CUPULIFERJE. 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



35 



The wood of Q 



Gamhelli is heavy ^ hard 



and often toujrh* althouof^h difficult to 



season. It contains numerous conspicuous medullary rays 



d 



narrow 



b 



of small open ducts 



marking the layers of 



ual growth 



d is dark red-brown^ with thin lighter colored sapwood 



The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.8407^ a cubic foot weighing 52.39 pounds.^ 

 largely used for f uel^ and the bark is occasionally of service in tanning leather. The acorns^ which 

 sometimes quite sweety were probably eaten by the Indians. 



It 



Qiierciis Gamhelii was discovered 



1844 



the banks of the Rio Grande by William Gambel^^ 



memory is preserved in the association of his name with this beautiful little 



ith 



rous summer green and brilliant autumn tints delights the traveler through the sombre forests of 

 central regions of the continent. 



^ Some idea of the slow rate at which the wood of this species their cattle and consequent abandonment of many wagons in the 

 is formed may be obtained from the log specimen in the Jesup Humboldt desert, they were caught by snow in the mountains ; and 

 Collection of North American W^oods in the American Museum of instead of abandoning the remainder and pushing through, they 

 Natural History in New York, obtained from the neighborhood of camped to await better weather, which did not come. The snow 

 Canon City, Colorado. It is ten and a quarter inches in diameter constantly accumulated, all the cattle died, provisions were con- 

 inside the bark, and shows one hundred and fifty-eight layers of sumed, and when too late they made snowshoes and tried to save 

 amiual growth. themselves. But few got across the range, including Gambel, and 



^ William Gambel was born in New Jersey. In his youth he those saved little but what they stood in. With numbers rapidly 



appears to have attracted the attention of Thomas Nuttall, the diminishing, the remnant pushed on down to Rose's Bar, where 



naturalist, who employed him as an assistant. 



1844 



several, including Gambel, died almost immediately of typhoid 



visited the southern Rocky Mountains with a party of trappers to fever. Gambel was buried on the Bar, which, however, as I have 



collect birds and plants for the Academy of Natural Sciences of understood, has since been entirely removed by hydraulic mining. 



Philadelphia. Returning to Philadelphia the following year, he His death occurred in the latter part of November, 1849, and I 



entered the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, have never since seen any of the survivors of his party or heard 



from which he was graduated in 1848. He was soon elected re- any further particulars. 



cording secretary of the Philadelphia Academy, but retired from 



"■ He was a genial, kindly man and delightful companion, but 



this position the following year and joined a party organized to averse to the rough life, hard work, and short commons then in- 

 cross the continent to the California gold-fields under the leader- separable from such a journey. He was about twenty-eight at the 

 ship of I. J. Wistar, afterward tt distinguished officer in the Union time of his death, and, had he lived to cultivate more congenial 

 army, a philanthropist and president of the Philadelphia Academy. pursuits at home, would certainly have attained increased distiuc- 

 The party started from Independence about the first of May, and tion as a naturalist. His taste for natural science was great, his 

 proceeded up the Platte valley, where Gambel left it to join a party attainments considerable, and his work, even in youth, valuable." 

 of Missourians led by a, Captain Boone of Kentucky. Gambel's (See, also, Meehan, The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United 

 fate IS described in the following extract of a letter from General States, ser. 2, ii. 62.) 



Wistar : — Nuttall described the new genera and species discovered by 



" In the year 1850, 1 met two men of Boone's train at Foster's Gambel in his first journey to the Rocky Mountains, dedicating 



Bar, who gave me the first information I had received of the fate to him the genus Gamhelia, formed to receive a shrub with beau- 



of the majority of their overland party. Being well furnished and tiful scarlet flowers from the island of Santa Catalina o£E the 



provisioned and mostly older men than we, they traveled leisurely California coast, and now merged into Antirrhinum, 

 and reached the Sierras only in October. After the loss of most of 



