Early Botanical Explorers on t he Pacific Coast 3 5 
California and Arizona. He is said to have collected fifty thou¬ 
sand specimens representing fifteen hundred to two thousand 
species. His notes and journals were all lost, but his specimens are 
in the herbarium of Trinity College. He was made curator and 
spent the rest of his life arranging his collections. He was not in¬ 
terested in introducing plants into cultivation, but only in collect- 
ing botanical specimens. However, several important trees were 
named from his collections. He went into the Santa Lucia Moun¬ 
tains, where he collected the Santa Lucia Fir, the Big-cone Pine 
{Pinus Coulter!) and the Prickle-cone Pine (Pinus muricata ). c 
Seeds of these were sent by other collectors to England and trees 
were raised from them, but they were named from Coulter’s 
specimens. 28 
Thomas Nuttall was born in Yorkshire, England, and at an 
early age was apprenticed to his uncle, a printer. In 1808, when he 
was 22 years of age, he came to the United States and became as¬ 
sociated with the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. In 1809 and 
1811, he and John Bradbury went on an exploring and collecting 
trip to the Upper Missouri. In 1819, he explored Arkansas terri¬ 
tory. In 1834, he joined the Wyeth Oregon expedition, and 
finally reached Fort Walla Walla on the Columbia River. 29 Dif¬ 
ficulties, hardships and dangers did not prevent him from collect- 
ing. To transport and dry botanical specimens and the paper in 
which to collect them under these conditions was extremely hard. 
It is said that he would sit for hours before a hot camp fire, with 
the sweat pouring down his face, to dry his papers. In 1836, he 
came by sea to California and collected at Monterey, Santa Bar¬ 
bara and San Diego. Richard Henry Dana, in Two Years Before 
