In 1888 I sent over three thousand leaf impressions from the Dakota sandstone to Dr. Lesquereux, and he selected from them over three hundred and fifty typical specimens, many of them new, for the National Museum. Hundreds of others, identified by him, were afterwards purchased by R. D. Lacoe, of Pittston, Pa., and presented to the Museum.
So feeble had the great botanist become in these last years of his life, that friends passed before his failing eyes the trays containing these great collections.
In my estimation, America can show no life more unselfishly devoted to science than that of Lesquereux, probably the most scholarly and conscientious botanist of his day. He once wrote me that he received a salary of five dollars a day from the U. S. Geological Survey, and out of this he had to pay his artist. He labored with unfailing enthusiasm to complete his monumental work, “The Flora of the Dakota Group,” but by the irony of fate, he never saw his beloved book in print. It was published by the Government five years after his death, under the able editorship of Dr. F. H. Knowlton.
He passed away at the age of eighty-three.
“Born in the heart of Switzerland’s mountain grandeur,” he once said, “my associations have been almost all of a scientific nature. I have lived with nature,—the rocks, the trees, the flowers. They know me, I know them. Everything else is dead to me.”
It was my good fortune to be in constant correspondence with Lesquereux, and his letters, which I need not say I prize highly, have done more, perhaps, than any other thing to fix my determination that, come what might, I would be a fossil hunter and add my quota to human knowledge. The letter here reproduced has been as a lodestar to lead me on past all discouragements in the path which as a boy of seventeen I set out to follow. May it shed light upon the life of some other straggler!
In 1897, not having the means to go into the vertebrate fields of western Kansas, I spent three months in the Dakota Group, although I knew that I had already supplied most of the museums of the world with examples of its flora, and that there was little interest in or demand for the leaves.
I secured over three thousand leaves, however, and paid first-class freight on them to my home at Lawrence. Then I hauled them out to my little twenty-acre farm, four miles southeast of town, and pitched my 9 × 9 wall-tent for a workshop, flooring it and putting up a stove. There I worked from November to May, standing on my feet on an average of fourteen hours a day, with my face to the opening of the tent for light, and my back to the stove. At night I worked over a coal-oil lamp.