Butterfly People Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by William R. Leach

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-90787-5

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-42293-5

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leach, William, [date]

  Butterfly people : an American encounter with the beauty of the world / William Leach.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-375-42293-5

  1. Butterflies—United States—History—19th century.

  2. Entomologists—United States—History—19th century.

  3. Industrial revolution—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.

  QL549.L43 2012 595.78’9097309034—dc23 2012000389

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Front-cover art (bottom row, center) by Ferdinand Heinrich Herman Strecker; (all others) Mary Evans Picture Library

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  Book design by M. Kristen Bearse

  v3.1

  In memory of Jeannette Hopkins

  Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

  —SIGMUND FREUD

  I did not dream of there being such splendid things in the world.

  —ADRIAN LATIMER of Lumpkin, Georgia, to Herman Strecker, January 27, 1880

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  Part One

  ENCOUNTERS WITH THE BUTTERFLIES OF AMERICA

  1 Yankee Butterfly People

  2 The German-American Romantics

  3 Beating Hearts

  4 Word Power

  5 The Life and Death of Butterflies

  Part Two

  ENCOUNTERS WITH THE BUTTERFLIES OF THE WORLD

  6 In the Wake of Empire

  7 Butterflies at the Fair

  8 Death of the Butterfly People

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  Preface

  NEARLY ALL MY LIFE I have been drawn to butterflies, among the most beautiful things in nature. As a nine-year-old boy I began collecting in and around a graveyard, in a field that led down to a railroad line, and at the margins of a streambed that ran along the railroad, all within easy reach of my home in a neatly packed lower-middle-class neighborhood. Nothing else so fulfilling or exhilarating marked my childhood. In my mind’s eye I see myself running, rushing, falling on the ground, heart pounding, intense beyond belief, lost to an all-consuming purpose. But I stopped collecting abruptly, for want of continuing reinforcement and the absence of informed guidance. I returned to it in my late twenties and, again, in my mid-thirties, in the glorious Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, where I first saw the Diana fritillary and the zebra swallowtail in all its seasonal phases. Then I stopped for good, although, in spirit, I hardly changed at all—despite the rising climate against collecting and my own misgivings about killing—because collecting took me out of myself and far into nature as nothing else could ever have done. It let me forget time and turmoil and defy many odds, and to see a multitude of living forms. It opened me to the sensuousness of the natural world, which reflected my own inner energies; the color in me met the color outside me. Yet I never took a course on insects or acquired a much greater knowledge until I decided to do this book, the research and writing of which have now cost me many years. I have written it in homage to my own past as well as to great Americans, collectors of all sorts (including some German and English butterfly people) as they came to know butterflies, first in America after 1850, then in the tropics after 1885.

  But the book became more than that. It became a story of the American awareness and experience of the beauty of the world, in both its natural and its artificial forms, spanning many years. Soon after the Civil War, Americans of all classes came in contact with nature—and with butterflies—in pervasive ways. This was a remarkable thing in its own right, for never before had so many people come to know so many butterflies, native and foreign; never before had so many entered “the kingdom of form,” as the American philosopher George Santayana put it in his 1896 Sense of Beauty, one of the most insightful books of the age. At the same time, the country underwent a massive industrial transformation, which produced a vast number of human-made artifacts, many seen for the first time at the world’s fairs, competing with butterflies—and other natural forms—for beauty. This, too, was a remarkable occurrence, opening up aesthetic frontiers of all kinds to more people in an unprecedented way. As Walt Whitman observed, it seemed as if Americans were about to know “nature and artifice” together at once, not as adversaries but as collaborators in the enrichment of life, and such, he believed, would continue to be the case, so long as a balance endured between them. But, as he feared, the balance did not last, and one form of “beauty”—the industrial, technological kind—began to take precedence, and at great cost to nature and to butterflies. So here, then, was my story: how Americans came to know the butterflies and, subsequently, how the butterflies (as exemplary of all natural beauty) began to lose out in the contest with another form of beauty, the industrial-artifactual one, and what that victory meant not only for the well-being of the natural world but for the well-being of American culture as well.

  The whole investigation was deeply gratifying for me, to make up for years of ignorance. I’m afraid I never overturned my deficit; nor had I ever expected to, since I had no desire to become a professional expert on insects. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal more about butterflies and about the history of America’s attachment to butterflies and of its complex relationship with the beauty of the world as well as of my own. I learned, too, how critical the study of these insects had been to the understanding of the natural world, not merely at the margins of inquiry but at the very core of it; for a brief moment in the 1870s and ’80s, some of the most advanced naturalists of Europe and England—Charles Darwin, August Weismann, Henry Bates, and Alfred Russel Wallace, among them—dwelled on butterflies as a way to illuminate the origin and evolution of species, and Americans, too, were at the forefront—leading all the others, in fact, in the depth and range of their insights, embracing Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the driving engine of evolution, even as most naturalists at the time rejected or denounced it. I also learned that butterflies captured the imagination of thousands of other men and women (besides the natural scientists), just as butterflies had captured mine when I was a boy, never to lose their hold on me.

  Introduction

  “THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD,” wrote America’s greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, in 1725, “consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the Supreme Being.… This beauty is peculiar to natural things, it surpassing the art of man.” In the nineteenth century, many Americans, including Edwards’s great-grandson William Henry Edwards, encountered the butterflies, among the most evolved in terms of beauty, by some accounts, of all creatures. By beauty here is meant not merely the wings, however beautiful they may be, but the metamorphosis (from the Greek for “changing form”) and life history of the insect, from the egg and caterpillar to the pupa and adult, as well as the butterfly in relation to a world full of other life. The encounter took place first with native American species, then with foreign or exotic one
s, moths as well as butterflies, the “night” and “day butterflies,” as they were called—or, collectively, the Lepidoptera, the order’s name referring, in Greek, to the scales covering the wings. By the 1880s, it seemed as if everyone in America was chasing “flying flowers,” to quote Augustus Radcliffe Grote, an American expert on moths.1 People from all walks of life—sheep farmers, shopkeepers, barbers, lawyers, actors, drugstore clerks, housekeepers, wallpaper hangers, priests, Wall Street brokers, glassblowers, miners, and mine managers—had taken up the butterfly net. At the end of the century a new kind of beauty would assume prominence, human-made and artificial; seen especially at the spectacular world’s fairs of the age, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, it would expand the world’s aesthetic palette, while at the same time challenging the “beauty peculiar to natural things.”2 For a fleeting moment, however, the reign of the butterflies, and of all similar natural life, held sway in the imaginations of many American men and women.

  Two phenomena were responsible, in particular, for this history, each ushering people into the natural world with unsurpassed effect. The first was economic and technological and was connected to the rise of capitalism; the second was cultural and institutional and was exemplified by the tradition of Enlightenment natural history, having at its heart a passion for the diversity and beauty of natural forms. One was extractive, the other adoring, and both derived from the thousands of years of experience the Europeans and English imported with them to America. Both existed in the same country and the same people, from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt and beyond. America was founded as a kind of European achievement, the beneficiary, as it were, of centuries of struggle, at once armed with the brilliance to build a new economic empire and endowed with the heritage to understand and protect the natural world.

  The American economy had many aspects dependent on nature as landed wealth or property, and that brought Americans close to nature. No economic system had ever done this more thoroughly or swiftly. In what seems a twinkling of historical time, it carried people across the continent in search of land, minerals, virgin forests, and fossil fuels, a situation speeded up by a remarkable series of land surveys and revolutionized by the railroads, which by the 1880s had bound the country into a single market, condensing into only a few decades the expropriation of nature it had taken the Europeans and English many hundreds of years to carry out. As a fortuitous blessing, Americans experienced the country’s flora and fauna, its native species of butterflies and moths. Later in the century, the United States joined other Western countries, England and Germany especially, in worldwide commercial trade and butterfly collecting, driven by imperialism and the spread of railroad lines from Canada and Argentina to East Africa and the Asian subcontinent, thereby putting Americans in touch with the foreign parts of the globe.3 Many individuals made a living finding and selling butterflies on the world market. Most tragic and complex of them all was Will Doherty of Mount Auburn, Ohio, who spent most of his brief life in pursuit of the rarest of species. Extraordinary collections of butterflies in America issued from this descent below the equator. The biggest private one was cobbled together by Herman Strecker of Reading, Pennsylvania, a poor stonecutter with a wild yearning for the “things of endless joy,” as he called his insects.

  Family farming, America’s most widespread economic activity, also exposed Americans to butterflies, even while the majority of farmers had little interest in insects other than to eradicate them. As all the butterfly people came to realize, America had various natural landscapes, from the remote alpine meadows of the Rocky Mountains and the vast blooming prairies of the Midwest to the deserts of the Far West, the freshwater marshes of Connecticut, and the semitropical forests of Florida, alive with “flying jewels,” to cite Augustus Grote again. But family farms, much nearer at hand and not fundamentally dependent on the railroad, did perhaps more than any other landscape to convert Americans into butterfly lovers. Farms were distributed throughout the country, and while they sacrificed virgin forests and ecosystems in the short term, they contributed over the long term to nature’s vitality.4 Their distinguishing features were not just plowed fields or barns or silos but also ponds, woodlots, hedgerows, stone walls, open fields along roadsides, and meadows by streams or riverbeds for grazing cattle, all created for human purposes but also serving as likely habitats and hideouts for animals.5 Renewed by repeated mowing, the meadows, especially, teamed with many kinds of birds; sweet-smelling flowering plants, intoxicating in the summertime, such as milkweed, joe-pye weed, thistle, and clover; and butterflies. Black swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes) and monarchs (Danaus plexippus), among the most common and handsome of American butterflies, actually rose in number in direct relation to the spread of small farms. So did the pretty inch-wide meadow fritillary (Boloria bellona), first named by the pioneering butterfly man Samuel Scudder, in the 1870s, because it so often flew in the meadows of New England, and nowhere else. Authorities on butterflies today call these insects “pasture species.”6

  A hallmark of this hybrid rural landscape (hybrid because it intermingled human nature with wild nature), was its “walking through” character, existing before property lines rigidly divided farms from one another, and making nature readily traversable by anyone interested in knowing it. Alpine or mountain meadows of the country’s wilderness areas, carpeted by flowers and sometimes staggering in their array of butterflies, were often too far away or frightening for most Americans to visit, but this agrarian tapestry, resplendent with “winged wanderers on clover sweet,” was everywhere and usually inviting.7 Just as the railroad drew people over the horizon to unusual insects, family farming performed a captivating magic of its own. The farm landscape was easily navigated. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant and farmer, took delight in it in the 1790s, as, decades later, did the English explorer and collector Edward Doubleday, who witnessed “in Ohio literally tens of thousands” of painted ladies (Vanessa cardui), a lovely, wide-ranging species with an intricate lacework of color and design on the underwing, fluttering “on the thistles by the road sides.” The writer and reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson remembered “vividly” as a boy in Massachusetts in the 1830s, “walking along [a] breezy, upland road, lined with a continuous row of milk weed blossoms and white flowering alder, all ablaze with butterflies. I might have picked off hundreds, so absorbed were they in their pretty pursuits.”8 Forty years later, Walt Whitman walked his farm lanes in Camden, New Jersey, and in Brooklyn, New York. “As every man has his hobby-liking,” he noted, “mine is for a real farm-lane fenced by old chestnut-rails,” along which he saw “butterflies and butterflies, all sorts, white, yellow, brown, purple—now and then some gorgeous fellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists’ palettes dabb’d with every color.” “In the lane as I came along just now I noticed one spot, ten feet square or so, where more than a hundred had collected, holding a revel, a gyration-dance, a butterfly good-time, winding and circling, down and across, but always keeping within the limits.”9

  Most of America’s principal butterfly people would find many new species of butterflies in ecologically wild, relatively pristine places, but they also encountered butterflies living near or in nature that had been modified in some way by farming. Herman Strecker wrote wittily about this environment in his 1878 catalog, Butterflies and Moths of North America: “The best time to give [butterflies] chase and try to run them down is under a July sun, with the occasional slight obstacles of fences, creeks, rocks, logs, farmers’ dogs and farmers’ boys (just as bad)” blocking entry to “a grain or clover field” or to “gardens, marshes and meadows along edges of woods, and above all where plenty of thistles and sumac are growing.”10

  Just as family farms helped Americans see and come to know butterflies, so the natural history tradition created the cultural context for butterfly collecting and study. It gave Americans the means—the language, the interpretative methods and skills—to recognize and understand the living things
around them, and, by validating collecting as the cardinal activity, it led curious individuals into a realm of unforgettable sensuous experience. In countries without such a tradition, little existed—save folk taxonomies—to explain what lay within nature’s kingdom or to promote collecting or to make of it anything more than a practical activity. In the West, however, natural history had a long lineage, dating from at least Aristotle, who inquired into all nature, from rocks and animals to plants and fossils.11 Between the late Renaissance and the mid-1700s, it entered a new phase, fresh with purpose and mission, and by 1800 had claimed many thousands of followers, reflecting the Western intrusion into the rest of the world.12 Natural history institutionalized collecting as a transcendent goal and invented the apparatus of collecting, from killing jars and nets to poisons, baits, and cabinets. It embraced, as well, a systematic approach to the study of nature, with two related aspects, each reliant on collecting. The first was devoted to taxonomy and nomenclature, or to the grouping and naming of organisms; the second, to the study of life histories and the interrelations of all organisms to one another and to the wider environment; this aspect came to be called ecology by the 1880s.

  Carl Linnaeus of Sweden, Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon of France, Alexander Humboldt of Germany, and, later, Charles Darwin of England, major architects of modern natural history and all scientific autodidacts, commanded, in their books, healthy swaths of nature.13 Together they helped forge nature as a magnetic fulcrum of transatlantic Western culture, thrilling enough to keep people in its thrall for another 150 years.

  Linnaeus was the great exponent of systematic order, establishing a binomial nomenclature, still standard today, that bestowed on all organisms two Latin words, one for the genus, or group, to which the individual organism belonged, the other for the species itself; the two words together represented the complete individual (thus, Homo sapiens for “wise man”). Early in his career, Linnaeus seemed to believe that every species was unchanging and God-created, although later he adopted “limited transmutation,” and he never failed to root his understanding of species in concrete natural evidence.14 He looked foremost at plants and flowers, identifying them partly by sexual characteristics, but he also named and described animals, including numerous lepidoptera caught by a brave cohort of young field collectors he sent around the world.