I grew up in Forest Acres, a housing development on the edge of Corvallis, Oregon. One might expect there to be no forest left in those acres, but fortunately this set of developers had made a mistake and left more than a few second-growth trees that flexed and hollowed in the wind that came in over the Coast Range on almost every summer afternoon. These native trees were white oaks, big leaf maples, and—most plentifully—Douglas firs. The Doug firs in particular defined my childhood in ways that are, well, hard to define. Let’s just say it was a rare evening when I did not have to scrub the sap from my hands before dinner.
The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest
Sasquatch Books
304 pages
$16.11
David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work: An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest
Sasquatch Books
208 pages
$6.69
From an early age I was told that our firs were named after David Douglas, an explorer who had come from Scotland to the Oregon country in the early 1800s to learn about the plants here. And that once or twice he had walked up the Willamette River, right close to our home, probably. On my way to school I would wonder if I were crossing paths, across time, with David Douglas. I was that smitten.
On winter mornings, from our house in the faux forest, we could look across the valley to the snowy peaks of the Cascades. On a good day I could see the summit of Mt. Jefferson, so named by Lewis and Clark, and a couple of the Three Sisters, shining like some kind of promise. By high school I was climbing them and finding a new sense of self in alpine wilderness. At Wheaton College I majored in biology for a couple of years and especially liked my systematic botany class, in which Al Smith would lead us in a lingering way around the campus to identify the local flora. What I didn’t like were the many technicalities of the Krebs cycle, and by the end of my college years I had drifted into literature.
But I never did forget about David Douglas, and six or seven years ago, as a sabbatical project, I decided to read his journals and letters and everything I could about him, with an eye toward writing a series of poems about this avatar of my childhood. So I did just that, purchasing several rare books, making hundreds of pages of handwritten notes, and getting a start on half a dozen poems before classes began once again. I even scraped together some funds for a two-week trip to Scotland, tramping about in the snowy highlands where he had first learned to collect and identify plants.
Then, one evening during my first fall back in the classroom, a wildfire broke like a wave across our campus and neighborhood. As it bore down on our house, I went into my study to sweep up whatever felt valuable in the moment. I remember looking at the tall stack of books and notes on David Douglas; and then I remember picking up a folder of freshman lit exams that I had been working on that day. That’s all I took. Everything else in the study burned.
I always thought I would get back to David Douglas, but I never did. I took some solace in the fact that, in the late spring of 1833, Douglas himself lost a season’s worth of plant specimens and nearly four year’s worth of his journal in a colossal canoe wreck on the Fraser River in what is now British Columbia. After that, it is fair to say, he went a little crazy, feeling he had lost “what can never be replaced, even by myself.” A little more than a year later, he fell into a cattle pit on the island of Hawaii and was gored and trampled by a feral bull. He was 35. Like Dogberry, and like all of us, ultimately, he was “a fellow that hath had losses.”
So when John Wilson asked if I would review a recent pair of books on David Douglas by Jack Nisbet, I thought perhaps this was a time to bring these losses to repair. And it helps that each of these books by Nisbet makes excellent reading. The Collectoris a brisk biography of the man, focusing more on his North American adventures than on his Scottish roots. David Douglas: A Naturalist at Work is topically organized around themes such as the Columbia River, the Chinook peoples, the Hudson Bay Company, the London Horticultural Society, conifer forests, magnetic surveys, and the exchange of plant species between the New World and the Old. This latter book, though shorter, is lavishly and beautifully illustrated with period drawings.
It also contains some passages in which Nisbet himself revisits the places Douglas explored—riding in a pilot’s craft across the treacherous sand bar at the mouth of the Columbia, or interviewing descendants of the native peoples that guided Douglas across their homeland. This layering of narrative is skillfully done. I can think of other books that fail at this doubling—among them, Winter Brothers, by Ivan Doig, in which Doig rather dully traces a 19th-century pioneer journal on the coast of the Olympic Peninsula. But I can also think of books that succeed at this method. A prime example is Early Days in the Range of Light, by Daniel Arnold, in which Arnold repeats the great 19th- and early 20th-century first ascents in the High Sierra, restricting himself to the original gear of the pioneer climbers. Or, more poetically, The Meadow, by James Galvin, about four generations of inhabitants of a high-altitude clearing on the Colorado-Wyoming border. What Nisbet, Arnold, and Galvin have in common is that they each choose to honor their forerunners more than themselves. They put themselves in their books, yes, but they do not make the mistake of thinking the books are about them.
The Collector shows Nisbet to be a master of the journals, letters, and contemporary accounts of David Douglas. He knows the juiciest quotes and employs them judiciously, ranging from Douglas’ first encounter with the coastal groundcover of salal, “a stately and beautiful shrub” from which he cannot turn his eyes, to the alimentary effects of camas roots, which taste like baked pears: “Captain Lewis observes that when eaten in a large quantity they occasion bowel complaints. This I am not aware of, but assuredly they produce flatulence: when in the Indian hut I was almost blown out by strength of wind.”
It also helps that Nisbet is a resident of the Columbia Basin. Throughout the book he rather helpfully locates Douglas in reference to contemporary place names. I was pleased to find, for example, that while I may or may not have crossed paths with Douglas during my childhood in Corvallis, I had often retraced his steps on Latah Creek while living on the edge of Spokane. Nisbet shows his intimate familiarity not just with the topography but also with the natural history of the Pacific Northwest as well, noting not only what Douglas saw but also what he apparently missed—rough-skinned newts among the salal and pictographs on the walls of the Columbia Gorge. This local knowledge is in marked contrast to that of Douglas’ previous biographers, Ann Lindsay and Sid House (David Douglas: Explorer and Botanist, 1999; rev. as The Tree Collector: The Life and Explorations of David Douglas, 2005), who, while providing a more thorough account, are sometimes in a geographic muddle when it comes to the lay of the land. On my two-week trip to Scotland, I asked the delightful Ann Lindsay if she had ever visited the Pacific Northwest, and she said she had been to Vancouver, British Columbia—for two weeks. We laughed a little at our perfectly matched ignorance of each other’s territories. My advice: read Lindsay and House for the Scottish origins of David Douglas, and read Nisbet for his American sojourns.
David Douglas was born at the end of the 18th century in the village of Scone in the shadow of the famous palace of that name, where his father served as a stonemason. Growing up, he was much more interested in roaming the hills and woods and fields than in sitting still in a classroom, and soon found work as a gardener—first at the palace, then closer to Edinburgh, and then, more formatively, at the botanic gardens of Glasgow University. There he met his lifelong mentor William Jackson Hooker, who in 1823 recommended Douglas as a botanical collector to the London Horticultural Society. This was an age of exploration and empire, and the London Society had been founded not only with the practical aim of finding new timber for the British navy and new fruits for British orchards, but also with the decorative goal of furnishing English gardens with exotic species from around the globe. The London Horticulturalists were also very interested in the pure science of plant taxonomy.
As Ann Lindsay demonstrates in her book Scottish Plant Explorers: Seeds of Blood and Beauty (rev. 2008), because of their relative expertise at coaxing plants out of the ground in a cold climate, Scottish gardeners were more than likely to be the ones employed in the grand gardens of the English. And once the English began to send plant collectors around the world, as early as the 17th century, those tough Scottish gardeners were ready at hand. Douglas was thus one of many of his fellow countrymen who ranged the globe and died in its furthest corners to supply the English gentry with botanical curiosities.
Of them all, Douglas was perhaps the most successful and indefatigable. He spent most of the last ten years of his short life on three separate trips to the New World. The first and shortest was to inspect oak trees and fruit orchards in New York, Pennsylvania, and the region of the Great Lakes, where he reached as far inland as the Detroit River. There, while he was high in the boughs of an oak tree in search of ripe acorns, his guide made off with his coat and cash, never to be seen again, and Douglas decided to head home.
His second trip took him around Cape Horn to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, the new center of operations for the Hudson Bay Company in the Pacific Northwest. For more than two years he accompanied trappers and traders and native peoples in their many forays in the Columbia Basin—pressing plants, collecting seeds, and carefully sending them back to England whenever he could.
Though based out of Fort Vancouver, Douglas felt most at home near Kettle Falls in what is now the northeast corner of Washington, especially in the green of spring. Here the forest is not so thick, nor the mountains so tall. The Columbia flows through open meadows and widely spaced ponderosas, and the hills mound up in stately but in modest ways. When I visited his native Perthshire, I saw a topographic resemblance, and I wonder if Douglas felt it too. Certainly, this region east of the Cascades gave him a sense of ease. One of Nisbet’s groundbreaking speculations, with some good evidence, is that Douglas fathered a son on a half-Scottish, half-Cree girl while visiting in this territory.
But plants were his first love. When he crossed the Canadian Rockies by snowshoe and returned to London in 1827, he found himself a minor celebrity. Because of the similarity in climate between Britain and the Northwest, many of Douglas’ seeds and shoots had already taken root and flourished. It was said that the currants alone which were sold out of the gardens of the Horticultural Society could have paid the expenses many times over of his solo expedition.
Douglas did not handle this celebrity well, soon becoming testy with his superiors over small matters. (One wonders whether this stonemason’s son knew how to make the transition from the wilds of the Columbia to the uncharted terrors of a Westminster dinner party.) And so his superiors sent him around the Horn again, back to the Columbia, from which he digressed for a year or two to the missions of California (for which his family of Dissenters gave him not a little grief), returning to the Columbia and then to the northern reaches of the Fraser, where he lost his journal and some of his confidence in the drink. From there he had hoped to cross overland to Russian outposts in Alaska and thence by way of Siberia to London again. But he returned down the Columbia to Fort Vancouver, licking his wounds, and departed for Hawaii to climb the volcanoes there and fall into that fatal pit.
The important thing to realize about Douglas’ journals and most of his letters is that they were written for and to his employers and mentors. When I first read them I was hoping for the rhapsodies of John Muir, that fellow Scot of a later generation who was accountable only to his own soul. Instead I found grocery lists of plants collected, tabulations of miles traveled, and incessant reminders to his superiors that he was doing everything humanly possible to discover and post whatever moveables lay at hand. Far from being a mystic, he shows himself a determined Scot, eager to please, a loyal servant of empire. As a collector, he proved himself a man obsessed—and, to be fair, in order to accomplish what he did, he had to be.
Nisbet does a terrific job of tracing Douglas’ many journeys and putting his work in its cultural and scientific context. But there is something finally too driven about this peripatetic man for me to warm to him. In Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, the bad doctor thirstily begs of Mephistopheles every bit of knowledge possible: “Nay, let me have one book more, and then I have done, wherein I might see all plants, herbs, and trees that grow upon the earth.” It is this Faustian covetousness that finally disillusions me with David Douglas. It is hard to let go of a childhood hero, but in my reading of his work I imperceptibly felt this happen, a letting go. And maybe, just maybe, that is why, when I rushed into my study on that evening of fire and gazed upon that stack of books and notes and poems, I let them burn.
And yet, of course, there is still a part of me that admires as well as tires of those Marlovian heroes. In the basement of Scone Palace is a letter written by Douglas to the local earl on the eve of his third and last trip abroad. This time, he says, he will let the boat drop him off on the Atlantic coast of Argentina and pick him up after he has walked across the continent to the Pacific coast of Chile. Like his projected stroll across Siberia, this plan was never accomplished. But even to have considered it! I marvel at what moved the man, even as I lament his apparent lack of an inner life. Julian of Norwich and Emily Dickinson traveled no further than the walls of their respective rooms, and yet they traveled far beyond David Douglas in spirit and imagination. But when I walk up the nearest canyon behind my home in Santa Barbara, and see by the trail the delicate blossoms of baby blue eyes, or the hanging curiosities of the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, I think of the man by whom they were carefully named and known, and I give a kind of thanks.
Paul J. Willis is professor of English at Westmont College. He is the author most recently of Say This Prayer into the Past, a volume in the Poiema Poetry Series under the Cascade Books imprint of Wipf & Stock.
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