Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Scudder and Edwards (as well as Strecker and Grote) never went as far in their criticism as Whitman and Thoreau; nor did they ever cast aside Linnaeus. What they did do was to combine taxonomy with natural history, the dead with the “living creature,” as Buffon, Humboldt, and Linnaeus himself championed it. Often, they got tangled up in the nitpicking of pure naming and classifying, the lumpers (those who preferred to combine various forms into one species) and the splitters (those who tended to declare each form a species) fighting it out over fractions and millimeters. But essentially they had the same deep interest in living things as Whitman and Thoreau.

  After the collapse of his West Virginia coal business in 1874, Edwards had worked like a demon on his insects, supporting his family partly with revenues from selling parcels of his land. By 1875 he had arranged with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway to get his own depot near his house (he could see it from his living room), giving him ready access to the big eastern cities and a speedier mail route for his larvae, eggs, and imagoes. Ten years later, the post took only two days to arrive from New York or Washington, D.C., three days in the other direction; and in an entire twenty-year period, 1868 to 1888, he did not lose a single express package and barely a bug (although insects hatched from eggs in transit and often died because of the lack of fresh food).57 With rails continuing to penetrate to the whole country west of the Rockies, down to southern California, skilled collectors were able to travel regularly over the lines, trunk and branch, and if the ecological costs of such change might prove incalculable, scientists and naturalists reaped riches not only in experiences at the end of the line but in the safe transport of new material (dead and alive) for study.58

  When the Canadian Entomologist asked Edwards to explain his entomological methods, he proposed breeding as a therapy against “despair” or “fear” that one might “go mad” with nothing to do. “Any one can take it up and follow it with a pleasure that becomes rapidly absorbing.”59 “I am deep in larvae. Never so much,” he wrote his friend Joseph Lintner in July 1880. He would go nowhere between each June and September, lest he miss a clue to resolving some tiny mystery.60 He criticized Europeans for looking only at “dried butterflies in cases” to establish species, and, to be sure, even in Britain, supposedly the nation of naturalists, life-history studies based on regular breeding had barely gotten under way.61

  Edwards enshrined much of his fieldwork of the late 1870s and early 1880s in volume 2 of The Butterflies of North America (1884), by all accounts his best book and by some accounts the best book ever written on American butterflies. If volume 1 presented only a few life histories, or “stories,” of butterflies, volume 2 glowed with the most complete accounts of well-known American butterflies, among them, the common sulphur, the wood nymphs, the alfalfa butterfly, the zebra heliconian, the baltimore checkerspot, the pearl crescent, and the tiger swallowtail. His systematics superceded anything done earlier, marked, above all, by a sophisticated Darwinian analysis that tied the history of butterflies to a larger evolutionary story, thereby making his book one of the best applications of evolutionary theory of the age. Scudder wrote that it “showed what one man, remote from associates, libraries, and even from much of his own field work, may accomplish.”62 There was a fullness to his life portraits, a keen awareness of connections to living places, a feeling for organic relationships, with each portrait benefiting, as never before, from the labors of many selfless people.

  In the early twentieth century, the naturalist Fordyce Grinnell Jr. remembered Edwards as “a great teacher,” able to arouse unusual “cooperation” in the interest of a common aim. For the Lepidopterist of 1917, he wrote, “We must all recognize W. H. Edwards as the greatest butterfly student which this country has ever produced or probably ever will. He described a good majority of our species; but his work on the life-histories was greater yet. The key to his great success in these two lines was his numerous correspondents in every part of the country to which he exhibited the greatest unselfishness in help and encouragement.”63 Edwards owed a great deal to knowledgeable women, sometimes chronically ill women, who worked out of their homes. Annie Wittfield, daughter of William Wittfield, a physician from Indian River, Florida, suffered from a heart ailment that would kill her at age twenty-three, but she found for Edwards caterpillars, eggs, and pupae of previously unknown species, which he described and Mary Peart figured. In the summer of 1887 Wittfield captured a dimorphic Mimic butterfly (Hypolimnas misippus), a tawny brown female first identified from a single specimen by Linnaeus and perhaps introduced into the Caribbean during the slave trade (the male was black with white spots on the forewings, edged in purple).64 Her discovery of the insect’s food plant (mallows and morning glory) and of its life stages stunned Edwards. “It is mostly owing to her zealous, friendly, and intelligent assistance,” he wrote in a plaintive obituary of her in 1888, “that I have been able to learn the history of so many Florida species. Her death is a loss to science and to me. For several years she had been a correspondent of mine and gave me intelligent aid in obtaining eggs and in making observations on the habits of butterflies.”65

  A greater boon by far to Edwards was Mary Peart, his premier artist, who had begun working for (or with) him out of the love of it and without regard to payment, partly because Edwards, through many letters written over many years, treated her as an equal, and partly because she had matured as both an artist and naturalist, proud of her work, able not only to draw insect imagoes with great skill but the entire life histories of the butterflies as well. She saw things that even Edwards failed to see. After her marriage in 1876, when she was twenty-nine, to an Englishman, John Peart (same surname, but unrelated), she and her husband lived in a “nice, little house, such as you only find in Philadelphia,” Edwards observed. He feared she would quit working for him and depend entirely on her husband, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She “hated to resign her Plates to any one else,” a relieved Edwards wrote to Henry Edwards. “I shall not find the like of this lady as an artist.”66 Of course, he paid her well, as he did his colorist, Lydia Bowen, although Bowen never ranked as high as Peart in Edwards’s mind. By 1880, Peart and Edwards were nearly collaborators, became friends, visited, and even attended cat shows together in Philadelphia, seeing “no end of pretty kittens in all colors, from Angora to Siamese.”67 Edwards would tell Scudder in 1885 that his “discovery of Miss Peart” had proved “as important a find as a new planet almost.”68 In order to figure well, she had to breed well, and, just as Edwards did, she took hours to wait and watch as one butterfly after another passed through all its stages. Edwards himself often carried a hand lens on his walks, but was inept at using anything more advanced in his home (although he did borrow a microscope from Theodore Mead); Peart, on the other hand, had begun to achieve an expertise with the microscope, familiar with every new invention on the market. The most precise drawings of the tiny pupae of some of Edwards’s rare insects were the result.69

  Besides depending on the expertise of women naturalists, Edwards continued to rely, whenever possible, on Henry Edwards and Theodore Mead, well into the 1880s, but three other men—two émigrés from Britain, Thomas Bean and David Bruce, and one American, William Greenwood Wright—emerged as crucial to the success of Edwards’s labors. The men formed a triad of stalwart Victorians willing to do nearly anything to assist Edwards in his work. A lumberman from San Bernardino, California, where he lived with his wife, Wright was past fifty when he began collecting. Gingerly he walked the uneven California coastlines looking for insects, scrambled over mountains and through canyons, and crossed the scorching Mohave Desert, just east of San Bernardino, or Death Valley along the Nevada border (the “mouth of hell”), often going alone with a covered wagon. He withstood the worst in nature, certain that however “desolate and comfortless” it seemed, it harbored as many secrets as “rustling leaves or babbling waters.”70

  Thomas Bean and David Bruce were like night and day, Bean single and shy, Bruce socia
ble and twice married, with six children.71 When Bean was seven years old, in 1851, he came to America from England with his family to live in Galena, Illinois. His father died six years later, leaving Thomas’s mother to support the family and Thomas himself, at thirteen, to clerk in a bookstore. He fought in the Civil War and returned home to a string of dreary jobs made bearable only by the insects that dressed the Galena meadows, especially his favorites—the fritillaries, the wood nymphs and satyrs, and the sulphurs. Sometime in 1883 he found work as the lone telegraph operator in a remote railroad outpost called Laggan, in Alberta, Canada, at the end of the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Laggan rested, he told a friend, “right on top of the divide within six miles of the actual summit” of a major mountain pass in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. Bean was soon picking butterflies off flowers or snatching them from the air by hand, until he bought a proper net. When he could, he camped out at extreme elevations, usually at the timberline and often in open air, but always with a fire burning, to collect the rarest specimens of the same butterflies he had known in Galena, but this time they were all alpine species.

  Isolated and mostly alone, the monkish, religiously agnostic Bean matured into a brilliant alpine collector who acquired more knowledge “about the high altitude Rocky Mountains than anyone else.”72 He treated his butterflies with a tender humor. In a letter to Edwards, he described the female Alberta alpine fritillary as “habitually un-vexed, her flight deliberate.” “She has a certain dignity of manner that commands respect. An air of speculation marks her, denoting a mind preoccupied with problems.” The male arctic ridge fritillary, on the other hand, cruises the high “upper slopes of the mountains stealthily” and “seems always on the lookout for an entomologist, whose advent is carefully noted.” “The female has no apparent preference for these extreme heights. She does not devote her valuable time to racing madly across the windy summits for the mere nonsense of the thing.”73

  David Bruce, too, knew the Rocky Mountains, although these were the Rockies of Colorado, the eastern part of which held a fair share of undescribed fauna. Born in Perth, Scotland, in 1833, he worked as a milliner, kept entomological diaries, and caught insects for Charles Darwin and Edward Doubleday. Around 1870 he sailed with his family to New York, moving to Brockport, an upstate village, there to paint houses out of necessity and to collect butterflies when he could. He inspired many “lads from around here” (as he put it) to take up “butterflying.”74 By the mid-1880s, with all his children grown, Bruce set off for Colorado, partly because it was healthier (he had asthma and rheumatoid arthritis) but mostly because of the lepidoptera hidden in the hills.

  William Greenwood Wright curtailed his lumber business soon after his wife died of a long illness and occupied the rest of his life with butterflies. Bruce solicited subscriptions for his expeditions to the Rockies (otherwise he could not have gone), but he had no desire to make a profit from his butterflies. “It is just as necessary as food and drink that I observe and collect insects,” he wrote another naturalist, “and while I am able to crawl, I shall do it. I don’t make half a cent by it.” Bruce was willing to buy insects from other collectors, as was Thomas Bean, but neither man would sell his own, not even to one another.75

  Bean, Wright, and Bruce did what they did for science, for fame, “con amore,” in Edwards’s words, and, above all, for Edwards himself, who made them feel at the center of modern natural science, just as Agassiz had done for Scudder. In letters delivered almost daily over many years, he taught them how to see and raise insects and about food plants and breeding boxes (his favorite were powder kegs). He urged them to plant butterfly gardens, and sent seeds to get the gardens under way. “Nothing is so good as single Zinnias,” he explained to Bean, when he first met him, in the spring of 1875, but “they are hard to get, as the fashion runs to double ones, which are worthless for the purpose.”76 When they were down emotionally, he picked them up. (“You are a real lepidopterist,” he told Bean, who had briefly lost faith in himself.) He published their thoughts and descriptions, in generous chunks of their prose, in his books, everything they could send him on “the habits and localities” of the butterflies they specialized in. He commiserated with them when their caterpillars died after being tended with the utmost care for several days, even weeks. “Sorry to hear of the demise of [your little alpine],” Edwards wrote Bean. “But in this transitory world, life is uncertain, caterpillar or mammal. Take the more care of those who are left.” Edwards promised these men a place in history, and even more. “Can’t you immortalize yourself,” he inquired of Bean. “I do exceedingly wish to give you credit for your hard work and in your own language, with quotation marks. Magazines are ephemeral, but the Butterflies of North America goes down to the ages.”77

  In exchange for immortality, these men fell down shafts in gold mines, stumbled through matted bogs, and tumbled over cliffs, breaking arms and legs. Bruce was “the greatest aid to myself,” wrote Edwards, “always ready to do everything to get eggs. He goes out every year and gets rare butterflies.”78 Though hobbled by arthritis, he scaled the peak of Mount Bullion, in the Rockies, in 1887, many thousands of feet above sea level, seeking the eggs of a satin-colored insect, the rockslide alpine, “the most difficult to capture of all our native butterflies from the nature of its habitat,” so named because it flew only above the timberline in places known for crashing, precipitous rock slides.79 “The collector cannot follow it,” Bruce reported, “and when it is at rest on the black rocks it is almost invisible.” Inching along the darkened mountain terrain on his hands and knees, he managed to secure only two eggs, nearly buried within rock crevices, and these he jubilantly mailed to Edwards.80 “No one but Bruce would have stuck it out and accomplished the result wanted,” Edwards recounted to Scudder in 1895. “He has borne in mind the need of the Butt. of N.A. and generally without payment, or other rewards than my thanks and his.”81 As for Bean, he delivered “the eggs of so many butterflies of exceptional rarity” to Edwards that his knowledge of them exceeded that of “anyone else in Canada.”82 Wright took “a vast deal of trouble expressly to aid me in making known the history of Papilio rutulus” (the western tiger swallowtail), Edwards recounted, consuming “days and weeks of experiment, and many disheartening failures.” Wright himself remembered that it was because of Edwards’s “instigation and encouragement” that he remained a butterfly collector.83 What Edwards always wanted, what he “yearned for,” as he put it, more than anything else in the world, were the eggs, so that he might follow the butterflies through their life histories. And here Bruce, Bean, and Wright surely satisfied him by sending thousands of eggs over the years, inserted into pen quills, sheltered in cork, squeezed gently down small glass tubes, or, in Wright’s case, carefully dropped into the leftover morphine bottles he had used to care for his wife in her last illness.84

  Even before the ink had dried on volume 2, Edwards began volume 3, in October 1883, hoping its completion would make him “go out, if go I must, in a blaze of Entomological Glory.”85 But the work was hard (“if I had known what I had to go thro’ when I began Butt. N.A.,” he wrote Wright, “I never should have made the beginning”), particularly, because of continuing money problems.86 Although his wife, Catherine, had a legacy of around $3,000, and his son, Willie, a recent graduate of law school, had begun investing in the gas and oil industry in West Virginia, Edwards himself, throughout the 1880s, was strapped for cash, forced to resort to a patchwork of means to pay his expenses.87 He beseeched his publisher, Houghton, Mifflin and Company of Boston, to extend “advances,” even without a clear prospect of completion, and the company did so, frequently and generously.88 He sold much that was dear to him—land in Paint Creek to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; his “ancestral home,” in Hunter, New York; many of his books on butterflies (including rare ones by John Abbot and Dru Drury); and, most heart-wrenching, his own butterflies. His buyer was William Holland, a wealthy young Presbyterian minister from Pitt
sburgh who had begun a massive buying spree of insects, both domestic and tropical, and who would, in time, enter the bloodstream of American butterfly science in a major, even malign, way.89 “He is buying left and right,” Edwards informed Henry Edwards.90 It was one of the ironies of the times that, at the very moment Edwards had reached a vocational pinnacle, he should have had to sell off the source of his achievement to an avaricious butterfly man.

  “It was painful to part with the collection or division of it,” he told Henry Edwards in May 1886. “It was pulling eye teeth. Still I greatly desire to publish.”91 Holland offered him $2,000 to cover costs of the artists and of the printing, in exchange for ownership of “the most complete collection in existence of North American insects,” as Edwards expressed it. “No other approached it in completeness,” he explained to Holland. “You yourself, after using no end of money, had written me that there were many species you despaired of ever getting.” Well, here they all were, “rich in varieties and localities,” and the “whole correctly determined.”92 Holland proposed to take possession in installments, so that Edwards might continue to turn to them for scientific study, but by summer of 1886 Edwards had already exhausted the first half of Holland’s money ($1,000) and told Scudder that “soon the rest will go.” “It is therefore of great importance to me and to the issue of this work to get what help I can. Please aid me in this matter.”93 Scudder contacted the trustees of the Elizabeth Thompson fund of the Association for the Advancement of Science, which, years before, had awarded him a grant for research on fossil insects. They gave Edwards $200, enough to defray some of the costs of his plates.94 A few years after that, Scudder intervened again, winning a $500 grant for his archcompetitor.95