The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

FRONTIERSHUNTINGTON

FALL/WINTER 2005

THE FACE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Conifers Around the World

A MEXICAN COSSACK IN

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS 51 YEARS OLD IN 1757 when heset out for England as a representative of Pennsylvania’s provincialAssembly. He would spend approximately 25 of his final 33 yearsabroad—first in England and then in France, where he courted

and secured an alliance with Louis XVI during the American Revolution. Inour cover feature, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell writes that Franklin felt athome in France, where artists competed to capture his image for posterity.

In this issue of Huntington Frontiers, we encounter stories of people whoseambitions carried them far from home: Scholar Samuel Truett introduces us toEmilio Kosterlitzky, who sought exile not once but twice.The Russian émigrécame to Mexico in the late 19th century and served in the Mexican army beforearriving in California, where he found unique employment in Los Angeles.American geologist Raphael Pumpelly traveled in the opposite direction, findinghimself in pre-Soviet Turkestan in 1903, excavating the ruins of an ancientcivilization.Writer Mark Wheeler explores the link between Pumpelly and amodern-day archaeologist named Fredrik Hiebert.

Such international exploits should not be relegated to a bygone era. BotanistZsolt Debreczy is currently visiting The Huntington, taking a break from hisfrequent travels documenting conifer trees of the temperate zones of the world.He is putting his finishing touches on his book Conifers Around the World andcontemplating his next expedition.

On such journeys of discovery and exploration,The Huntington is bothdestination and departure point.Archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert’s interest inRaphael Pumpelly brought him to The Huntington, where Pumpelly’s papersare housed. Others, though, can trace the seed of discovery to a moment in theHuntington’s archives, as in the case of Cyndia Clegg (see page 25).

Indeed,The Huntington has long been aplace for the comings and goings of scholars,who in turn share with us the adventures andaccomplishments of the famous and obscurealike. But it is also a place for contemplation,a place where sixth-grade students fromRockdale Elementary (page 18) can enter theworld of history and find a place of their own.

MATT STEVENS

The Huntington Library,Art Collections,and Botanical Gardens

SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON

STEVEN S. KOBLIK

President

GEORGE ABDO

Vice President for Advancement

PATRICIA DAVINI

Executive Assistant to the President

JAMES P. FOLSOM

Marge and Sherm Telleen Director of the Botanical Gardens

SUSAN LAFFERTY

Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education

SUZY MOSER

Assistant Vice President for Advancement

JOHN MURDOCH

Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Collections

ROBERT C. RITCHIE

W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research

LAURIE SOWD

Director of Operations

ALISON D. SOWDEN

Vice President for Financial Affairs

SUSAN TURNER-LOWE

Associate Vice President for Communications

DAVID S. ZEIDBERG

Avery Director of the Library

MAGAZINE STAFF

Editor

MATT STEVENS

Contributing Writers

LISA BLACKBURN

TRAUDE GOMEZ-RHINE

Designer

LORI ANN VANDER PLUYM

Proofreader

CAROL B. PEARSON

Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of Communications. It strives to connectreaders more firmly with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features thework of researchers, educators, curators, and othersacross a range of disciplines.

This magazine is supported in part by theAnnenberg Foundation.

INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS:Matt Stevens, EditorHuntington Frontiers1151 Oxford RoadSan Marino, CA 91108huntingtonfrontiers@huntington.org

Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography providedby the Huntington’s Department of Photographic Services.

Printed by Pace Lithographers, Inc. City of Industry, Calif.

© 2005 The Huntington Library,Art Collections, andBotanical Gardens.All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, withoutpermission of the publisher is prohibited.

FROM THE EDITOR

A PLACE IN THE WORLD

Opposite page, upper left: Cones of the Himalayan pine (Pinuswallichiana). Photo by István Rácz, © DAP. Upper right: Terracotta portraitmedallion of Benjamin Franklin, 1777, by Giovanni Battista Nini (Italian,1717–1786), Huntington Art Collections. Bottom: Emilio Kosterlitzky on awhite horse, with his customs guards on patrol in Sonora. Courtesy ofArizona Historical Society/Tucson, AHS no. 4377.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 1

[ VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2 ]

AMERICAN IDOL 6The face that captured French hearts and mindsby Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

SEEING THE FOREST AND THE TREES 9The man who wrote the book on conifersby Matt Stevens

A MEXICAN COSSACK IN SOUTHERN

CALIFORNIA 14Fame, notoriety, and anonymity in the borderlandsby Samuel Truett

FF AA LL LL // WW II NN TT EE RR 22 00 00 55Contents

66

DEPARTMENTS

WORK IN PROGRESS: Scholar gives voice to long-neglected women authors | by Traude Gomez-Rhine 2

LESSONS LEARNED: Sixth-graders weigh in on Luks’ Boxing Match | by Susan Alderson Hoffmann 18

DISCOVERY: A modern-day archaeologist excavatesa hero | by Mark Wheeler 20

BOOKS IN PRINT: Recommended reading 24

99

1144

2 Fall/Winter 2005

Novel AmericansSCHOLAR ELAINE SHOWALTER GIVES VOICE TO LONG-NEGLECTED WOMEN AUTHORS

by Traude Gomez-Rhine

[ WORK IN PROGRESS ]

CONSIDER THE CAREERS of these ambitious19th-century American women writers:Rebecca Harding Davis was a pioneer ofrealist fiction and a nationally acclaimed

journalist. Her groundbreaking novella Life in the IronMills, first published in 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly,launched a 50-year career that would produce at least500 published works.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ most famous book, The GatesAjar, appeared in 1868, selling almost 200,000 copies. Setduring the Civil War, her popular novel was translated intoseveral languages.

Julia Ward Howe is best remembered as having pennedthe lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but wasalso famous in her lifetime as a poet, essayist, and lecturer.In 1908 Howe was the first woman elected to the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters.

Their legacy? Famous during their lives, these womenwere largely forgotten thereafter.

Elaine Showalter is on a mission to revive their spiritand move them more prominently into the Americanliterary consciousness.The professor emeritus fromPrinceton University came to The Huntington last yearto do research for a book about American women writersfrom 1650 to 2000.“This is an American legacy that hasbeen neglected and forgotten,” she says.

The topic, of course, is enormous in scope—350 yearsof American women writers. In one book? Such ambitionis usually reserved for multi-volume projects taken on bya committee of academics. Showalter has already carriedout a similar mission for British women writers, publishingA Literature of Their Own: British Novelists from Bronte toLessing in 1977, which highlighted many minor andforgotten women writers from the 1840s through the1970s. Her work ultimately helped to launch the field offeminist literary history in the United States and Europe,

putting her on the academic map and causing much debatewithin universities around the world.

Showalter had long hoped to do an American versionof the British book but for years was as daunted by theprospect as she was intrigued. “For a long time I justdidn’t think it was possible,” she says, adding that a typicalAmerican woman writer of the 19th century would publish50 books. Meanwhile in England,“Emily Bronte writesone great novel and dies.That’s kind of sad, but it makesyour life as a critic a lot easier,” she says.

Showalter, however, is not one to shy away from bigprojects, or controversial ones. During her 20 years atPrinceton, she wrote more than 20 books, including

Elaine Showalter at El Alisal, the Charles Fletcher Lummis House nestled inthe Arroyo Seco in Pasadena. In the early 1900s, writers like Mary Austin andCharlotte Perkins Gilman joined an informal literary circle hosted there byLummis. Photo by Lisa Balckburn.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 3

The New Feminist Criticism (1985), The Female Malady:Women, Madness, and English Culture (1986), and Hystories:Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997). She also hasmaintained a fruitful side career as a journalist, writingfor British newspapers such as the Evening Standard andFinancial Times and American newsstand perennials Vogueand People magazines. Such an eclectic array of publica-tions might seem strange for a powerhouse academic,but Showalter loves dabbling in pop culture.As often asshe has been lauded for her ambition, she also has beenlambasted, frequently on the Internet, where a Googlesearch can return a long list of retorts and rebuttals toher books and ideas. Even news interviews with a more“objective” tone carry such headlines as “Who’s Afraidof Elaine Showalter?” and “Elaine Showalter:An Anarchistin Academia.”

Such a formidable reputation arises from Showalter’swillingness to express the frank views of a feminist in thepublic spotlight and to take on controversial topics. (In her

book Hystories, for instance, she candidly expresses herhypothesis about chronic fatigue syndrome, which resultedin some furious responses and even hate mail.) She main-tains her direct manner with her current project.“There hasbeen a lot of scholarship on individual [American women]writers, but no one has put it all together,” she says.“I amsure my conclusions will make a lot of people angry. Sothey will argue with me, but that is what scholarship isabout. I am not going to mince words in this book.”

Aware of the difficulty of writing a book while main-taining a full academic schedule, Showalter retired fromPrinceton in 2003; she has since put many of her journalismassignments on hold.The Showalters—her husband is aFrench professor retired from Rutgers University—had justsold their New Jersey home of 40 years and moved toMaryland when a letter arrived from the Huntington’sRobert C. Ritchie, the W. M. Keck Foundation Directorof Research, inviting Elaine for a 10-month residency asthe R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow.

Showalter had planned to use the Library of Congressfor the book’s primary research, but Ritchie’s letter changedeverything.“Getting that invitation to come out here wasjust the best thing that ever happened to me in my whole

life,” she says.“It was like winning the lottery.” So she andher husband packed the car and headed west.

Once the couple settled into an apartment in Pasadena,Showalter delved into her research, focusing primarily on19th-century women writers, an area of particular strengthin the collections here. “I really didn’t know that TheHuntington would have virtually everything that I wouldneed,” she says.“Everything.Amazing.The holdings inAmerican literature pre-1900 are astonishing.”

Many of these volumes were unwittingly collected byHenry E. Huntington, who during his lifetime purchasedmore than 200 complete libraries. In 1936 the HuntingtonLibrary accepted a gift from Josephine P. Everett of about500 titles concerning women and women’s history.Thesebooks formed the core of the holdings in women’s studiesand provided the impetus toward collecting more inthis area.

But Showalter was aided in her research by forces thatstretched beyond the Huntington’s rarified historical col-lections to the egalitarian realm of the World Wide Web.Getting her hands on actual books is critical, but access tosecondary sources is also crucial. Fortunately, a number oflibraries have put their holdings online.

This virtual world—coupled with the range of resourcesall physically situated at The Huntington—contrasts dra-matically with Showalter’s experience in the 1970s, whenshe would spend an entire year traveling from library tolibrary in England in a quest for women writers’ archives,sitting long hours in chilly reading rooms. She has writtenof this experience,“I was often rewarded by becomingthe first scholar to read a harrowing journal or open abox of letters.” Despite the romantic image she conjuresup, Showalter says she would never be able to pull off

Famous during their lives,

these women were largely

forgotten thereafter.

California writer Mary Austin (second from left), best known for her book TheLand of Little Rain, in Carmel, Calif., ca. 1906. There Austin helped to estab-lish an artists’ colony that included (left to right) the writers George Sterling,Jack London, and James Hopper. Mary Austin Collection, Huntington Library.

4 Fall/Winter 2005

[ WORK IN PROGRESS ]

her current project if she had to crisscross the continentalUnited States in the same way.“People don’t think ofscholarship as involving physical labor, but if you have tobe going all over the place, it can really wear you out.Working at The Huntington really makes it possible tocomplete this project in a reasonable amount of time.”

Showalter has enjoyed more company in her researchon American writers than she had with English ones. Anumber of American women writers forgotten by historyare gaining their due, says Nicolas Witschi, associateprofessor of English at Western Michigan University andhimself a Huntington researcher.Witschi has done signifi-cant scholarship on California writer Mary Austin, whohad frequented literary salons held at the Charles Lummishome in the Arroyo Seco early in the 20th century, as didthe writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman’s work hasbeen brought back to life in the last 30 years, says Witschi,

and Austin has gained new acclaim in environmentalliterary circles for her masterpiece, The Land of Little Rain.But Austin wrote widely in many areas and harboredliterary ambitions that were just as fierce as those of hermale peers who have received more recognition.“ElaineShowalter, throughout her career, has done tremendouswork in drawing attention to the accomplishments ofwomen writers,” says Witschi.“She is no doubt craftinganother necessary corrective, to help with the continuingeffort to recover the voices of women writers on theirown terms.”

Other notable writers in Showalter’s new canon includeCatherine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and FannyFern, not exactly household names of the same ilk asJames Fenimore Cooper,Washington Irving, NathanielHawthorne,Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, andSamuel Clemens, but true talents nonetheless.

Critics have long acknowledged Cooper and Irving forushering in an American literary tradition in the 1820s.Showalter is not simply calling for equal recognition ofwomen like Sedgwick and Child, who wrote during thesame period. She argues they were better writers thanCooper and Irving.

By the 1850s, best sellers tended to be written bywomen. In 1855 Nathaniel Hawthorne famously said,

“America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob ofscribbling women, and I should have no chance of successwhile the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

The sentiment was that women—whose books oftensold in the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands—were driving more deserving writers out of the literarymarketplace with what could only be drivel. Showalterhas a strong distaste for a stereotype that has continuedto gain acceptance even today: that women novelists ofthis period were commercial writers while the men wereartists.“Their careers and ambitions were much morecomplicated than that,” says Showalter.

She hopes her scholarship will have an impact onhow American literature is taught while also captivatinga wide readership that extends beyond academia. Knopfwill publish the book, slated for 2007-8, with an accom-panying anthology.

“This is a book I would like Laura Bush and BarbraStreisand to read,” Showalter says.“I want to reach MariaShriver and Oprah Winfrey.” It will be a book of literaryopinions, she says, unabashedly told from her point ofview, about a tradition of achievement that has been onlypartially understood.

Experience has taught Showalter to be prepared for abumpy ride.After A Literature of Their Own was published,she was widely praised and attacked for the work, so muchso that 20 years later she wrote a summation of her expe-rience in the Brown University publication Novel:AForum in Fiction (1998):“What I did not anticipate was thatin feminist literary history and criticism, as in every other

Three hundred and fifty

years of American women

writers—in one book?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (far right) with fellow suffragettes Anna Gordon andAlice Stone Blackwell, date unknown. Huntington Library.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 5

field, being first has its disadvantages, because you becomethe launching pad for subsequent work and the startingpoint for everyone else’s improvements and corrections.For the past 20 years, I have been attacked from virtuallyevery point on the feminist hermeneutic circle, as separatist,careerist, theoretical, antitheoretical, racist, homophobic,politically correct, traditional, and noncanonical critic.”

Whatever the reception of this book, Showalter ulti-mately hopes that her scholarship will help to expandthe American literary legacy to include these overshad-owed women writers, bringing their rich work to newaudiences and keeping their voices alive.

Traude Gomez-Rhine is a staff writer at The Huntington.

Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934)first met Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1860–1935) in Pasadena in the late1890s. Both women frequented theartists’ colony at El Alisal, CharlesFletcher Lummis’ adobe home alongthe Arroyo Seco. The two women sharedmuch in common: both had left unhappymarriages to devote themselves to theirwriting; both were active in feministcauses; both found personal freedomby moving west and developing a deepkinship with the California landscape.

Mary Austin was born in Carlinville,Ill., and moved with her family in 1888to the San Joaquin Valley. She was keenlyaffected and inspired by the region andwould later write of it profoundly, mostnotably in The Land of Little Rain (1903).

Austin came to Southern Californiain 1899 and described Pasadena as “acity of residences, beautiful as thedream of a poet, but quite staid andsedate, and proud of its quietness.”Here she taught school and joined theliterary circle established by Lummis, thenoted author and editor, who became amentor. In 1905 she moved to Carmel,where she helped establish an artists’colony that included Jack London and

George Sterling. She later moved toNew York, participating there in feministcauses with Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Gilman is perhaps best known for her1890 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”Written while Gilman lived in Pasadena,it narrates a young wife and mother’sdescent into madness and is consideredher most autobiographical work.Gilman’s major concern during her life-time was feminism—women’s suffrageas well as women’s economic inde-pendence—and she achieved interna-tional fame with the 1898 publicationof her seminal work, Women andEconomics: The Economic RelationBetween Men and Women as a Factorin Social Evolution.

Gilman was born in New England, adescendant of the prominent and influ-ential Beecher family—she was thegreat-granddaughter of another writer,Harriet Beecher Stowe. Despite thisfamous ancestry, her family lived inpoverty. In 1888 she left her husband,Charles Walter Stetson, and moved withher daughter to California. She renteda cottage on Orange Grove Boulevardfor $10 a month and wrote, “ToCalifornia, in its natural features, I owe

much. Its calm sublimity of contour,richness of color, profusion of flowers,fruit and foliage, and the steady peaceof its climate were meat and drink tome.” In 1932 Gilman learned she hadbreast cancer. She spent the rest of herdays completing her autobiography,The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.With no hope for recovery, she took herown life on Aug. 17, 1935.

The Huntington holds the Mary AustinCollection, purchased from the Austinestate. Within it are approximately11,000 items—letters, manuscripts, andresearch materials such as her extensivedocumentation on the Indians of theSouthwest and Spanish American folklore.

CROSSING PATHSIN PASADENA

T hree hundred years after BenjaminFranklin’s birth,Americans are poisedto celebrate his multifaceted genius:Franklin the politician, printer, post-

master, writer, scientist, and inventor. BenjaminFranklin, our quintessentially French hero? As historian

Gordon S.Wood reminds us in his recent book, TheAmericanization of Benjamin Franklin,“Franklin belonged

to France before he belonged to America.” After all,Franklin spent nearly nine years as a diplomat in Paris nego-

tiating and maintaining a political alliance between the UnitedStates and France.The popularity of the American cause in France—

and the singularity of Franklin’s appearance there—won him unprece-dented fame and immortalized his furrowed countenance, graying locks,and balding pate for posterity.

For all his powerful intellect and shrewd statesmanship, it wasFranklin’s Everyman qualities that fascinated the French, who perceivedAmerica as a nation of farmer-philosophers.As Wood writes,“America intheir eyes came to stand for all that 18th-century France lacked—naturalsimplicity, social equality, religious freedom, and rustic enlightenment.”Franklin, in turn, came to stand for all that America represented; his plainspeech and dress gave him an air of homespun dignity that was lackingin the empty magnificence of the French court.

6 Fall/Winter 2005

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, ca. 1778–87, HuntingtonArt Collections. This pastel is attributed to Jean Valade(1709–1787), who copied it from a well-known portraitby Joseph-Siffrede Duplessis (1725–1802).

The face that won theAmerican Revolutionby Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

AmericanIdol

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 7

When he arrived in Paris in theautumn of 1776, Franklin stood out in“the costume of an American farmer:his hair lank and unpowdered, hisround hat, his suit of brown wool con-trasting with the sequined, embroi-dered suits, the powdered and scentedhair of the courtiers of Versailles,”wroteMadame Campan, lady-in-waiting toMarie-Antoinette.

On a previous visit to France in1767, Franklin had worn conventionalclothing, donning a wig and a fancyFrench-made suit for an audiencewith Louis XV. Upon his return nineyears later, however, he dressed down,going about town in a plain brownsuit and a marten fur cap he hadacquired in Canada. Under his cap,Franklin wore his hair unpowderedand loose, rather than tied up in aqueue or covered by a wig. Indeed, hesuffered from a scalp condition thatmade wigs uncomfortable; Franklinordered one for his audience withLouis XVI but abandoned it at the

last minute. Instead, he met the kingbareheaded and wearing a suit of plainvelvet with no sword when swords,wigs, and embroidered suits weredictated by etiquette.This was not justa fashion statement, but a calculatedpolitical move; Franklin knew that hewas his own best advertisement for hisambitious diplomatic agenda.

Far from being offended, Franklin’saristocratic hosts were charmed. “Noman in Paris was more fashionable,more sought-after than DoctorFranklin,” the royal portrait artistElisabeth Vigée-Lebrun testified.Indeed, coiffures à la Philadelphie andgowns of gris Américan soon adornedthe ladies of the court. French artists,

too, were fascinated by Franklin’sunconventional appearance. Whetherclad in rustic furs or plain cloth andlinen, he seemed theliving embodiment ofthe democratic beliefsfor which America wasfighting—beliefs thatwere becoming increas-ingly popular amongthe French, who wouldoverthrow their ownking just a few yearslater, in 1789. Franklin complained:“Ihave at the request of Friends sat somuch and so often to painters andStatuaries, that I am perfectly sick ofit. I know of nothing so tedious assitting hours in one fix’d posture.” Butthe demand for portraits of theAmerican patriot was insatiable.

No artist captured Franklin’sphysical and psychological likeness assuccessfully as Joseph-Siffrede Duplessis(1725–1802). His iconic portrait inoils was hailed as a masterpiece when

it appeared in the Salonof 1779. One critic com-mented: “[Franklin’s] largeforehead suggests strengthof mind and his robust neckthe firmness of his character.

Evenness of temper is in his eyes andon his lips the smile of an unshakeableserenity.” Copies appeared for salealmost immediately. Franklin encour-aged this; the portrait was a personalfavorite, and reproductions saved himthe trouble of sitting for other artists.More importantly, though, the portraitconveyed the deceptively unsophisti-cated image Franklin wished to projectto the world.The Huntington’s pastelversion, attributed to Jean Valade(1709–1787), is one of many replicasof the portrait made in the 1780s.

In addition to the pastel, theHuntington collections include twoportrait medallions of Franklin, one inSèvres porcelain and one in terracotta.

Two portrait medallions of Franklin from theHuntington’s French art collection. The first, from1777, is in terracotta and executed by GiovanniBattista Nini (Italian, 1717–1786). The second isfrom Sèvres, Royal Porcelain Manufactory, ca.1778. It is a soft-paste porcelain with clear glazeand gilding.

Benjamin Franklin, our quintessentially French hero?

n The portrait conveyed thedeceptively unsophisticatedimage Franklin wished to project to the world.

8 Fall/Winter 2005

The latter may be the one Franklindescribed in a letter to his daughterdated June 3, 1779:

The clay medallion of me yousay you gave to Mr. Hopkinsonwas the first of its kind made inFrance. A variety of others havebeen made since of differentsizes; some to be set in the lids ofsnuffboxes, and some so smallas to be worn in rings; and thenumbers sold are incredible.These, with the pictures, bustsand prints, (of which copiesupon copies are spread every-where,) have made your father’sface as well known as that of themoon, so that he durst not doanything that would oblige himto run away, as his phiz woulddiscover him wherever he shouldventure to show it. It is said bylearned etymologists, that thename doll, for the images children

play with, is derived from theword IDOL. From the numberof dolls now made of him, hemay be truly said, in that sense, tobe i-doll-ized in this country.

Franklin’s humble“phiz” (his physiognomy,or face) masked his talentfor self-promotion andsubtle manipulation.Thisunlikely American idolwore his democratic cre-dentials on his fur-trimmed sleeve. Hisdiplomatic mission was successful; heobtained France’s financial and mili-tary support, which enabled Americato win the Revolutionary War.Today,when we picture Benjamin Franklin,we tend to picture him as he lookedduring his residence in France.

Though his countrymen mistrustedFranklin for his Francophile andAnglophile sympathies, the Frenchnever forgot his friendship, or his face.

When Franklin died in 1790, theFrench government declared three daysof national mourning in his honor.And it was a French philosophe,A. R. J.Turgot, who best eulogized his friend

Franklin, linking his early scientificaccomplishments to his mature cam-paign for democracy:“He seized light-ning from the skies and the scepterfrom tyrants.”

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a MellonFoundation Curatorial Fellow in Frenchart at The Huntington.

The three Huntington portraits of Benjamin Franklin will be displayed in the exhibition “The Artof Virtue: Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” on view from Dec. 17, 2005, to March 26, 2006,in the Library’s West Hall. The exhibition showcases one of the Huntington’s greatest treasures—the autograph manuscript of Franklin’s renowned autobiography.

In commemoration of Franklin’s 300th birthday in January 2006, historian Gordon S. Wood will deliver the Allan Nevins Memorial Lecture, speaking on the “Americanization of BenjaminFranklin.” Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor of History at Brown University anda scholar of the early American republic. In 1997–98, he received the Fletcher JonesDistinguished Fellowship at The Huntington. The lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. onWednesday, Jan. 11, 2006, in Friends’ Hall.

The first page of Franklin’s autobiography, 1771–c.1790, Huntington Library.

Commemorating the 300 th

Anniversary of Franklin’s Birth

Franklin knew that he was hisown best advertisement for hisambitious diplomatic agenda.

Seeing the

FORESTand the

TREESVisiting botanist Zsolt Debreczywrites the book on conifers

by Matt Stevens

Zsolt Debreczy is at home in the world.Well, at least

in its temperate zones.Born in Hungary and raised behind the Iron Curtain,

Debreczy is at ease in just about any part of the worldwith a temperate climate.Take away the polar circles andtropics, and you’re left with vast stretches of geographyin the Northern and Southern hemispheres.The botanistspent a total of five years—cobbled together from count-less trips over the past 15 years—scouring the woods inEurope, China,Taiwan, Japan, North America, Chile, theCaribbean, New Zealand, and Tasmania. His diligencepaid off. He managed to track down and documentnearly 500 species of conifers, including pines, spruces,firs, and cypresses.

10 Fall/Winter 2005

“No one else has studied so manyconifers in their native habitatsthroughout the world,” says BillThomas, former president of theAmerican Conifer Society and co-editor of Growing Conifers: Four-Season Plants. “Debreczy’s study hasbeen of worldwide significance and isan incredible undertaking that maynever be matched by anyone else.”

Debreczy recently traded in hishiking boots for a desk in theHuntington’s botanical library, wherehe has been translating his book onconifers from his native language intoEnglish. He used the reference mate-rials there to supplement his fieldnotes. The revised and expandedwork will be published by DendroPress next spring.

His work space is in close proximi-ty to that of Kathy Musial, Huntingtoncurator of living collections, whosewide-ranging responsibilities includemanaging all acquisitions to theGarden’s permanent collections, aswell as verifying the identification andcorrect nomenclature for all theplants in the collections. Several yearsago Debreczy ventured to the out-

skirts of the Huntington grounds tohelp Musial identify some coniferswhose labels had disappeared yearsbefore. Musial is returning the favorby serving as Debreczy’s editor.

Debreczy has labored a lifetimeover how to capture the essence of atree in words and images, and Musialadmits to putting in many sleeplessnights getting at the essence ofDebreczy’s translations.

Debreczy published his originalbook in 2000 and called it Fenyök a földKörül, a title that translates literallyinto “Conifers Around the Earth.”Translation is often an inelegant busi-ness, and though Debreczy is fluent inEnglish,he benefits greatly from some-one who might suggest the more palat-able Conifers Around the World. Musialfirst met Zsolt—pronounced “jolt”—on an Earthwatch expedition to Chilein 1996. She is quick to explain thatshe is not a conifer expert:“Floweringplants are my gig.” Musial is comfort-able with geography, however, and is astickler for the accurate spelling ofplace names. (It’s not surprising thatshe is the ultimate arbiter for all labelsin the Huntington gardens.)

Conifers Around the World has beena massive undertaking: more than 520taxa (including subspecies and vari-eties) presented in 3,000 photographsbound in a two-volume set that willfill 840 pages. The English editionadds almost 200 species to the mix.Despite these impressive figures, thebook pales in comparison to Debreczy’sgreater obsession: The DendrologicalAtlas. Dendrology is Greek for the“study of trees,” and “atlas” evokes—aside from the obvious connotationto mapping—the mythical hero whobore the world on his shoulders.Debreczy has been carrying the bur-den of this enterprise since 1971. At34 years and counting, the atlas proj-ect has almost matched the half-waymark of James Murray’s ambitiouscompilation of 70-plus years—theOxford English Dictionary.

Like Conifers Around the World, theatlas narrows its focus—if you can saythat—to trees from the temperate andadjacent regions of the world. Basedon field documentation, it will weighin at 14 volumes—the first four focuson gymnosperms, with the remaining10 volumes addressing angiosperms.Angiosperms are the flower-bearingplants and constitute by far the major-ity of the tree species in the world.Gymnosperms are in the minority,producing their seeds in exposedstructures, like cones, rather than inprotective ovaries housed in flowers.Conifers are a relatively small groupof gymnosperms, numbering about700 species. The gymnosperm por-tion of the atlas is a massive undertak-ing alone—with 10,000 black-and-white photographs and 480 full-pageline drawings. A publication date hasnot been set.

Debreczy hadn’t set out to publisha distinct book on conifers.He and hislong-time collaborator, photographerIstván Rácz, had amassed more than340,000 black-and-white and color

Above: Kathy Musial, the Huntington’s curator of living collections, assisting Zsolt Debreczy with theEnglish translation of his book on conifers. Previous page: A close-up view of the Montezuma cypress inthe Huntington’s Rose Garden. Photos by Lisa Blackburn.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 11

photographs over the years, many ofwhich were taken for documentationpurposes. The two collaborators fre-quently showed some of the imagesin slide presentations and lectures,including several talks at Harvard’sArnold Arboretum in the late 1980sand early 1990s when they both servedas Mercer Fellows there. Both hadbegun their careers at the NaturalHistory Museum in Budapest, now theHungarian Natural History Museum—Debreczy in 1965, and Rácz in 1976.They interspersed their images withanecdotes from the field and researchfrom their scholarship: the pair had

published 12 books and 250 articles inHungary before coming to Harvard.

While the plan for the atlas hadalways entailed black-and-white pho-tographs accompanied by drawings,they realized that the color picturescould comprise a stand-alone book

on conifers. Both works willappeal to nature lovers and profes-sionals in the fields of botany,forestry, and horticulture, butConifers is probably more accessi-ble to the casual enthusiast.

Debreczy’s earliest inspirationwas Alfred Rehder’s Manual ofCultivated Trees and Shrubs Hardy inNorth America:Exclusive of the Subtropicaland Warmer Temperate Regions, firstpublished in 1927 and revised in 1940.The subtitle might have givenDebreczy an early inkling of how toset the parameters of his own futurestudy. Rehder’s work was publishedonly in English and forced Debreczyto expand his descriptive vocabulary.And the lack of any photographs ordrawings did not discourage Debreczyas much as it fueled his imagination.How might he illustrate such a work?

From early childhood, Debreczyliked making sketches of insects andflowers and frequently exhibited hisdrawings in grade school. In college, hefound success when he organized hisinformation visually. He could take a500-page botany textbook and convertit to 50 richly illustrated pages. Hewould then read the more manageable“guide” several times to absorb thematerial. “When I followed mymethod,” he says modestly, “Iwould earn the best grade.”

Producing a book requires asimilar process—taking a widebase of knowledge and reducingit to its essence. In 1971 he hadpublished a book on temperate-zone evergreens, relying heavilyon the artistic talents of VeraCsapody.The botanical illustratorwas already a legend in Hungarywhen Debreczy met her in the late1960s. She had contributed 4,250 plantdrawings to Sándor Jávorka’s ambitiousHungarian Flora in Pictures (1934). Inthe early stages of the atlas project,Debreczy didn’t have the resources to

travel extensivelyand instead relied onCsapody’s renderingsof dried and pressedspecimens from theherbarium. Even thoughCsapody’s drawings were wellcrafted and precise, Debreczy noticedthat they looked different from thetrees he encountered in nature.“Plants, particularly woody plants,” heexplained, “are not like butterflies,which can be rendered in flat draw-ings that are useful for viewing speci-mens in display cases or in the wild.”Branches, cones, needles, and leavesare very different in three dimensions.Thus, around 1973, he abandoned anexpanding treasure trove of two-

dimensional drawings and set out tocapture specimens in three dimen-sions. Sadly, this realization coincidedwith Csapody’s declining health. Hewas able to secure the services ofother talented artists, but he had to

Debreczy abandoned an

expanding treasure trove of

two-dimensional drawings and

set out to capture specimens

in three dimensions.

Two views of the Pinus wallichiana, more com-monly known as the Himalayan pine. IstvánRácz’s photo is reproduced in Conifers Aroundthe World, and Li Ailii’s drawing will be publishedin The Dendrological Atlas.

12 Fall/Winter 2005

move on without hismentor and dear friend.

Debreczy loves talk-ing about trees and relieson body language asmuch as any other formof communication. Allof us have seen children“acting” like trees bystanding still and spreading their armsin an effort to maximize their span.Debreczy has his own method of treeimpersonation to convey the essenceof a tree in its natural surrounding.Toemphasize the protective “instincts”of a tree, Debreczy hunches over in acrouch, adopting the position of aschool child in a classroom earth-quake drill.Trees in nature are suscep-tible to a variety of forces: scarceresources, weather and soil variability,harsh climate, burrowing animals, andhungry insects, to name a few.Depending on circumstances, trees ofthe same species in the wild, there-fore, might grow at different rates andexhibit variations in structure or size.Furthermore, one specimen or theother might be indistinguishable from atree of a related—but distinct—species.

An unlikely example of a vulnerableconifer can be found on the outskirtsof Oaxaca, Mexico. On a trip in the1990s, Debreczy and Rácz gloried inthe majesty of El Arbor del Tule andlater wrote about it in an article inHarvard’s Arnoldia magazine. Thetree, known to botanists as Taxodiummucronatum, is more commonly called

the Mexican bald cypress or theMontezuma cypress. But nothing iscommon about this particular tree—more than 1,500 years old, its circum-ference is in excess of 200 feet. Thatmeans it takes nearly 20 people—join-ing hands and with arms fully extend-ed—to encircle the massive trunk.Thename of the town,Tule, derives fromthe word for “marsh” in the localZapotec dialect. The small town hasbecome threatened by the nearby cityof Oaxaca, whose half million inhabi-tants vie for water and other resources.At the time of Debreczy’s visit, thetree had lost some of its light-greenfoliage, and some of its branches hadbecome brittle and dry.Today, thanksto local intervention, the tree is get-ting the irrigation it needs to survivefor future generations.

What might that conifer look likeif it took root in a cultivated botan-ical garden or arboretum? In 1912,Mr. Huntington’s landscape gardenerand ranch superintendant, WilliamHertrich, traveled to Chapultepec Parkin Mexico City and brought backseeds of the same species.Three spec-imens now occupy the center of theHuntington’s Rose Garden, with sev-eral more gracing the Lily Ponds. At93 years of age, they tower over theproperty but are mere saplings com-pared to the ancient giant. TheHuntington specimens will not likelyexperience the dramatic explosion ofgrowth—or the endangerment—of ElArbor De Tule. They lack the large,

knotty “cypress knees” at their bases,which are common in swamp envi-rons, where roots are submerged inwater, as opposed to the soil found inthe Huntington’s Rose Garden or evenadjacent to the Lily Ponds. Debreczycan point out dozens of distinctionsamong trees of the same speciesdepending on their locations.He appre-ciates botanical gardens and arboretabut understands that trees in cultiva-tion can be radically different fromthose in nature.

His commitment to thoroughnessrequires exhaustive fieldwork, a chal-lenge that does not come easy for some-one who cut his teeth in a Soviet state.Ironically, his scramble for resourcesmight have been more challengingafter the collapse of the Berlin Wall.Before then, Hungarian citizens were

Debreczy can point out

dozens of distinctions

among trees of the same

species depending on their

locations.

Two specimens of the Taxodium mucronatum, more commonly known as the Mexican bald cypress or theMontezuma cypress. The young tree (upper left) is from the Huntington’s Rose Garden; El Arbor del Tulegrows near the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. Photos by Lisa Blackburn and István Rácz.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 13

more likely to have the leisure timeto support gardens and clubs, and thegovernment provided more resourcesin support of the sciences. ButDebreczy’s adaptive traits rival those ofthe trees he finds in nature. He splitshis time between the Massachusetts-based International DendrologicalResearch Institute, where he isresearch director, and the InternationalDendrological Foundation in Hungary.On trips he continues to rely on col-laboration with people like Musial,who helped Debreczy document thevegetation surrounding conifer speci-mens in Chile, Taiwan, and Japan;she also organized the fieldwork ontrips to New Zealand and Australia.Debreczy has long practiced synecol-ogy, or the science of how plants livetogether in a habitat—a term thatmight just as easily apply to the inter-dependence of botanists and otherprofessionals in the field.

After all these years, one mightexpect that Debreczy is ready to setdown more permanent roots in oneplace, either in New England or

Hungary. But as he explains, “Theforests, rocky slopes, deserts, temper-ate rainforests, herbaria, and librariesof the world are my actual home—be

they in Chile, China, orMexico.” And now, ashe spends more time inthe library than innature, he takes stock ofhis inventory of mate-rials—photos, drawings,descriptions—and settlesback to work with thesame passion he exhibitsin the field.

Matt Stevens is editor ofHuntington Frontiersmagazine.

Unless otherwise noted,images are courtesy of theDendrological AtlasProject. Copyright DAP.

From the book Conifers Around the World, a view of a mixed coniferous forest in Glacier National Park, Montana. Photo byIstván Rácz.

Debreczy collecting Hidalgo fir, or Abies hidalgensis, at Agua Zarca in eastern Hidalgo state, Mexico,September 2004. Assisting him are local forestry volunteers Felipe Hernandez Juarez and his nephewZenon Hernandez Juarez. Photo by István Rácz.

scientist than a soldier,”another reporter wrote.The man before him wasEmilio Kosterlitzky, a leg-endary warrior whosecareer extended from theApache wars to the MexicanRevolution. Some calledhim a soldier of fortune, aworld traveler in search ofa good fight. Others said hewas a Cossack who hadtraded the Russian steppesfor the Mexican country-side. Like the enigmaticborder hero of pulp fiction,he was a man without ahistory, a citizen without a nation.

In August 1913,San Diegowitnessed a strange sight.Trains bearing Mexicanprisoners of war rolledinto town, depositing theirhuman cargo near the gov-ernment barracks on MarketStreet.“Leather-lunged sol-diers shouted weird mili-tary orders, and bewilderedMexican men and womenchattered excitedly,” wrotea reporter for the San DiegoSun. It was as if “some lit-tle Mexican town had beenpicked up with all its inhab-

itants and transplanted righthere in San Diego.”

It was a strange sightbecause the United Stateswas not at war with Mexico.These men, women, andchildren were refugees fromborder battles of the MexicanRevolution, raging since1910. International lawstipulated that the UnitedStates—a neutral neigh-bor—had to hold them asprisoners of war until theycould safely be returned toMexico. They were boundfor an internment camp atFort Rosecrans, just acrossSan Diego Bay.

Stranger still was thebronzed man in a white sunhelmet and a linen suitwho towered over the

other Mexicans. More thansix feet tall, with thickglasses, he looked “morelike a college professor or a

Like the enigmatic

border hero of pulp

fiction, Kosterlitzky

was a man without

a history.

Fame, notoriety, and anonymity in the borderlandsby Samuel Truett

S

S

his colleagues were consid-ered rough characters.

Kosterlitzky also openeddoors as a master linguist.He not only spoke Spanish,but also English, French,German, Russian, Italian,Polish,Danish, and Swedish.Americans with poor Spanish-language skills turned to himas a cultural broker. In 1885,

What larger twist of fatebrought this notoriouswarrior to California? Hispassage from Mexican bat-tlefield to U.S. internmentcamp evoked a familiarwestern plotline: a wildwarrior caged, a lone riderunhorsed, the transfor-mation of the wide-openfrontier into a patrolledspace between nations.Riding west into the sunset,Kosterlitzky prepared tovanish. “I have nothing tosay that would make inter-esting reading,” he toldspectators. “I have beentalked about enough in thepapers. I want to be left outof them as much as possiblefrom now on.”

Border crossings werenot new for Kosterlitzky.He was born in Moscow in1853 as Emil Kosterlitzky,the child of a Germanmother and Russian father.His father was said to be aCossack, a member of amilitary caste, usually com-posed of ethnic outsidersfrom Russia’s frontiers whoserved as soldiers of theTsarist state. Emil hoped tofollow in his father’s foot-steps, but instead ended upin the navy. At 18, as a mid-shipman on a training vessel,he deserted off the Venezuelacoast. “Still clinging to hislove for horses and his boy-hood ambition to becomea leader of cavalry,” a jour-nalist later embellished, hesailed to the border state ofSonora, Mexico, and joinedthe Mexican army.Changinghis name to Emilio, he setout to make a fresh start.

The borderlands offeredexpansive vistas forKosterlitzky. He becameMexican by marrying intoa Mexican family, but healso became part of a fron-tier military fraternity thatgained status by fightingIndians. In the 1880s, in thewars against Apache andYaqui Indians, Kosterlitzky

became a defender of thenation’s front lines. By bru-tally repressing one group,he earned his place as acitizen of another.

The Apache wars alsoopened doors north of theborder. In 1882,Mexico andthe United States signed areciprocal crossing treaty,allowing troops to pursueIndians across borders. Inthe 1880s, Kosterlitzkyhelped U.S. soldiers in theGeronimo campaigns, andhe later assisted in the sup-pression of such “bandits”as the Apache Kid. He wasonce described as “a favoritewith all the boys in blue.”

Americans equatedKosterlitzky with the freeand wild Cossack, a mythicalicon not unlike the U.S.cowboy. The fact that herode the Mexican country-side, not the Russian steppe,made him only more roman-tic. If the violence of thefrontier made Kosterlitzky

a citizen of a foreign land,the fantasy of the frontierensured his rise as a localhero. His white skin—andwhite horse—set him apartfrom his brown-skinnedneighbors, whom whiteAmericans equated withbanditry, not heroism. Inpopular accounts, he was apicturesque leader, whereas

Ee Emilio Kosterlitzky

What larger twist

of fate brought this

notorious warrior

to California?

S

S

Above: Posing in uniform, date unknown. The triangle of stars on his visorsignify his rank as colonel in the Mexican army. Opposite: Kosterlitzky (firstrow, 16th from left) and fellow refugees at Fort Rosecrans, September1913. Both images courtesy of Special Collections, University of ArizonaLibrary, Kosterlitzky Papers, AZ 333.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 15

combat smuggling, fight“bandits,” and suppress laborstrikes. Like the Cossacks ofRussia, he epitomized thepolice power of the state—but also of corporate elites,who relied on Kosterlitzky topolice the borderlands totheir advantage. He thusevoked what was unfree—and not just free—aboutthe frontier.

The Mexican Revolutionwas fought in part to redressthe inequalities of this trans-national world. Many rebelssought to open doors thathad been closed to ordinary

people and political outsiders.But they also shut otherdoors. Violence drove outforeign entrepreneurs, andfears of revolutionary ban-dits and U.S. interventionencouraged both sides tosee the border as a dividingline, not a crossroads.

And so it was in 1913,when Kosterlitzky—nowalmost 60—lost a battle forthe border town of Nogales,Sonora. Outnumbered byrebels, he and his troopssought refuge in Arizona.He remained in Nogales,Arizona, for several monthsbefore being sent to FortRosencrans.

Upon his release in1914, Kosterlitzky and hisMexican family moved

he moved to the center ofa new transnational world asan officer in the gendarmeríafiscal, or customs guard,where he managed themigration of people, goods,and capital across borders.

U.S. investment in Sonorawas booming by 1900, andKosterlitzky served as apoliceman and gatekeeper.He distinguished betweenlegitimate and illegitimateborder crossings and kept

law and order to increaseinvestor confidence.

In this capacity, he wasoften anything but heroic.He patrolled the bordertogether with such groupsas the Arizona Rangers to

“Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Systems” (detail), Rand McNally & Co., 1911. Huntington Library.

Railroad networks knit Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, together after the 1880s,turning an isolated frontier into a crossroads between nations. These connec-tions, controlled largely by the Southern Pacific, paved the way for transnation-al development. By policing this crossroads, Kosterlitzky made Mexico safe forinvestors. But confidence was shattered when the Mexican Revolution brokeout.The dashed lines on the lower right corner of this map show a ghost land-scape of railroads that were never built, a Southern Pacific promotional dreamthat faded after rebels swept across the sierras in 1912.

16 Fall/Winter 2005

Kosterlitzky evoked

what was unfree—

and not just free—

about the frontier.

S

S

Mexican exiles in LosAngeles, questioned thedeeper loyalties of this “sol-dier of fortune,”who shiftedfrom one nation to thenext, offering his services,like the Cossacks of old,to those in power. ButKosterlitzky rarely strayedfar from Mexico, at least inthe way he perceived hisown identity. He nevergave up his Mexican citi-zenship, and when he diedin 1928, he was buried atCalvary Cemetery, near EastLos Angeles. “We considerKosterlitzky as a soldier ofthe Republic,” wept hisMexican pallbearers.

Samuel Truett is assistantprofessor of history at theUniversity of New Mexico.While at The Huntington as aMellon Postdoctoral ResearchFellow in 2004–5, he con-ducted research on a biographyof Emilio Kosterlitzky as wellas on a history of ruins andempire in America.

north to Los Angeles.Mexican Los Angeles wasbooming as a result of thechaos in Mexico; peoplewere leaving in vast num-bers, and most immigrantswere moving to East LosAngeles,a center of MexicanCalifornia even now. YetKosterlitzky and his familybought a bungalow to thewest of downtown LosAngeles.The only Mexicanson the block, they were lostin an Anglo-American sea.

Why choose exile? It wasnot the first time Kosterlitzkyhad jumped ship, vanishinginto another culture. Yetwhatever his motivation asa teenager, he now had anew reason to lie low and“be left out of the papers asmuch as possible.”

In his last days at FortRosecrans, Kosterlitzky hadmet up with F. P. Webster,

an agent with the Bureauof Investigation (the prede-cessor to the FBI).Websterasked him to send fellowinternees to San Diego tomingle with local Mexicansand learn about revolution-ary activities. Kosterlitzkywould then translate theirfindings for Webster.

This relationship openednew doors, for soon afterhe moved to Los Angeles,Kosterlitzky found steadywork as a linguist.Accordingto the 1920 census, he hadbecome a translator for theU.S. Postal Service. But hisfamily knew somethingthe census taker did not.Kosterlitzky lived incognitobecause he was a special kindof linguist, employed by theBureau of Investigation fora country that was increas-ingly concerned about itsborders. The United States

embraced Kosterlitzky byturning him into a spy.

During World War I, hepassed as a German doctorand spoke German withimmigrants in PershingSquare in downtown Los

Angeles. Shortly before heretired in 1927, he turnedonce again to Mexico whileinvestigating a plot to over-throw the government ofBaja California.

Despite his commentsback in 1913, Kosterlitzkyhad not escaped coverage inall newspapers. La Opinión,a publication read by

The United States

embraced Kosterlitzky

by turning him into

a spy.

S

S

Kosterlitzky with his wife, Francisca,and daughters Anita and Mary Louise,on the beach in Los Angeles, 1914.Courtesy of Special Collections,University of Arizona Library,Kosterlitzky Papers, AZ 333.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 17

18 Fall/Winter 2005

Weighing InSTUDENTS CONTEMPLATE A BOXING MATCH

by Susan Alderson Hoffmann

W HAT EXCITES A YOUNG MIND?

For a group of sixth-graders, it was theopportunity to visit the Huntington’sScott Gallery of American Art and

weigh in on the meaning of Boxing Match (1910) byGeorge Benjamin Luks (1867–1933). Like the crowd atringside, the students drew near to wonder about theboxers, the audience, and the reasons Luks chose to depictthis scene.

Their interest in the painting began at school, in theclassrooms of Jim Mayhew and Doris Riley. Both areteachers at Rockdale Elementary, a school in Eagle Rockthat is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Forthe past two years, the entire Rockdale faculty has workedwith members of the Huntington’s education staff todevelop an in-depth art program inspired by works inthe Huntington art collections. Each grade studies a singlework of art over the course of the year.

Mayhew and Riley chose Luks’ Boxing Match for theirsixth-graders.This gritty view of urban life inspired class-room discussions on the history of New York around 1910.Students discovered that former slaves and their families—as well as recent immigrants—were moving to Americancities at this time; some of the newcomers entered theworld of sports to earn a living. Private clubs, perhaps likethe one shown in the painting, hosted fights for wealthyfans (in ringside seats) and members of the lower classes,whose faces disappear into the background.

The teachers addressed the sensitive issue of racism thataccompanied many of the famous boxing and wrestlingmatches of this time. In 1910, the African American boxerJack Johnson defeated his white opponent, Jim Jeffries.That victory set off race riots across the United States.Luks didn’t identify the fighters in his painting, nor thelocation of the match. Like George Bellows, anotherrealist painter who depicted brutal fights and wrestlingmatches, Luks generalized his scenes. But common to thework of both was the suggestion that the African Americanwould overwhelm his white opponent, fueling racist notionsof ethnic superiority.

Armed with this background information, studentsturned their attention to the aesthetic qualities of thepaintings.Which art elements did Luks use? And whydid he use them? In the classroom, Mayhew and Rileyreviewed the elements of art as detailed in the state’sguidelines for primary education. Line, shape, texture,color, and space became the language of the Rockdalestudents, important tools they would use during theirvisit to The Huntington.

The in-depth classroom study helped the studentsachieve an important goal of the program: to develop theskills needed to view a work of art in a museum settingand make informed opinions on its meaning.When thestudents approached the Luks painting at The Huntington,they led the discussion, with teachers and docents joiningin.“They were contemplative,” Mayhew noted, “verythoughtful and focused.” Riley agreed.“They felt they hadsomething to say.”

Back at school, in written essays, students interpretedthe work. Some focused on the elements of art and howthey contributed to the subject. Recalling the surface ofthe painting as “very thick and rich,” one student concludedthat the “texture makes it very real.”

The dramatic encounter of the boxers, one nearlyfalling from a punch, caught the attention of many students,who described the scene in terms of what they called“unbalance”: “George unbalances the picture…[making]it look like something is really happening.”

In their own way, these young students recognized therealism of the scene and appreciated how the artist directedthe viewer’s attention. Luks depicted a shallow space, onestudent hypothesized,“because he wanted people to focuson the boxers.”

Other students brought the subject of the match, withits racial overtones, into the context of their lives today.“The racism problem is still in the air that we breathe”was the conclusion drawn by one student.Another formeda different view, writing,“Luks made this painting…to showthe racism and segregation against blacks back then….Thisis very different than how it is now.”The audience depictedin the painting drew as much attention as the fight.“Wecan see the faces of the upper-class people but not thelower-class people.Why is it that people think whitepeople are so superior?”

Such reflection on art brought these students into thecommunity of museum visitors—children, adults, andscholars—who study art and interpret its meaning.Thesuccess of the program depended upon the determinationof teachers, school administrators, and Huntington educators

[ LESSONS LEARNED ]

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 19

to bridge the divide between the classroom and the artmuseum, a place foreign to many students from Rockdale.

Partnerships like the one forged between TheHuntington and Rockdale Elementary School belongto a program developed by the LAUSD in 1998.Thatyear, the district began a 10-year plan to reintegrate artseducation into the curriculum—at every grade and forevery student attending Los Angeles schools. District leaders

recognized the need to include local arts providers in theprogram, appreciating how the combined resources ofthe classroom and arts institutions would enhance theprograms offered to their students. Rockdale Elementarywas one of the first schools in LAUSD to receive fundsfor arts education.Today, the goal of arts for all has beenachieved at Rockdale, with all students receiving instructionin art, dance, music, and theater.The Huntington is nowusing the Rockdale model to build a partnership withschools in the Pasadena Unified School District.

Bringing schoolchildren into a direct experience withart, via school tours, has been a tradition at The Huntingtonsince 1937, as has the preparation of “pre-visit” materials forteachers.The new model, with collaboration at its core,combines the best of the classroom experience, where thefoundation for learning is laid, and the magic of viewingart in person.The benefits of this model can be seen—andheard—in the responses of students.They have enteredinto the world of history, learned the language of art, anddeveloped the confidence to make informed opinions.More than looking, they are now “weighing in” on whatart means to them.

Susan Alderson Hoffmann is the Art Educator at The Huntington.

Sixth-graders Jennifer Estrada, Delaney Harris, and Courtney Canlas discussLuks’ Boxing Match in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery of American Art withtheir teacher, Jim Mayhew. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

20 Fall/Winter 2005

Back to the SourceA MODERN-DAY ARCHAEOLOGIST DIGS DEEP IN CENTRAL ASIA AND EXCAVATES A HERO

by Mark Wheeler

[ DISCOVERY ]

W HEN ARCHAEOLOGIST FREDRIK

Hiebert returned from a 1988 dig inthe Kara Kum Desert in Turkmenistan,he thought he had it made. He was,

he believed, the first American archaeologist to dig in theSoviet-controlled country, and he was convinced that whathe had found there would rewrite history.

Hiebert, then a graduate student at Harvard, was inter-ested in the origins of the Silk Road, the legendary traderoute that connected China with countries to the west.Digging alongside his Russian colleagues at a now dried-updesert oasis in the Murghab River delta, Hiebert expectedto find artifacts from the 2,000-year-old classical era. Instead,the group found a much older civilization that they thoughtto be unknown to the West. Dating back 4,000 years, itwas comparable in age to the great civilizations of ancientMesopotamia, India, and China.

“I was starry eyed, thinking we’d found this great, 4,000-year-old civilization!” says Hiebert, an archaeologist withthe National Geographic Society and formerly a professorof anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.Thenhe found out from his doctoral adviser at Harvard that hewasn’t the first American to excavate a site in Turkmenistanafter all, nor was his party the first to note the existence ofa previously unacknowledged civilization.That honor wentto, of all things, a geologist, who beat him to Turkmenistanby some 84 years.

The man was Raphael Pumpelly, the first professor ofmining at Harvard University (1866–75), the head of theNew England section of the U.S. Geological Survey from1884 to 1889, and a man who brought a geologist’s eye andthe now-standard scientific method—hypotheses, followed

by fact collecting and testing—to the study of prehistoricsites in Asia.A collection of Pumpelly papers is housed atThe Huntington.

“Raphael Pumpelly was part of an intellectual commu-nity that was pushing science forward in the 19th century,following Darwin and the theory of evolution,” says DanLewis, curator of the history of science and technology atThe Huntington.And he had an advantage over scientists

Pumpelly was one of those

larger-than-life figures who

lived a life of adventure.

Three generations of Raphael Pumpellys, 1917. In 1960, the geologist’sgrandson donated the Pumpelly papers to The Huntington. Photo by ElisePumpelly Cabot, from Pumpelly’s autobiography, My Reminiscences (1918),Huntington Library.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 21

today, says Lewis.“It was a tight-knitgroup. He could write a letter to thevery best people in a field and not onlyreceive a reply, but develop a long-termcorrespondence with the best minds ofhis day.”These correspondents includedsuch colleagues as Louis Janin, one ofthe country’s most active and importantmining engineers; Bailey Willis, an oldfriend and colleague of Pumpelly whowas renowned for his work on seismol-ogy during the early 20th century (and whose papers are also held by TheHuntington); and William Morris Davis,among others. Davis, often called thefather of American geology, accompaniedPumpelly to Asia in 1903 and createdthe field of geomorphology, the studyof the earth’s landforms.

The Pumpelly collection comprisesletters, field notebooks, and diaries—morethan 15 boxes of material—all donated to TheHuntington in 1960 by Pumpelly’s grandson, RaphaelPumpelly III.These include the diaries of his wife, ElizaShepard Pumpelly, who accompanied her husband to Asiain 1904. Fred Hiebert used Pumpelly’s field notes and Eliza’sdiaries to deepen his own understanding of the day-to-dayarchaeological experience of that time. In 2003 he published

A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization: Excavationsat Anau,Turkmenistan.“I was able to use these notes, writtenby Pumpelly in 1904, as if they were modern field noteswritten by one of my graduate students working today,”he says.

“Notebooks from this fieldwork are chock-full ofdrawings, measurements, and Pumpelly’s characteristicallytiny, crabbed penmanship,” says Lewis. Hiebert’s research atThe Huntington continues to inform his fieldwork; in 2004and 2005 Hiebert again traveled to Turkmenistan to attenda conference commemorating the 100th anniversary ofPumpelly’s excavations. Both the conference and the

subsequent field seasonfocused on learning more about theancient culture in Turkmenistan that so fascinated Pumpelly.Scholars from around the world placed the ancient culturesof Turkmenistan in the context of other world civilizations.The recent excavations continue the tradition of sieving forseeds, bones, and shards of pottery.Anau, it turns out, wassomething of a trade post 4,000 years ago, a small, fortified

settlement guarding an important pass thatgave central Asians access to the goods andwealth of the civilizations to the south.

Born in 1837 in New York and educated inGermany, the six-foot, three-inch Pumpelly,who had a fondness for cigars and wore along, flowing beard, was one of those larger-than-life figures who lived a life of adven-ture. He “dodged Apache arrows,” as hisbiographer Margaret Champlin described

it, while in Arizona developing a silver mine; taughtJapanese miners to use gunpowder to clear rock beforehe was kicked out of that country after being accusedof being a spy; and traveled by camel and cart from Chinaacross Mongolia, Siberia, Russia, and on to central Asia.He crossed huge, dried inland seas, where he could see theruins of cities on the ancient shorelines. It was during thistrip that, by studying the geology of the area, he became oneof the first individuals to investigate how environmentalconditions could influence human settlement and culture.

Forty years after his first trip from China into centralAsia, Pumpelly, now 65 in 1903 and at a time in life when

Raphael Pumpelly’s journals from 1903and 1904. Huntington Library.

Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

“Notebooks from this fieldwork are

chock-full of drawings, measurements,

and Pumpelly’s characteristically tiny,

crabbed penmanship,” says Dan Lewis.

22 Fall/Winter 2005

[ DISCOVERY ]

many people begin to slow, reinvented himself as anarchaeologist by applying for and receiving a grant fromthe Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.The institu-tion, newly founded in 1902, had just announced its intentto fund scientific research. Pumpelly was an early applicant(heartily endorsed by prominent historian Brooks Adams);his goal was to return to central Asia to study the prehis-toric archaeology he had seen years before and to studythe geological and climatic factors that affected these earlycivilizations. Pumpelly speculated that a large inland sea incentral Asia might have once supported a sizeable popula-tion. He knew from his travels and study that the climatein central Asia had become drier and drier since the timeof the last ice age.As the sea began to shrink, could it haveforced these people to move west, bringing along theirskills, especially agriculture and an early proto-language,to the primitive Stone Age people of Europe?

This is a scenario that modern archaeologists still debatetoday, especially concerning the origin of language. In1903 and again in 1904, Pumpelly traveled to what wasthen called Turkestan to conduct a geological survey andto excavate a site named Anau, near the border of Iran.His findings convinced him that an ancient civilizationhad indeed existed in central Asia.

At Anau, Pumpelly carefully excavated two 50-footmounds—called kurgans—by digging a series of terraces

and shafts. He carefully labeled theposition of each found item, usingmethods that are now utilizedby modern archaeologists. Forexample, he practiced fine-scalearchaeology, using sieves to cap-ture seeds and tiny bones, andemployed specialists, such asbotanists and anatomists, to ana-lyze his finds.The pioneeringmethods, says Hiebert, wouldonly develop incrementally in hisfield over the next 50 years or so.And in the absence of modernmethods like radiocarbon dating, Pumpelly used his trainingas a geologist, keeping careful stratigraphic records to datesites. His findings would come close to matching data col-lected years later using modern technology and, as Hiebertputs it,“spending a lot of money.” Pumpelly’s early interestin how humans respond to environmental change, he notes,is still a keynote feature of archaeology.The kurgan digsunearthed pottery, objects of stone and metal, hearths andcooking utensils, even the remains of skeletons of childrenfound near hearths. He discovered evidence of domesticatedanimals and cultivated wheat—sure signs of civilization.

But his work was stopped abruptly by, of all things, aninfestation of grasshoppers.Eliza wrote in her diaryin early May 1904:“Thegrasshoppers have invadedour camp.They come atnoon almost as suddenlyas a thunder shower buthave not disappeared asquickly. Raphael wentdown in the well yesterdayand he said they rainedupon him in swarms andfor a little while he hada horrid time fightingthem….These grasshop-pers are not enchantingcompanions.”A week latershe had had enough:“Thegrasshoppers are still hereand the air still smells ofthem—we are hurryingto get off and hope to begone by the end of the

0 50 150 mi100

0 50 100 150 200 km

TURKMENISTAN

55 60 65

60 6555

40

35

40

35

KAZAKHSTAN

UZBEKISTAN

TURKMENISTAN

IRANAFGHANISTAN

KA

ZA

KH

STAN

Turkmenbashi

Amu Dar’ya

Gushgy

Chärjew

Dashhowuz

CaspianSea

GarabogazAylagy

SariqamishKuli

Amu DaryaM

urghab

Garagum Canal

Mary

ASHGABAT

Anau

Kara Kum Desert

The excavation site of Anau in Turkmenistan, 2004.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 23

week.” Raphael and his excavation party were forced toabandon the site. Pumpelly was never to return.

Hiebert’s initial disappointment to learn that he wasn’tthe first American to excavate in central Asia quicklyturned to admiration for the man and his farsightedness.Hiebert now calls Pumpelly his hero, a “mythic figure”in archaeology.

“So why isn’t he heralded as the founder of modernarchaeology instead of being relegated to a footnote inhistory?” Hiebert asks.“Most people in my field havenever even heard of him. I’m bugged by that.”

The reasons, he says, are varied. One was a defense ofconventional wisdom. In 1904 Mesopotamia, Egypt, andthe Mediterranean were the accepted great centers of civ-ilization.“So why in the world would Pumpelly havegone to Turkmenistan to look for civilization? To his

peers, it made no sense; people couldn’t comprehend it.”Second, using sedimentation rates to date the site, Pumpellyoriginally estimated Anau to be about 10,000 years old.Some 12 years later, after other research in nearby areashad been published, Pumpelly reevaluated his data andrevised his date, saying it was closer to 6,500 years old,dating to around 4500 B.C. But in the interim, Hiebertsays, the extended date may have hurt Pumpelly’s credibility.

Then, notes Hiebert, by 1919–20 Turkmenistan hadbeen absorbed into the Soviet empire, and scholars “just

stopped thinking about it.” Soviet archaeologists didconduct work throughout the Kara Kum Desert, he says.Their method was to mount large-scale excavations(often of entire settlements), revealing the existence ofnumerous heavily fortified, large urban centers.That work,though, was only published in obscure Russian journals,mostly ignored by western archaeologists.And things stayed

that way, says Hiebert, until Turkmenistan began to “defrost,”finally declaring its independence from Russia in 1991.

Beginning in 1993, following Turkmenistan’s independ-ence from Russia, Hiebert returned to excavate, this timechoosing to work at Anau. In 1996 he and his colleagues

Fredrik Hiebert now calls

Raphael Pumpelly his hero, a

“mythic figure” in archaeology.

Raphael and Eliza Pumpelly (third and fourth from the left) with members of the excavation team at the north kurgan at Anau, 1904. From Pumpelly’s autobiogra-phy, My Reminiscences (1918), Huntington Library.

Fredrik Hiebert on the south kurgan in Anau, October 2004. Photo byLisa Pompelli.

24 Fall/Winter 2005

[ DISCOVERY ]

Books in PrintA SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCH IN THE COLLECTIONS

LAND OF SUNSHINE: AN ENVIRONMENTAL

HISTORY OF METROPOLITAN LOS ANGELES

William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds.

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Land of Sunshine explores the environ-mental history of greater Los Angeles.

Although many people might equate Los Angeles withuncontrolled sprawl, history shows that it was intenselyplanned.The contributors to this volume attempt to recastthe region as a sustainable metropolis, highlighting regionalhistory and the ways in which metropolitan nature hasbeen constructed and construed for well over a centuryin greater Los Angeles.

A GREAT AND NOBLE SCHEME: THE TRAGIC

STORY OF THE EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH

ACADIANS FROM THEIR AMERICAN HOMELAND

John Mack Faragher

W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2005

On Aug. 25, 1755, the New York Gazetteprinted a dispatch from the maritime province of NovaScotia:“We are now upon a great and noble Scheme ofsending the neutral French out of this Province.” NewEngland troops were rounding up some 18,000 French-speaking Acadian residents at gunpoint and scatteringthem throughout the British Empire. Faragher brings to light a tragic chapter in the settlement of America.

UNSETTLED: THE CULTURE OF MOBILITY

AND THE WORKING POOR IN EARLY

MODERN ENGLAND

Patricia Fumerton

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Poor migrants made up a growing class ofworkers in late-16th- and 17th-century England. By 1650,half of England’s rural population consisted of homelessand itinerant laborers. Unsettled attempts to reconstructthe everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Fumertonalso explores seamen, who were a particularly large andprominent class of mobile wage laborers in the 17th century.

were digging in the same kurgan Pumpelly had dugin 1904.“We dug further down than Pumpelly hadbeen able to do, and what we found was a confir-mation of everything he believed.”There was earlyevidence of civilization in the form of farming—specifically, tiny grains of white wheat. Proof, saysHiebert, that the Turkmen people were engaged inagricultural production as early as 6,500 years ago.Hiebert’s wife, a zooarchaeologist (who joined thedig just as Eliza had 95 years earlier), discoveredbones of domesticated animals.“So here we were,almost 100 years after Raphael Pumpelly had beenhere, confirming that he was right.”

In 2004, on the occasion of the 100th anniversaryof Pumpelly’s 1904 Anau dig, Raphael’s great-grand-daughter Lisa Pompelli (who uses the original spellingof her family’s Italian surname) accompanied Hiebertand his archaeological team to Turkmenistan toattend the international conference and celebratethe opening of that country’s museum devotedentirely to wheat and its early cultivation.

While it might seem odd to devote an entiremuseum to the celebration of wheat, Hiebert notesthat the Turkmen have become very interested intheir own history.“It’s a history that was repressedfor some 70 years by the Soviets,” he says.“So theyare just now, in the 21st century, exploring theirown lost past and their heritage.And now they’vediscovered this western scientist.” So excited arethey about Pumpelly, he says, that they’ve evenrepublished all of Pumpelly’s original work.“Ofcourse,” says Hiebert, with a smile,“none of us canread it because it’s written in Turkmen!” Despite thelanguage barrier, the enthusiasm and excitement forRaphael Pumpelly is not lost on Hiebert.

Mark Wheeler is a freelance science writer whose work hasappeared in Smithsonian and Discover magazines.

ART IN A SEASON OF REVOLUTION: PAINTERS,

ARTISANS, AND PATRONS IN EARLY AMERICA

Margaretta Lovell

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

Lovell positions both well-known paintersand unknown artisans within the frame-

work of their economic lives and families. Highlightingmaritime settlements such as Salem, Newport, andBoston, Lovell considers the ways in which 18th-centuryNew England experience was conditioned by its marketsand the cataclysm of revolution.

MUSICAL METROPOLIS: LOS ANGELES AND THE

CREATION OF A MUSIC CULTURE, 1880-1940

Kenneth Marcus

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Marcus argues that the study of music inLos Angeles reveals the development of the

city itself. Performers and audiences came from a varietyof different backgrounds, but the notion of diversity wentwell beyond ethnicity.A “media diversity”—recordings,radio, and film—influenced the music culture of LosAngeles, which in turn influenced America at large.

NARRATING SCOTLAND: THE IMAGINATION OF

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Barry Menikoff

University of South Carolina Press, 2005

Narrating Scotland reveals that Stevenson’sgoal was nothing less than the reconstitution

in fictional form of his country’s history in the periodjust after the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion. Menikoffcontends that in Kidnapped and David Balfour Stevensonimaginatively reconstructed that culture, in part for thesake of his nation, and for its posterity.

SUNSET LIMITED: THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC

RAILROAD AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE

AMERICAN WEST, 1850-1930

Richard J. Orsi

University of California Press, 2005

The Southern Pacific was the only majorU.S. railroad to be operated by westerners and the onlyrailroad built from west to east. Sunset Limited exploresthe railroad’s development and influence—especially asit affected land settlement, agriculture, water policy, andthe environment—and offers a new perspective on thecompany’s role in shaping the American West.

BA

CK

FLAP

Photo by Lisa Blackburn

THE PEACEABLE AND PROSPEROUS REGIMENT OF BLESSED QUEENE

ELISABETH: A FACSIMILE FROM HOLINSHED’S CHRONICLES (1587)

Edited by Cyndia Susan Clegg, with textual commentary by Randall McLeod

Huntington Library Press, 2005

Cyndia Clegg knew something was odd when she sat down tolook closely at two copies of the 1587 edition of RaphaelHolinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland at TheHuntington back in the early 1990s. Shakespeare had consultedthe Chronicles, which surveys the history of the British Isles fromthe earliest times well into the reign of Elizabeth I, and Cleggwas working on an article on Richard II. She thought to herself,“These copies are quite different!”

Clegg began exploring copies in the British Library, theCambridge University Library, and several more in privatehands. The result is this facsimile of Holinshed’s history of thereign of Queen Elizabeth. Clegg has used the Huntington’s“Melton Holinshed” (pictured above)—named after the previousowner of the book—as the primary text. It comprises a completeset of 16th-century page proofs—that is, original pages withproofreading corrections. She supplements it with variants froma total of eight other copies (three of which are also fromThe Huntington).

Randall McLeod uses the Melton Holinshed to analyze 16th-century printing practices. Clegg’s essay explains how so manysubstantially different copies could have entered the market-place, detailing the three stages of censorship by Her Majesty’sMost Honourable Privy Council. “Censorship is always going toexist in one form or another,” Clegg concedes. “We learn more ifwe ask, ‘Who has the power to censor?’” Far from mere propa-ganda, the variant copies reveal subtle concerns about thedepiction of Mary Queen of Scots’ trial and execution, anti-Catholicism, and justice.

– Matt Stevens

On the CoverThe face has long been familiar to Americans, from school

children to anyone lucky enough to have had a $100 billin his or her wallet. The Huntington’s late-18th-centurypastel portrait of Benjamin Franklin is attributed to theFrench artist Jean Valade, who copied it from a well-known portrait by another French artist, Joseph-Siffrede Duplessis. (In fact, it was a Duplessis imagethat served as the inspiration for the renderingon the $100 bill.) To commemorate the 300thanniversary of Franklin’s birth, we explore the Frenchlineage of a uniquely American icon. Valade’s pastel

(front cover) and the medallion (on the left) from theRoyal Porcelain Manufactory in Sèvres are two of the

nearly 300 items from the Huntington’s collection of 18th-century French art. A four-year research project of the collec-

tion will culminate in a forthcoming catalog.

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