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Athena's retinue: nineteenth-century scientists embedded in the army

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2012

LEWIS PYENSON
Affiliation:
Department of History, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008–5334, United States. Email: lewis.pyenson@wmich.edu.

Abstract

Between 1860 and 1880, scientists in the United States, Argentina and Russia accompanied military expeditions on the northern Great Plains, in Patagonia, and in northeastern Asia. The extent to which the scientists were able to remain at arm's length from the slaughter of war is seen in the publications resulting from their travels. In the context of consolidating or extending national territory during the modern age, military patronage did not invalidate the research findings of attentive naturalists, who adhered to transnational disciplinary norms. There is only weak evidence to suggest that local prejudice determined the form of natural knowledge stemming from the expeditions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2012

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References

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12 George Bird Grinnell to O.C. Marsh, 4 December 1873, for career plans; Grinnell to Marsh, 11 November 1873: ‘I suppose that you have been informed of the failure of our house.’

13 Henry Farnum, recollections of 1931; George F. Eaton, secretary of the Conneticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, to Donald Adams, editor, New York Times Book Review, 17 July 1940. Yale University Archives, O.C. Marsh Papers, MSS Acc. 343, Microfilm Reel 26.

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19 Jackson, Donald, Custer's Gold: The United States Cavalry Expedition of 1874, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966Google Scholar, pp. 46–72, for a comprehensive discussion of the scientific corps. Grafe, Ernest and Horsted, Paul, Exploring with Custer: The 1874 Black Hills Expedition, Custer: Golden Valley Press, 2002Google Scholar, p. 15, for Donaldson and Wood. Grafe and Horsted's book is a masterful study of the expedition.

20 Ludlow and Wood favourably impressed another Yale scientist in 1875: ‘Ludlow is a very pleasant man – 35 perhaps – all the people we meet join in praising him up so enthusiastically that I am beginning to think he must be something quite remarkable in the way of a military man. His assistant Wood, is an attractive fellow, and I doubt not will be a pleasant companion.’ Edward Salisbury Dana to Henrietta Silliman Dana, 30 June 1875, Yale University Archives, Dana Family Papers, MS 164, Box 21, folder 204.

21 George Bird Grinnell to O.C. Marsh, 5(?) June 1874, citing Grinnell's letter of credentials from Sheridan. Yale University Archives, O.C. Marsh Papers (OCM), MSS Acc. 343, copies courtesy of Daniel L. Brinkman, Division of Vertebrate Paleontology, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

22 Grinnell to Marsh, 7 June 1874, OCM.

23 Grinnell to Marsh, 21 June 1874, OCM.

24 Grinnell to Marsh, 25 and 26 June 1874, OCM.

25 Grinnell to Marsh, 28 July 1874, OCM.

26 Grinnell to Marsh, 10 and 15 August 1874, OCM.

27 T.B. Walker et al., Memorial for Newton Horace Winchell, Last of the Founders and Charter Members of the Academy of Science, Minneapolis, 1914 [Bulletin of the Minnesota Academy of Science (1914) 5(2)].

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30 Grafe and Horsted, op. cit. (19), p. 19, Calhoun on 20 July 1874.

31 Winchell, ‘Hennepin at the Falls of St Anthony’, 1908, in Walker et al., op. cit. (27), p. 106.

32 Winchell, Newton Horace and Winchell, Alexander N., Elements of Optical Mineralogy, New York: D. van Nostrand, 1909Google Scholar, for another side to Newton H. Winchell's science. The book, written with his son Alexander (with a doctorate from Paris and a professorship in mineralogy and petrology at the University of Wisconsin), is based on the work of Michel Lévy, Fernand André Fouqué and Alfred Lacroix.

33 E.S. Dana to Henrietta Silliman Dana, 18 July 1875; E.S. Dana to James Dwight Dana, n.d., Yale University Archives, Dana Family Papers, Box 21, Folder 204.

34 E.S. Dana to Henrietta Silliman Dana, 1 August 1875, Yale University Archives, Dana Family Papers, Box 21, Folder 204.

35 Reiger, John F., The Passing of the Great West: Selected Papers of George Bird Grinnell, New York: Scribner, 1972, p. 109Google Scholar.

36 François-Marc Gagnon, ‘The forest, Niagara and the sublime’, in Hilliard T. Goldfarb (ed.), Expanding Horizons: Painting and Photography of American and Canadian Landscape 1860–1918, Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Somogy, 2009, pp. 33–36.

37 E.S. Dana to Henrietta Silliman Dana, 10 August 1875, Yale University Archives, Dana Family Papers, MS 164, Box 21, Folder 204.

38 Frank Graham Jr, with Buchheister, Carl W., The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society, New York: Knopf/Random House, 1990Google Scholar; Hagan, William T., Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indian, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997Google Scholar, for Grinnell's Indian advocacy. Also Reiger, op. cit. (35), pp. 124–143.

39 Schuchert and LeVene, op. cit. (10), pp. 139–168.

40 Stewart, Charles, ‘No culture without history’, Anthropological Quarterly (2005) 78, pp. 269277Google Scholar, for Powell's appeal to Thucydides.

41 Verbruggen, Christophe and Pyenson, Lewis, ‘History and the history of science in the work of Hendrik De Man’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis (2011) 41, pp. 487511Google Scholar, for Pirenne.

42 A concise and reliable survey of science in nineteenth-century Argentina may be found in Marcelo Montserrat, ‘La ciencia’, in Miguel Angel de Marco (ed.), Nueva historia de la nación Argentina, tomo VI, tercera parte: La configuración de la República independiente 1810–c.1914, Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2001, pp. 403–427. Montserrat's text provides a notable discussion of the impact of Italian savants on science in Argentina and also of the reception of Darwin's Origin of Species. Montserrat's contribution, ‘The evolutionist mentality in Argentina: an ideology of progress’, in Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper and Rosaura Ruiz (ed.), The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America and Brazil, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, pp. 1–28, is a model of sophistication and grace.

43 Jens Andermann, ‘Entre la topografía y la iconografía: mapas y nación, 1880’, in Marcelo Montserrat (ed.), La ciencia en la Argentina entre siglos: textos, contextos e instituciones, Buenos Aires, 2000, pp. 101–125. Idem, ‘Argentine literature and the ‘Conquest of the Desert’, 1872–1896’, www.bbk.ac.uk/ibamuseum/texts/Andermann02.htm.

44 Montserrat, Marcelo, Ciencia, historia y sociedad en la Argentina del siglo XIX, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1993, pp. 3182Google Scholar, on evolution, progress, and positivism. Also Lipp, Solomon, Three Argentine Thinkers, New York, 1969Google Scholar, notably pp. 16–26, on the same theme; Marcelo Montserrat, ‘La mentalidad evolucionista: una ideología del progreso’, in Gustavo Ferrari and Ezequiel Gallo (eds.), La Argentina del ochenta al centenario, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1980, pp. 785–818.

45 Podgorny, Irina, El sendero del tiempo y las causas accidentales: los espacios de la prehistoria en la Argentina, 1850–1910, Rosario: Prohistoria, 2009Google Scholar; Podgorny and Lopes, op. cit. (9), pp. 159–178; in 1889, the naturalist Estanislao Zeballos, founder of the Sociedad Científica Argentina and in that year minister of foreign affairs, donated to the Museum of La Plata skulls that he had collected from the battlefields of Patagonia (pp. 164–165, 239). Also Farro, Máximo, La formación del Museo de La Plata, Rosario: Prohistoria, 2009Google Scholar, pp. 63–79. Andrés Di Tella, ‘Ruins in the desert: field notes by a filmmaker’, in Michael Lazzara and Vicky Unruh (eds.), Telling Ruins in Latin America, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 87–94, for a discussion of the controversy about the skulls, p. 90 for novelist David Viñas's identification of the autochthonous genocide with the desaparacidos of the military regime in 1976–1983. Podgorny, Irina, ‘La derrota del genio: Cráneos y cerebros en la filogenia argentina’, Saber y tiempo (2006) 20, pp. 63106Google Scholar. In 1912, the great reforming educator and architect of Argentina's scientific pre-eminence in Latin America, Joaquín V. González, affirmed that Argentina's mission was to spread civilization by vanquishing indigenous peoples. Podgorny, Irina, Arqueología de la educación: textos, indicios, monumentos, Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología, 1999, pp. 123124Google Scholar. Noteworthy is the centenary memorial of the Conquest of the Desert, published in four volumes by the Academia Nacional de la Historia, under its president Enrique M. Barba: Congreso nacional de historia sobre la Conquista del Desierto, Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1980.

46 Steiner, George, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971Google Scholar, p. 87: ‘The accomplishments of art, of speculative imagining, of the mathematical and empirical sciences have been, are, will be, to an overwhelming extent, the creation of the gifted few … The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. For a truly cultured sensibility to deny this, under pretexts of liberal piety, is not only mendacious but rank ingratitude.’ Dachau on p. 63. Shall Steiner's quotation be engraved over the gates of Yale, Cambridge and Geneva universities, where Steiner gratefully spent much of his scholarly life?

47 For example, Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescault, dying in the green desert of Louisiana. An exhaustive look at the word ‘desert’ in Argentina in Angel A. Castellán, ‘Nacimiento historiográfico del termino “desierto”’, in Academia Nacional de la Historia, op. cit. (45), vol. 4, pp. 293–305.

48 Nouzeilles, Gabriela, ‘The iconography of desolation: Patagonia and the ruins of Nature’, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (2007) 40, pp. 252262Google Scholar.

49 There is a large literature on the Conquest of the Desert. Néstor Tomés Auza, ‘La ocupación del espacio vacío: de la frontera interior a la frontera exterior, 1876–1910’, in Ferrari, Gustavo and Gallo, Ezequiel (ed.), La Argentina del ochenta al centenario, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1980, pp. 6189Google Scholar.

50 Olascoaga, Manuel J., Estudio topográfico de la Pampa y Rio Negro, vol. 1, Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional Monumento al Teniente General Roca, 1939, p. 44Google Scholar, Roca to the editor of La república, 24 April 1876.

51 Olascoaga, op. cit. (50), p. 154, Roca addressing his troops on 26 April 1879; Olascoaga, Manuel J., Estudio topográfico de la Pampa y Rio Negro, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional Monumento al Teniente General Roca, 1940, p. 204Google Scholar, Lt Col. Enrique Godoy's diary of 1 May 1879, concerning the activities of his division ‘in this crusade of civilization against barbarism’.

52 Bravo, Alvaro Fernandez, Literatura y frontera: procesos de territorialización en las culturas argentina y chileana del siglo XIX, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Universidad de San Andres, 1999, pp. 170171Google Scholar. For the deeper background to the Conquest of the Desert: Mónica Quijada, ‘Repensando la frontera sur Argentina: concepto, contenido, continuidades y discontinuidades e una realidad especial y étnica (siglos XVIII–XIX)’, Revista de Indias (2002) 62, pp. 103–142. Stuckert, Guillermo V., La campaña del General Roca al desierto y la Academia Nacional de Ciencias, Córdoba: Academia Nacional de Ciencias, Miscelanea no. 40, 1961, p. 21Google Scholar, for the estimate. The estimate is about the same number as casualties in the Falklands War of 1982. By way of comparison, the Dirty War in Argentina (1976–83) had thirty thousand desaparecidos, the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 during the US Civil War resulted in more than fifty thousand casualties, roughly equivalent to the Battle of Waterloo; the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 produced more than half a million casualties. It is hard to internalize these statistics.

53 Stuckert, op. cit. (52), p. 39.

54 Stuckert, op. cit. (52), pp. 4, 19, 24; the captives are memorialized in the epic poem by Esteban Echeverria, ‘La cautiva’ (1837), and in the painting by Angel Della Valle, La vuelta del malón (1892).

55 Tognetti, Luis and Page, Carlos, La Academia Nacional de Ciencias: etapa fundacional, siglo XIX, Córdoba: Academia Nacional de Ciencias, 2000Google Scholar; Luis Tognetti, ‘La introducción de la investigación científica en Córdoba a fines del siglo XIX: La Academia Nacional de Ciencias y la Facultad de Ciencias Físico-matemáticas (1868–1878)’, in Marcelo Montserrat (ed.), La ciencia en la Argentina entre siglos: textos, contextos e instituciones, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Manatial SRL, 2000, pp. 345–365; idem, La Academia Nacional de Ciencias en el siglo XIX: los naturalistas, publicaciones y exploraciones, Córdoba: Academia Nacional de Ciencias, 2004; Telasco García Castellanos, Sarmiento: su influencia en Córdoba, Córdoba: Academia Nacional de Ciencias, 2004. The constitution of the scientific commission, as well as its antecedents, in Francisco Cignoli, ‘La comisión científica agregada al estado mayor de la expedición al Rio Negro (1879); sus propositos; sus logros’, in Academia Nacional de la Historia, op. cit. (45), vol. 4, pp. 71–80.

56 Eduardo L. Ortiz, ‘On the transition from realism to the fantastic in the Argentine literature of the 1870s: Holmberg and the Córdoba Six’, in Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz (eds.), Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America, London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, [2005], pp. 59–85; Montserrat, Marcelo, ‘Holmberg y el Darwinismo en la Argentina’, Criterio (1974) 47, pp. 591598Google Scholar.

57 Stuckert, op. cit. (52), p. 21. Doering was the expedition's geologist because his academy's geologist, Göttingen-educated Luis Brackebusch, was then devoting his attention to producing a geological map of the northern part of the country, where its proven mineralogical wealth lay. Tognetti and Page, op. cit. (55), p. 52, for Brackebusch's focus on the north.

58 Stuckert, op. cit. (52), p. 37; Tognetti, La Academia … los naturalistas, op. cit. (55), for a summary of the expedition.

59 Adolfo Doering, with Carlos Berg and Eduardo L. Holmberg, Informe oficial de la comisión científica agregada al Estado Mayor General de la expedición al Río Negro (Patagonia) realizada en los meses de Abril, Mayo y Junio de 1879, bajo las ordenes del general Julio A. Roca, Pt. 1: Zoología, Buenos Aires: Ostwald y Martínez, 1881, p. 6.

60 Pablo Lorentz and Gustavo Niederlein, Informe oficial de la comisión científica agregada al Estado Mayor General de la expedición al Río Negro (Patagonia) realizada en los meses de Abril, Mayo y Junio de 1879, bajo las ordenes del general Julio A. Roca, Pt. 2: Botánica, Buenos Aires: Ostwald y Martínez, 1881, p. 174; Stuckert, op. cit. (52), p. 37 for an abridged excerpt.

61 Lorentz and Niederlein, op. cit. (60), p. 175.

62 Doering, Adolfo, Informe oficial de la Comisión cientifíca agregada al Estado Mayor general de la expedición al Rio Negro (Patagonia) realizada en los meses de Abril, Mayo y Junio de 1879, bajo las ordenes del general d. Julio A. Roca: Geología (1879), Buenos Aires: Ostwald y Martínez, 1881–1882, pp. 299530, 301302Google Scholar.

63 Stuckert, op. cit. (52), detail facing p. 24.

64 Johnson's stricture turned on its head by Adam Gopnik, ‘Writing and winning’, New Yorker, 18 October 2010, pp. 23–24.

65 Kropotkin, , Memoirs of a Revolutionist, London: Smith, Elder, 1899, p. 119Google Scholar.

66 The principal source for Kropotkin's life in Russia is his Memoirs. Recent, derivative accounts may be found in Hewitt, Kenneth, ‘Between Pinochet and Kropotkin: state terror, human rights and the geographers’, Canadian Geographer (2001) 45, pp. 338355CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kearns, Gerry, ‘The political pivot of geography’, Geographical Journal (2004) 170, pp. 337346CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with a list of Kropotkin's articles on geography in English. Also Shpayer-Makov, Haia, ‘The reception of Peter Kropotkin in Britain, 1886–1917’, Albion (1987) 19, pp. 373390CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Bassin, Mark, ‘The Russian Geographical Society, the “Amur Epoch,” and the Great Siberian Expedition, 1855–1863’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1983) 73, pp. 240256CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stolberg, Eva-Marie, ‘The Siberian frontier between “White Mission” and “Yellow Peril,” 1890s–1920’, Nationalities Papers (2004) 32, pp. 165181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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69 Kropotkin, op. cit. (65), pp. 214–215.

70 Kropotkin, Peter, ‘Russian explorations in Manchuria’, Geographical Journal (1898) 11, pp. 6265CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pierre Kropotkine, Orographie de la Sibérie, Brussels: Veuve F. Larcier, 1904, published in 1876 in Russian in the memoirs of the St Petersburgh Geographical Society. Also Tatiana K. Ivanova and Vyacheslav A. Markin, ‘Piotr Alekseevich Kropotkin and his monograph Researches on the Glacial Period (1876)’, in Geological Society of London, History of Geomorphology and Quarternary Geology, Special Publication no. 301, 2008, pp. 117–128.

71 Eric Gautier, ‘Pierre Kropotkine: scientifique et anarchiste’, University of Nantes, Centre François Viète, mémoire de D.E. A., 2000, pp. 26–40.

72 Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930, p. 226.

73 Kropotkin, ‘An appeal to the young’ (1880), originally in French, in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger N. Baldwin, New York: Vanguard, 1927, New York: Dover; 1968, pp. 264–267.

74 Kropotkin, op. cit. (65), p. 240.

75 Kropotkin, op. cit. (65), p. 238.

76 van der Oye, David Schimmelpenninck, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001Google Scholar, p. 37, for quotation; Rayfield, Donald, The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839–88), Explorer of Central Asia, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976, p. 20Google Scholar, for Kukel.

77 Kropotkin, op. cit. (72), p. 230.

78 Jackson, op. cit. (19), p. 21, for Custer as a schoolmaster; Elizabeth B. Custer, op. cit. (29), p. 145, for Napoleon.

79 Miller, David Humphreys, Custer's Fall: The Indian Side of the Story, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957, pp. 6365Google Scholar.

80 Luvaas, Jay, The Military Legacy of the Civil War: European Inheritance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959Google Scholar.

81 Pyenson, Lewis, ‘Revisiting the history of relativity’, Metascience (2011) 20, pp. 5357CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Pyenson, Lewis, ‘The enlightened image of Nature in the Dutch East Indies: consequences of postmodernist doctrine for broad structures and intimate life’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2011) 41, pp. 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Radde, quoted in Bassin, op. cit. (67), p. 254.

84 Olascoaga, op. cit. (50), p. 143, for servants; Stuckert, op. cit. (52), p. 30, for the anonymity of the scientists' three servants; Kropotkin, op. cit. (65), p. 133, reports having a ‘soldier servant’ when he was in the Corps of Pages; Grafe and Horsted, op. cit. (19), p. 5, for Sarah Campbell, the cook.

85 Mokyr, Joel, The Gift of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002Google Scholar, is silent about Athena's destructive side. The book identifies ingenuity in artifice – technology – with Athena's science. A more appropriate appeal for Mokyr would be to Hephaistos, the ugly, crippled metallurgist who, Book Eight of the Odyssey tells, fabricated a mechanical device to catch his wife in flagrante.

86 Mitchell, Andrew J., Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 5861Google Scholar.

87 Paul Forman's writings are seminal for the modern/postmodern break: ‘The primacy of science in Modernity, of technology in Postmodernity, and of ideology in the history of technology’, History and Technology (2007) 23, pp. 1–152; idem, ‘(Re)cognizing Postmodernity: helps for historians – of science especially’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2010) 33, pp. 157–174. A short elaboration: Lewis Pyenson, ‘Technology's triumph over science’, Chronicle [of Higher Education] Review, 11 March 2011, pp. B4–B5.