Donaldson's Flora | Kirkby Teaching Resources

Epilogue

Although often described as pedantic, ponderous, or oddly amusing, most descriptions of Donaldson also mention his close family ties, his benevolent and gregarious nature, and his obvious love of life.

However, it should be noted that Donaldson’s geniality was conditional upon 19^th century concepts of race. He closed out his last letter to the St. Paul Pioneer, dated August 30, 1874, with a profoundly racist call for the Black Hills to be taken from the Lakota.

‘One question, shall the grand and beautiful Eden just discovered “well-watered as the garden of the Lord,” rich for horticulture, agriculture, and mining, be longer left as only an occasional hunting ground for the most obstinately depraved nomad that bears the “human form divine,” and that too, when thousands through whose veins thrills the noble Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and German blood demand it for their homes?’

At the time, those sentiments were widely shared and celebrated in many Euro-American communities. From a modern perspective though, knowing their eventual toll, it was a profoundly regrettable way for Donaldson to close out his time in the Black Hills.

photograph of botanical specimen collected by Aris Berkeley Donaldson while on the 1874 Black Hills Expedition — Sample of Astragalus *adsurgens* *Pall.* collected by Aris Berkeley Donaldson during the 1874 Black Hills Expedition. (from Brief History of and Collector's Index to the Wabash College Herbarium (WAB), Now Deposited at the New York Botanical Garden (NY) by Veronica J. Masson, in Brittonia, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1994), pp. 211-224 - Springer Nature

Appendix

Although he was never truly a botanist, Aris Berkley Donaldson played many roles over the course of his life. He was a farmer, a student, a schoolteacher, naval veteran, principal, university professor, lawyer, and newspaper editor. However, perhaps his most lasting claim to intellectual immortality is that for sixty days in the summer of 1874, he was a correspondent accompanying Custer’s 1874 Black Hills Expedition who also happened to collect specimens of seventy-four botanical species for Newton Horace Winchell.

Apart from military records and seventy photographs taken by Saint Paul photographer William Henry Illingworth, remarkably few physical relics remain from the 1874 Black Hills Expedition. Given their resistant nature, it is not surprising that many of Winchell’s rock and mineral samples survived, but it is startling that so many of Donaldson’s samples, surely among the most delicate artifacts of that expedition, still exist today.

Forty of Donaldson’s seventy-four specimens survived up until the 1990s as reported by Veronica J. Masson in their ‘Brief history of and collector's index to the Wabash College Herbarium (WAB), now deposited at The New York Botanical Garden (NY)’ published in the August 30, 1994, edition of Brittonia, 46(3), pp. 21 i-224.

Presently, at least thirty-two botanical specimens collected by Aris Berkley Donaldson during the 1874 Black Hills Expedition remain in the New York Botanical Garden’s Steere Herbarium and can be viewed online at the links below. If the herbarium links are not working, the images are also available at this linked page.

Agastache arrisatus

Aplopappus spinulosus DC.

Artemisia ludoviciana Nutt.

Astragalus adsurgens Pall.

Astragalus ceramicus var. filifolius (A.Gray) F.J.Herm.

Calochortus nuttallii Torr.

Calochortus nuttallii Torr. & A.Gray

Calylophus serrulatus (Nutt.) P.H.Raven

Carum gairdneri Beuth & Hook

Collomia linearis Nutt.

Cuscuta indecora Choisy

Dalea purpurea Vent. var. purpurea