Underneath the profusion of vegetation lay its deep and dense root system, extending 6 to 8 feet or more beneath the surface. This underground root system worked in concert with a network of bacteria and fungi, each giving to and taking sustenance from the others.
The underground space was shared with colonies of worms and insects that fed upon dead plant matter and bacteria. Other colonies of living things tunneled amongst the roots–snakes, mice, gophers, ground squirrels, badgers and moles–feeding on seeds, dead plants and one another.
These burrowing insects, reptiles and mammals each became a part of the complex chain of life that flourished in the sunshine above the soil. Bees and butterflies gathered and spread the pollen of the prairie flowers. Prairie chickens and songbirds–meadowlarks, horned larks, bobolinks–fed on the flower seeds and the vast array of prairie insects such as grasshoppers, beetles, spiders, crickets and ants.
The birds, rodents and snakes were in turn the prey of the prairie hunters: the coyotes, foxes and wolves on the ground, the hawks and the owls from above. The abounding landscape seemed to be designed to survive the caprices of nature. It was based on the perennial plants, annually rebudding and reflowering over a hundred years or more and acquiring the genetic ability to fend off diseases and pests. In times of protracted drought, the deep root system reached down to underground water supplies, so that even after years of lying dormant, the prairie could explode into new healthy growth as soon as the rains returned. In times of flood the same dense root system held the soil together, preventing it from being washed away.
In the normal cycle of the dry seasons that came in the spring or fall,
the parched grasses would ignite, whether from lightning or the fires set by nomadic Plains Indians. Then the prairie became an inferno that would sweep for days across the rolling horizon. But these fires, too, seemed to be part of the prairie`s cycle of survival, eliminating old growth to make room for the new and, by preventing the encroachment and spread of forest trees, protecting it from its most powerful rival for dominance of the land.
To the early explorers, the most astounding and discouraging aspect of the prairie was this lack of trees. Without sufficient forests, settlers would not have the lumber to build homes or fuel to warm themselves. And so the prairie, in the earliest days of the nation, was regarded as a wasteland.
In 1787 a young James Monroe, then working for the Continental Congress, gave this report on the Illinois prairie: ”A great part of the (Northwest)
territory is miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and will not have a single bush for ages. The districts, therefore, within which these fall will perhaps never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy.”
Thirty-one years later, Monroe, now president, signed the papers admitting Illinois into the Union. By that time he and many others knew of the riches under the prairie, a blanket of topsoil that was more fertile and ran deeper–from 4 to 8 feet and more–than anywhere else on Earth. The only thing that stopped them from farming the prairie was the dense root network that armored the first several inches of soil; the wooden plows of the day were no match for it.
That obstacle, however, was overcome in 1838, when a blacksmith named John Deere working in Grand Detour, Ill., invented a steel plow specifically designed to turn the prairie. Soon the richest soil in the world opened up in all its abundance to the waves of immigrants descending on America.
From 1830 to 1860 Illinois` population exploded from 157,445 to 1,711,951. Most of the settlers were farmers who replaced the prairie grasses with corn and wheat, harvesting unprecedented yields with the new mechanical reapers.
There was an almost religious zeal to the task of transforming the prairie, a heeding of God`s instructions to the human race in Genesis to ”be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it.” The toil and achievement of those pioneers is at the core of our national character and still is an inspiration to the American entrepreneurial spirit.
Kennicott was a witness to that zeal as he moved into the prairie to hunt and collect specimens in 1855. In fact, he shared in the zeal. His own family were pioneers, and his own studies of the region`s extraordinary biotic wealth revealed the potential good it held for mankind.
In 1855 the prairie seemed too vast to be subdued by man. If he ever feared that it would all disappear some day, Kennicott, who suffered periods of deep melancholia, only hinted at it in a letter to a friend describing a winter scene:
”As far as the eye can reach on the prairies is one endless stretch of white, and with their loads of snow the distant woods look like banks of clouds. It is very beautiful everywhere, but `tis a sad sort of beauty; the Earth seems dressed in a winding sheet.
Whether or not he foresaw the prairie`s demise, Kennicott was convinced of the great value of collecting, evaluating and storing the specimens of prairie life for future generations. That is why in 1857 he threw his energies into organizing the Chicago Academy of Sciences.
His enthusiasm for founding the academy was shared by a number of other civic leaders. Most prominent among them was a group of doctors, including James Van Zandt Blaney, a founder of Rush Medical College; Nathan Davis, a founder of the American Medical Association; and Edmund Andrews, a founder of Chicago Medical School. The practice of medicine in those days flowed directly out of nature, and doctors were particularly interested in the collection and study of wilderness plants for medicinal purposes.
Kennicott, at age 21 already the most active and accomplished naturalist of the group, was also its sparkplug. They started out with only $1,500, but with Kennicott`s zeal and collections at its core, it was a good enough start so that what they began still survives today.
Once the academy was established, Kennicott went off to the Smithsonian late in 1857. There he worked on sorting and classifying his Illinois collections and underwent further study with his mentor, Baird. There, too, he fell into a group of other young naturalists from other parts of the country as experienced as he was in tramping the immense frontiers of the young nation and discovering and recording its natural wealth.
As a group, they were intensely dedicated to science. But, perhaps as a result of their long and lonely scientific sojourns in the wilderness, they were also, as a group, a bunch of free spirits in the civilized precincts of Washington, D.C. Today they might be called ”party animals.” They took lodgings together and organized themselves as the ”Megatherium Club,”
deriving the club`s name from an extinct giant sloth. Working and studying all day at the Smithsonian, they returned at night to their rooms, whose walls were decorated with fish nets, crabs and shells. There they dined on oysters, drank copious amounts of scuppernong wine and ale stored in kegs in the basement, and over cigars traded stories of their adventures into the wee morning hours.
Among the ”Megatheria,” as the members called themselves, was William Stimpson, who soon became Kennicott`s best friend and one whom he would eventually draw into the Chicago academy.
”He has the strange weakness of wishing to appear idle, thoughtless and even dissipated,” was how Kennicott described Stimpson to his parents in a letter back home to The Grove. ”From merely hearing him talk, one would suppose he was a hard-drinking, idle fellow with no ambition beyond being considered a good fellow.”
Stimpson`s pose was one that Kennicott readily saw through, however. When the two met, Stimpson, 26, was only slightly older than Kennicott but was already acknowledged as the nation`s leading authority on marine
invertebrates. He had served, at 20, as a naturalist on a four-year American expedition to explore the Pacific that took him to the Bering Strait, Japan, Hong Kong, the Solomon Islands and Australia.
So while Kennicott could talk about the ”suckers” of southern Illinois and a bully`s anger cooled down with a copperhead snake, Stimpson could talk about wandering too far away from his expedition`s party on a Solomon Island beach, being attacked by angry, spear-wielding natives and escaping by throwing down his tobacco pouch to divert their attention.
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Kennicott was the youngest of the Megatherium Club members, but he was perhaps their brightest light. Baird, the mentor of them all, said of Kennicott, ”I know of no American naturalist who gives such promise.”
Perhaps spurred by the adventures of the other Megatheria, Kennicott proposed an open-ended expedition of his own to the Arctic regions of the Canadian wilderness. Baird, who for years had chafed at the lack of scientific data and specimens from that region, readily agreed and found financing for the expedition. Backed by the Smithsonian, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the Chicago Audubon Club and the Hudson`s Bay Co., Kennicott plunged into the wilderness from Ft. William on Lake Superior`s North Shore on May 19, 1859. He was gone for 3 1/2 years.
The letters Kennicott wrote to Baird and his family during this odyssey are a priceless record of life in the wilderness.
On the first leg of his journey, he traveled with a brigade from the Hudson`s Bay Co. in birch-bark canoes, reaching Lake Winnipeg via wilderness rivers and portages. His party had three enormous canoes, each 36 feet long, 4 feet wide and capable of carrying 3,000 pounds of gear and cargo. Each was manned by a crew of eight men–Iroquois Indians, half-breeds and French Canadians. The bow and stern of each canoe were ornamented with figures, like that of a horse, or flags, and the paddles were painted red and embellished with black and green markings.
”All, except the steersman,” Kennicott said of the crews, ”keep perfect stroke in paddling, and when the three canoes kept abreast, as they sometimes did, all singing and keeping stroke together, the effect was very exhilarating. The Iroquois paddle with great rapidity, making about 40 strokes per minute on average, dipping the paddle a foot or 18 inches into the water and pulling with very considerable force. When it is considered that this is kept up–exclusive of several short resting spells of 10 or 15 minutes each and of the stops for breakfast and dinner–from 12 to 15 hours per day, some idea may be formed of the extreme powers of endurance possessed by these voyageurs.”
Kennicott traveled as far as Ft. Simpson on the Upper Mackenzie River in 1859, collecting all kinds of specimens–mammals, fish, insects and birds and their eggs. These he sent back home, including enough duplicates to be divided among the Smithsonian and the Chicago academy and other museums. He then settled at the fort for the Arctic winter of nearly daylong periods of darkness.
Kennicott followed that pattern for the next three years: combing through the wilderness by foot and canoe during the warm months, by snowshoe and dog sled in the cold; collecting specimens in daylight hours, then skinning and preparing them at night by the light of a candle lashed to a tent pole; holing up for weeks and months at a time in such outposts as Ft. Resolution, Ft. Yukon, Ft. Liard and La Pierre`s House in the Richardson Mountains.
He made friends with agents of the Hudson Bay Co. and their half-breed employees. To them he imparted his zeal for collecting specimens, promising them the same kind of Latinized immortality in scientific annals that he had achieved for himself if they faithfully collected and sent specimens to the Smithsonian. Many did so for decades, and the names
of many of them did indeed become part of the nomenclature of the species they had sent to the institution.
He also made friends with members of local, Iroquois, Eskimo and Slave tribes, attempting to learn their languages and taking careful notes of their speech in his journals. The Slaves wanted to give him a name in their language, but Slave men his age, who were pretty much all married, derived their names from their being the father of their oldest child or, if they had no children, from figuratively being the father of their favorite dog. So Kennicott, unmarried and, when he first met the Slaves, with no dogs, was named for his favorite possession, the meerschaum pipe that he smoked constantly. To the Slaves, he was ”Big Pipe`s Father.”
He eventually acquired a team of dogs, however, and became an expert with the dogsled.
”My four dogs are to me treasures beyond price,” he boasted in a letter. ”They bear the euphonious names of: No-gah, or carcajou (wolverine), so called because he is strong and never tires; Tin-geuk, or moose, because he has a big head and can trot as fast as another dog will gallop; Vuht-sih, or caribou, because he is so active; and Moos-toos, or buffalo, because his big shoulders call to mind that animal.”
Kennicott traveled a great deal with his dogs in the dead of winter, marveling at the unreality of the Arctic cold, giving a clear dissertation on the sound of human breath at minus-40 degrees:
”It is precisely like that produced by the crushing of a body of loose, dry snow from some height, as a house roof or tree. When I first heard it, not knowing its origin, I was no little puzzled at not being able to find the snow that I was sure I heard falling. The breath does not produce the sound at the instant it leaves the mouth or nostrils but after it has floated off to the distance of a foot or two. It is heard distinctly in a temperature 40 degrees below zero, and louder as the temperature is colder.”
Despite the friendships he made, the wilderness was an achingly solitary place where bouts of melancholia would sometimes seize him. He wrote endlessly to Baird of his failures to collect enough specimens to make the expedition worthwhile. Mail took six months to reach him, and Baird`s letters of genuine praise and admiration would come too late to ease his lonely spells.
Some solace may have come with the prearranged rituals he practiced with his family and friends back home. At 7 p.m. Chicago time each Tuesday, he sat quietly and thought of his sisters at home in The Grove, while they did the same in his behalf. In the evening of the 10th day of each month he thought of Washington and the home of Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian. At the same time, Henry`s two young daughters sat playing the piano in their parlor, thinking of a certain young naturalist deep in the Arctic.
On Christmas morning, 1861, he and three other men were dogsledding over a mountain range on a three-day trip. Some of the lonely pain seeps through in his account of that morning:
”We had crossed the highest part of our track over the mountains just at the first appearance of the gray light of the southeast, which precedes the first real daylight by several hours at this season, and here, about 9 o`clock on Christmas morning, I stopped and smoked the last of my cigars to the health and `conduction` of the family circle assembled at `The Grove` and to the
`Megatheria` and then sang, `Do they miss me at home?` But the temperature was more than 40 degrees below; too cold for cigars or sentiment, so I got on my sled, relieved my feelings by a yell, the like of which some of you mayhap remember, which started my dogs off on a gallop, and rode down the mountains singing `La Claire Fontaine.` ”
Kennicott continued to collect and send specimens until the spring of 1862, when he received bad news from home. His father was deathly ill at The Grove, and the Civil War had broken out. He immediately left the Yukon for Chicago.
At home, his father lingered until the summer of 1863. Baird and others persuaded young Kennicott not to join the Union Army, convincing him that his work sorting and classifying the almost-countless specimens he had collected in the Arctic was more vital to the nation.
Kennicott`s stature grew enormously as the magnitude of his Arctic expedition came to light. The mass of material began to present problems for the academy, whose rented rooms at 263 S. Wabash Ave. were too small to house the mounting collection of specimens. Kennicott`s growing celebrity, however, and the fame of his collections began to attract the attention of wealthy Chicagoans. Eager to give the city a patina of serious cultural pursuit, they began to donate money to the academy.
By 1864 there was enough money to put together a fairly substantial museum in the Metropolitan Block at LaSalle and Randolph Streets. There was even enough left over to hire Kennicott on full salary as the museum`s curator, director and trustee. He began to dream of expanding it into a great, world-class institution on the scale of the Smithsonian, with himself at the helm and his old friend Stimpson at his side.
Kennicott thought that financial backers could be lured into the idea. By creating an initial stir with the Metropolitan Block museum as a bait, ”the great Institution to be considered as merely a possibility in the distance. . . When their mental gullets are stretched by swallowing the (Metropolitan Block) museum, we can try `em with the great Chicago Institution for the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge!!!!”
”Things is movin`, ” he wrote enthusiastically to Baird. ”That is so!”
But Kennicott was by then a man much in demand as a naturalist. The Western Union Telegraph Co. was studying the possibility of laying an overland telegraph cable from the U.S. to Alaska, then known as Russian America. From there it was to cross the Bering Strait over to Russia and to western Europe as a direct link to the U.S. Kennicott was hired to command a scientific corps that would collect natural-history specimens as it surveyed the prospects of such a project.
Taking a leave of absence from the academy, he joined the expedition in early 1865. To watch over the museum in his absence, he got his fellow trustees to hire his friend Stimpson.
The telegraph expedition was a disaster. Sailing from New York, the expedition members crossed Nicaragua by land to the Pacific, then sailed on to San Francisco. Management of the undertaking was autocratic and shoddy, ridden with petty jealousies among the crews and leaders and suffering a long delay in San Francisco. Kennicott suffered a heart attack. When the expedition finally shipped out again, it reached Alaska dangerously late in the season and badly equipped for the winter.
It was so late in the year, in fact, that Kennicott`s crew lost its first season of collecting, forced to winter with short rations at Ft. Nulato, a Russian outpost on the Yukon River. Kennicott spent a winter of dejection with his men. With spring his enthusiasm began to soar again. Then on May 12, 1866, he overexerted himself while saving a Russian from the fort whose canoe had capsized in the swift, frigid river jammed with breaking ice floes.
His companions worried about his health that night. Kennicott went to his room and wrote out instructions for what needed to be done to complete the expedition should something happen to him. Unable to sleep and the sun already up, he roused one of his men at 5 a.m. and asked him to go walking with him. Still sleepy, the man begged off, but heard Kennicott strolling through the fort compound, humming a voyageur tune. When breakfast was served later in the morning, Kennicott was nowhere to be found, and a search party was sent out.
His body was discovered a few hundred yards away, next to the river. On the river bank, Kennicott had laid out his compass and had been scratching out bearings of the distant mountains in the sand.
”He lay upon his back, his arms across his breast,” wrote William H. Dall, one of his crew, ”his hat, a black felt broad-brim, just touched his forehead with one edge. . . His eyes were half-closed, his face calm and peaceful.”
Kennicott was 30 when he died. The telegraph cable was never laid, becoming unnecessary when one was laid across the Atlantic. But Kennicott`s work on his two Arctic expeditions did have historical as well as scientific repercussions. Many of his observations of the land were instrumental in convincing the United States to buy Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867.
When news of his death reached Chicago, it was just one of two severe shocks to the academy. The same year he died a fire destroyed the
Metropolitan Block, and with it half of the museum`s collections. Kennicott`s legacy was strong enough, however, to keep interest high and money coming in. Hiring Stimpson as Kennicott`s replacement, the trustees put up an even larger building, the most fireproofed museum in the country, at Wabash Avenue and Van Buren Street.
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Stimpson proved to be every bit as enthusiastic and visionary as his late friend. By 1871 he had so successfully rebuilt and enlarged the academy`s collections that it ranked fourth largest in the country. By then married and the father of two small children, Stimpson realized the work of a naturalist would never make him rich.
Suffering from tuberculosis, he worried about his health. He set about reclaiming specimens he had left with the Smithsonian and Harvard University, collected all his manuscripts and began writing at the museum. He planned two books as the summation of all his work in marine biology. Though only 40 years old, he told friends that if something happened to him, at least the books would be his legacy to his children so that they would know that he
”had not been idle.”
On Oct. 8, 1871, a fire broke out on the city`s West Side. Stimpson and the trustees who were able to reach the museum decided it lay safely south of the fire`s path. Besides, they thought, the building was fireproof enough to protect its contents. Their decision seemed sound, but the fire went out of control to become the Great Chicago Fire.
On Oct. 11, the day after the fire burned out, Stimpson and Eliphalet W. Blatchford, one of the academy trustees, went to the museum. There they saw that the fire had been so devastating that it literally exploded the building`s 2-foot-thick masonry walls and turned Kennicott`s collections, Stimpson`s collections and every other collection housed in the museum into ashes. The two then made their way to the core of the building where two days earlier Stimpson had left his nearly completed manuscripts in the museum vault.