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Article Excerpt
On May 23, 1887, two brothers who had not seen each other for nearly forty years reunited at a ferry dock in Oakland. (1) Since their last meeting in their native England, their lives had taken extraordinarily different paths. In 1848, Alfred Russel Wallace had sailed from London to the Amazon to collect rare species of plants and animals. The following year, his older brother John had joined the hordes seeking gold in California.
When the brothers next greeted one another, Alfred had become the most famous living naturalist of his era, the man whose published contribution to the concept of natural selection sparked Charles Darwin to finally issue his epochal treatise on evolution, On the Origin of Species. For the thirty-plus years following Darwin's death in 1882, Alfred was Darwinism's most prominent champion. One of his recent biographers, referring to the anthropologist Loren Eiseley's proclamation of the nineteenth century as "Darwin's Century," has noted that in Darwin's absence, "the nineteenth century probably would be known as 'Wallace's Century." (2)
Though decidedly less famous, John had become an engineer whose skills were renowned throughout the Mother Lode, leading to posts as president of the Tuolumne County Water Co., San Joaquin County surveyor, chief engineer of the narrow gauge San Joaquin & Sierra Nevada Railroad, and the surveyor who conquered the daunting Sonora Pass. "Among all the Argonauts who came to California in early days in search of the 'Golden Fleece,'" the Stockton Daily Independent observed following his death, "none was better known throughout the mining regions than John Wallace.... He was a man of great prominence as an engineer and held the most responsible positions in his line of business that were obtainable in the mountains. In those days of great projects, which required engineering ability of the first order, the work to be done was of a magnitude that made almost any position as an engineer important." (3)
Yet the brothers' relationship, their reunion, and Alfred's subsequent sojourn in California--including a trip to the redwoods with conservation pioneer John Muir; discussions with Leland Stanford, one of the railroad "Big Four," former governor of California and, at the time of Alfred's visit, a U.S. senator; and lectures on natural history, most often on the theory of evolution, which he would compile for his 1889 bestseller Darwinism--have never been the subjects of a focused examination.
Alfred's voluminous writings--including an autobiography and unpublished journal of his North American travels--John's published Gold Rush letters, and the brothers' private correspondence, much of it at the Natural History Museum in London, reveal for the first time the story of two men who grew up together but followed different paths a continent apart, and who, once reunited, helped to popularize in California the modern age's most important scientific theory.
"A SCATTER'D FAMILY"
John Wallace was born in 1819, the seventh of nine children, in St. George's, Southwark, England. Alfred, the eighth child, was born four years later in Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales. The family, of modest means (father Thomas Vere Wallace was an occasional teacher and librarian), later moved to Hertford. It was there, when Alfred was seven years old, that the brothers' story nearly ended. They and several schoolmates were about to bathe in the river Beane when Alfred was unexpectedly pushed into the water. Unable to swim, he sank under the surface and swallowed water. Eleven-year-old John jumped in and pulled him out. "If my brother had not been there," Alfred wrote, "it is quite possible that I might have been drowned." (4)
John was important to Alfred not only as guardian but also as mentor and role model, "my chief playmate and instructor," as Alfred put it. John transformed a stable loft into a playroom where he built fireworks, toys, and gadgets illustrated in The Boy's Own Book. Alfred admired his brother's skill and assisted him, conceding that "John was of a more mechanical turn than myself." He followed John to Hertford School but, most importantly, learned from him the use of tools, resulting in a lifelong appreciation for "the pleasure and utility of doing for one's self everything that one is able to do." (5)
Both brothers would grow tall, about six feet, and lean, but their personalities differed. Whereas John was solidly practical, Alfred tended to the "reflective and imaginative." In a revealing comment made many years later, Alfred quipped that John in his bachelor days "used not to be considered witty." (6)
As a teenager, John was apprenticed to a London builder named Webster and became an accomplished carpenter while also learning surveying. He toiled ten hours a day to earn thirty shillings per six-day week. When Alfred was fourteen, he was removed from school and joined John. Nightly, the brothers frequented a workingmen's club where books and lectures provided entertainment as much as games of dominoes. There Alfred became a disciple of the utopian thinker Robert Owen. John's views on political economy from that time are unknown, though his later writings suggest a different philosophy.
A few months later, Alfred moved in with his eldest brother, William, a surveyor in Bedfordshire, to begin his apprenticeship in what would become the family trade. The work of surveying--entailing walking the land and living in the countryside, particularly in Wales, where they later set up shop--fed Alfred's intense and insatiable curiosity about geology and botany: "The solace and delight of my lonely rambles among the moors and mountains, was my first introduction to the variety, the beauty, and the mystery of nature." (7) But William disapproved of the herbarium Alfred had built for his newfound and burgeoning scientific study and, like their father, had little interest in the natural world. When Alfred reached twenty-one, he once more shared London lodgings with John, his favorite brother, as he looked for employment, which he found as a teacher in Leicester. There he met Henry Walter Bates, an entomologist who would encourage his interest in nature and exploration.
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Upon William's unexpected death in 1846 in Neath, South Wales, Alfred took over William's unfinished surveying work amid a railway boom, providing much-needed funds. He convinced John to give up his carpentry and team up to start a business in building, surveying, and architecture. As they designed and supervised construction of a new Mechanics' Institute at Neath, John built a small boat so the family (their mother, Mary, and youngest brother, Herbert Edward, had moved in; their father had died in 1843) could ply the river Neath and its canals to the seaside activities available at Swansea.
During their two summers at Neath, the brothers explored the rough countryside, Alfred taking notes and contemplating the processes of nature with John, the only brother with whom he could share his passion. "We had both of us at this time determined, if possible," Alfred recalled, "to go abroad into more or less wild countries." (8)
In 1848, they shuttered their business and Alfred--inspired by Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and other books by explorer-naturalists--partnered with Bates and sailed to South America, where he would spend the next four years species hunting in the rain forest to study the natural world "with a view to the theory of the origin of species." He would be joined by Herbert, who wrote, "We are doomed to be a scatter'd family, and if it must be so, if circumstance has so ordered it let us meet it bravely and with honest hearts go forth resigned and cheerful ... perhaps in some future time yet meet again." (11) But Herbert would never return home; he died of yellow fever in 1851. (9)
CALIFORNIA HOME
Meanwhile, earthy John, in dire economic straits at Heath, kept cows on a few rented acres of pasture near town and tried dairy farming. But the enterprise failed and in spring 1849, he joined the frenzied rush to California in search of gold. An eight-month voyage around the Horn on the schooner Pera landed him in San Francisco on December 12. The winter rainy season, however, was the wrong time to travel to the mines. He stayed in Matin County, involved in an unsuccessful woodcutting venture, before traveling to Stockton and then Sonora. He mined there but, as with most Forty-niners, did not hit...
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