harper, New York.

De Voto, B. 1947. Across the wide Missouri. American Book Co., Boston.

Goetzmann, W. J. 1966. Exploration and empire. W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York.

Graustein, J. E. 1967. Thomas Nuttall, naturalist. Explorations in America, 1808-1841. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Isley, D. 1994. One hundred and one botanists. Iowa State University Press, Ames.

Kastner, J. 1977. A species of eternity. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

McKelvey, S. D. 1955. Botanical explorations of the trans-Mississippi west, 1790-1850. Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Nuttall, T. 1818. The genera of North American plants. 2 vols. D. Heart, Philadelphia.

Nuttall, T. 1834. “A catalogue of a collection of plants made chiefly in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains or northern Andes, towards the sources of the Columbia River, by Mr. Nathaniel B. [sic] Wyeth, and described by T. Nuttall.” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 7: 1-60.

Pennell, F. W. 1936. “Travels and scientific collections of Thomas Nuttall.” Bartonia 18: 1-51.

Reveal, J. L. 1992. Gentle conquest. The botanical discovery of North America with illustrations from the Library of Congress. Starwood Publishing, Washington, D.C.

Reveal, J. L., G. E. Moulton & A. E. Schuyler. 1999. “The Lewis and Clark collection of vascular plants: Names, types and comments.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 149: 1-64.

Reveal, J. L. & J. S. Pringle. 1993. “Taxonomic botany and floristics,” pp. 157-192. In: Flora of North America Editorial Committee (ed.), Flora of North America north of Mexico. Volume 1. Oxford University Press, New York.—See http://www.inform.umd.edu/PBIO/usda/fnach7.html for an online version.

Rickett, H. W. 1950. John Bradbury’s explorations in Missouri Territory. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 94: 59-89.

Townsend, J. K. 1839. Narrative of a journey across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia River, and a visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chile, &c., with a scientific appendix. H. Perkins, Philadelphia.