Butterfly People Read online

  Perhaps most stirring of all, Edwards, in the halls of the British Museum, bumped into a thin, intense Edward Doubleday, now the curator of insects, and Doubleday told him of plans to leave the museum for Kentucky, to make his home there. (A year later he would be dead from a spinal tumor.) No record exists of what passed between them, but the Englishman must have given Edwards an earful about what should be done on American butterflies and why it should be done by Americans. In his meetings with Gould and Spence, Edwards had been exposed to a new middle-class market in natural history books, but his time with Doubleday, as well as his visit with Wallace and Bates, meant even more, for even though he did not sell his brother’s gold cross and was disgusted by London’s class extremes—“its gold and rags”—he returned home sold on butterflies, not birds, as his life’s work.34

  The second legacy from Jonas, the title to thirty thousand acres of land bought cheap from a Virginia speculator, would reward Edwards for many years, for under it was one of the thickest veins of coal in the world, enough to make the region the bulwark of the country’s coal industry by the end of the century and beyond.35 Oil, squeezed from cannel coal, had just become profitable as a lamp illuminant, and others in the East—above all, the speculators—were eager to exploit it. (In fact, from the 1790s on, easterners owned more than 93 percent of west Virginia, turning it, in effect, into a colony of absentee American capitalists. It has remained that way ever since, with most residents themselves left poor and landless.)36 An incipient capitalist as well as a naturalist, Edwards decided to make his living operating coal mines. Several months after Jonas’s death and his trip to London, he shrewdly studied real estate law, passed his bar exam in New York (the first man to do so in that state), set up an office on Wall Street, and then traveled to the Kanawha Valley to take possession of his land.37 After raising capital from London and New York investors, he organized, in 1864, at the height of the Civil War, the Wall Street–funded Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company, with himself as manager at a salary of $3,000 a year. He launched the first coal towboat in mining history, set up cabins for workers and a company store, and blasted the first mines near what would become his home.38 For four more years, Edwards went by coach and horse, back and forth to West Virginia from Newburgh, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River, where he had lived since 1859 with his wife, Catherine Tappan, the daughter of the abolitionist Arthur Tappan, and their three children.39 All the while, his pursuit of coal unveiled another reality having nothing to do with coal, and as enthralling to him as it had been to his Calvinist forebear.

  Many more people were collecting butterflies since Edwards’s days at Williams, a change that helped move him away from birds. He had first begun to “go down the butterfly path,” as he put it, around 1856, when he was thirty-three. Probably he picked up the essentials of butterfly learning from John Weidemeyer, a German-American in New York City who, in 1864, wrote one of the first American books on butterflies, the unillustrated Catalogue of North American Butterflies—half of which dealt, however, with West Indian and Central American insects. Weidemeyer had a strange notion of “North American”; nevertheless, he raised informed questions about several American species that Edwards later attempted to answer, and in the late 1850s, he generously shared insects with Edwards for study and identification.40 Another German-American was John Akhurst of Brooklyn, an affable seller of entomological supplies and a taxidermist famous in naturalist circles for his goggles and his flowing shoulder-length hair, sprinkled with the white arsenic he used to stuff birds. Akhurst instructed Edwards in the arts of breeding and preserving lepidoptera.41

  Samuel Scudder, in his early twenties, would pay visits to Edwards in the late 1850s and early 1860s, once consuming “half a morning to trying to describe the differences” between various fritillaries, as Edwards would later remember it.42 Edwards often went on trips of his own, one a visit to Washington, D.C., where he learned from Titian Peale how to enclose specimen boxes in glass, thus letting the viewer see insects from nearly any angle, “a great contrivance, for discovery of differences or resemblances,” and a reminder of Gould’s encasements for hummers in London.43 Also, in Washington, he met Spencer Baird, busy amassing the collections of the Smithsonian (among the earliest in the country); Baird offered to send him, in exchange for a promise to identify them, all the insects his men had caught on expeditions, a tremendous boon for Edwards.44 His first interest had been birds, but there were numerous books on birds already, and Edwards knew he could not compete with them. American butterflies, on the other hand, presented nearly an open field.

  In 1868 Edwards shed his absentee-owner status and moved south, out of necessity, from New York’s Hudson Valley to Coalburgh, the name he himself may have chosen for that tiny town along the Kanawha River, the central artery of West Virginia. Although the state was covered by a vast forested wilderness, Edwards’s county had been settled to some degree with family farmers along or near the river.45 When he cleared land to make way for his dwelling, he left standing elm, sassafras, and tulip trees, the food plants for several butterflies, with moist woodlands near the river, the ideal breeding grounds in particular for the zebra swallowtail, an insect Edwards would soon come to study.46 Pawpaw bushes, the food plant of the zebra, dressed the lower hillsides along the pathway from Edwards’s house to the entrance of the mine on the mountainside facing the river. “As I write,” Edwards said in a letter to Henry Edwards, a stage actor, a devoted butterfly man, and one of William’s closest friends (although no relation), “I see patches of lavender blue phlox at 200 square, and masses of white trillium, and were I in the spot, I should see millions of violets, blue, yellow, and white. This is the loveliest bit of territory in the United States. I wish you were here to see it.” Weeks later he wrote, again to Henry, that “the last rain has made all nature beautiful. I have roses without end. Swarms of Cybele [great spangled fritillaries] are in my clover.”47

  Edwards planted flowers in the garden near the house, especially his preferred zinnias, milkweed, and phlox. In late summer, when he stepped off his back porch, he would see swallowtails “swarming over the Phloxes and Zinnias.”48 Along the wooded peripheries, he put flowering pear, peach, apple, and plum trees, all pleasing to butterflies, and still farther off, well beyond his house, there was a wilder nature, from the narrow swampy lowlands and clover fields along the river below to the sinewy topography above, with its deep hollows, silvery creeks, and rolling mountains, cradling a vast population of butterfly life.49 Until he was sixty years old, Edwards gathered larvae on the mountaintop behind his home.50 Weather and season permitting, he went out nearly every day, recording what he learned in a journal he kept from 1859 to the end of the century.

  The place he favored most was Paint Creek, a field and streambed that sloped down to the nearby Kanawha River; he decided early on, ironically, that it would also be the site of his coal mining business. In August 1864, he spied a butterfly there he had never seen before, on ironweed—a male specimen of the Diana fritillary (Speyeria diana), a bright, handsome orange-and-russet-brown insect, its underwings speckled with silver characteristic of nearly all fritillaries. The insect was feeding in its preferred habitat, an opening at the edge of a mountain forest. Three weeks later, he also saw an even more striking butterfly, larger, dark blue and velvety black, with little white markings along the wing margins, “feeding so quietly on ironweed,” as he put it, “as to allow me to stand near it and watch its motions.” He soon learned that this was the female counterpart of the earlier butterfly; the two, so visually different, were the same species, European or English claims to the contrary notwithstanding.51 More secretive and forest-bound than the male, the female was there mainly to find a mate or to lay eggs on violets, its only food plant. “The contrast between the sexes has no parallel among North American butterflies,” Edwards wrote.52 On one April morning, “up Paint Creek,” he also saw “myriads of blues,” little, jewel-like insects, and caught hundreds in a single
arc of the net. The next April, he watched countless female zebra swallowtails “flying through the woods” as hundreds of checkerspots “swarmed” around his feet; a year later, in May, troops of butterflies massed on the wet sandy pathways, forming a sprawling patchwork of color. And then, on one early June day in the late 1870s, he inspected a giant rock slab near the woods “moistened by the drippings from a coal seam over it” and “studded with Papilios as thick as they could stand. Allowing one square inch to each butterfly, and this is ample, there were upwards of two-thousand butterflies in that mass.”53

  Such a surfeit of winged creatures, side by side with a mostly buried mineral treasure, defined Edwards’s life in the early 1870s. But how did he reconcile these two incompatible forms of energy, one alive and symbolic of nature’s beauty, a thing of use value merely, serving as a window into nature’s realm, the other dead, attractive for the price it would draw in the market, and capable of severing the link to life and obliterating beauty? Were butterflies and coal the same in his mind, both property at the disposal of human beings, or did they stand for opposing ways of being and seeing?

  Some Americans at the time feared the impact economic activity might have on nature, among them two New Englanders: Henry Thoreau of Concord, Massachusetts, and George Marsh, a Vermonter and an early advocate of nature protection. Heirs of the Romantic tradition developed by the English and Europeans, both men lamented the demise of the forests caused by railroads and heedless agricultural practices.54 Thaddeus Harris, a librarian at Harvard College and an all-round naturalist, also worried about economic change, especially in Cambridge, where he lived, “mourning,” as he noted in an 1851 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, that the “so-called hand of improvement” had “rooted out many of the beautiful plants and insects that were once found in this vicinity.” They have “entirely disappeared from their ancient haunts, driven away, or exterminated by the changes effected therein.”55 Europeans, with so much of their forests already cut down, were even more apprehensive. In the mid-1870s August Weismann, one of Germany’s most respected naturalists, painted a sorry picture of an economy that had “caused the extinction” of many “vertebrate animals” and “constantly leads to extermination of many other species of different classes.” “When in America hundreds of thousands of acres of primeval forest are annually destroyed,” he observed, “the conditions of life of a numerous fauna and flora must be thereby suddenly changed, leaving no choice but extermination.”56 Many years earlier, Humboldt had said the same things, despite affirming, as he frequently did, an inexhaustible nature. “When forests are destroyed,” he wrote in his 1815 Personal Narrative of Travels, “as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an improvident precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. By felling trees that cover the tops of and sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations; the want of fuel and a scarcity of water.”57

  Edwards may have shared these ideas, but no evidence exists that he did, and there are many arguments to the contrary—not least his youthful exposure to the tanning business, which Edwards never faulted, though it stripped the bark of the hemlock trees and polluted streams. Coal was comparable to tanning in its potential to inflict harm, but Edwards never publicly addressed that danger. His vested interest probably prevented his criticizing a business that paid for his butterfly work. So, too, may have been the scale of the mining, overseen by Edwards himself so long as he remained in charge, with never more than one hundred workers, still decades away from the absentee corporate ownership at the end of the century.58 Edwards, moreover, ran his mines not far from a nearly pristine nature. Who could imagine that mining might decimate the butterflies in what seemed their sempiternal numbers? “You live among a nature not yet wasted,” wrote Philipp Zeller, a Prussian lepidopterist, to Edwards, while “our environs [in Europe] are so cultivated as to yield less and less every year.”59

  The tension between butterfly collecting and coal mining seemed not to weigh too heavily on Edwards; nor did it on many of his contemporaries, who, like Thomas Jefferson before them, both worshipped nature’s splendor and exploited it. Edwards embodied this tension to the highest degree, but so did other butterfly men, especially in the Far West, where they joined the California gold rush, from Pierre Lorquin, who left France to get rich, to Richard Stretch, an English immigrant to San Francisco and a railroad engineer who collected small lepidoptera, to Henry Edwards, a collector supreme and stage actor, who happily performed Shakespeare for gold miners. In a public lecture entitled “Iron and Its Relation to Civilization,” delivered in San Francisco in 1876, Henry Edwards celebrated mining as a “necessity of our being,” observing, “what an utter blank the world would be, if iron did not exist—no railroads, no ploughs, no printing presses.” He urged America to “develop her mineral treasures,” “the grandest foundation on which the prosperity of a country can be based.”60 Nature might be treated both as moneymaking property and as a blessed gift of beauty; take something away from it and it would pop up again somewhere else or in some other form. All is one. Linnaeus, Buffon, and Humboldt believed this. Emerson believed it, too, writing that “man’s operations taken together are so insignificant that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.” So did Whitman, who affirmed in 1878 “the pulsations of all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever,—the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things—where from I feel and know that death is not the ending, as was thought, but the real beginning—and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter.”61

  The conception of American nature as endlessly fertile, seen alike in the coal and the butterfly fauna of Paint Creek, hid much wrong in mining. This outlook pervaded the first of Edwards’s great three-volume Butterflies of North America, issued in ten parts at three-month intervals between 1868 and 1872, published in Philadelphia by the American Entomological Society; it was the first book of its kind by an American. Edwards traveled from Coalburgh to Philadelphia and back again, nursing it through production.62 The time was ripe for such a work, he believed, since so many species had been unearthed or were better known than since the days of Boisduval. He had hoped to present a “complete” account of North American butterflies but, lacking time, chose “a sufficient number of new, or hitherto unfigured or disputed species, to make at least a moderate volume.”63 Other works could follow later.

  Edwards spared “no expense” on pictures, because words alone “hindered” insight into “natural history,” he told a friend. “Nothing is more discouraging to the beginner than dry, unillustrated descriptions.”64 Based on specimens he obtained with great care on his own, the images were drawn mostly by Mary Peart and colored by Lydia Bowen, a protégée of Audubon’s, who would remain Edwards’s principal colorist for the next twenty years, with help from her sister, Mrs. Leslie. The plates were among the best ever done for a work of natural history, unencumbered by fantasies or myths about nature, combining accurate science with a feeling for the beauty of the things they depicted; they nearly approximated the actual color (tints, shadings, suffusion) of the butterfly wings. In 1770, the wealthy English jeweler and butterfly man Dru Drury, in his Illustrations of Natural History, imagined “preserving” butterflies from “the ravages of time” by representing them “perfectly” in his volumes; at the same time, he saw the “difficulty” of capturing “the innumerable train of colors, the great variety of tints, the harshness of some, the softness of others, together with the manner of their running into one another.” The task seemed insurmountable.65 But by the mid-1850s, throughout the West, technical advances had overcome many of the hurdles, from the elite market to the poor color. Peart and Bowen reaped the benefits of these changes.

  Edwards’s volume presented both sexes of many American butterflies for the first time, among them many checkered species of fritillaries, crowned by the gra
nd dimorphic Diana fritillary of Paint Creek and by the nearly equally grand Nokomis fritillary, a “superb” sexually dimorphic species captured in 1871 during a government expedition to Arizona. Edwards was the first American naturalist to systematically study the “blues,” the jewel-like insects he found on Paint Creek and its environs. Among the earliest on the wing even as snow still lay on the ground, they gave him a sense of well-being little else could equal.66

  Edwards wrote many fine descriptions of these butterflies, although there was nothing groundbreaking about them, especially in the early parts of The Butterflies of North America. But between 1870 and 1872, he embarked on research that would begin to change how both butterflies and the natural world came to be perceived. First, he began to breed seriously from egg to butterfly or imago; second, he became an outright Darwinian naturalist. Edwards insisted, as some of his predecessors had already suspected, that one could not safely identify butterfly species merely by looking at the adult insect, or imago. Imagoes could mislead, and even though the adults of some butterflies might resemble each other nearly exactly, there might be so many differences among them in the early stages as to challenge any designation of them as belonging to the same species. Beneath looks might lurk differences in the early stages; if eggs, caterpillars, and pupae differed, then so did the “butterflies” that succeeded them. One must go, therefore, beyond imagoes (however persuasive as identifiers) to the study of metamorphosis, or the “changing of form,” at all stages of the life history of the butterfly. To do that, one had to breed systematically, touching every phase, as Buffon long ago had insisted.