I put the book down and brought my head back into the 21st century. I’d been reading 19th-century correspondence about explorations in the far Northwest by some of the most important people to document the biological diversity of Alaska and western Canada. I’d just finished a long letter from 1864 by Robert Kennicott to R. McFarlane, a Hudson’s Bay Company factor.

This was in William Healy Dall’s 1915 biography of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who was the first curator at the Smithsonian Institution and later served as Assistant Secretary and then as Secretary.
Continue reading →