The Splendid Haul of Cyrus Guernsey Pringle Rob Nicholson A good active collector could make a splendid haul by putting in a season between Monterey and Saltillo including high mountain valleys not hard to reach but involving hard work and some risks.-C. C. Parry to Asa Gray,1878 f Henry David Thoreau created the model When Pringle and two other Vermont Quak- the New England activist-biologist, then ers were conscripted and sent to a military camp forperhaps its finest exemplar was a modest on an island in Boston harbor in late August of man from the hills of Vermont, Cyrus Guernsey 1831, they were thrown into the guardhouse: whose name resonates with Pringle, very Here we are m prison in our own land for no in humble agrarian Yankee rectitude. Beginning crimes, no offence to God nor man: nay, more: circumstances, Pringle went on to capture the we are here for obeymg the commands of the Son attention of an American president, work with of God and the influences of his Holy Spirit. I legendary Harvard botanists, and achieve a must look for patience m this dark day. I am record of botanical fieldwork in Mexico that is troubled too much and excited and perplexed. unsurpassed today. Over the next few weeks the prisoners were C. G. was born into a Pringle farming family bullied by their military guards and urged even in East on 1838. Charlotte, Vermont, May 6, by other Quakers to agree to hospital work in After attending local secondary schools he lieu of active service. Still adamant, Pringle and enrolled at the of Vermont in University 1859, his fellows were sent to Virginia, and guns were but soon had to return to the farm because of a "thrust over our heads and hung upon our death in the family. Pringle became an avid and shoulders." As they marched toward the battle- skilled horticulturist at a young age, developing front, Pringle had his first glimpse of the after- new strains of vegetables and reporting his shocks of battle: results in horticultural journals. His hybridizing Seeing for the first time, a country made weary work with potatoes was so successful that a with war-blight, a country once adorned with seedhouse in New York purchased the market- groves and green pastures and meadows and for new varieties. ing rights fields of wavmg gram, and happy with a thou- It was not his of commingling plant genes sand homes, now laid with the ground, one real- that first brought Pringle public attention, izes as he can m no other way something of the however, but his refusal to be drafted into the ruin that lies m the trail of a war. But upon these Union Army during the Civil War. A devout fields of Virginia, once so fair, there rests a two- Quaker and pacifist, he refused to perform any fold blight, first that of slavery, now that of war. When one contrasts the face of this with task that would support the war effort, and country the hillsides and vales of New although draftees could hire proxies to fill in for smiling England, he sees stamped upon it m characters so marked, them, he also refused an uncle’s offer to pay his none but a blind man can fail to the commutation The of his wartime read, great money. diary irrefutable arguments against slavery and against in a experience, published 1918, portrays strong- war too: and must be filled with loathmg for willed man uncom- of deep faith who remained these twin relics of barbarism, so awful m the promising even while sometimes questioning potency of their consequences that they can his own zealousness. change even the face of the country. 3 For twenty-six years beginning in 1885, C. G. Pringle explored the flora of Mexico as a botanical collector for Harvard’s Gray Herbarium. Although he hired assistants from both Vermont and Mexico, Filemon Lozano, seen here with Pnngle, was his principal assistant from 1902 on. 4 Despite punishments that at one point ing on Sargent to direct his cadre of plant collec- included being staked to the ground in the tors on behalf of his wood collection, but the summer sun, Pringle would not relent. Through two men disagreed about which species to pri- the intervention of Isaac Newton, the Secretary oritize, and Jesup bristled at what he saw as of Agriculture, who was sympathetic to the extravagant expenses. As a result of these dis- Quaker cause, Pringle and his fellows were putes Sargent began pressing Pringle for faster taken to Washington where their case was results, and after receiving a particularly bully- brought before President Lincoln. When ing set of demands in October of 1882, Pringle Pringle’s health began to deteriorate, Lincoln cabled his resignation from Arizona. Explaining "was moved to sympathy on my behalf" and the conflict in a letter to Asa Gray, he wrote: he was on November 6. paroled All season [Sargent] has goaded me on to comple- After his three-month ordeal, Pringle tion of the Museum work, demanding impossi- returned to the family farm in East Charlotte bilities of me. He wished me to suspend m great and to his horticultural pursuits. He collected measure (or entirely so) my own collectmg, but new varieties of grapes, currants, plums, toma- offered no terms to compensate me. I suspended work for own but toes, and corn and resumed his hybridizing the Museum my thirty-three in an entire season. Yet I am with work with oats, wheat, tomatoes, plums, cur- days charged and as I under- rants, gooseberries, and potatoes. During the unfaithfulness, incapacity, even, stand it, with dishonesty. I recollect saying I 1870s he began to receive requests from the should endeavor to please Mr. Sargent but that Boston area for of native Vermont specimens he should never make me his hack. I expect him The fern of plants. expert George Davenport to be terribly angry and give me a bad name [13 Medford, Massachusetts, for example, asked November 1882]. him for rare ferns from the Vermont woods. As continued as patron and a result of joining the Massachusetts Horticul- Gray Pringle’s him to the Herbarium as a tural Society and other local botanical groups, appointed Gray botanical collector. wrote to met Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who Gray Pringle saying Pringle "in is often called the father of North American that he preferred him to collect in Mexico, new From then arena for botany and whose family were to become life- ground." on, Pringle’s would be where he long supporters of Pringle’s collecting efforts. plant collecting Mexico, undertook 39 between 1885 and In 1880 Pringle was given three commissions expeditions some as as ten months. to collect in the western United States. For Dr. 1909, lasting long did continue to collect for Gray he was to collect plants of general botanic Pringle Sargent His field of November interest; for the U.S. Census Department, he occasionally. entry 10, reads: was to explore the region’s forests under the 1907, direction of the Arnold Arboretum’s Charles Once again I spend another happy day on the Sprague Sargent and submit systematic, geo- mountainside above the Valley of Mexico ... I graphical, and economic data; for the American collect a half dozen species in scores and cones Museum of Natural History’s Jesup Collection of two pines for Professor Sargent, P. teocote and P. pseudostrobus. of North American Woods, he was to obtain large samples of wood, also under Sargent’s And on four occasions Pringle shepherded direction. This work would keep him in the through Mexico the eminent pine taxonomist West from 1880 until the fall of 1882. George Russell Shaw, helping him find and But during the course of Pringle’s expedition, identify a large number of Mexican pines, an disputes arose between Sargent and Morris K. exceedingly complex group. In 1909 the Arnold Jesup. Jesup was a wealthy New Yorker who had Arboretum published Shaw’s work as The Pines helped found the American Museum of Natural of Mexico. History and who was underwriting the Museum’s effort to collect logs from every tree Cyrus Pringle always began his expeditions by species in the United States. Jesup was depend- boarding the train at Charlotte for the long trip C. S. Sargent called Pachycereus pringlei one of the most interestmg of Prmgle’s many Mexican discovemes. This drawmg, made from a photograph taken on San Pedro Martm Island, shows what is surely one of North Amenca’s strangest and most remarkable forests. Sometimes more than thirty feet m height, P. pringlei is thicker and more ponderous than any other known cactus. Its flowers are scattered along the ribs, two or three feet from the top. southward. He usually brought with him some It may be a measure of the botanist’s iron con- young men from the local area as assistants, but stitution that three weeks after his return to these Vermont farmboys often wilted in the Vermont he boarded a train for Mexico a third heat and difficult conditions of Mexico. 1886 time that year. O. W. Barrett, a Vermont bota- was a particularly bad year, with two expedi- nist who had collected with Pringle both m tions cut short so that Pringle could return Mexico and Vermont, described the difficulties home with sick assistants. His journal entry for faced by Pringle and his assistants: Sunday, July 25, reads like a Vermonter’s haiku: Usually, one Mexican helper would be left at the "base" to guard the property and to The boys rested, I dried plants.