12 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 307. 



space and a glimpse of verdure than there is about the City 

 Hall. Surely the Municipal Art Society, the Historical So- 

 ciety and every other organization of people who make any 

 pretense to cultivation or refinement, and every man or 

 woman who has the slightest regard for the history, the 

 honor, the health or the beauty of the city ought to protest 

 against this backward step toward barbarism. 



Josiah Gregg. 



IT is remarkable that so little is now known or remem- 

 bered of this man, who in his time made important 

 contributions to the knowledge of the natural history of an 

 interesting region, and who wrote a work of enduring in terest, 

 describing, as it does, one phase of American commercial 

 activity, all knowledge of which without his narrative 

 would have passed out of the knowledge of man with the 

 picturesque race of hardy pioneers that it brought into 

 existence. 



The name of Josiah Gregg does not appear in the dic- 

 tionaries of authors or of biography. The date and place 

 of his birth are not known to this generation, and all that 

 can be gathered of his early life is found in the preface of 

 his book, in which he tells his readers that he was " cradled 

 and educated upon the Indian borders " and that he had 

 been " familiar with the Indian character from infancy." 

 Ill health, he tells us, too, first induced him to cross the 

 prairies, and to this journey, which was followed by sev- 

 eral others, and to a long residence in northern Mexico, we 

 owe The Commerce of the Prairies, a book in which can be 

 found the only good account of the prairies and plains of the 

 continent, and their commerce and population ; and, although 

 it is, perhaps, as a collector and discoverer of plants that 

 Josiah Gregg is most interesting to the majority of our 

 readers, so much of the true spirit of his life is told in the 

 following letter which Mr. John Bigelow, of this city, has 

 written at our request, that it cannot properly be withheld 

 from publication : 



It gives me pleasure to comply with your request for such 

 information as I can furnish about Mr. Josiah Gregg and my 

 humble part in the preparation for the press of his Commerce 

 of tiie Prairies. 



I owed the acquaintance of Mr. Gregg to the late William 

 Cullen Bryant, to whom, in 1843, Mr. Gregg applied for 

 a reference to some competent person to revise some 

 notes of his and put them in shape for publication. Mr. 

 Bryant advised him to call upon me. I found Mr. Gregg 

 to be at that time a man about forty years of age and about 

 five feet ten inches in height, though from the meagreness 

 of his figure looking somewhat taller; he had a fine head and 

 an intellectual cast of countenance and temperament, though 

 his mouth and the lower part of his face showed that he had 

 enjoyed to but a limited extent the refining influence of civil- 

 ization. He had fine blue eyes and an honest, although not a 

 cheerful, expression, due, as I afterward learned, to chronic 

 dyspepsia. He was withal very shy and as modest as a school- 

 girl. 



We were soon at work together. He had previously con- 

 fided his notes to Count Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, subse- 

 quently and for many years a translator in theState Department 

 at Washington, but their views of the way in which the work 

 they were engaged upon should be executed were so widely 

 divergent that their partnership was speedily dissolved. As 

 I became more acquainted with Mr. Gregg I had no difficulty 

 in discerning the cause of their incompatibility. He had no 

 notions of literary art and he knew it, but he was morbidly 

 conscientious, and nothing would induce him to state anything 

 that he did not positively know as if he did know it, or to' over- 

 state anything. Tasistro had no such infirmity. Then Gregg had 

 about as little imagination as any man I ever knew, while Tasis- 

 tro had such an excess of it that he had no difficulty in believing 

 and affirming things that never happened. It was not strange, 

 therefore, that they soon parted with opinions of each other 

 not in the least improved by their association. 



I soon found that all I had to do was to put his notes into 

 as plain and correct English as I knew how, without in the 

 least modifying the proportions of his affirmations. He would 

 not allow his version of a fact to be expanded or con- 

 tracted a hair's-breadth, no matter what might be the artistic 



temptation, nor however unimportant the incident ; he always 

 had the critics of the plains before his eyes, and would sooner 

 have broken up the plates and reprinted the whole book than 

 have permitted the most trifling error to creep into his descrip- 

 tion of the loading of his mules or the marshaling of one of 

 his caravans. 



Although Mr. Gregg's early education had been limited 

 and his reading not extensive, he had a vague notion, not un- 

 natural to a frontier man of reflection, that there is no fame 

 so enduring as authorship, nor any way in which a man may 

 multiply himself so many times by the forces of other men as 

 by writing a book. His whole soul, therefore, was completely 

 absorbed in the work upon which we were engaged, as if it 

 involved the destiny of empires. He had no family; he had 

 a competence for all his moderate wants, and he dreamed of 

 a fame from this work which should place him among the 

 authors of his generation and compel his acquaintances to 

 look up to him as he himself was accustomed to look up to 

 those whose writings had delighted or instructed him. 



Mr. Gregg had his lodgings at the Franklin Hotel, then stand- 

 ing on the corner of Broadway and Liberty orCortlandt Street, 

 and in his room there he spent pretty much his whole time, 

 when not eating or sleeping, upon his manuscript and proofs. 

 He rarely went out, except to the store of his publishers under 

 the Astor House ; he never went to the theatre, or, indeed, to 

 any place of amusement. He took no recreation of. any kind 

 so far as I could learn. He did not appear to visit anywhere, 

 nor did he appear to have any acquaintances. His heart was 

 wholly in his book ; it was his joy by day and his dream by 

 night. His stay and life in the city during its incubation was 

 his great trial. He pined for the prairies and the free open air 

 of the wilderness. New York to him was a prison, and his hotel 

 a cage. Whatever value his book possesses — and as a history 

 of the trans-Mississippi commerce before the invasion of the 

 railway, it has, I think, great and enduring value — was due to 

 him and to him only. My laundry work added no more value 

 to it than the washing and ironing adds to the value of a new 

 garment. 



Nowhere in all our literature can be found so full and 

 entirely reliable an account of ourearly transcontinental com- 

 merce, and of every kind of life that flourished over the terri- 

 tory which it traversed, as in The Commerce of the Prairies ; 

 and the time is not distant when very little can be learned of 

 the condition upon which that commerce was conducted, 

 except from his book. It was favorably received by the public, 

 and in due time reached a second edition. His publishers were 

 unfortunate, and I doubt if Mr. Gregg ever derived any pecun- 

 iary advantage from his literary venture ; that was a secondary 

 matter with him, though there were some circumstances con- 

 nected with his failure to receive the pecuniary returns to 

 which he was entitled that did not enhance his respect for the 

 publishing trade, and may have strengthened his preference 

 for the frontier life and the unsophisticated dwellers of the 

 wilderness. 



Mr. Gregg's interest in botany can, perhaps, be traced to 

 his intimacy with Dr. Engelmann, who lived in St. Louis 

 when it was the starting-place for all expeditions across 

 the plains, and who speaks of him as "an indefatigable dis- 

 coverer and my friend." His principal botanical collections 

 were made between Chihuahua and the mouth of the Rio 

 Grande, particularly in the neighborhood of Monterey and 

 Saltillo in Nueva Leon, a region which only one botanist 

 explored before him — Jean Louis Berlandier, a Belgian, and 

 a pupil of the elder Candolle, who first reached Mexico in 

 1828, and resided until his death in the city of Matamoras, 

 where he established himself as an apothecary. 



Mr. Gregg discovered many undescribed plants, and his 

 name is connected with several interesting species of the 

 Rio Grande valley, among them Acacia Greggii, Cereus 

 Greggii, Fraxinus Greggii, Sargentia Greggii, Linum Greggii 

 and Porophyllum Greggii. Twice the generic name of 

 Greggia has been proposed in his honor, but as an older 

 Greggia, now reduced to Eugenia, already existed, the name 

 of Josiah Gregg, under the present ruling of American bot- 

 anists, cannot be commemorated in a genus of plants. 



Of the death of Mr. Gregg as little is known as of his life, 

 and the only printed notice of it we have been able to find 

 is contained in the first part of Asa Gray's Platita Wrighl- 

 iance, written in 1850, in which allusion is made in the pref- 

 ace and on page 9 to Mr. Gregg's death in California from 

 "overexertion in scientific investigation in the interior." 



