BY EDWIN WAY TEALE 



THE SON of a pioneer druggist, the 

 first of 10 children, Robert Ridgway 

 was born at Mount Carmel two days 

 before the Fourth of July in 1850. When 

 he was only 4 years old he made his first 

 drawing of a bird. 

 By the time he 

 was 10, he had as- 

 sembled a private 

 museum of nests 

 and eggs and was 

 producing accu- 

 rately colored 

 paintings of the na- 

 tive birds. In his 

 effort to record the 

 exact hues of the 

 feathers, he ground 

 pigments and com- 

 bined them with Teale 

 gum water of his own manufacture in a 

 back room of his father's drug store. . . . 

 One summer, when the water of the 

 Wabash was abnormally low, the cargo 

 of a sunken river steamer, the Kate 

 Sarchet, was salvaged near Mount Carmel. 

 It included a rusty rifle. To provide the 

 young ornithologist with a collecting gun 

 of his own, Ridgway's father had the barrel 

 bored out and the weapon transformed into 

 a percussion-cap, muzzle-loading shotgun. 

 By following a formula found in an old 

 book, Ridgway mixed together chlorate of 

 potash, yellow prussiate of potash, and 

 white sugar to manufacture his own gun- 

 power. 



Knowing nothing of taxidermy or of pre- 

 paring bird skins, he had no way of pre- 

 serving the specimens ^e collected except 

 by painting pictures of them. When he 

 was 14, bright-colored songbirds such as he 

 had never seen before appeared in num- 

 bers one vidnter around Mount Carmel. 

 He named them the "roseate grosbeaks." 

 Their identity remained a mystery for 

 months. A neighbor suggested he send his 

 painting to the commissioner of patents 

 in Washington. The commissioner, who 

 knew nothing about birds, turned the draw- 

 ing over to Spencer Ftillerton Baird, then 

 beginning his brilliant career at the Smith- 

 sonian Institution. Baird identified the bird 

 as a purple finch. He suggested that young 

 Ridgway send him drawings of any other 

 birds that puzzled him. Thus began the 

 most important correspondence of Ridg- 

 way's life. 



LESS THAN three years later, when he 

 was still not quite 17, he returned 

 home one March day, after climbing to 

 the nest of a red-tailed hawk, and found 

 a letter from Washington awaiting him. 

 Baird offered him the position of zoologist 

 on a United States expedition being sent 

 to explore the 40th parallel from the east- 

 em slope of the Sierra Nevada, in Cali- 

 fornia, to the eastern slope of the Rockies, 

 in Colorado. Thus, about the middle of 

 April, 1867, Ridgway broke home ties. 

 Driving with his parents to Olney, some 

 50 miles to the north, he boarded the first 

 train he had ever ridden on. 



Later he remembered that, at trequeni 

 intervals, in stretches of still primitive 

 forest, the wood-burning engine stopped to 

 load on fuel stacked beside the rails. The 



40th Parallel Expedition, led by the noted 

 government geologist Clarence King, era- 

 barked from New York in a side-wheel 

 steamer bound for Panama. A similar 

 craft carried the party up the Pacific coast 

 to San Francisco. There the group headed 

 inland for two years of scientific explora- 

 tion. 



When this exploration ended, Ridgway 

 returned to Washington to illustrate and 

 prepare scientific descriptions for the mon- 

 umental five-volume treatise on North 

 American birds being written by Baird 

 and Dr. Thomas M. Brewer of Boston. At 

 the age of 24, he was appointed curator 

 of birds at the Smithsonian Institution. 

 Only two other museums in America at 

 that time had salaried officials in charge 

 of a department of birds. For several 

 years young Ridgway lived in one of the 

 red-brick towers of the Smithsonian build- 

 ing and during more than half a century, 

 until his death in 1929, he remained a 

 member of the scientific staff of this 

 world-famous institution. 



QUIET AND UNASSUMING, he turned 

 out a vast body of valuable work. He 

 published more than 13,000 pages of ma- 

 terial on birds. Two genera, 23 species, 

 and 10 subspecies of birds were named for 

 him. He was one of the founders of the 

 American Ornithologists' union. Between 

 1901 and 1919, eight volumes of his Birds 

 of North and Middle America appeared 

 under the imprint of the Smithsonian In- 

 stitution. This was his magnum opus. . 



When, as a boy beside the Wabash, Ridg- 

 way began studying birds, he imagined 

 that he was the only person in America, 

 perhaps in the whole world, engaged in 

 such pursuits. In a history of the United 

 States he had come across references to 

 Wilson, Audubon, Bonaparte, and Nuttall. 

 But they all were no longer living. He 

 concluded that all ornithologists belonged 

 to a past period. . . . The only natural 

 history books he possessed were Oliver 

 Goldsmith's Animated Nature and Sam- 

 uel G. Goodrich's The Animal Kingdom 

 Illxistrated. In contrast, I found when I 

 visited the local library the young natural 

 ist in Mount Carmel today has more than 

 a score of excellent bird books at his dis- 

 posal 



During all the years that Robert Ridg- 

 way worked in Washington, far from the 

 Illinois country of his boyhood, he said he 

 felt he was in prison. The sensitive, living 

 man inside the shell of his reputation was 

 he once confessed, "homesick for 45 

 years." In 1913, he could stand it no 

 longer. He returned to Olney, where he 

 had boarded the train that originally car 

 ried him away. There, with his wife, he 

 settled down at a pleasant, elm-shaded 

 home on the south side of town. Arrange- 

 ments had been made for him to continue 

 his Smithsonian work in these congenial 

 surroundings. 



f©1957, 3965, by Edwin Way Tealel 



