Edward Palmer papers relating to the American West

Edward Palmer (1829-1911), often regarded as "the father of ethnobotany," was born in England on January 12, 1829, and later emigrated to the United States. He developed an interest in natural history collecting under the tutelage of Dr. Jared Kirtland in Cleveland, Ohio, who taught him to prepare bird skins to dry and to press plants. He had his first major opportunity to collect when he was appointed to Captain Page's Water Witch expedition to Paraguay as hospital steward and botanical collector in 1853. After the Paraguay expedition he went to England to visit his mother, where he was married to Dinah Riches in 1856, and then came back to the U. S. He studied medicine for a few months in Cleveland at the Cleveland Homeopathic College, then he lived in Kansas and Colorado, and for a few months in California, where he worked on the Geological Survey of California collecting marine invertebrates. During the Civil War, he did medical work in army outposts in the Southwest for a while after the war. He managed to make natural history collections while working for the U. S. Army. The rest of his life was mostly taken up with making archaeological, zoological and botanical collections for a variety of patrons, primarily in southwestern U. S. and Mexico. He is best known for his botanical collections, which are said to number over 100,00 specimens. He made numerous botanical collecting trips to Mexico from 1878 to 1910. Palmer also was known for extensive surveys of Indian mounds in the eastern U. S. including: Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other states.