CHARLES WRIGHT. 1 



Charles Wright died on the 11th of August, at Wethers- 

 field, Connecticut, at the home where he was born on the 29th 

 of October, 1811, and where the early as well as the later 

 years of his life were passed. He received his education in 

 the grammar school of his native village and at Yale College, 

 which he entered in 1831, graduating in 1835. His fondness 

 for botany was developed while he was in college, although, 

 so far as we can learn, he had no teacher. The opportunity 

 of gratifying this predilection in an inviting region may have 

 determined his acceptance, almost immediately after gradua- 

 tion, of an offer to teach in a private family at Natchez, Mis- 

 sissippi. Within a year pecuniary reverses of his employer 

 terminated this engagement. At this time there was a flow 

 of immigration into Texas, then an independent republic ; 

 and Mr. Wright joining in it, in the spring of 1837 made his 

 way from the Mississippi to the Sabine, and over the border, 

 chiefly on foot, botanizing as he went. Making his head- 

 quarters for two or three years at a place then called Zarvala, 

 on the Neches, he occupied himself with land-surveying, ex- 

 plored the surrounding country, " learned to dress deer-skins 

 after the manner of the Indians, and to make moccasins and 

 leggins," "became a pretty fair deer-hunter," and inured him- 

 self to the various hardships of a frontier life at that period. 

 When the business of surveying fell off he took again to 

 teaching ; and in the year 1844 he opened a botanical corre- 

 spondence with the present writer, sending an interesting col- 

 lection of the plants of eastern Texas to Cambridge. In 1845 

 he went to Rutersville in Fayette County, and for a year or 

 two he was a teacher in a so-called college at that place, or in 

 private families there and at Austin, devoting all his leisure 

 1 American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., xxxi. 12. (1886.) 



