A Naturalist in Indian Territory. The Journals of S.W. Woodhouse, 1849-50 by John S.Tomer; Michael J. BrodheadReview by: Joseph EwanSIDA, Contributions to Botany, Vol. 15, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER, 1993), p. 561Published by: The Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41967041 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

Tomer, John S. and Michael J. Brodhead (eds.) 1992. A Naturalist in Indian Territory. The Journals of S.W. Woodhouse, 1849-50. (ISBN 0-8061- 2476-8, hbk). University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK 73019. $29.95. 288 pp.

"Last night the Camp was alarmed by the horses breaking their picket pins and running furiously & snorting and it was thought by many that Indians were about," Dr. Woodhouse, physician and naturalist with the Creek-Cherokee boundary survey, was writing his journal 16 August 1850. He was then east of the Cimmaron River in Indian Territory. "There is much of a sameness in this part of the country[.] hardly a flower of any kind is to be seen." The doctor wrote the next day that "shortly after I got in bed I thought I saw an Indian skulking near the camp. I put on my shoes seized my gun and started in my shirt tails but saw nothing of him[.} this has been a tremendous hot day."

Thirty years after Thomas Nuttall had botanized in the Arkansas Territory, Samuel Washing- ton Woodhouse (1821-1904), who had known Nuttall at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, is today generally identified as the author of the later "Report on the Natural History" appended to Lorenzo Sitgreaves' Report of an Expedition down the Zuni and Colorado Rivers. Woodhouse published eight papers on birds and mammals of the southwest in the Academy's Proceedings. John L. LeConte described Woodhouse s beetles; Edward Hallowell, his reptiles; and Baird and Girard, his fishes. In 1865 Asa Gray, who was then working on the Compositae for his Synoptical Flora , named Achyropappus woodhousei for the collector. Incidentally, though unidenti- fied by these authors, Asa Gray's handwriting is illustrated by his annotation on the Woodhouse specimen of Solidago petiolaris (p. 41). Most of Woodhouse's surviving plant collections - originally over 1400 - received by John Torrey in 1852 are now in the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium.

Authored by an ornithologist-museum curator, John Tower, in tandem with Michael Brodhead, an historian of the American West, this book will interest the student of Indian lore, the ecologist reconstructing the habitat of the buffalo hunter, or Nuttall's canebrake "still to be seen," or by the reader picturing Tallassee before it became Tulsa. Thoroughly documented and indexed, this resurrection of Woodhouse's three journals is a blend of habitats and habits. "The prairie was covered by flowers of Red, Yellow & White, forming a bouquet on a large scale[.} we got our tents pitched and had dinner at 1 2 N[.] in the evening we took a bath and I wrote to Aunt. " That was Woodhouse in Indian Territory.

Woodhouse retired from the natural history stage in 1854 due, it is said, to declining health. He was elected to the ornithology committee of the Philadelphia Academy along with its patron Thomas B. Wilson and John Cassin (see SIDA 15 (1): 167. 1992). As a player in the bygone Audubonian Epoch Woodhouse came back on stage in his last years and was greeted at the A.O.U. meeting the year he died. A lingering question: for whom did the American Woodsman name his son, John Woodhouse Audubon? - -Joseph Ewan , Missouri Botanical Garden , P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299, U.S.A.

Sida 15(3): 561. 1993

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