construction workers, building the now-famous bridge on the cliffs above, dislodged a boulder. The rock ricocheted off the canyon wall and struck Samuel. Doctors amputated his leg that night, but he died of his injuries the following morning. It was a disastrous end to what had begun as an exuberant expedition.
Undeterred, Alexander decided that her father would have wanted her to pursue her passions, and upon her return from Africa she enrolled in natural history courses at the University of California. She soon became one of the most accomplished female hunters and collectors of her time. Over the next four decades Alexander and her longtime partner, Louise Kellogg, took dozens of expeditions throughout the North American West. They collected tens of thousands of plant, animal, and fossil specimens, and they explored remote corners of the continent at a time when few women participated in scientific research or traveled alone. In 1947, at the ages of eighty and sixty-eight, Alexander and Kellogg set off with the botanist Annetta Carter for a three-month plant-collecting expedition in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The trip would be Alexander’s last. Yet when asked if she or her companions had ever been frightened, as elderly women traveling without an escort in a foreign country, Alexander replied, “Somos tres mujeres sin miedo”: we are three women without fear.7
FIGURE 7. Joseph Grinnell at work in the field. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
In 1906 Alexander contacted Grinnell to ask for advice in preparation for her first collecting trip to Alaska. The Berkeley paleontologist Jon C. Merriam and the first chief of the federal government’s Bureau of Biological Survey, C. Hart Merriam (no relation), had both recommended Grinnell to Alexander as an expert on Alaskan fauna. Grinnell impressed Alexander, and she soon approached the young scientist with a proposition. She wanted to use her inheritance in a way that would honor her father’s memory, and she had decided to donate a portion of her money to the University of California for the establishment of a zoology museum. She hoped that Grinnell would accept a position as its first director, an unusual opportunity for a young man who was still pursuing his doctorate. Grinnell agreed, and Alexander spent the next year negotiating with the university for space, resources, and administrative autonomy. It was the beginning of a collaboration that would last for more than three decades.8
When the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology opened, in 1908, it joined the larger movement to establish natural history museums throughout the United States. Many of these museums began as “cabinets of curiosities”—the personal collections of specimens and artifacts that wealthy patrons donated for public education and entertainment. The contributors and board members of these institutions were among the country’s richest and most powerful people. They represented a political elite that included politicians, leaders of industry, and prominent activists behind a variety of Progressive Era causes, from child welfare to occupational safety, public education, women’s suffrage, and conservation. Some also participated in anti-immigration groups, and many supported efforts to “improve society” through eugenics.9
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology grew in scope and influence. They mounted ambitious expeditions to remote lands, assembled catalogues of specimens from around the world, constructed ornate Victorian buildings to house their collections, and produced elaborate public displays to represent the diversity of life. These were scientific institutions in the sense that they hosted research and promoted public education. But like zoos, they also promoted themselves as sites for leisure and entertainment. To attract patrons, they often emphasized the exotic: African mammals arranged in dramatic dioramas, reconstructed skeletons of immense blue whales, life-size models of snarling tyrannosaurs, and the obligatory aquatic scenes of quizzical duck-billed platypuses.10
The MVZ would develop a different approach. It would forego international expeditions and the collection of exotic specimens, and it would delegate the task of staging public exhibitions to other institutions, such as the California Academy of Sciences. Grinnell wanted to establish the West Coast’s first major center for biological research, and like the generation of California naturalists who came before him, he focused his work on the region where he lived. Under Grinnell, the MVZ accrued a small staff of skilled researchers and collectors dedicated to the study of native fauna in and around California. The state became not only a study site but also an organizing framework and common bond for the museum’s researchers, students, patrons, and network of local informants.11
Grinnell welcomed specimens from other areas of the North American West, especially those adjacent to California, but as early as 1907 he wrote to Alexander to protest her planned acquisition of specimens from more-distant regions. Alexander had proposed to purchase a large collection from the Galápagos Islands, which to many observers would have seemed like a coup for a small, upstart museum. Yet Grinnell argued that the Galápagos had been “worked over again and again, better than any area of similar extent in California.” Unlike these islands, which had been popular with naturalists since Charles Darwin’s time, California was “in the newest part of the new world” and still offered a fresh field for research. The state, Grinnell concluded a few years later, “is practically inexhaustible, is naturally of easiest access and should be of greatest interest to this institution.”12
Grinnell viewed the physical collections of the MVZ not only as an important contribution to future generations of natural historians but also as the foundation of a comprehensive methodology that would foster his ambitious research program. Throughout his life, he focused on three interrelated areas of theoretical inquiry: the classification of biophysical environments, the spatial distribution of vertebrate species, and the ways that organism-environment interactions shaped animal evolution. These interests inspired one of the most innovative and energetic careers in the history of biology. Between 1893 and 1939, Grinnell published 554 books and articles. He extended C. Hart Merriam’s life zone concept, developed the idea of the niche, and provided a basis for the competitive exclusion principle. He also popularized the use of trinomial taxonomic classification, the division of distinct species into less-distinct subspecies defined by their morphological differences and geographic ranges. Grinnell viewed these fine distinctions, identifiable only through close observation and laborious mapping, as essential for understanding the evolutionary processes that led to the emergence of new species.13
Some of Grinnell’s most significant contributions involved his biogeographical research, which refined, revised, and extended Darwin’s theories about speciation, including the role of physical geography in the processes of adaptation and radiation. As early as 1904, Grinnell’s work on the chestnut-backed chickadee signaled his intent to develop the role of geography in evolutionary theory. A decade later he published two landmark works about the Colorado River, the first of which explored it as a pathway of species dispersal and the second of which considered it as a barrier. His nuanced thinking about the complexity of physical space and its importance in evolution provided a basis for countless future studies. Grinnell’s many protégés built on his work and amplified its influence even further. In 1941, for example, his former student Alden Miller published a classic study on speciation in the avian genus Junco, which Ernst Mayr later cited as a crucial contribution to the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology.14
Several influences shaped Grinnell’s work on spatial processes. At Stanford he studied among a group of naturalists who were developing theories of speciation based on geographical distribution. He arrived in Berkeley at a time when researchers in North America and Britain were beginning to think more rigorously about wildlife-habitat relationships, and the influences of a number of those individuals appear throughout his work.15 By the 1930s and 1940s, members of this loosely knit community included such key figures in the history of ecology as Charles Elton, Paul Errington, Herbert Stoddard, Aldo Leopold, and David Lack.
Grinnell’s
