A British Butterfly Collector on the Texas Frontier

By James Kaye

The protagonist is a young British butterfly collector who, working for the British Museum in London, collected the little-known butterflies and moths at the time in Texas in 1840. The collector teamed with a Spanish seorita to collect them across Texas when traveling in an ox-drawn covered wagon over rough and muddy roads and through the ranges of hostile Native Americans. The book is about their collections and, at times, hazardous adventures. The text is a natural history of the butterfly and moth species pictured. The book is also a history of pioneer Texas of the 1840s as well as the ethnology of Comanche Indians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490759548

James Kaye

James Kaye is a retired research biologist from the National Park Service working first in Carlsbad Caverns, then Padre Island, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Channel Islands and lastly Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, during which Kaye wrote thirty papers in science journals on plant and animal subjects. Other interests were (are) in the art of British artist John William Waterhouse with three papers on his life and works in art journals; two being in The British Art Journal. Kaye also wrote five articles on the 1800s pioneer era of Texas, his home State, appearing in history journals and four novels based on Texas history; one being A British Butterfly Collector on the Texas Frontier. When a teenager, Kaye collected butterflies in Texas and of the obstacles encountered as written in the Dedication to all collectors of them. In 1948 on a summer vacation trip in Green Mountain Falls and when Midland trains were still running through the town, and when on hikes up along the Crystal Creek waterfalls, Kaye collected specimens of the so-called Rocky Mountain Apollos commonly known as The Snow Butterfly of the Mountains (Fig. 33). His interest in them and in the history of Green Mountain Falls as well as that of Ute Pass inspired much of the storylines in The Falls of Green Mountain Novella, sometimes known as a “long short story.”

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© Copyright 2015 James Kaye.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-5953-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-5955-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-5954-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015906756

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter One

The Interview

Chapter Two

Voyage Of The Hannah Elizabeth

Chapter Three

Sally

Chapter Four

The Pineywoods

Chapter Five

The Dance

Chapter Six

The Encounter - Mosa

Chapter Seven

The Brazos

Chapter Eight

The San Bernardo

Chapter Nine

The Colorado

Chapter Ten

The Navidad And Lavaca

Chapter Eleven

The Big Hill And Peach Creek

Chapter Twelve

The Battle

Chapter Thirteen

The Aftermath

Chapter Fourteen

The Interlude

Chapter Fifteen

San Antonio De Béjar

Chapter Sixteen

The Edwards Plateau

Chapter Seventeen

The Future

Addenda

References

Picture Credits

About the Author and Story

Dedication

To those in their youth who chased butterflies, the adventures of it are well written by American Lepidopterist Ferdinand Heinrich Hermann Strecker (1836-1901). When as young as five, Strecker chased and netted them and later wrote of it in his 1878 Butterflies and Moths of North America of the obstacles encountered; those of fences, creeks, rocks, logs, and through gardens and farm fields, and over and through meadows and marshes and along the edges of woods where plenty of sumac [poison] and thistles grow. (American Painted Lady on Thistle Gouche on paper © Katie Lee)

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Preface

William J. Holland’s 1898 and 1930 editions of his epic tome, The Butterfly Book, describes and depicts in seventy-seven full color Plates and numerous figures the more than seven hundred valid species and the several hundred varieties then known in North America north of the Rio Grande of Texas. In the writing, Holland (1848-1932) had access to all of the then known American literature referring to most of the species occurring north and south of the equator.

The earliest descriptions by other Lepidopterists of North American butterflies are found in writings now virtually unknown and largely unavailable except in the rarest of copies. The very first illustration, a painting of an American butterfly, was that of a Tiger Swallowtail by John White in 1587 during an exploration of Virginia by Sir Walter Raleigh and now in the British Museum in South Kensington.

In 1764, the imminent taxonomist Carl Linnæus described and named a good number of the commoner North American species among hundreds of others in the world. Johann Christian Fabricius considered one of the greatest entomologists of the eighteenth century described in 1775 and 1798 more than 9,000 species of insects though briefly and only a very few of were (are) of North American species.

About that same time, Pieter Cramer a wealthy Dutchman published Papillons Exotiques that contained recognizable pictures of a number of the North American forms. He was the first Lepidopterist to draw in color and to describe the Diana Fritillary, Speyeria diana, and the Zebra Swallowtail, Eurytides marcellus; the latter common in eastern Texas mentioned and pictured in this book. In the later 1700s Jacob Hübner published essentially a picture book of butterflies that did however include scattered illustrations of North American species though with almost no text in support of them.

The first work largely devoted to the lepidoptera of North America was published in England in 1797 by Sir James Edward Smith and illustrated by American John Abbot entitled The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia where Abbot lived.

The largely European domination in the butterfly world in those earlier years continued until the 1872 to 1878 publications on North American butterflies and moths by American entomologist Ferdinand Heinrich Hermann Strecker (1836-1901). By about the age of forty, Strecker had assembled an amazing collection of some 200,000 specimens of butterflies and moths coming from all corners of the world including 399 new species and around 150 subspecies. At the time of his death, Strecker’s collection was the largest and most important private collection in the New World of butterflies and moths now housed in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It was in 1878 that Strecker published his Butterflies and Moths of North America and wrote fondly of his chases to catch them (Dedication).

Another important work of North American butterflies of the times was the 1837 General history and illustrations of the Lepidoptera and caterpillars of Northern America that contained 104 color Plates by French physician Dr. Jean Baptiste Boisduval of Paris, but also a celebrated entomologist of other forms.

In 1842, five years later, American entomologist and botanist Dr. Thaddeus William Harris published a report on the insects of the State of Massachusetts injurious to vegetation though of the more than 2,000 insects reported, only a relatively few of the New England butterflies named were such as some swallowtail, white and sulphur species which also occur in Texas.

In 1852, Englishman Edward Doubleday, a Quaker much enamored of butterflies, traveled extensively in the United States to compare similarities of American and English species and wrote The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera: Comparing their General Characteristics. He was so struck with the flora, butterflies and landscapes in the United States the richest and most verdant pastures he had ever seen, that he thought of moving to Kentucky, but didn’t.

From the times of the more recent publications on North American butterflies, the 1878 Strecker Butterfly book, and that of the 1898 Holland book, used the binomial nomenclature system devised by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 that classified all living things down basically to genera and species. But ever since, and it always will be, that taxonomic splitters and lumpers will continue to change Latin names back and forth, and while logically in most cases name changes are based upon sound morphological studies and comparisons of species, all too often name changes seem little more than whimsical nuttiness and matters of one’s own personal opinion.

The Zebra Swallowtail binomial now Eurytides marcellus has been tossed around even from genus to genus based largely in some cases upon only the minutiae of morphologies. For examples, scales on the wings and the upper surfaces of the antennae are more loosely scaled on Graphium than on Papilio warranting, to the splitters, classification into a whole different genus.

The Zebra Swallowtail was originally described by Carl Linnaeus as Papilio ajax but later became named by others, the splitters, as Protographium marcellus and Eurytides marcellus, though according to still other splitters the genus name also became Bellerographium, Neographium, Iphiclides and Graphium with the latter taxon being more applicable to the similar so-called Kite Swallowtails of the Old World tropics. However, of the more than one hundred worldwide Graphium species known, Howe lists Graphium marcellus (Cramer) as being the only Zebra Swallowtail found in North America and specifically north of Mexico through eastern Texas and east to the Atlantic Coast. Glassberg, Carter, Brook, and Neck (see References) classify the Zebra Swallowtail as Eurytides marcellus. Clarence M. Weed named the Zebra Swallowtail Iphiclides ajax marcellus, and so it goes. William J. Holland followed Linnaeus with Papilio ajax, though he named marcellus as a variety after William Henry Edwards, and who wrote in his book: There is a great deal of dispute about the names of the Ajax group by the different forms of this beautiful insect. The forms are only seasonal variations in appearance of the early and late spring and summer broods but still of the same species.

In more recent times, some the best known books on North American butterflies are the works of Glassberg, Howe, Scott, and Brock and Kaufman. Good references to Texas butterflies specifically are by Wauer and by Neck using the nomenclature accepted and valid in the Checklist and English Names of North American Butterflies by the North American Butterfly Association. Serious students of Texas butterflies can search the Internet for Texas Butterfly Bibliography–Texas Entomology and South Texas Butterfly Pictures and Profiles listing publications specifically on Texas butterfly classification and natural history. Appendix 3 in Finding Butterflies in Texas by Roland H. Wauer lists them by ten regions in the State and being a reference for some of this book’s storylines.

The following Chapters herein written in a novel format, the privilege of creative writing, are of the 1840 adventures of a young British butterfly collector who in England first collected butterflies for the Steven’s Auction Rooms in London, well known of the times as one of the largest sellers worldwide of butterfly and moth specimens. The adventurer subsequently collected butterflies for imminent British entomologist Edward Doubleday of the British Museum in want of specimens in far-away Texas little studied in the mid-1800s. Too, specimens were needed for comparisons with species common to both sides of the Atlantic such as the Monarch, Red Admiral, Painted Lady and Mourning Cloak though the latter is known in England as the Camberwell Beauty.

The 1840 year of this book occurred during the fifty year pioneer era of Texas between the 1820s and 1870s when European and Anglo-American settlers suffered the hardships and dangers of settlement including depredations by hostile Indians inclined to barbarous acts.

[The primary reference for the storylines on Texas Indians written in Chapters Eleven and Twelve set off in brackets as is this one, is The Indians of Texas in 1830 by Ethnologist and Biologist Jean Louis (Jon-Louie) Berlandier (see References) who travelled among them and knew them well, especially the Comanches.]

A BRITSH BUTTERFLY COLLECTOR ON THE TEXAS

FRONTIER - 1840

Chapter One

THE INTERVIEW

London, 1840

Please enter and please sit. British entomologist Edward Doubleday asked as he motioned Kenneth Stanley known fondly to family and friends as Ken to a chair next to his cluttered roll-top desk with its pigeonholes crammed. Atop in an inkwell sat a bottle of India ink next to a holder of goose quill pens and assorted pencils and crayons. Across the top of his desk lay handwritten pages for Doubleday’s epic treatise, The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera Comprising their Generic Characters, long already in the writing [published in 1852]. In a top drawer Doubleday had a draft of his List of the Specimens of Lepidopterous Insects in the Collections of the British Museum which in it, contrary to some other taxonomies, placed swallowtails at the top of the hierarchy of Lepidoptera and the skippers at the bottom; also with William Henry Edwards in his The Butterflies of North America 1868-1897. (Other thinkers placed swallowtails at the bottom.)

Atop an adjacent work table were paraphernalia for the mounting of butterfly wings such as spreading boards, paper strips, forceps and positioning pins. On other tables about the room sat rearing cages of butterfly and moth larvae and at the time were the curious blue-tailed caterpillars of Eyed Hawk Moths, Smertinthus ocelatta, feeding upon willow and poplar leaves, and caterpillars of Emperor Moths, Saturnia pavonia, with purplish tubercles feeding on heather leaves. In other cages were caterpillars of Red Admirals, Vanessa atalanta, feeding on buddleia leaves, and those of Peacock Butterflies, Inachis io, feeding on stinging nettles (Figs. 1 & 2).

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Insect show cases with glass-topped drawers lined one wall which were fumigated with the unmistakable aroma of naphthalene crystals used for repelling dermestid beetles, well known among entomologists for the bad habits of them to feed on insect specimens, and skins of mounted animals being no exception. Edward Doubleday was also an outstanding ornithologist proven in a sense of it in that he had several mounted specimens of birds inside glassed cases.

Along other walls floor to ceiling were book shelves including one of the earliest works on British butterflies, the 1717 Papilionum Brittaniae Icones by James Petiver who coined the name Fritillary for that particular group of world-wide butterflies including North America. Other of his books by world-renown lepidopterists were those by Germans Jacob Hübner and of his 1790 Contributions to the History of Butterflies, and a treatise by Johann Andreas Bergsträsser describing butterflies in Europe.

English Lepidopterist Henry Walter Bates who did much of his work in the rainforests of the Amazon and who sent back over 14,000 insect specimens wrote of it all in his best known publication, The Naturalist on the River Amazon. Englishman biologist John Edward Gray published over 1000 papers on animal species of which many were on butterflies.

Dutchman Pieter Cramer’s 1782 Die Uitlandsche Kapellen was a prized book with its beautifully illustrated life-sized hand-colored engravings of butterflies from Asia, Africa and America, and being the first book on exotic lepidoptera to use in the, then, new binomial taxonomic system developed by Carl Linnaeus in 1735. Files of his butterfly taxonomies occupied a large part of one shelf along with various journals, proceedings, and reports on butterflies and moths. Other works of French lepidopterists included importantly that of Jean Baptiste Boisduval’s scholarly General History and Illustrations of the Lepidoptera and Caterpillars of Northern America published in Paris in 1837.

Edward Doubleday pulled Boisduval’s book from a shelf along with that of Cramer’s with its more than 1600 butterfly illustrations and showed them to Ken and asked: Are you familiar with these books?

Yes sir. He answered, feeling rather smugly to know of them.

How so? Doubleday asked, curiously.

I work as an apprentice in the Stevens Auction Rooms on Bloomsbury Street in Covent Garden that sell butterfly specimens locally, and others that are shipped all around the world. I help mount and dry those for local sales and fold those in glassine envelopes for shipment. The books you’re showing are also in the library there for species identifications that I’ve read and studied. I also help label specimens with information as to the localities and dates collected and if known I record information of field observations. Not long ago I went with Mr. Stevens to the London docks to receive several boxes just in of butterflies from Canton, China. There were some very fine specimens in the order now already being sold in the Auction rooms.

Yes, said Doubleday, I knew of your work from Samuel Stevens when I asked him for recommendation of someone well experienced in such things as you mention, to explain the reason I invited you here. But more than that, I need someone who can identify butterflies and moths at least down to family names. For example, what family is this specimen? Doubleday asked as he handed Ken a swallowtail species common to Europe.

"Surely you don’t need me to identify the family for you." Ken Stanley remarked facetiously with a wry grin, suspecting maybe a trick question of some kind, knowing that Edward Doubleday was one of the best-known British Lepidopterists.

Oh no! Doubleday smiled in reply. "I know the family name, but I want to know if you know it…and don’t worry about the species taxon or race of which there are many. What family is it in?"

It’s in the family Papilionidae. Ken answered though he felt a bit amused to have been asked about a butterfly so common in England and so easily recognized by its hind wing tails. Moreover, he had pinned many for local sales and folded others for shipment. He even knew the Latin name, Papilio machaon, given to it by Carl Linnaeus.

Then what about this one? Doubleday asked as he pulled from a tray a butterfly specimen that had no tails on its hind wings.

That’s a new one for me, Ken admitted, but by its size and wing shapes, veination, and markings I’d say that it too is in the family Papilionidae even though it has no tails. Ken looked closely to ascertain that the tattered specimen hadn’t once had tails though now missing from wear and tear.

It’s not from Europe which is why you wouldn’t likely know it. Doubleday remarked. "It’s a tailless swallowtail from the southern United States known as Battus polydamas sent to me by a colleague in Georgia.

What family would you place this one sent to me by another colleague who collects butterflies in the southern parts of the United States west to Texas, New Mexico and Colorado? This was collected in the Colorado Rocky Mountains known as Parnassius phoebus.

I’m sorry sir, but I can’t name the family. Ken replied rather disappointed that he couldn’t.

Never mind. Doubleday apologized for him. "I wouldn’t expect you to know the family, as these butterflies are found in the northern latitudes in North America and in Western Europe and Asia but not here. However, they are closely related to swallowtails but note that it, too, has no tails.

Now let me show you three more of our common butterflies here in England and elsewhere in Europe. Tell me the family and genus names if you know them. Doubleday first showed Ken a small yellow butterfly with black spots on its fore wings.

With no hesitation Ken answered. It’s in the family Peridae and in the genus Colias.

Very good! Doubleday replied. What about this one? He asked as he held up a butterfly with red stripes across its fore wings.

It’s a Red Admiral in the family Nymphalidae and genus Vanessa. Ken answered, rather pleased again to know the answers.

Very good! Doubleday replied once more. Now what about this one? Doubleday asked as he held up a small butterfly with angled fore wings with copper-colored splotches and with greatly elongated mouth parts protruding forward