Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  There were also his “stock of monstrosities,” “my especial mania,” as he called it—insects with three wings; a female moth without wings or legs, unlike its mate, which had both; a silver butterfly from Chile, its wings, body, head, and antennae coated entirely in “burnished silver.”146 And what of his female tiger swallowtail with “the left wings and half the body black, and the right wings and half the body, yellow; it is all female though, not a hermaphrodite. I acquired another female that is all mixed up, neither black nor yellow but both. There is some rule for these things, but we have not yet got to understanding them.”147 “If you want to see lepidoptera especially that mimic others and other things,” he informed Samuel Henshaw of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, “you ought to see my collection.”148

  Other Americans, too, after 1885, were making collections almost wholly from the tropical or exotic trade, key among them, William Holland, the Pittsburgh minister whose destiny as a collector would become intertwined with Doherty’s. Wealthy, ambitious, and eager for the approval of those with power and status, Holland saw butterfly collecting—as he did everything else—as a route to high social rank, collecting primarily because that was what men did who had the means to command some of the most unique creatures on the planet. But he was wealthy through no account of his own.

  He’d been born in 1848 on the island of Jamaica, at a Moravian missionary station run by his parents, devout Moravians who wanted to “bring Christianity to the needy” and to “undertake any task assigned to them by their church,” to quote their son.149 His father collected butterflies and other insects, and a cousin of his mother’s, Thomas Horsfield, had studied butterflies on Java in the early 1800s. After the family migrated to a Moravian settlement in Salem, North Carolina, Holland caught his first butterflies and, like Edwards and others, learned to skin and stuff birds.150 Following the Civil War, he attended Amherst College, where he bragged to his parents that his cabinet of specimens “beat” Amherst’s cabinet “all hollow.”151 Then, out of loyalty to his parents, he enrolled in a Moravian seminary near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, hating it all the while, because he believed it would trap him in poverty and self-sacrifice. Unbeknownst to his parents, he applied to and got accepted at the Princeton Seminary in New Jersey, run by Presbyterians and the most prestigious theological institution in the States.152 The leader of an affluent suburban church near Pittsburgh interviewed him for a job. “Half-a-dozen millionaires” lived within only a “rifle-shot of the church,” he wrote his parents; the church attracted “the very best and most substantial kind of people.”153 It was an irresistible overture.

  William Holland. Courtesy of the Heinz Library and Archives, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  Holland decided to become a Presbyterian, as entrepreneurial in religion as he would become in butterflies.154 In an 1873 letter home, he explained, “I am given to calculating my chances very closely and have done so heretofore”; against the “prominent influence” of his new pulpit, a Moravian ministry would be an “insignificance.” Besides, “my friends among the rising young men of the country are mainly in the communion of the Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches”; “to leave them” would “go hard with me.” Whereupon Holland’s accommodating father apologized for having “protested against you receiving the call” and insisted that his son “follow the light that God gives you, and He will bless you!”155 Holland despised people he considered losers, including his younger brother, Daniel, and perhaps even his own father and mother. “The trouble with Dan,” he wrote his parents, “is that he isn’t anything. I mean he has nothing that he can really do.” He must learn that “brains are always marketable. Culture, if of the right sort, always commands money.”156 William had learned that lesson himself and, at twenty-six, became the minister of a large Presbyterian church at a comfortable starting salary of $2,500, with “a prospect of increase” and a parsonage. A few years after that, he married Carrie Moorhead, the daughter of John Moorhead, the owner of the Pittsburgh Iron and Nail Works and the director of the Exchange National Bank. A little later, after the deaths of both John Moorhead and John’s wife, Holland became the executor of the estates of both, with “practical oversight and control,” as he put it, of more than $1 million.157 It was his wife’s money that allowed him to go on a butterfly shopping binge, first for American insects (all of Theodore Mead’s, all of William Henry Edwards’s) and then for tropical fauna, a quest that took him a little longer.

  He began by advertising his desires—as Strecker had done—in the relevant magazines (including Papilio) and by seeking out Strecker himself for advice and guidance.158 He inquired of Strecker how to set prices and how to “trade” butterflies with Europeans. At Strecker’s invitation, he spent a day and night at the older man’s home in Reading in May 1883, mesmerized by his “truly wonderful collection,” and both humbled and exasperated by comparison. “I have now nearly 1500 species,” he told his parents. “He has over 70,000 fine examples of species from all parts of the world.” Holland was secretly determined to close the gap between them, and he obsessed so much about it that he contracted a “terrible facial” tic that drove him “almost insane”; he tried to treat it himself with morphia, cocaine, and chloroform, becoming so numbed he could scarcely move. William Henry Edwards sympathized wryly: “I was sorry to hear of your illness but I should think with all the insects of the world in your brain, you would take to your bed permanently. It would kill me.”159

  In the same year Holland saw Strecker’s insects, he started to buy from Staudinger. Five years later he jubilantly added a marginal note to the latest list he had received from Staudinger: “all insects marked off with red ink are in my collection.” The red was smeared over virtually every species, and there was nothing left for him to buy.160 (In 1892, Strecker, who could hardly match Holland’s buying power, attached a double-underlined comment in the margin of a letter from a friend: “Holland is a shark.”)161 As for Will Doherty, Holland had heard of him in 1886 from an Anglican missionary in Penang, and soon thereafter he became Doherty’s first big customer, “offering” the “most liberal terms,” along with a $100 check for openers. But, in fact, Holland paid his bills late, sometimes aggravating Doherty, who planned his movements in relation to payments from his customers. “Holland writes at great length about trifles,” Doherty told his father in Mount Auburn, Ohio, in 1890, “and then when I particularly want to hear from him there is a silence of six months or so. He sends me money now and then, without telling me what it is for and how much more he owes me.”162 As Holland became aware of Doherty’s upper-class clients, he behaved toward Doherty as if he were Doherty’s only patron and exhorted him, on patriotic grounds, to get all the butterflies for him. Doherty refused, writing home that Holland “is tremendously provoked to see my best things [butterflies] go to Elwes, Oberthür, and regards himself as my especial benefactor, though up to his last payment, he systematically underpaid me.”163 Doherty wrote his parents that “Oberthür is worth fifty men like Holland.”164

  Besides Holland, there were many other Americans in debt to Doherty. Berthold Neumoegen, flush from his new success on Wall Street, in the late 1880s began “vying with the greatest collections in Europe,” as he put it. He, too, devoured Staudinger’s lists and, on a trip to a sanatorium in Silesia for the treatment of consumption (tuberculosis), which would one day kill him, spent two weeks in Dresden at that merchant’s villa. There he bought a copy of his Exotische Tagfalter, bound in two volumes.165 In gratitude, Staudinger got him elected to the Entomological Society of Berlin.

  Staudinger and Neumoegen arranged with the Berlin art dealer Eduard Honrath to send a collector to Ceylon and Java for three years, and Neumoegen employed collectors throughout the world.166 He tried, like Holland and other rich men, to “take” Doherty “over” as his personal insect provider, claiming, in Doherty’s words, that “there will be no end of the money I can make out of him, and from this time forth I may live a prospe
rous gentleman.”167 Doherty had liked Neumoegen, but he grew tired of his bravado and his chronic delays in payment, driving Doherty, in the end, to a rare fury because he desperately needed the money.168 All the same, Doherty sent Neumoegen many fine specimens, the best of all a black-and-metallic-green swallowtail endemic to Sambawa, one of many green lepidoptera he obtained from the greenest jungles in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. “The brightest metallic green is, I think, the latest developed color among butterflies, and decidedly the most conspicuous,” Doherty observed in the article “Green Butterflies,” published in Scudder’s Psyche in 1891. “No one who has not seen it can imagine the brilliancy,” he said. “The brightest of the metallic blue butterflies look dim beside it.”169 After Neumoegen received all the Sambawan specimens in one mailing from Doherty, he picked the swallowtail to send to Honrath in Berlin—failing to mention Doherty’s name—for confirmation of its uniqueness. Honrath, excited beyond words, begged to describe and name it, and did so, calling it Papilio neumoegeni, for the wrong person; the name still stands. When asked its value, Neumoegen responded, “Who can say? It is the only one in the world. Supposed you offer me fifty pounds, which I would certainly refuse, for money can not buy it.”170

  Neumoegen reported to Strecker on his progress, arousing the stone carver’s envy but never coming close to the size of his collection, as did no other American in the nineteenth century, not even Holland. Strecker, until his death, was still cutting and decorating gravestones, some on a grand scale, such as an 1887 Civil War memorial for the Union dead in Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading; it overlooks Strecker’s own undecorated gravestone. Clients complained occasionally about his work: “The cross is not exactly perpendicular to the base of the stone. It leans a little forward,” wrote one. “There are ugly marks—eyesores—all over the stone, and the lettering at the head of the stone is very indistinct. As we have had an experience with one imperfect stone, you will well understand our feelings.”171 Strecker was proud of his handicraft, but his heart and soul were in his lepidoptera, and by the 1890s, he not only had a gigantic collection but had become engrossed in the business side, described by other dealers as a “large handler of exotics.”172

  By 1895, many merchants in the United States were doing a full-time business in insects, while others operated on an informal or part-time basis; it was impossible to establish exactly the total figure, since the line between formal and informal dealing was always unclear, despite published directories of naturalists and dealers.173 Strecker himself crossed the line, selling throughout the country and abroad, notwithstanding his constant demurrals about business. “I hate business people, their ways, their slang, their tricks, their crookedness,” and he was not a businessman in any conventional sense, dealing, as he had always done, to get money only to buy more glorious butterflies for his own collection.174 Like Staudinger, he printed a price list, practiced a liberal credit policy, and advertised; although unlike Staudinger, he never had an Andreas Bang-Haas to take over the business.175

  By 1890, Strecker was, perhaps, the most prominent dealer in America, at the center of a democratic circuitry of distribution, doing more than any other to bring the tropical and exotic world to American collectors, poor and well-off alike. By the mid-1890s, commercial dealers had downgraded what had once been Strecker’s “haupt desiderata” into ordinary duplicates, underlining the degree to which market prices had come to determine the “value” of lepidoptera, a trend Strecker earlier tried to steer clear of but now had to negotiate, struggling to make a profit before the market turned even lower. He stashed the duplicates in his fourth-floor “selling” room, twenty thousand in 1885 ready for circulation and probably three times that number ten years later.176 Suites of previously rare birdwings and papilios stocked his cabinets, as did the blue Morpho menelaus, the blue Morpho sulkowski, and the blue Morpho cypris. He tantalized young Charles Dury of Cincinnati by mail with a “brilliant Blue Morpho,” an insect Dury had “never before seen.” Out of curiosity, Dury visited Strecker’s home; like so many others, he came away dazed. “I have thought and dreamt of huge butterflies, since I saw your collection. When I wake up at night I fancy I see them flitting before me and spreading their wonderful wings.”177 In 1880, Adolph Eisen, a young leather cutter in Coldwater, Michigan, received several exotics from Strecker in a package, crowned by a Morpho cypris and a Morpho sulkowski. “I can not find proper adjectives to express my admiration of these Insekts.” But Strecker’s insects “aroused the whole neighborhood, everybody wanted to see them.” “Some people even asked me if I had made these Insekts myself and I could not convince them that they were natural specimens.”178

  After unwrapping a package from Strecker, a manufacturer of rope buckles and anti-friction pulley locks in Newark, New Jersey, thanked him for the “great joy” such “really beautiful things aroused” in him.179 “They were a beautiful lot,” said a sheep farmer from Dutchess County, New York, of an 1891 Strecker mailing; “I never tire of looking at them. Those yellow flies from Florida and the Orange one from Mexico are the brightest things I have ever seen.”180 Strecker helped celebrate the birthday of a lawyer in Volga, Dakota (then a territory), whose wife wanted to “make [her] husband a present, and I know of nothing which he would enjoy more than butterflies.” Strecker dispatched nineteen swallowtail species from South America on Christmas Day.181 He mailed morpho butterflies to Emily Morton, the young naturalist in Newburgh, New York, who used them at the center of a collection she was making for a friend. He sent some also to Adrian Latimer, a young drugstore employee in “straitened circumstances” in the rural village of Lumpkin, Georgia, working a sixteen-hour day in unhealthy “confinement wrapping packages, filling prescriptions, and manufacturing nostrums” for $12 a week. “It is perfectly magnificent,” the young man wrote back. “I did not dream of there being such splendid things in the world. Since getting [the box of Morpho cypris] I have been scarcely fit for work, being almost unwilling to take my eyes off it.” They represent “something to live for” besides “money-making.”182 Strecker delivered morphos, too, to Frank Snow, a leading Midwest naturalist who pioneered the science curriculum at the University of Kansas at Lawrence; he’d told Strecker that he wanted no tropical insects, but Strecker sent some anyway, and Snow reversed himself, saying, “I have broken my rule.” During exam time at Princeton University, an undergraduate, Elison Smythe, later a respected entomologist, received a radiant blue wafer. “I believe that the Morpho has cost me about ten points on my last exam, for while I was studying I had to stop every now and then to take a look at it.”183

  “When i opened the box [of Ornithoptera],” a young man who worked in a Pittsburgh glass factory since his thirteenth year wrote Strecker in 1886, “my hart leaped with joy to think i am a possessor of such wounders of nature.” A month later, after examining another box of “beautiful flying gems,” he told Strecker he “never had the least idea that I should be the fourtunate possessor of such wounderful things as i have been getting from you.”184 He couldn’t spell, but he was intelligent and witty and had poetic talent, writing “of nature’s sweeter cup” of flowers “as they peep up through the sward” and “show the beauty of our god.” He practiced what he called “Butterflyology,” “not for ambition’s sake, but because i love the beautiful in nature.” “If I had a million dollars, I would use it for butterflies.”185 The man’s name was George Ehrman, and despite repeated layoffs and bouts of poverty, he would amass one of the most remarkable collections of tropical butterflies in America and acquire his own string of correspondents. Strecker opened doors for him, sending him gorgeous insects, sometimes in exchange for native rare moths Ehrman caught at the fiery gas wells in and around Pittsburgh, features of the industrialization sweeping through that city, which drove many of the industrialists themselves into the suburbs. Ecologically devastating, the wells produced “a smoky atmosphere”—as one butterfly man put it—“which penetrates almost everything unless hermetically se
aled” and “prove[s] very injurious to these tender insects.”186 The wells lured hundreds of thousands of moths from the nearby forests, many of which Ehrman captured before they got swallowed up in the flames. Once he walked thirty miles to the wells to get Strecker an assortment of “Sphingidae, Bombycidae, Noctuidae, and Geometridae in aboundance.” A grateful Strecker delivered more insects, even Papilio antimachus—in Ehrman’s words, “that wounderful insect.”187

  The commercial collecting of Will Doherty and Herman Strecker, one in foreign lands, the other at home, had a double effect. On the one hand, it degraded the character of the collecting experience, obeisant more than ever to Doherty’s “dollar bills waving their green wings,” rather than to nature itself, with all its sensual potential. Both Doherty and Strecker were aware of this fact and hated it, Doherty perhaps more tragically than Strecker, who seemed to have few regrets about persuading his customers to give up collecting native for foreign species, which almost always meant putting a price on an insect, in disregard of its natural place and intrinsic value. The commerce of these men, along with that of the Germans and the English, sometimes served science, but as time went on, it also acted as an ever-growing countervailing power. Imperialism fostered commerce; the entire market in living things (or in once-living things) may have emerged when it did because of imperialism. Yet the transfer into America and elsewhere of ever-cheaper specimens, from nearly every corner of the earth, did more than exploit nature commercially or demean collecting; limited by its emphasis on what the market would bear (thereby excluding, at one time or another, many lepidoptera), it nevertheless brought the fecundity of exotic nature, superimposed over native nature, to many Americans, introducing them to a “new wealth of beautiful forms,” in the words of George Santayana.188 Exotic butterflies—the “ornamented organisms” of Alfred Russel Wallace, the golden birdwings of Robert Rippon’s tribute in Icones Ornithopterorum—came to symbolize the transnational character of the American experience. Such an exposure was the fruit of the ongoing migration of Westerners into a paradise of animal color, pattern, and form.