How the Smithsonian Supported Scientific Exploration During Westward Expansion

A new book on the history of the Smithsonian reveals its place alongside the nation’s development

The Smithsonian Institution came of age in the era of Manifest Destiny. The territorial gains that followed the Mexican-American War produced a nation that stretched to the Pacific coast. Inspired by dreams of a fortune in gold, the promise of an agricultural paradise, or the simple desire to see what was over the next hill, thousands of Americans—citizens and immigrants alike—uprooted their lives and set out for the far western edge of the continent via overland trails, a sea voyage around Cape Horn, or a dangerous trek through the disease-ridden jungles of Central America.

The first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Joseph Henry, certainly appreciated the possibilities that American expansion offered to the Smithsonian. “Our new possessions in Oregon, California and Mexico,” he wrote in 1849, “offer interesting fields for scientific inquiry, particularly in the line of natural history.” It was the second secretary, Spencer Baird, however, who took full advantage of those possibilities. During the decade leading up to the Civil War, he had recruited adventurous civilian naturalists, as well as the scientifically inclined officers and men of the US Army Corps of Engineers, to undertake scientific collecting efforts on behalf of the Institution.

Americans emerging from the tragedy of the Civil War turned their attention to the center of the continent, where rolling prairies beckoned potential homesteaders. Before 1860, Southern congressmen had opposed any attempt to extend the offer of inexpensive western land to settlers, fearing that an influx of foreign immigrants and Northern free staters would block the extension of slavery into the new territories. With the removal of Southern opposition in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, “the hope of the poor man,” as writer Mari Sandoz, the daughter of a homesteader, proclaimed. Earlier policy offered public land at $1.25 an acre, “too rich for the penniless,” who stood to lose the land and the money if they failed to improve the place within five years. The new legislation offered 160 acres under the same terms with no outlay beyond a $14 filing fee.

The settlers would soon have a means of traveling to their new homes and sending their crops to eastern markets. Just as President Lincoln had decreed that work would continue on the unfinished Capitol dome despite the war, the first transcontinental railroad began pushing west in 1863. Towns would follow the tracks, as would a new generation of settlers in search of a homestead and a fresh start. But what was the nature of the vast open spaces between the Kansas frontier and the Rocky Mountains?

The antebellum surveys conducted by the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers were of little practical value to potential homesteaders. The army had pursued limited and very specific goals: the survey of five potential routes for a transcontinental railroad, the establishment of the borders separating both Mexico and Canada from the United States, and the exploration of the lower Colorado River. Almost as an afterthought, these expeditions usually included a young naturalist or two, often graduates of elite universities, usually mentored and recommended by Spencer Baird. Useful as they were to science and the military, the multivolume survey reports had little to say about climate, growing seasons, soil types, the availability of water, or a host of other matters that would spell success or failure for a farmer.

If solid information was in short supply, opinions were readily available. Early reports painted a bleak picture. In 1810, explorer Zebulon Pike suggested that “these vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa.” In the report of his 1820 expedition, Major Stephen Long described the rolling prairies dominating the center of the continent as the “Great American Desert.” Edwin James, a member of his party, remarked that the area “is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and, of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.”

Boosters like William Gilpin, however, were quick to assure potential settlers that the Great Plains and the Great Basin beyond were anything but uninhabitable. Gilpin had accompanied John Charles Frémont on his 1843 expedition across the Rockies, helped to organize a provisional government in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and participated in the occupation of New Mexico in 1846. Established as a lawyer in Saint Louis by 1860, he published his own glowing account of the West aimed at prospective homesteaders. The Great Plains, he insisted, were the “Pastoral Garden of the world.” Plowing this rich land would scarcely be necessary. With a “fine calcareous mold” covered in “thick nutritious grasses,” one had only to scatter the seeds and harvest a crop. Everywhere, the ground was “soft arable and fertile,” capable of supporting “agriculture on a large scale, comparatively a new order of industry to our people.” The Great Basin, stretching from the western edge of the plains to the mountains, was, Gilpin admitted, “universally an arid region, and nowhere is arable agriculture possible without artificial irrigation.” Fortunately, the soil could be “easily and cheaply saturated by all the various systems of artificial irrigation, acequias, artesian wells, or flooding by machinery.” Irrigation ditches would serve as fences, enabling the production of “a prodigious yield . . . of grain, grass, vegetable, the grape and fruits, flax, hemp, cotton, and . . . flora.”

There was a clear need for practical, trustworthy information on the agricultural and economic potential of the West. The approach adopted by the federal government to meet that need involved a new round of scientific appraisals reflecting the lessons and experience of the state geological surveys that had played such an important economic and intellectual role in Jacksonian America. While the movement to identify and map a state’s topography, geology, and economic resources began in the South in the 1820s, Edward Hitchcock and James Hall provided models of what could be accomplished with the geological surveys of, respectively, Massachusetts (1830–33) and New York (1836–41). Both men took a broad view of their task, providing accurate maps and detailed geological studies of value in planning transportation improvements. They reported on soils, rivers and lakes, minerals, building materials, and other economic resources and cataloged the zoological, botanical, and paleontological features of their regions. Hitchcock produced a richly illustrated seven-hundred-page report, while the New York survey issued twelve volumes.

Recognizing the value of these studies, other states established their own geological surveys during the antebellum years. The California survey, running from 1860 to 1874, was the result of almost half a century of experience at the state level and served as a springboard to broad national surveys. William H. Goetzmann, the preeminent historian of the scientific exploration of the West, noted that “the California Survey . . . deserves to be ranked as the first in a series of great surveys that characterized the post–Civil War exploration in the Far West.”

Joseph Henry played a key role in selecting Josiah Dwight Whitney as the director of the California survey. A native of Massachusetts and an 1839 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, Whitney accepted a position with a geological survey of New Hampshire under Charles T. Jackson in 1840. He moved on to a survey of the mineral resources of the Lake Superior region; worked on the geological surveys of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin; and published The Metallic Wealth of the United States (1854). As Joseph Henry was certainly aware, he also translated The Use of the Blowpipe in Chemistry and Minerology by J. J. Berzelius, a work describing the scientific contributions of James Smithson.

The legislation establishing the California Geological Survey, signed on April 21, 1860, named Whitney as head of the project. The survey would provide accurate topographic maps of the state as well as catalog its geology, natural history, and resources. Whitney also intended to nurture talent. His most consequential hire, Clarence Rivers King, joined the survey in 1863. The son of a frequently absent father engaged in trade with China, King was educated in elite New England schools and graduated from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1862, where he studied chemistry, geology, and physics. In May 1863, having declined either to register for the draft or pay $300 to hire a substitute, he turned his back on the war and traveled west with friends to California armed with letters of introduction to Whitney. William Brewer, Whitney’s assistant, noted that the twenty-one-year-old geologist combined a scientific background with physical strength and endurance, an adventurous nature, and a romantic appreciation for the sublime mountain landscape.

Clarence King remained with the California survey until 1867, building practical experience equivalent to a graduate education. In addition to his solid geological work, which included a survey of the Yosemite Valley, he participated in ascents of Mount Tyndall, Mount Shasta, and Mount Whitney, chronicling his experience in what remains a masterpiece of the literature of the West, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. King traveled to Washington, DC, in 1866, confident that he could apply the principles demonstrated on the California survey to a study of a 450-mile strip along the fortieth parallel, from the high Sierras of California, east through Nevada and Utah, and on to the Colorado Rockies. He would, as one admirer remarked, parallel “the Continental Railway in Geology.”

With his experience, Ivy League background, and more than a dash of charisma, King was ready to take his place on the national stage. On March 2, 1867, Congress authorized the War Department to undertake geological surveys of the West. Despite his status as a civilian, King was named US geologist of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel.

The Smithsonian would support the scientific exploration of the West as it had before the war. Both Henry and Baird exercised influence with Congress and the executive departments in support of King’s survey and those that followed. At King’s request, Henry and Baird provided scientific instructions and supplied the materials and supplies required for the preservation of natural history specimens. They maintained a considerable talent pool of young naturalists primed for a western adventure. They would also reap the scientific reward, receiving, housing, and supervising the study of the collections gathered by the survey.

King’s initial crew, including the camp support staff and military escorts, numbered thirty-five. Four geologists, four topographers, two botanists, a zoologist, and a meteorologist made up the professional staff. Recognizing the impact that images of the western landscape would have on the American imagination, he hired famed Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan to create a visual record of the project.

King also hired one extraordinary young man recommended by Spencer Baird. Fourteen-year-old Robert Ridgway had written to Baird in 1865, asking him to identify a bird he had drawn. Always ready to encourage talent when he found it, Baird was soon on the receiving end of more drawings, bird skins, nests, and eggs from the budding naturalist. Baird wrote to his young friend in March 1867, offering Ridgway the choice of working with him at the Smithsonian or the opportunity “to go to the Rocky Mountains and California for a year or two as a collector of specimens.” At Baird’s suggestion, King issued an official invitation to the teenaged ornithologist, who, with parental consent, signed on at a salary of fifty dollars per month, plus expenses. After a few weeks of training with Baird in Washington, young Ridgway was off to join King and launch what would become a great career in science.

Through a congressional extension in 1869, King’s team was funded to operate in the field for another six years. Collections flowed into the Smithsonian. As the survey moved from west to east along the route to be followed by the Central Pacific Railroad, young Ridgway grew accustomed to the rough life on the trail. Assigned to ride a tall, rawboned mule prone to bucking, the youngster “felt very much as if I were straddling a high peaked roof.” Several days later, “the cantankerous brute” saved his life. The mule insisted on charging far ahead of the group. Feeling ill, Ridgeway dismounted to rest in the animal’s shadow. He awoke in the ambulance, O’Sullivan’s rolling photographic studio. Had “my steed’s preference been for the rear of the line,” he noted, “it is easy to see that I might not have lived to relate the incident.” Along with his fellows, he would face bouts of malaria, Indian raids, nests of rattlesnakes, clouds of mosquitoes dense enough to snuff out candles, and drinking water “so sulphureous that it smelled like rotten eggs.” With the completion of fieldwork, Ridgway returned to the Smithsonian as the Institution’s first curator of ornithology in 1874, where he would remain until his death in 1929.

King's survey was not yet underway when Spencer Baird recognized an opportunity to launch a similar endeavor in another part of the West. In 1867, when drafting the legislation authorizing Nebraska statehood, Congress included $5,000 to fund a survey of the geology and resources of the area. “If you want the place,” Baird urged ex-Megatherian Ferdinand Hayden, “you had better come at once and see about it.” Hayden responded that he could “accomplish so much if I can get that place,” and immediately asked his prewar comrades, including Major General Gouverneur K. Warren, for letters of support.

Hayden had spent the war years as an army surgeon, rising to the brevet rank of lieutenant colonel, after which he had accepted a position teaching geology and minerology at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania. Finding academia too tame for his adventurous spirit, he took a leave of absence in 1866 and spent that summer and fall back in the Black Hills and Badlands of the Dakota Territory, once again filling wagons with the remains of prehistoric turtles and other fossils. Hayden extended his leave the following year when he accepted the post of geologist in charge of the Nebraska Geological Survey, reporting to Joseph S. Wilson, the commissioner of the General Land Office. In addition to reporting on geological features, he would focus on economic resources from soil and water conditions to potential mineral wealth.

With a limited budget, Hayden initially operated with a small staff, including both James Stevenson—who had accompanied him on an 1856 US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers expedition—and fellow Megatherian Fielding Meek. The new survey would draw all supplies, weapons, animals, and other support from the army. He also reached out to Spencer Baird with a detailed list of required collecting equipment and supplies. While the official collections went to the General Land Office, Hayden conducted an “independent survey” on behalf of the Institution from Denver south into New Mexico. Baird arranged the transportation of the resulting collection to the Smithsonian. When Hayden visited in December 1868, Henry explained that much of the material he had contributed had already been passed on to other institutions, for, he cautioned, “my policy in regard to collections is that the Smithsonian Inst fund must be guarded from absorption in a museum.”

Congress renewed funding in 1868 for Hayden’s survey and doubled it to $10,000 in 1869, redesignating the operation as the US Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, now operating under the oversight of the Department of the Interior. With the increased funds, Hayden began to expand his staff. While he would be accused of padding the survey payroll with congressional relatives, the scientific caliber of the staff was very high. He hired Cyrus Thomas, who would one day produce a major study of mound archaeology for the Smithsonian, as botanist and entomologist. Henry Elliott, who had been serving as Joseph Henry’s private secretary since returning from the Western Union Telegraph Expedition, signed on as an artist and naturalist. William Henry Holmes would replace Elliott in 1870. Holmes had come to Washington to study painting under Theodore Kaufmann but attracted the attention of Mary Henry, who urged him to paint studies of items in the collection. When Elliot decided to leave the Hayden survey, Fielding Meek hired him as a replacement.

Stories of the natural wonders of the Yellowstone valley had been circulating since John Colter, a veteran of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, had wintered in the area in 1807–8. Inspired by a short report of an army visit to the area in 1870, Hayden decided to devote his 1871 season to a formal survey of Yellowstone while dispatching Stevenson to explore the Teton Range. Like King, Hayden recognized the importance of a visual record of the areas being surveyed. Photographer William Henry Jackson joined the survey in 1870 and remained for nine years, producing scores of iconic images.

Thomas Moran, a thirty-four-year-old Philadelphia painter who had never ridden a horse, also accompanied the expedition. “I have always held,” he remarked to Hayden, “that the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature, would, in capable hands, make the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful pictures.” Indeed, Moran’s large canvases of the Grand Canyon, along with William Jackson’s photographs, including his famous Mountain of the Holy Cross, are among the outstanding representations of the western sublime. In his finished seven-by-twelve-foot painting The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Moran portrayed two small figures, Hayden and Stevenson, standing on a rock in the foreground, dwarfed by the grandeur of the scene. Hayden’s report, along with Jackson’s images and Moran’s art, resulted in the creation of Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872.

Read more in Smithson's Gamble, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from Smithson's Gamble © 2025 by Smithsonian Institution

Tom D. Crouch | Read More

TOM D. CROUCH is a curator emeritus of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. He has authored many books, including the award-winning The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright and Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age.