by John F. Ross
His brother-in-law suggested to Wes that he might consider enrolling at Davis’s alma mater, Illinois College in Jacksonville, if he could come up with the $30 tuition. The school would accept Davis’s promise that Wes would be good for the further hundred dollars required for living expenses. Wes passed the entrance examination after cramming for five weeks with the help of a local tutor, who lent him books on mathematics, science, Latin, and Greek—no insignificant feat for a young man whose formal education was spotty at best.
So, in October 1855, Wes enrolled in Illinois College’s three-year agricultural science program. Although required to attend daily chapel, he had at least landed in a college that taught science, if only the applied kind that would benefit a farmer. His marks proved excellent. He joined a literary society and debated the question of whether phrenology deserved the rank of a serious discipline. Most important of all, he met a former professor who remained a large presence in the college town. Jonathan B. Turner had mentored John Davis in developing a progressive western agrarian outlook at college in the late 1840s. The outspoken Turner, a Yale-educated Congregationalist minister, had since been forced to resign his professorship, another casualty of the mounting sectional animosities: His abolitionism and liberal religious doctrines had grated too harshly on the ears of many southerners attending the Presbyterian school, and so Turner had retired to his house on college hill. Clutching a letter of introduction from his brother-in-law, Wes had called upon Turner, who gave him a tour of his experimental seventeen-and-a-half-acre lot of flower and vegetable gardens and hedged fields.
Turner had been one of several eastern elite academics who had come to the prairie west in the 1830s, bent on helping the Illinois farmer profit from the new scientific age. While John Davis’s description of Jacksonville as the “Athens of Illinois” might have been a little grandiose, it indicated how deeply Turner and his fellow professors believed that the slowly forming western lands harbored the right conditions for a new era in American history. Turner had noticed that western farmers tended to build their farms near copses of trees, the only source of the critical fencing material necessary to contain and protect livestock and crops in the days before barbed wire. Because these stands remained widely scattered and separated by miles of prairie, many farmers lived far from central locations that would make possible democratic- and society-building institutions, such as public schools and churches. Turner set out to find a cheap solution to fencing in the form of a fast-growing hedge—“horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight”—freeing farmers from their dependence on woodlands. He experimented with barberry, box, and hawthorn, even sending away to England for seeds, but had little success until a circuit-riding preacher gave him some Osage orange, so named from its bumpy, grapefruit-sized, somewhat-citrus-smelling seedpod. If pruned and its tendrils woven just right, it grew rapidly in straight lines so dense that not even small birds could pass through it. Soon Osage hedgerows stretched across thousands of miles of the Midwest, contributing to the rise of town life and civic engagement.
Wes loved this quick-minded radical thinker, who expanded as easily on growing plants and inventing agricultural machines as on his cosmic theories about humankind. Turner believed that three great races—yellow, white, and black—had each been created with separate and equal characteristics to push humanity toward greater perfection. All would have their day, and none could be judged as inherently superior. Even if deterministic and simple, Turner’s thought possessed a utopian grandeur, the wide-open prairie lands quickly welcoming and spreading a genuine intellectual content to the western movement. He was seeking to turn farmers into “thinking laborers,” as distinct from the more urban professions that consisted of “laborious thinkers.” The latest findings in science should be easily available to all farmers, freeing them from always having to move on once the soil was depleted.
Turner would prove instrumental in bringing about the Morrill Act, which Lincoln signed into law on July 2, 1862, that directed the federal government to provide land grants for the states to finance institutions devoted to teaching agricultural and industrial workers. This most important education law in American history would anticipate—and indeed initiate—the system of state universities, but even more important it would enshrine the idea that every male citizen should have access to government-supported collegiate education in those practical subjects for which the young nation thirsted.
Money problems forced Wes out after a semester, but he was back the following fall after a stint teaching, although he would have to quit again soon. But Turner had stirred up Wes’s ideas, energizing forward-looking thoughts rooted in prairie optimism, but, as it proved, of even far greater scope.
* * *
Over the summers Wes underwent his real education—certainly out in the fields and wild forests, but now especially in far more ambitious forays on the nation’s river courses. He would experience firsthand one of America’s most astounding geographical realities: that it boasts more miles of navigable inland waterways than all the rest of the world combined, creating a veinlike matrix in which one river falls into another to yet another again until their combined waters empty out into the sea. The rivers’ connectivity provided exceptional freedom of movement. And along with this came an interaction of new ideas and older traditions—sometimes comical, but often enough explosive, collisions of people from innumerable backgrounds, castes, and inheritances. In the Midwest, a new America was being consolidated to the creak of the oar and the rhythmic slap of the paddlewheel. Upon the muddy waters of the Mississippi took place one of the most colorful, violent, and productive experiments in American history. More than any other single factor, river-transportation improvements had brought about the antebellum transformation of the Midwest from a little-settled backwater to the nation’s breadbasket.
For young men of the early- to mid-nineteenth-century Midwest, before railroads and later highways, the rivers of the heartland—the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, and the great streams feeding them—beckoned with intoxicating appeal. While upper-class easterners took the Grand Tour of Europe, or like Richard Henry Dana, Jr., signed on for an ocean voyage such as he chronicled in Two Years Before the Mast, midwesterners and curious easterners rode flatboats and jumped, or booked passage, on steamboats. While Mark Twain certainly became Old Man River’s most famous champion, watercourses attracted many teenagers, such as nineteen-year-old Abraham Lincoln, who signed on as a bow-hand on a flatboat floating to New Orleans in 1828. Testing themselves against strong currents became a rite of passage. “The instance of a young man of enterprize and standing, as a merchant, trader, planter, or even farmer, who has not made at least one trip to New Orleans, is uncommon,” wrote the missionary Timothy C. Flint in 1828. The long trip, he added, was more perilous than a voyage across the Atlantic.
In the summer of 1856, when Wes rowed his flat-bottomed skiff into the Mississippi current at St. Anthony Falls near Minneapolis, he was not only participating in a grand American tradition, but pushing into the messy, democratizing turmoil of the great American river. That summer he would take the river all the way to New Orleans. The following year he rowed from Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Ohio. In 1858, he rowed down the Illinois River from Ottawa to its mouth, then up the Des Moines.
Along the way, he encountered the entire range of American enterprise as the waterborne pageant laden with lumber, pork, cheese, butter, flour, corn, and whiskey floated past him. Boats descending the Ohio to its junction with the Mississippi bore cloth, tools, agricultural implements, ammunition, and, again, whiskey. Great creaking flatboats, or “broadhorns,” often stretching one hundred feet, carried their cargo, large families, their crews, and livestock. After completing a single trip downriver, boatmen typically chopped up these makeshift craft for fuel and lumber.
“I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy—an acre or so of white, sweet-smelling boar
ds in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more,” recalled Twain. Prostitutes primped deckside aboard floating brothels, sometimes sliding provocatively by chapel-boats manned by exhorting ministers. Other vessels shipped entertainers or sometimes printers with their print shops while hucksters sold snake oil from smaller vessels. For a mostly agricultural people so often desperately bored, diversion came in bouts of heavy drinking and endless hands of cards. Hundreds of boats rafted together by night, not only for protection from roving bands of river pirates but for companionship; a curious camaraderie developed among the constantly churning mix of people they would never meet again. Preachers vied for people’s souls while pickpockets, card sharks, and wily con men emptied pockets.
On the river, steamboats had become king, gaudily painted creations belching steam from towering stacks, their sternwheels furiously churning and moving them up to twelve knots an hour, faster than the fastest sailing ships on the ocean. On the river, steamboat designs may have appeared the epitome of ingenuity, but everywhere Wes looked there were formidable competitors, such as Henry Miller Shreve’s snag boat, whose steam-powered windlass enabled its crew to clear a 150-mile logjam from where the Red River joined the Mississippi. Two years before, a steamship toiling day and night had set the transit record, traveling between New Orleans and Louisville in four days, nine hours, and thirty minutes. In 1815, when Wes’s father was a teenager, that same trip had taken twenty-five days.
Wes learned to keep a weather eye out for the sight or sound of steamboats, their captains paying no heed to craft the size of his skiff. When fog descended, dodging the river’s myriad snags, drifting trees, sandbars, wreck heaps, and small islands became yet more hazardous. The river claimed lives as a matter of course.
A typical skiff was pointed at the bow, blunt at the stern, and flat bottomed, measuring on the order of fifteen feet long, three and a half feet wide, and fourteen inches deep. Skiffs had become the ubiquitous small boats on the river, as ferries across streams, as tenders for larger vessels, and as fishing craft. Each steamboat carried a “yawl” skiff, which not only brought passengers aboard but scouted the main channel and took off cargo to lighten the load should the mother ship catch on a sandbar, or even, if necessary, to function as a lifeboat. The slightest change in the lines of a skiff—for instance, a wider stern—enabled it to take on more weight and gain more balance, but sacrifice speed and ease of turning. Wes would watch the French bateaux with pointed bow and stern, dugouts, pirogues, and “covered sleds” or “ferry-flats,” silently gauging their maneuverability and functionality.
But this particular skiff would give Wes ample freedom to prosecute the next serious stage of his self-education: assembling a first-class collection of freshwater shells. North America boasts the world’s largest diversity of freshwater mussels, some 350 varieties known in Powell’s day, the richest concentration lying in the Ohio and western stretches of the Mississippi, ranging from the 1.5-inch Lilliputian to the dinner-plate-sized white heel splitter and five-pound washboard, some living for up to a hundred years. Their vernacular names caught the rough poetry of pioneer life: lady’s dagger, elephant ear, deer toe, pimpleback, pink mucket, fawn’s foot. Wes liked to beach his skiff on the shoals that appeared at riverbends to poke among the rocks for shells dropped by muskrat or raccoon, as the iridescent white, pink, and purple interiors struck his eye. The trash piles, or middens, of early riparian Indians also proved rich hunting grounds.
He found bivalves in the gravelly bottoms of streams and rivers, detecting their rough contours with his bare feet. Colorful markings defined the butterfly and the rainbow. In bankside outcroppings, Wes pulled fossil mollusks, their shells heavier and grainier, lacking the chalkiness of living species. After several weeks on the river, the skiff rattled and grumbled from the shifting bags of shells. Wes not only discerned the telling similarities and differences between species, but also how much individuals within a single species might vary. He could also detect the relations between shells and where they grew. In fast water, he knew he would find the monkey face, its knobby protuberances preventing the swiftest current from washing it away. In lakes or on slower-moving streams, he would dig out yellow sand shells or shiny-rayed pocketbooks, their smooth shells enabling them to ride effortlessly through mud and sand.
Wes was beginning to weave together strands of the bright web that connects the teeming natural world. Although science knew little yet of glaciology—let alone how the Wisconsin Glaciation more than ten thousand years earlier had scraped, abraded, and gouged much of North America under a mile-high mass of ice—he became conversant with what would soon be termed “glacial wash,” the pebbles, clay, sand, and cobbles that the great sheets had dumped upon the emerging landscape as they receded. He began to tell how soil and vegetation altered with changes in the drift. The intimate relation between surface geology and agriculture made itself inescapably clear.
Victorian naturalists had begun to collect marine invertebrates seriously, believing them a key to unlocking the secrets of life. Darwin had driven himself to distraction—and deeper ill health—systemetizing the world’s largest barnacle collection over eight years. Collecting invertebrates caught fire in America as well, Edgar Allan Poe lending his name to promote The Conchologist’s First Book in 1839. As American naturalists ranged across a new continent, they still collected with something of a chip on their shoulders, laboring under the European disdain embodied in the unfounded assumption that America’s fauna and flora, like its indigenous peoples, were somehow degenerate. The great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, whose six-thousand-page Histoire Naturelle had been consulted by most educated men on both sides of the Atlantic, claimed that the New World’s cold and wet climate had withered its fauna. “In America, therefore,” opined Leclerc in his fifth volume, “animated Nature is weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions.” The count’s theory of North American degeneracy rang pleasantly in the ears of social scientists and politicians intent on proving that European civilization remained—and could remain—superior to that of the raw New World. Many American naturalists, Wes included, readily saw that the collections of their continent’s natural gifts were fuel for a mounting nationalism.
For Wes, any casual assumption of nature’s permanence began to dissolve. Rivers jumped their courses, mussel species simply died out—the world existed in endless flux. What could he be sure of that was permanent?
* * *
January 1859 found the twenty-four-year-old teaching in Hennepin, a small northern Illinois farming town perched on bluffs carved by the Illinois River as it broke south from its westward course. His on-again, off-again sampling of higher education was over. Financial difficulties and boredom had ended his brief matriculations at Illinois College, Illinois Institute, and Oberlin, leaving him with no degree to show for his efforts. Yet he found that he had been born with a talent for teaching and administration, which soon carried him to become principal of the Hennepin School system for $100 a month. More important, he had discovered that fieldwork satisfied his ever-burning curiosity far more than the classroom. Teaching furnished him with the long breaks necessary to explore.
Outside Hennepin, he found rich hunting grounds for fossils in the slag heaps of coal mines, then chased up Senachiwine and Crow creeks and other tributaries of the Illinois. His forays collecting mollusks by now not only reached along the Mississippi, but also the Ohio, Des Moines, Wabash, and Illinois rivers. He had searched the small interior waters of Wisconsin and Illinois, got up to the Great Lakes, and lingered so long prospecting for minerals in the Iron Mountains south of St. Louis that he had to pawn his watch to get home. His mollusk collection had grown into one of North America’s finest, which he carefully housed in sturdy wooden boxes he built himself. Anyone can pick up something and stick it in their pocket. But when a collector moves beyond the desire to own only the finest, most unusual specimens and
settles in to collect a wide diversity of examples, then new insights become available, detail upon detail that beget new questions. “Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds,” wrote Thoreau upon discovering the beauty of keeping precise records of the seasons and climate around Walden Pond.
In 1860, the twenty-six-year-old got the professional break he so desperately craved: His impressive collection, along with a good word from Professor Turner, earned him membership in the Natural History Society of Illinois, and his mollusks drew second prize at the Illinois Agricultural Society fair in Jacksonville. Then, again with Turner’s warm endorsement, he joined the Natural History Society’s committee on conchology, eagerly becoming its secretary. The 1860 census listed Wesley not as a teacher or farmer, but as a “naturalist.” In truth, this designation remained a stretch—he was still only a very talented amateur, his collection representing more sweat and passion than knowledge and expertise; many of the specimens he identified only by locality. College credentials might have evaded him, but his mollusks now landed him among serious scientists, whom he soon impressed with his drive and intense curiosity. His emerging abilities, it became apparent, lay not in careful, detailed descriptions, but in discerning wider patterns—a general field of inquiry that would later be termed as ecology.
