Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  SEVEN

  Butterflies at the Fair

  Millions of moths, once hidden in darkness, swirled through the electric lights of the 1893 world’s fair, more blinding in their brightness at the time than any artificial light on earth. Butterfly people who attended the Chicago Columbian Exposition that summer, along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, must have wondered over them. Samuel Scudder, who, in The Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada, had noted the impact of artificial light on insects, was there. So was Theodore Mead, who brought with him other members of the Edwards family but not William Henry, who stayed home, captive to his caterpillars.1 Official displays of lepidoptera were scattered throughout the grounds; they had been orchestrated by one of William Henry Edwards’s friends, Selim Peabody, who years earlier had exhibited his own collection of butterflies at an “exposition” in the Chicago Academy of Sciences. Now he was chief of the fair’s Department of Liberal Arts, with more exhibits, according to him, than any other department of the fair, housed in the “largest building in the world under one roof ever erected.”2 Illinois State was displaying a big array of butterflies native to the region, arranged by George French, the author of the country’s first butterfly manual; David Bruce, an alpine butterfly expert, had mounted the Colorado display in that state’s “historical department”; and New York State had invited Herbert Smith, the tropical collector, to present his selection “of showy insects.”3

  Most of the butterfly collections at the fair were of native species, although the Pennsylvania managers had tried hard to persuade Herman Strecker and William Holland to put their thousands of specimens, tropical and domestic, on public view. Holland had been the state managers’ first choice (“they almost entreated me,” he told Scudder), but he’d refused, too busy and fearful of damage to his insects.4 Strecker had also refused, lest he lose his job at the Reading marble yards, and despite a nice money offer. The Pennsylvania fair managers had pleaded with him not to “miss the greatest opportunity in [his] life,” and so he’d reversed himself. Soon thereafter, however, the managers had reversed themselves, probably because Holland had insinuated that Strecker might embarrass the state.5 “I understand that, failing to get my collection,” Holland wrote Scudder, “the Commissioners will request Strecker to exhibit himself and his collection at the Fair. One of the Commissioners told me that he regarded Strecker as the larger curiosity of the two, a remark which you and I probably would fully appreciate.”6 Pennsylvania’s big space reserved for butterflies went unfilled.

  Historians have seldom written of the Chicago world’s fair as nature-friendly, but it was. The butterflies were there, not in splashy numbers, though enough to be noticed. There had been exhibits of them earlier, at local and state industrial expositions, but the 1893 fair may have been the last fair to show lepidoptera, and much else in the natural world. Tropical fish swarmed in the vast aquarium in the Fisheries Building, “never before seen in any exposition,” according to the Official Guide. Mounted reptiles, birds, and animals, some “rapidly becoming exterminated” (according to the guide), filled the U.S. Government Building. Live exotic animals were caged in the Midway, presented by Hagenbeck and Co., Germany’s inventors of the modern zoo. There were tree specimens and tree parts in Forestry and eight greenhouses in Horticulture, with rhododendrons, roses, carnations, and orchids (18,000 orchids!), plus geometrical beds of tulips and velvety pansies outside, belonging to “a revolution in the pansy world.” A stream of flowers, ferns, palms, and shrubs, wild, domestic, and tropical, snaked through to Wooded Island, the ten-acre retreat landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted for weary fairgoers.7 Nature had been harvested from everywhere on earth in this imperialist time, and even the smells of family farms from the hybrid rural landscape still inside the city of Chicago itself reached the fair. The older natural history tradition had grown more vigorous, enlisting more and more advocates over the last one hundred years.

  Far more visible than nature’s diversity, however, were the exhibits of man-made artifactual diversity, at one end of the scale paintings from Constable to Cassatt in the Arts Building, many lent by Americans who’d bought them from abroad. “Never has there been so brilliant a showing of modern works of art as here assembled,” claimed the American guide.8 The fair organizers talked up cultural enrichment (“unspoiled by commercialism,” insisted Peabody’s daughter in her biography of her father). But there were other signs of human creativity in exhibits of technology, arrayed alongside nature’s specimens in one gigantic revelation of the prowess of Western nations. Henry Adams observed of the fair of 1893, in his Education, “The majority at least declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery.”9

  Night illumination at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, showing a searchlight sweeping the darkness. From John P. Barrett, Electricity at the Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Donnelly, 1894).

  Fair managers did nothing to hide the imperialist purpose of this achievement. The Official Guide called it “the first Exposition ever held” in which the “foreign nations and their colonies are represented in all the great department structures of the World’s Fair.” Selim Peabody’s Liberal Arts Building allotted prime floor space to Germany, England, and France, shoving other nations to the periphery. At the urging of the “Kaiser himself,” German inventiveness could be found in the “grandest display of industries and arts ever made at any foreign exhibition,” perhaps most forcefully by the Krupp armament company, which displayed the world’s biggest military cannon, with enough firepower to unleash twenty-three-hundred-pound shells at a range of sixteen miles.10 American engineering included, ironically, a model exhibit of Dam 6 on the Kanawha River in West Virginia, one of ten in the system of movable dams that had contributed to the flooding of William Henry Edwards’s population of baltimore checkerspots in Fraser’s swamp. It was the only exhibit chosen to illustrate the “involvement” of the U.S. Corps of Engineers “in large public works.”11

  The railroad overshadowed everything else, in all its multiple designs, from the great feeder line, the Illinois Central, which discharged visitors by the millions into the fair through a massive depot at the densest edge of the city, to the latest rail inventions in the British and German exhibition halls and the parade in Louis Sullivan’s U.S. Transportation Building of the entire “evolution of the World’s Railway,” assembled by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.12 It was at the White City that Americans first became aware of the fetish potential of electrical light, which turned the fair into one huge flaming orb at the edge of the lake. The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, by comparison, had shut down at night. Architects wired the 1893 fair for three times more electric lights than Chicago itself, the most electrified city in the country.13 Tens of thousands of lights outlined every major building, beamed forth from the incandescent Tower of Light of the Electrical Building, radiated through the big Columbian Fountain near a prime fair entry, and flashed at the top of the fair’s tallest building. Searchlights, modeled after German prototypes, penetrated points deep in Chicago and scooped out of the night a flying horde of lepidoptera.14

  On view, too, at the French and German Pavilions and at the U.S. Photographic Section, were the latest advances in color photography.15 The Germans, in particular, dazzled with an exhibit on “a new world of color,” so said the Guide Through the Exhibition of the German Chemical Industry. Four prominent German companies had brought their products to the fair, expanding the chemical rainbow by adding synthetic indigo, deltapurpurine, azoblue, chloramine yellow, heliotrope, and so on, plus a whole range of new reds, new oranges, new violets, and new grays, many flourishing overt signs of imperialism, such as “Congo-red,” “Congo-orange,” “Congo-brown,” “Nzanza-black,” “Tabora-black,” and “Guinea-green.”16 Americans came to gaze at these technologies, as well as at all the goods produced by them, from the Brownie cameras of Eastman Kodak to the mountains of fruit, vegetables, and grains in the C
alifornia and Illinois expositions, much of it grown by a new industrial agriculture. Human creativity—high art at one end and railroads and piles of industrially generated fruit at the other end—clashed yet also blurred and merged into a whole wild weave, human commerce, human culture, and nature’s abundance tangling at so many points as to seem one and the same, a comprehensive and marvelous intermingling.

  The Columbian Exposition telescoped a unique moment for Americans, beauty of a natural kind side by side with beauty of an unnatural kind, giving pleasure in a way perhaps never known before, certainly not for so many people at one time.17 George Santayana, a philosopher of that moment, in his Sense of Beauty, written only three years after the fair, hoped Americans would step away from their driven utilitarianism to acknowledge the full aesthetic life before them. “To learn to domesticate the imagination in the world,” he wrote, “so that everywhere beauty can be seen, and a hint seen for artistic creation,—that is the goal of contemplation.” “Art and life exist to be enjoyed,” Santayana would later say, “not to be estimated.”18

  There was another, darker side to the story. Man power had the means to despoil, even devastate, nature power (even as nature, unintentionally, could harm humans). After 1893, man power would emerge on such a Faustian scale as to suggest to many superiority over nature power (to say nothing of God power), with nature no more than a human source and resource. The great French naturalist Comte de Buffon wrote that “all the inventions of men, whether they be necessities or conveniences, are only grossly executed imitations of that which nature makes with the utmost finesse.” At the end of the nineteenth century, the American sociologist Lester Ward observed, “Applied sociology proceeds on the assumption of the superiority of the artificial to the natural.… The great fact is that man has, from the very dawn of his intelligence, been transforming the entire planet he inhabits.”19 As the United States moved at a breathtaking pace into an industrial order, its experience with nature—with all the magnificent butterflies and moths—reached a precarious stage. Even the most artifactual pillars of the new economy—electrical lights, photographic innovation, railroads, synthetic chemistry, industrial technology, and the exploding commercial market itself—had the wherewithal to complement the human experience of the natural world.20 On the other hand, at every point, the opposite was true. This tension had a singular meaning for pioneer butterfly people, who reaped many of the rewards of the era. Still, the new context diminished them, too, along with the amateur tradition from which they came, even as it raised up others like William Holland of Pittsburgh, who had amassed an immense collection by outspending everybody in America. Step by step from his early days on, Holland had maneuvered himself into strategic positions, until, by the late 1890s, he had become commanding general of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, itself a new version of an old institution, one lavishly funded by the steel magnate and capitalist incarnate Andrew Carnegie. Twenty-six years younger than Edwards, Holland would change the lives of all the leading naturalists, old and young, and not for the better.

  Encounters with butterflies were enhanced, in many ways, by American breakthroughs in technology. In Europe, railroads had cut through already built areas, most with ancient histories, but in America, railroads preceded development, advancing through sparsely populated spaces and introducing those who rode them to the edges of wilderness or to a reality they could have seen in no other way.21 New kinds of landscapes appeared in the wake of the incursions; the historian Robert E. Kohler has called them “twilight zones” or “inner frontiers,” separating the developed (or town centers) from the undeveloped (the wild country).22 In time, Americans would recast these spaces or zones into farms, then into suburbs or new cities, in the process weakening or erasing their nature-rich character. Until then, for many decades after 1880, they were allies of the hybrid rural landscape, acting as avenues into nature, both wild and humanized, and inspiring the creation of a new and ever-expanding popular literature on nature. “For a period of some four or five decades,” Kohler observes, “the landscape of North America afforded an unusual intimacy between settled and natural areas. Densely inhabited and wild areas were jumbled together. Areas of relatively undisturbed nature, with much of its original flora and fauna intact (except for the larger game and predators), were accessible to people who lived in towns and cities.”23

  At least from the early 1870s on, railroads abetted the naturalist’s systematic zeal, delivering Thomas Bean to Laggan, Canada; Samuel Scudder, David Bruce, William Wright, and Theodore Mead to the biologically diverse regions of Colorado; and Will Doherty over the Ganges to the Himalayas (and, at the end of his life, through Kenya). The great butterfly collections of Neumoegen, Holland, and Strecker owed their existence, in good measure, to the Chesapeake and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the Canadian Pacific.24 Once Strecker realized how fast freight moved across the continent, carrying insects to him in only a few days, he became addicted to the mail, waiting impatiently, in throes of Sehnsucht unleashed by the railroads, ecstatic when boxes arrived at the post office. When the mail was delayed, he behaved like a child denied sweets, erupting in tantrums. The railroad was a drug, a poison, and an elixir.

  William Henry Edwards’s experience with the railroad was perhaps more complex than that of any other butterfly man or woman, a romance with both a capitalist and an entomological dimension. Even though railroads (and speculation in them) may have led to the collapse of his business, he never ceased being impressed by their economic march across the country. “The Chesapeake and Ohio,” he wrote Mead in 1888, “are making vast preparations for a big coal trade to the Northwest against the completion of their bridge over the Ohio at Cincinnati, and of their new track from Ashland to Cincinnati along the south side of the Ohio River. This will be done by Christmas, and then the coal trade to the far North West even to Dacota begins.” And entomologically his excitement rose even higher, since at the end of every new line, new butterfly treasures, hitherto hidden, might be found. “On Wednesday I went to the end of the RR track with an excursion party, two miles along the Falls,” he told Mead in 1872, of the “progress” of the Chesapeake and Ohio in a place quite distant from Coalburgh. “The track ended under a tremendous cliff and everything about was picturesque enough,” and “I could not but think with pleasant anticipation of an excursion to that region next summer, with a walk of a few miles along the ground under the cliff and of the possible interesting butterflies one might find there.”25 In 1878 he wrote to Lintner: “I see the Southern Pacific RR from the Southwest is advancing fast and Arizona will be open to us before long.”26

  Edwards’s research for his third volume of The Butterflies of North America depended more than ever on the railroad. For years he had longed to go west with his crony and helpmeet Henry Edwards, to “bathe my entomological soul” by studying the swallowtails and other butterflies on his own, and to “rob a few eggs,” as he put it. His relative poverty prevented that, until, in the year of the fair, his son, Willie, flush from profits in gas in West Virginia, seemed ready to help.27 “My Gas Co. is in good shape,” Willie wrote Theodore Mead, his brother-in-law, and “I now control almost all the region, rights to the city, etc.”28 Father and son tracked the progress of Willie’s wells and drilled on what was left of the father’s land and on property Willie bought back from his father’s creditors.29

  By the mid-1890s, Willie could “foot the bills” for his father’s entire trip west.30 Healthy and spirited at seventy-two, William Henry Edwards arranged with David Bruce to go by rail to Glenwood Springs, a mecca for naturalists at the headwaters of the Colorado River, “the richest spot for rare butterflies known to us,” Edwards told Wright.31 Edwards retraced a route Mead had taken more than twenty years earlier, and arrived in Denver four days later, thence to travel to Glenwood Springs, where he took a room at the new Hotel Colorado, “large, very costly, and well-equipped.” In a month’s time, he returned home by train, with all his work on swa
llowtail polymorphism in a valise and his caterpillars in pasteboard boxes bound together by a shawl, and arrived at Coalburgh, “the larvae bearing the journey well.”32 The Glenwood Springs experience occupied a place in his memory that matched his 1848 Amazon journey; “I set it all down in my notebook,” he recounted, “written up every day, and it stirs my blood now to read of it.”33

  Artificial light, like the railroads, revealed much in nature hitherto concealed. Americans and Europeans had long been relying on light at night (other than moonlight) to collect moths. “When you go after moths in the night,” the English entomologists Kirby and Spence advised collectors in their 1819 Introduction to Entomology, attach a lamp to your stomach, “made with a concave back, and furnished with a reflector.” “If you hold your expanded fly-net before this,” they explained, “you may then entrap a considerable number.” Light traps to ensnare insects were invented in the United States in 1860, probably relying on intense limelight, induced by the focusing of a jet of mixed gases on a lump of calcium chloride (lime). The Texas lepidopterist Gustav Belfrage collected moths and butterflies with limelight in the 1860s and ’70s, and some naturalists collected at gas lamps on the streets. “Most every favorable night I go out to the gas lights and look for moths,” wrote Charles Dury of Cincinnati to Strecker in 1873.34 Among the earliest naturalists’ accounts of collecting by arc or electrical lights occur in letters from Richard Stretch to Henry Edwards in 1881 and 1882, when Stretch netted hundreds of moths under arc lights at the hydraulic mines in Cherokee Butte, California, and near the three electric lights in Nevada City. City lights, especially, invited much bug hunting. Since the “introduction of electrical lights into our cities,” Samuel Scudder observed in The Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada, “entomologists have made use of them for the capture of insects, many nocturnal animals being attracted from the surrounding country by the brilliancy of the light.”35