John Torrey:
Western Flora

Torrey’s descriptions included plants collected on James Peak (now known as Pikes Peak), and later continued to document the findings from 1824-28, naming plants including hoary fleabane (Erigeron canus), a relative of the daisy found in the western U.S.; trailing krameria (Krameria lanceolata) found in the Great Plains; and Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum).

Image: S. Seymour, View of Ruins at the Base of the Rocky Mountains. In Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains by Stephen Harriman Long (1784-1864). Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1822-1823. LuEsther T. Mertz Library, The New York Botanical Garden.

Torrey confined his work on Wilkes’ specimens to cataloguing the collections made in California and Oregon. This research comprised Torrey’s last major research project, the results of which were published in the Phanerogamia of the Pacific Coast of North America (1862).

Image: Quercus macradenia herbarium specimen. Collected during Wilkes Expedition, 1838-42. William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, The New York Botanical Garden.

Frémont had learned to collect plants on his first expedition in the service of Joseph Nicolas Nicollet (1783-1843). Nicolett, a geographer was charged with mapping the upper Mississippi basin in the 1830s. When Fremont began to make plans for the first expedition he would lead in 1842, he wrote to John Torrey to enlist him in the review and classification of the plant specimens he would discover. This first letter began a long and fruitful friendship—the two men corresponded for more than a decade, and over the series of expeditions Frémont would lead, he collected more than 1,000 specimens, which resulted in the naming of 137 new species and 19 new genera—including one he named after Torrey (Torreya).

Learn more about the 1842 Expedition

Image: Letter Written by John C. Fremont to John Torrey, November 16, 1842. LuEsther T. Mertz Library, The New York Botanical Garden

Image: Paulus Roetter, Prairie of the Antelope. In Report on the United States and Mexican Border Survey by William H. Emory (1811-87). Washington: C. Wendell, printer, 1857-59. LuEsther T. Mertz Library, The New York Botanical Garden.