Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Early in the 1890s, ill Berthold Neumoegen, only five feet tall, looked shrunken or “geschrumpt” (to quote his curator, Jacob Doll). Yet chronic tuberculosis had barely dented his upbeat disposition or his fervor for butterflies. In the summer of 1893 he had camped out in the Adirondacks for two months, sure it would “make a man of him again,” and he was still stretching every line of credit to get more insects: “30,000 insects from Mexico, 10,000 from Honduras, 5000 from Brazil.” “Keeps me busy and pleasantly excited,” he told William Henry Edwards in 1894.11 But he died a year later, at fifty-one, nearly penniless. “In his death,” the New York Entomological Society resolved at its 1895 executive meeting, “the world has lost one of its most eminent students and collectors of Lepidoptera.”12 Still, museums did not rush to harvest his collection. It took another five years for Rebecca Neumoegen to sell his specimens; the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (now the Brooklyn Museum) bought them in 1899; in turn, in the 1920s, the butterfly man William Schaus purchased them from that institute on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, where they still reside.13

  “I feel almost broken down,” Henry Edwards, the impassioned ally of nearly all butterfly people, wrote to Scudder in April 1891, “the result of grip-pneumonia and rheumatism. I went with [my theater] Company to Washington and Baltimore, but I had to give up at the latter place and come home.”14 William Henry Edwards tried to take care of him, inviting him to West Virginia to “camp with me for a week or a month as you please and have the run of the house” (everyone else had gone to Florida to visit the Meads). “We will have High Jinks.”15 Henry didn’t go. But toward mid-May, after more insisting from William, he took a train to Hunter, in quest of therapeutic relaxation in the Catskills. Within a week, just short of sixty-four, he passed into what he had called, in an earlier eulogy to a friend, “the impenetrable shadow of the world beyond.”16 Many, mostly from the theater world, paid their respects at his Manhattan home at 185 East 116th Street. William Winter, a leading theater critic of the New York Herald Tribune, delivered a short tribute, and, set among the flowers sent by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, was a card with the words “The Curtain Falls.” An agnostic, Henry had demanded brevity and simplicity in the service; he was cremated at Fresh Pond, on Long Island, and his ashes thrown into the sea.17

  Soon after, William Beutenmuller, who had been the curator of Henry Edwards’s collection for five or six years, set about selling it, with help from William Henry Edwards, who paid to advertise it in newspapers and encouraged William Holland to buy it after learning of Holland and Carnegie’s plans for “a fine museum-of-the-future.” “Of course I do not know” he noted, what kind of “collections you mean to have, but certainly you should have to look far before you could find another such general and cosmopolitan collection as that of Henry Edwards.”18 Henry’s wife, Polly, often sick herself, had nothing to call her own except the household furniture and Henry’s books and bugs, but she refused to part with the collection in “separated lots,” willing to sell it only “as a whole,” in accord with her husband’s wishes.19 Henry Edwards’s more than 250,000 specimens, from all insect orders, reflected his democratic appetite, although preponderant among them were butterflies from the Pacific Coast region (many he had caught, named, and described himself) and from the tropics, most of which were carefully arranged and labeled, and many yet unnamed. “In a great collection like mine,” he had written in 1885 to Arthur Butler, the butterfly curator at the British Museum, “there must be a great lot of things unnamed. During the past two years, I have some lovely species of Lepidoptera from Mexico, many of which are new.”20 With so many bugs (and so little time), he, like Neumoegen, had hired his own expert, William Beutenmuller, a young German-American butterfly man from Hoboken, New Jersey.21 The collection traveled with Edwards to Australia in 1889 and back a year later, then big enough to fill an entire floor in his house, every available nook occupied by “boxes and cabinets of an infinite variety and shape.”

  William Holland bargained for the great collection, offering a low price, thinking Beutenmuller and Polly Edwards were on their knees. “Mr. Carnegie and I made them an offer,” he curtly told Scudder, “which is not as great as they demand, but in view of all the facts seems to me to be about right.”22 Well, it was not to be, sadly for him. Beutenmuller persuaded Morris Jesup, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, to acquire the collection—which, ironically, Edwards himself had earlier tried to sell to Jesup. In the late 1880s, fearing that he would die leaving nothing of value to his wife, Edwards had urged Jesup to buy the insects. Jesup had dawdled, teased, then refused. Edwards had complained to Scudder, “They kept me ‘on a string’ with my collection for over three years, having made two distinct engagements to buy it, but it all fell through at last, and I have given it and them up. It appears that their idea of an entomological collection is to have a few cases of showy things from anywhere and without any system of arrangement for the admiration of ‘jays’ [simpletons] and nurse-girls. I am utterly disgusted with them.” Henry Edwards abandoned his hope in the days of Papilio of making New York a magnet for scientific study. “If I were a millionaire I would found an entomological museum—per se—but not in New York—not in New York!”23 Now, with Henry Edwards dead, Jesup consented, but on nearly humiliating terms: the museum would house the collection only if somebody else paid for it.

  In response, Beutenmuller sent out numerous letters to potential contributors and set up a subscription fund, inviting gifts from affluent New Yorkers. Annie Trumbull Slosson, a fiction writer and a naturalist, who had begun to achieve a reputation as a lepidopterist, donated $200; it was her money that, in 1893, had revived Edwards’s old society, the New York Entomological Club, expanding “Club” into “Society.” Henry Edwards, on the other hand, had many more poor friends than rich ones—actors, actresses, stage hands, stage technicians who collectively contributed $10,000 out of the total of $15,000 demanded by Jesup. Indeed, Holland blamed them for “making it impossible for Mrs. Edwards to accept his own offer.”24 Jesup, now in control of an impressive trove of lepidoptera, permitted Beutenmuller, soon to become the museum’s curator of insects, to put three thousand of Edwards’s butterflies on public display.25 His insects had found a home in a place that had not wanted them when he was alive.

  William Henry Edwards greatly mourned Henry Edwards. He owed him a lot; years before, Henry had singled him out as the leading American butterfly naturalist, one who deserved all Henry could give him—bugs, data, insight, friendship, loyalty. William thanked Henry by quoting him in all three of his volumes, where Henry’s voice can be heard describing freshly this species or that, noting the character of its life history, its locality, perhaps some high western peak or hidden valley in California or Colorado. “Harry was a most delightful man and warm friend,” he wrote. “He had no enemy and never had, I venture to say. A great loss to our branch of science. I lament him exceedingly.”26

  William Henry Edwards was too generous: everyone has enemies, for whatever reason and however unjustified, and sometimes the most bitter ones are those who had once been close, who had belonged to the same group or sect, or shared intimacies and secrets. Herman Strecker had opened his soul to Henry Edwards in the late 1860s, and Henry helped usher him into tropical lands, in 1870 mailing the great “green Ornithoptera” Strecker had mooned over as a boy. Now, twenty years later, with Henry gone, Strecker called him a “great humbug” and “Old Buzzfuzz,” and his collection “a mass of rubbish in such a condition that it matters little whether the insects are in boxes or in the gutter.”27 In the Papilio days Henry Edwards had excluded Strecker from the magazine and scolded him for his treatment of William Henry Edwards. Strecker had not forgotten. He had brooded, too, over what John Smith, in his analysis of American collections before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, had said about Henry Edwards’s cabinet (“the best” all-around collection in the country, available to any who car
ed to see it) as against his own (“richer perhaps in exotics than in American fauna,” but “tied up and inaccessible”). So the inflammable German-American stonecutter, who in earlier times had been served so ably by Henry Edwards, had turned ruthlessly against Edwards, who had never attempted to regain Strecker’s confidence.

  Strecker, in the old days, had stayed at the home of Berthold Neumoegen sometimes for many days at a time, drinking his wine freely and often borrowing or getting free lepidoptera. But he came to hate Neumoegen as much as he hated Henry Edwards, again mostly because—in his mind—Neumoegen had betrayed him in the early 1880s by siding with Augustus Grote and Edwards in the creation of the journal Papilio. Making matters worse was Neumoegen’s incessant bragging to him, and to others, of the number and rareness of his own insects, telling the New York Times, in 1882, for instance, that he possessed the biggest collection in the country. So in 1892, when Strecker learned from Staudinger that Neumoegen could not meet his debts for specimens bought over months on credit, Strecker took his revenge, informing Staudinger that Neumoegen owned nothing himself and lived in the house of his father-in-law, who controlled all the “property” in it, including the “Schmetterlings,” the butterflies. Besides, he was “a Jew, and you know how they are.” So here it was, the final card slammed down against a man who believed that he could “keep friends with everybody” and “hurt no one” and who resembled Strecker in all essential ways, to say nothing of having gotten him out of many fixes.28 Strecker suggested that Staudinger find some way of “seizing” Neumoegen’s “seat in the Stock Exchange.” But fortunately for Neumoegen, he began delivering payments to Staudinger, without ever suspecting Strecker’s duplicity.

  Yet for all his mean-spirited, hateful resentments, Herman Strecker’s aptitude for friendship, and for generosity, actually began to strengthen as he became less driven as a dealer, a shift aided by an ever-swelling number of “professional collectors,” who all together, as a class, helped to drive down the prices of insects. As Will Doherty would discover, these men made it harder to earn a living from selling butterflies. And as Strecker himself wrote a dealer in 1897, “once anything would sell, but now through many dealers, the naturalists have been particular and nothing but specimens in almost perfect order will command any sale.”29 But Strecker had other reasons besides a saturated market for turning once again to natural science.

  Around 1900, he renewed contact with an old childhood buddy and fellow collector, Russell Robinson, whose father had built the railroad from Reading to Philadelphia and who, unlike Strecker, had left butterflies behind for a quite different career—a decision, he told Strecker, he now, at age fifty-seven, much regretted: “I wish to god I’d stuck to butterflies. If I had, I would have been a happier man.” Still, there were compensations. He had begun butterfly hunting again, this time “in the clover fields and gardens” around his house in Virginia, and he had a son, Wirt, a young army captain, who had just come back from Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela, where he had discovered an undescribed dwarf variety of the Thoas swallowtail (Papilio thoas), a tropical species occasionally found in southern Texas. The father had passed on to the son the love of nature Strecker had imbued in him. Wirt would teach chemistry and natural history at West Point and bequeath to other young men the same interest; a gravestone to his memory with a small butterfly inscribed on it can be visited on the academy grounds. Russell Robinson reminded his old friend “of the radiant brightness connected with our young life” and invited him to spend a month at his Virginia home, “when the butterflies are moving and you can do so.” “I’ll feed you well, hear your prayers, and take you away from women and brick and mortar, where the Good Lord is if you want to see him.”30

  Contact with Robinson must have set Strecker’s scientific juices flowing, inspiring him to return to fresh work on butterflies, as he had long wanted to do. Many of his old friends, such as a now aged John Morris, the author of America’s first butterfly catalog, had backed him up in this. Shortly before his death at ninety-two, in 1895, Morris told Strecker that “I just today picked up your capital book on Butterflies” and “got so deeply interested in what I had read before over and over, as to spend I do not know how much time, in poring over it.”31 He longed to have Strecker as a guest again at his country home in Lutherville, Maryland, with its spreading oaks, pear trees, lanes and meadows, and butterflies without number.

  Strecker also had many new friends as well as faithful ones from the past, all naturalists with few commercial entanglements—Harrison Dyar, John Smith, William Beutenmuller, Henry Skinner, and Henry Bird, among them. Bird wrote several articles on the Papaipema genus of moths, which delighted Strecker, so he got himself invited to Bird’s home in Rye, New York, and sat for hours in his kitchen, drinking all the medicinal Scotch Bird’s mother had stored in the cupboard.32 The memory of his supposed thievery of insects at the American Museum of Natural History, given credence by Grote thirty years before and never decisively disproven, had by now become a subject of jokes by friends, not to malign but to get closer to him.33 “If I were Dr. Skinner,” John Smith told Strecker in 1900, “I would never under any circumstance allow you to see another insect under my charge; would never allow you to enter my door again, and would give peremptory orders that at the American Entomological Society all keys to the collections should be refused you.”34

  Strecker managed to write and publish two supplements to his 1878 catalog, but both lacked, of all things, colored pictures, to the dismay of friends who knew how crucial they had been to him and how gifted he was as a lithographic artist. John Smith, who admired him as much as the others, reminded Strecker of Strecker’s own motto, that “a description without a figure was good for nothing.” Smith’s gentle rebuke hurt; after all, Strecker could trace his whole butterfly life back to the pictures he had devoured in the Philadelphia academy as a boy.35

  Henry Skinner tried to persuade Strecker that color photographs had great promise and pointed to Holland’s Butterfly Book as proof. “Have you seen Holland’s new book?” he asked; “if not I think it will open your eyes to the possibilities of the 3 color half-tone process.… The Hesperiidae [skipper butterflies] came out wonderfully.”36 Strecker might even make money if he followed Holland’s lead, Skinner suggested, and Strecker responded not by ridiculing the idea (Holland as a model?) but by meekly observing that he had no desire to “make money,” only to ensure that “the things in my collection will have a status. I don’t care if any one buys it or not, it fixes the species, and that is all I care for.” Yet “if I could get a decent plate cheaply I would not hesitate,” he admitted. “Yes, I wish the color-type business would get cheaper then I could figure my monstrosities and other things of interest.”37 Strecker had ceased to imagine that he might rely on his own craft, rooted in an earlier artistic tradition reaching back hundreds of years in Germany, on the grounds that, as he said in 1900, “to draw on stone as I did in former years is too great an undertaking with the limited time at my disposal.”38

  Things might have been different had Strecker not been chained to business, whether in butterfly selling or monument carving for the dead. He did both right up to the end of his life. “I hate business,” he wrote a friend in 1895, regarding the butterflies, “and hate it to be intruded into science beyond the mere unavoidable mention of getting boxes made. I never had any predilection for business. It makes me mad when I am forced into rules or set phrases.”39 “It is hard to get away from business,” he told Harrison Dyar, one of his new naturalist admirers (here he meant the gravestone business). “It is my bread and butter, but I hate it. If only I could give all my time to science. I am getting near the end and have accomplished nothing.”40 “I have been worked fearfully getting gravestones in place for Decoration Day,” he wrote Henry Skinner in 1900. Staudinger’s death that year at seventy made Strecker feel even closer to the grave. How much these two men had in common: an almost innate love for all kinds of butterflies, the same l
onging to be known as lepidopterists rather than as collectors, the same business phobia. But unlike Strecker, Staudinger, at fifty, had dropped his business in the lap of his son-in-law, freeing him to write his big catalogs, and when he died, he had reached commanding stature, in part because of his relationship with the German kaiser and the Royal Museum of Natural History in Berlin. “He was the best and greatest of all,” Strecker told a friend, without a hint of envy, “and his place will not be filled again perhaps for ages.”41

  In early 1901, William Kearfott, a moth specialist in Manhattan, asked Strecker, then sixty-five, to join him and “a dozen or more members of the New York Entomological Society, all friends of yours,” at his house in New York. “We will have a love feast and I will not take no for an answer.”42 Of course, the butterfly maniac could not resist and relished every minute, but over the next five or six months, he suffered from crippling influenza and then some kind of stomach ailment; in late November, he had a stroke as he was getting on a train in downtown Reading, and he never recovered.43 His friends and enemies assumed he died well-off, but he surprised them all by leaving behind nothing but his collection, his house, and $9,000.44 Eveline Strecker hastened to offer her husband’s collection for sale, for $20,000, but though both Holland of the Carnegie and Skinner of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences wanted it badly, each balked at the price. “Strecker’s wife has an exaggerated notion of the value of her husband’s collection,” Holland complained to George Hampson, a former tea planter and moth authority at the British Museum. “It was Strecker’s fate to make a great many new species on the basis of worn or rubbed specimens, sometimes on the basis of merely abnormal varieties. The poor old fellow had but small resources and thought he knew a great deal more than he did.”45 Year after year, as Eveline grew poorer, she lowered her price. In 1905, her son Paul borrowed $2,500 from her, her only savings, and fled town. The lepidoptera and the great archive of letters remained, confined on the third floor, until 1908, when a native of Reading, William Gerhard, a collector of Bolivian insects for a drugstore mogul in the mid-1890s and later the first curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago, took a train to Reading, his heart set on the collection. Gerhard arranged to have the glass cases and drawers full of Strecker’s precious cargo, plus the sixty thousand letters and books Strecker had saved during his nearly fifty years as a butterfly man, lowered tenderly out the third-floor window by block and tackle and packed off in a freight car to Chicago. The whole thing weighed more than fourteen thousand pounds and cost Gerhard $15,000.46 Until the 1980s, without any decree from any imperial authority, as in Staudinger’s case, the Field Museum housed Strecker’s insects in a separate place within its collections, keeping both Strecker’s ordering of species and his hand-printed labels.47