16- CONTRIBUTIONS TO WESTERN BOTANY NO. IS 



Park R. R. He was assistant topographer and botanist for a year with 

 the Hayden Survey. Was forest topographer in the survey of the Adirondacks, 

 New York. Was forest topographer for the Northern Trancontinental 

 Sun'ey_,in.. Yakima. Region, Wash. Was on the forest map of the Tetons 

 Reservation, U. S. Geol. Surv. Was Surveyor of Canon county, Colo. 

 Was city engifteer of Canon City. Was a member of the Board of Edu- 

 cation of San Diego, Cal. Was Hon. Curator of the herb, of the Uni- 

 versity of California. Was a member of the California Academy of 

 Sciences, and San Diego Academy of Sciences. Was a corresponding 

 member o£ the Phil. Acad. Sci- and New York Lyceum of Natural His- 

 tory. Was owner and editor of Zoe. Presented his hexbarium to the 

 University of California. 



The two Brandegees, after living to a ripe old age, have also gone. 

 Mrs,, Brandegee, who was considerably the younger, died first in 1920. 

 Sh-s was iricontestibly the greatest woman botanist that ever lived. More 

 of her later. Her husband, Thomas Siith Brandegee, first came to my 

 notice in .1877 when I was studying _ Porter and Coulter's Botany of Colo- 

 rado;- where all through the book were constant references to his collec- 

 ticms-;iH-Wet Mountain Valley, the Sangre de Christo range. Canon City, 

 etc. He was a civil engineer in the employ of the Rio Grande R. R., 

 v.-ith headquarters at Canon City. The next year I began my botanical 

 wurk in the west at Colorado Springs, but I never met Brandegee for 

 many years thereafter. He graduated from Yale in 1867 and was a 

 classmate of my old friend, C- P. Brooks of Salt Lake City, who was the 

 leading civil engineer of Salt Lake for many years. 



_ Brandegee was a little, quiet, refined man, a great friend of the 

 ladies, and a hard student, an old bachelor. In the early eighties he 

 was attached to the transcontinental survey, following the line of the 

 Great Northern R. R., and collected considerably in Washington. Then 

 he seems to have made San Francisco his headquarters, where his botan- 

 ical work brought him in touch with the California Academy of Science 

 and the Californian botanists of note at that time, nam.ely, Lemmon, 

 Greene, Behr, Mrs. Curran and others. Mrs. Curran was formerly Kate 

 La>T.e' 'Of Carson City, Nevada. The two seemed to naturally fit into 

 each other's lives in a remarkable way and soon married. She was the 

 most virile woman I ever knew and) he was the most feminine man I 

 ever knew Her mentality was that of a man through and through and 

 she was intensely active and efficient. While all his tastes seemell'more 

 femmine. He was a college man and an engineer at a time when such 

 men were at a premium in the building of the great highways across the 



Brandegee began hig work in Colorado just at the time of the clo^e 

 or Government exploration. In fact he was attached to two such parties. 

 «ne in the San Juan of Colorado, and the other in Washington, north of 

 the old rou e of Lewis and Clark. From his writings I leari that he 

 was first with th0 Santa Fe R. R. Then with the Rio Grande R R 

 I^et must have been emnlnved dnrlnnr the railroad war between the two 



