dee Me Aa se B OUN SBaU tL Ee Tel oN 3 
These brief personal impressions and recollections are put down in 
memory of a companion and a friend. No doubt a complete record of his 
life and work will appear in The Auk, organ of the American Ornithol- 
ogists’ Union, which he joined in 1885 and of which he was elected a 
Member in 1907. But in order that our community of Illinois “bird people,” 
of which he was the salt, may read in the Bulletin of the Illinois Audubon 
Society, of which he was an honorary director, some account of his journey 
among us, I must include some biographical data. With regard to these data 
I cannot claim chronological accuracy. For most of it I am indebted to 
The Glen Ellyn News and The Glenellyan, whose recognition of Mr. Gault 
as one of the foremost citizens of Glen Ellyn is pleasing to those who knew 
their friend to be closer to nature than to commerce. 
Benjamin True Gault was born November 2, 1858, in Decatur, Illinois, 
when doubtless the passenger pigeon, the Carolina paroquet, and the 
aboriginal wild turkey were to be found in that region or, at least, not far 
from it. A part of his boyhood was spent in New Hampshire with his 
parents. With them he moved west again to Glen Ellyn about 1890, as 
noted above. As the present writer’s own active interest in the birds about 
Chicago began about 1887 he is able to reconstruct some of the seasons 
afield which Gault must have enjoyed along the Du Page and Des Plaines 
Rivers and in following the windings of Salt Creek. The young naturalist 
covered much territory and you will find among his notes reference to Half 
Day, on the northwest, as well as Worth, on the southwest. I had him much 
in mind when, about 1932, I visited the locality where, about forty years 
before, he had found the nest of the Louisiana water thrush (our only 
breeding record, I think). Here I actually flushed one of these birds from a 
small stream emptying into the Des Plaines near Wheeling. “It was here, 
as with Gault,” I said, “As with Gault, it was thus.”—But it wasn’t! 
It was in 1902 that, in company with George K. Cherrie, he visited 
South America on a collecting expedition. “Yes, that’s our Mr. Gault, our 
own village bird man who conducts bird-seeking expeditions in the spring, 
for whom the bird sanctuary on Main Street was named, and who has been 
in charge of its development”—thus the home town newspaper, July 19, 
1935, commenting upon an item reprinted from an issue of its predecessor, 
dated August 22, 1902, in which the coming South American venture was 
announced. : 
In the home newspaper, too, Mr. Gault is quoted to the effect that he 
had visited about forty of the states. He made at least one trip with the 
late William I. Lyon, whose banding work took him annually to the breeding 
islands of gulls and terns in the Great Lakes. But the journey to which 
he had looked forward for years was the Irish journey. It was in 1924, at 
the age of 66, that he set out alone to visit a wild section of Erin’s western 
shore. He lived there summer and winter for two years, occupying such 
crude quarters as the region afforded. Household facilities were primitive, 
the food simple and the fare frugal. He went out upon the waters of the 
broken coast with the rough boatmen who were the heirs of its grandeur 
and danger. A younger man might have wearied of the life in a short 
season but Gault was having a dream come true. When, later, he returned 
to Chicago and related some of his experiences his listeners knew that he 
