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  Hosack had Lombardy poplars at Elgin. Some New Yorkers were felling their poplars because they didn’t want caterpillars dropping on their heads, but it is unlikely that Hosack did. He was much too comfortable with the natural world. He was also far too proud of the collection of native and exotic trees slowly maturing around the perimeter of his property. Someday, he would achieve the enclosing effect that Curtis had sought with his poplar “walls” at Brompton.

  As Hosack nurtured his Elgin tree collection—what would later be called an arboretum—he had the ear of the world’s greatest expert on American trees: his friend François André Michaux. Hosack was also benefiting from the expertise of the late André Michaux, because François André had edited and published his father’s History of the American Oaks in France in 1801. It was probably Hosack who wrote the anonymous review of this book that appeared in the Medical Repository, lavishing praise on foreign governments for supporting their botanists and botanical gardens. “It is almost incredible how much good may be done in this way by a government, at a very trifling or insignificant expense. . . . How differently nations act!” The review also charged Americans with botanical illiteracy: “While our native citizens are ignorant or incurious of the leafy tenants of their forests, the more enterprising and industrious sojourners from foreign countries discover, describe and arrange them, and teach us how to know and understand them.”

  Hosack was as enterprising as any immigrant. Just as he had in every other part of his garden, he was cultivating species of medical interest among his trees. The bark of his English elm could be boiled into a decoction useful in cases of skin ailments such as lepra ichthyosis, a condition in which the skin turned scaly as a fish. The Cherokee people chewed the root bark of bristly locust for an emetic effect. Even the dreaded Lombardy poplars were useful. Their buds, gently bruised and mixed with fresh butter, produced a cooling ointment for wounds, and the leaves could be soaked in vinegar and applied to ease the agony of gouty feet.

  Two months after the caterpillar scare, Delile wrote to a friend at the Jardin des Plantes saying that Hosack had gathered “the majority of the plants and above all the trees that grow at great distances across the territory of the United States.” Among the American tree species at Elgin were red maple, snakebark maple, and sugar maple; white oak, scarlet oak, black oak, chestnut white oak, post white oak, and pin oak; sweetgum, tuliptree, sassafras, quaking aspen, yew, bristly locust, and red cedar. Hosack had planted many exotic trees as well, including English elm, European mountain ash, and an oak from China. He was always on the alert for interesting new species. One day at a friend’s house, Hosack saw a writing desk made of an unusual wood. The desk had come from the friend’s brother, who lived in Bermuda, and Hosack was soon writing to Bermuda himself. “I have seen in the possession of your brother a writing desk of your native Cedar. Be so good as to direct one for me. As a Botanist I’m desirous of specimens of this sort,” he wrote. “I will also trouble you for a few Bermuda Cedars.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1806, Charles Willson Peale consulted Hosack’s brother-in-law, Caspar Wistar, about a painful condition. Peale was suffering from a hydrocele in his scrotum—had suffered on and off for years, in fact. He had already told Wistar about it in 1804, when Peale had tried to treat it with ice. “Doctors as well as Lawyers should know the whole truth,” Peale wrote Wistar cheerfully. “I have the pleasure to inform you that the effect from the application of the Ice to my Scrotum Six times yesterday” seemed to be a positive one. Peale decided ejaculation would help ease the pressure, too, but he was now a widower, and he thought that if he slept with a woman out of wedlock he might lose his children’s affection and respect. He therefore concluded that he “must submit to the lesser evil!”—masturbation. He wrote Wistar about the results. “After the discharge of that redundancy . . . the organs were in a better state to be healed.” Peale remarried in the fall of 1805, which, according to his theory, should have taken care of the problem for good. But the following June he was again suffering from a hydrocele. This time, Wistar performed the injection method that Hosack had been the first to perform in the United States. Peale was soon reporting to Wistar that his pain was vastly diminished and his temperature had returned to normal.

  Not long after this, Hosack pioneered another surgery in the United States: the first documented ligation of a femoral artery. His patient was an oysterman with a visibly pulsating mass in his thigh. Hosack sliced the man’s leg open and—as he later explained to Delile—“with my fingers I readily detached the artery [and] passed the needle probing with a double ligature beneath it. I then tied the ligatures leaving about an inch between them and divided the artery between the ligatures.” Within two months, the oysterman was back at work.

  With his innovative surgeries and his mesmerizing lectures, Hosack was starting to gain a national reputation. As word of Elgin spread across the country, too, more and more young Americans were coming through the garden gate in search of Hosack. He liked to think of his garden as a nursery not only for all the world’s flora but also for his own annual crop of engaged citizens. He explained his philosophy in a letter to one of his early botany students, Amos Eaton. “There is no study so well calculated to occupy the young mind, as the study of natural history,” he told Eaton. “Since my acquaintance with the principles upon which the subjects of natural history are arranged, I certainly look with very different eyes upon every object that falls under my view, whether it be the production of nature or of art.” He believed that studying the natural world saved young men from the “vicious propensities and pursuits” of city life. The rewards of teaching botany, meanwhile, flowed right back to him. He loved spending time with his students, whom he affectionately referred to as “my young gentlemen.”

  These days, as he walked along the garden paths with his students, Hosack saw an admirable scientific institution. He lectured on the plants that stretched in all directions around them, each species carefully labeled with its Latin and English names. He now had more than fourteen hundred exotic species in the garden and more than two hundred fifty native New Yorkers. At the end of his spring botany course, Hosack instituted an annual tribute to Linnaeus: a strawberry festival. In 1750, Linnaeus had managed to recover from a terrible attack of gout after eating wild strawberries, which he credited for his cure. John Francis later recalled expressing concern to Hosack about the annual expense of the strawberry festival, but he replied that “the disciples of the illustrious Swede must have a foretaste of them, if they cost me a dollar a piece.”* Hosack also predicted that strawberries would eventually become “abundant and cheap” in the United States.

  Proud as he was of his Elgin collections, Hosack knew that Linnaeus had already named six thousand species in the 1753 Species Plantarum; in the half century since then, naturalists around the world had found many more. Hosack wanted them all. His circle of friends and students—Francis, Delile, Michaux, the Eddy boys, and others—kept up a hectic pace of plant collection in the fields and woods around New York, while Hosack continued fetching new shipments down at the harbor. Caspar was now helping his uncle compile a catalogue of the Elgin collections. They sat with plants around them, writing out species names, crossing out those that later seemed wrong, and putting asterisks next to those they had found growing locally.

  Some of these specimens survive today in the herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. One day Caspar collected a wild grass specimen of some sort, for example, and Hosack and Delile labored over its identity. It seemed to be a species of Festuca—but what was the correct species name? They settled on fasciculata. On September 6, 1806, Hosack wrote the name and the date on a scrap of paper and affixed it to the specimen. The work of botanists was incredibly difficult, full of riddles and blanks. Still, it struck some of Hosack’s medical colleagues as frivolous. The activity behind the stone walls at Elgin seemed too conveniently severed from the bloody mess of clinical practice. But Hosack believed that saving lives requir
ed more of American doctors than sawing away at a diseased limb. It also demanded the rusty reds of dried flowers, the bone-brittle boughs lying on a table, the veined and mottled pages covered in Latin binomials.

  Detail from Hosack’s Festuca specimen, collected in 1806

  Soon Hosack had the Elgin catalogue ready. Now, when he wrote to his botanical contacts around the nation and the world asking for plants, he would be including this catalogue to show what specimens he could share by way of exchange. He had an ever-widening circle of naturalists he could write to, even within the United States. Thanks largely to his own example, more Americans were beginning to realize that botanical gardens were both urgent and possible in the young Republic. Scattered efforts were underway to launch gardens in other towns. In 1805, a group of private gentlemen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had pooled funds to endow a professorship of natural history and to launch a botanical garden connected to Harvard College. In Philadelphia, Rush was lobbying the state legislature for a garden—although he was having as little luck as Hosack in securing public funds.

  Hosack had a strong competitive streak, especially about New York, but his allegiance to the world of botany triumphed over his hometown pride. In September 1806, he sent his new Elgin catalogue to President Jefferson with a long letter and a bold idea. He told the president he had already managed to grow cotton at Elgin and he hoped to naturalize other Southern and tropical plants to the Northeast before long. If the government were to fund a chain of botanical gardens across the country, American botanists could study the plants of each different region and share their findings nationally, with benefits for the entire nation.

  It was a lot to ask of an embattled president. Perhaps Hosack should have stopped there, but he made two more requests of Jefferson. The first had to do with François André Michaux, who was still in New York. Hosack praised Jefferson for having dispatched Lewis and Clark, and then he confidently suggested a new expedition, to the southwestern part of the Louisiana Territory. “In Natural History much is also to be expected from exploring the territory in the course of [the] Red River”—in today’s Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. “That latitude is always rich in vegetable productions.” Hosack explained to Jefferson who Michaux was and proposed that he be named leader of the new expedition. Evidently no one had ever told Hosack about the botanical debacle that had unfolded in 1793 while he was studying in Britain, when Jefferson helped organize a western expedition for François André Michaux’s father that had been aborted by a political scandal involving the French minister Genêt.

  Worse still, Hosack hadn’t heard that Jefferson had already sent an expedition to the Red River five months earlier, with a surveyor named Thomas Freeman at its head. The president had asked sixty-five-year-old William Bartram to serve as chief naturalist, but Bartram had declined. Freeman had next turned to Benjamin Smith Barton, who also said no but suggested his student Peter Custis. In April 1806, the Freeman–Custis Expedition, with thirty-five men in its ranks, had left Fort Adams near the town of Natchez on the Mississippi and navigated to the Red River. As the explorers floated along, they admired the deep thickets of willows lining the riverbanks and beyond that endless groves of cottonwoods, sycamores, cypresses, oaks, and mistletoe-draped pecan trees. In late July, however, the trip was abruptly cut short by the one thousand Spanish soldiers who had been chasing them through the countryside. Guides from the Caddo Nation informed Custis and Freeman that the Spanish commander was “a Cross and bad man” who wanted to capture and kill the members of the American expedition for trespassing on what he considered Spanish territory. After a tense encounter with the Spaniards, Freeman and Custis turned their group around and hightailed it back to Natchitoches (in today’s Louisiana). They had arrived there only two weeks before Hosack advised Jefferson to send an expedition to explore the Red River.

  Hosack blundered on in his letter to Jefferson with a bold request concerning the Lewis and Clark expedition: “If sir the gentlemen who are at present on their travels to the Missouri, discover any new or useful plants I would be very happy in obtaining a small quantity of the seeds they may procure.” Hosack didn’t realize it, but he had probed yet another sensitive spot. Jefferson was at that moment agonizing about the long silence from Lewis and Clark. Jefferson’s response, written one week later, was all of two sentences long: “Th. Jefferson presents his compliments to Mr. Hosack & his thanks for the catalogue of his plants. Should he have it in his power to be useful to his institution at any time he shall embrace the occasion with that pleasure which attends every aid given to the promotion of science.” It wasn’t very encouraging. But it was just enough for Hosack to keep nursing his hope that he might one day receive some of the Lewis and Clark specimens for Elgin.

  Neither Hosack nor Jefferson knew it, but Lewis and Clark were finally emerging from the wilderness. Five days after Jefferson wrote Hosack, Lewis sat down in a hotel room in St. Louis and composed a letter to the president announcing “the safe arrival of myself and party.” In the course of a journey lasting more than two years, the men had battled grizzly bears, run canoe-crushing rapids, crossed the Rockies, and lain helplessly ill beside the trail, wracked by fever and diarrhea. They had traveled—by foot, on horseback, and in their boats—over seven thousand miles. Lewis reported to Jefferson that “we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean,” but he also broke the news that there was no all-water route to the Pacific coast. It took a full month for this letter to reach the president in Washington. When Jefferson received it, he was filled “with unspeakable joy,” as he told Lewis in an immediate reply. Hosack probably heard the exciting news a few days later when the New-York Herald published a letter from a St. Louis resident who had seen Lewis and Clark. “They arrived here about one hour ago . . . three cheers were fired. They really have the appearance of Robinson Crusoes—dressed entirely in buckskins.”

  When Charles Willson Peale heard that Lewis had returned, he was as desperate as Hosack to see specimens. Already in the fall of 1805, Jefferson had forwarded to Peale skeletons, skins, and live animals from a tantalizing early shipment of plant, animal, and mineral specimens Lewis and Clark had sent from Fort Mandan, the encampment (in today’s North Dakota) where they had waited out the winter of 1804 to 1805. Now, however, while Clark went to visit friends in Virginia, Lewis went to Washington to see Jefferson and enjoy a long winter visit packed with festive dinners and excited conversations about the expedition. Peale kept needling Jefferson from Philadelphia, telling him in February 1807, “I long to see Captain Lewis.” In April, Lewis finally traveled to Philadelphia, where he sat for a portrait by Peale and showered him with specimens for the museum. Peale rejoiced to a friend, “I have animals brought from the sea coast” that are “totally unknown.”

  Peale soon began preparing and mounting the latest trove of animal specimens and drawing pictures of them for a volume on the Corps of Discovery’s natural history findings that Jefferson and Lewis planned to issue, along with two other volumes that would contain a narrative of the journey and a record of Lewis and Clark’s geographical findings. As for the expedition’s botanical feats, the number of plant species new to Western science that Lewis and Clark had collected and described during their voyage came to nearly one hundred eighty, among them many plants used as medicines by Native Americans.

  Jefferson sent none of these treasures to Hosack. The latter may have annoyed the president with his demands, or perhaps Hosack’s close association with the late Hamilton nettled Jefferson. Hosack would be shut out of the most thrilling botanical discovery of his era. After setting aside certain seeds for his own gardens at Monticello, Jefferson divided the bulk of the plants among three Philadelphia naturalists whom he and Lewis knew well. The first was William Hamilton of The Woodlands; the second was Benjamin Smith Barton. The third was Bernard McMahon, whose Gardener’s Calendar Jefferson loved and with whom he had been exchanging letters and plants for several years. In March
1807, Jefferson sent some of the Lewis and Clark plant specimens to McMahon, who thanked Jefferson and promised to keep him updated on the progress of the plants he was growing from Lewis’s seeds. Among them were Mandan tobacco, snowberry, Osage orange, prairie flax, and many more species completely novel to naturalists—at least to those of European descent.

  Just as Lewis was arriving in Philadelphia, McMahon sent him a note. “There is at present a young man boarding in my house, who, in my opinion, is better acquainted with plants, in general, than any man I ever conversed with on the subject.” McMahon told Lewis he thought this young man, Frederick Pursh, would be the right person to help catalogue and draw illustrations of Lewis and Clark’s botanical specimens for the planned natural history volume. Pursh was an immigrant from Saxony who had recently spent several years as head gardener at The Woodlands, but McMahon told Lewis—“between you and me”—that William Hamilton hadn’t treated Pursh very well. Pursh had decamped in 1805 to work for Benjamin Smith Barton, who needed help collecting and drawing specimens for a planned book on the flora of North America. Barton, the second naturalist to whom Jefferson and Lewis directed plant specimens from the expedition, was also the man Jefferson envisioned writing the text for the volume on the expedition’s natural discoveries. Since the talented Pursh was already working for Barton, these two could easily join forces to organize, illustrate, and describe Lewis’s plants.