Mary Vaux Walcott

American artist and naturalist Mary Morris Vaux Walcott (1860–1940) pursued many interests and activities, including mineralogy, photography, and mountain climbing. However, she was best known for the many wildflower watercolors she produced. These watercolors were collected in the five–volume North American Wildflowers, which became known as "the Audubon of Botany." She was married to famed geologist and paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott.

Early Life

Walcott was born as Mary Morris Vaux on July 31, 1860, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Later in life, when Vaux (pronounced "vox") became quite active as a nature painter and naturalist, she became known as the "society lady in hobnailed boots." The moniker reflected her background, for she was born into one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most prominent Quaker families in Philadelphia.

Her father and two younger brothers inspired Walcotts's passion for nature. Her father, George Vaux, senior (1832–1915), held the Quaker belief in the spiritual value of travel and the study of nature. Vaux herself believed that the wilderness was a sacred place that put one "in the presence of the creator's handiwork." Her brothers, George Vaux, Jr. (1863–1927), and William S. Vaux (1872–1908), were mountaineers, photographers, and scientists.

Walcott received a set of watercolor paints when she was eight years old. She soon began trying her hand at painting flowers in what would become a lifetime activity. From 1869 to 1879, she attended the Friends Select School, a Quaker institution in Philadelphia. During that period, she studied drawing and she continued painting in private. In 1880, her mother died. Walcott, only 19 and the family's only daughter, looked after her father and brothers. She took care of the family home and helped work the family dairy farm.

Canadian Rockies Captivated Family

When Walcott was in her twenties, she made her first trip to the Canadian Rockies in Western Canada, with her family in 1887. The first of many, it helped initiate her career. Her family was traveling on the recently completed Canadian Pacific Railway, en route to a stay at the Glacier House, located on Rogers Pass in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia. On the trip, her brothers were primarily interested in studying the glaciers in the area, particularly the Illecillewaet, which they would photograph and measure over many years.

The beauty of the Canadian Rockies enthralled the family. After that first trip, they spent all of their summer vacations in the mountains. During these trips, Walcott developed into an amateur naturalist, photographer, and mountain climber by spending time in the outdoors with her brothers. Eventually, she combined those interests with her lifelong love of painting. During one vacation, a botanist asked her to paint a watercolor of a rare blooming arnica. Encouraged by her result, she decided to concentrate on botanical illustration, spending much of her time painting watercolors of wildflowers. For many years, Walcott explored the rugged terrain on foot or horseback, seeking out significant flowering species to paint. She became an accomplished amateur botanist.

In the mountains, she also studied mineralogy with her brothers, and she assisted them in their detailed study of the glaciation of the glaciers of the Selkirks near Glacier House and of Wenkchemna, Yoho, and Victoria glaciers. In Glacier Observations, published in 1907, the brothers wrote, "Of all the phenomena that attract the nature lover in the high mountains, possibly none is moreinteresting than the glaciers."

In the late 1880s, the brothers wrote reports, drew maps, and lectured to scientific groups and to nature groups such as the Appalachian Mountain Club. In addition, Canadian Pacific Railway published an illustrated pamphlet based on their studies. The brothers frequently updated the publication. Walcott wrote the last update, completed in 1922. At the time, few American women were so actively involved in scientific endeavors. In 1900, when Walcott climbed Mount Stephen, a 10,496–foot peak in Field, British Columbia, it was the first major ascent by a woman of a peak that high.

Also Excelled in Photography

Walcott also helped her brothers record the flow of glaciers in drawings, maps, surveys and photographs. Back home, they became members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia, one of the oldest and most respected organizations of its kind in the United States. George's and Walcott's photographs mostly depicted mountain landscapes, while William's concentrated upon the movementand physical features of glaciers. The brothers took most of the photographs, using large–format cameras, while Walcott took care of the technical work on the photographs and did all of the printing. They exhibited their work in Philadelphia and lectured for the Photographic Society. Also, their photographs appeared in publicity brochures.

In addition to photographs, the three siblings took films, using early motion–picture cameras. Photographs that turn up in exhibitions today include landscape studies and scenic views of the Selkirkand Canadian Rocky Mountains; glaciers in the Selkirk and Rocky Mountains; the Canadian Pacific Railway in the Selkirks; the Canadian Pacific Railroad hotels at Glacier and Field, British Columbia; and Lake Louise and Lake Banff in Alberta. Also included are pictures taken during the family's mountain–climbing excursions and other outdoor activities. As a woman, at the time, Walcott received no recognition for her drawings or her photographs. Her works were exhibited only under her surname.

Married Smithsonian Institution Secretary

In 1913, while on a research trip to the Canadian Rockies, Mary Morris Vaux met Charles Doolittle Walcott, an eminent geologist and invertebrate paleontologist who was conducting his own geological research. Charles Walcott, who was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., at the time, had discovered the Burgess Shale fossils during an earlier visit to the Canadian Rockies. Walcott, a leading authority on paleontology of the Cambrian Era, had heard that a Canadian Pacific Railway worker had found a fossil bed in Yoho National Park. He decided to visit the site in 1907. Upon arrival, Walcott, like the Vaux family, was so taken he would return to the Canadian Rockies every summer.

In 1909, as he was traveling on a ridge that connected Wapta Mountain with Mount Field, highabove Emerald Lake, he encountered a block of shale from what is now known as the Burgess Shale formation, that had fallen onto the trail and blocked his way. At first, Charles Walcott was going to merely push the slab out of his way. Instead, he took his rock hammer and split the slab open, revealing many fossils.

Walcott returned the following year with his sons, Stuart and Sidney. They examined all the layers on the ridge above where the block of shale had fallen. Their explorations turned up a fossiliferous band. They spent the next month quarrying the shale, loading fossil samples onto their packhorses, and taking the samples to the nearby Canadian Pacific Railway station. Eventually, nearly 65,000 specimens on 30,000 slabs of rock were delivered to the Smithsonian Institute. For years, the Burgess Shale formation and its fossil yield would remain an object of fascination for scientists.

Walcott traveled in other areas besides the fossil field during his excursions there. In June of 1914, Mary Vaux, then 54, married him. Mary Vaux Walcott became an active hostess in Washington, D.C., and helped her husband in a variety of projects. They also traveled together the area they both loved. Starting in 1915, the couple spent three to four months each summer in the Canadian Rockies. Charles Walcott continued his geological and paleontological research, while Mary Vaux Walcott painted hundreds of watercolor studies of native flowers.

Of their field trips, Walcott later said, "This afforded me a wonderful opportunityfor intimate study of the flora, my aim being to collect and paint the finest specimens obtainable, and to depict the natural grace and beauty of the plant without conventional design." Typically, during their trips, she sketched wildflowers she spotted while the pack–trains were stopped or were being prepared. She would then finish these sketches in watercolor back home in Washington, D.C.

Paintings Published

In 1925, driven by a growing demand, the Smithsonian Institution published Walcott's watercolors in a five–volume book, North American Wildflowers. Botanists, artists, and wildflower enthusiasts had urged preserving the paintings in a format easily available to students, scientists, and nature lovers. The publication was produced in limited and library editions. It contained 400 lithographic prints of her watercolors of native wildflowers and brief descriptions of each, and the five volumes covered all of North America.

The project drew immediate praise and was called "the Audubon of Botany." The watercolors were described as both beautiful and accurate. For Walcott, the publication represented years of painstaking effort. Wildflowers have a short and somewhat unpredictable season, and by their nature exist in dangerous and hard–to–reach places on mountainsides. It took her many trips to produce the 400 paintings.

In later years, the volumes of North American Wildflowers became indispensable guides for hiking and field identification. In 1935, Walcott contributed some of her illustrations to North American Pitcher Plants, a reference volume the Smithsonian Institution also published.

Mountain Peak Named After Her

The publication of North American Wildflowers was testament to her talents and efforts. In 1908, she received an extraordinary tribute when close friend Mary Schaffer, an artist and writer, named a 10,500–foot peak in Jaspar Park, Alberta, after her. Back when she was studying art in 1899, Walcott met fellow student Schaffer. The two women became close friends and shared some noteworthy experiences. The year they met, they traveled together by train to the Glacier House, part of the way spent riding on top of a boxcar. Later, they would become members of the Alpine Club of Canada, and together they explored the Nakimu Caves near Rogers Pass.

In a book she later wrote entitled A Hunter of Peace, Schaffer noted, "And one more name we left behind, not carved upon a tree but in our memories. All day the thought of one who loved the hills as we did ourselves was in my mind, and though she could not be with us, yet did I long to share our treasures with her. On the lake's west shore rose a fine symmetrical peak, and . . . I said: 'With everyone's sanction I call that peak Mount Mary Vaux.' " No one argued with her, and the peak officially bears the name that Schaffer first suggested.

Died in Canada

Charles Walcott died in 1927. Mary Vaux Walcott continued taking trips to the Canadian Rockies every summer until 1939. When she made her last visit, she found that many tourists, whom she felt did not care about the natural surroundings, had overrun the area. Mary Vaux Walcott died in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, on August 22, 1940. She left $400,000 to the Smithsonian Institution to support geological research and publications her husband had begun.

Besides her affiliations with the Alpine Club and the Photographic Society of Philadelphia, she served on the federal Board of Indian Commissioners from 1927 to 1932. In 1933, she was elected president of the Society of Woman Geographers.

Books

Almanac of Famous People Eighth Edition, Gale Group, 2003.

Online

"Book of the Month," Special Collections Research Center—Syracuse UniversityLibrary,http://libwww.syr.edu/information/spcollections/bkomonth/June2003/ (January 10, 2004).

"Charles D. Walcott," Peakfinder.comhttp://www.peakfinder.com/people.asp?PersonsName=Walcott%2C+Charles+D. (January 10, 2005).

"Mary Morris Vaux Walcott," Women in American History by Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/women/articles/Walcott–Mary–Morris–Vaux.html (January10, 2005).

"Mary Vaux (1860–1920)," Peakfinder.comhttp://www.peakfinder.com/people.asp?PersonsName=Vaux%2C+Mary (January 10, 2005).

"Mary Vaux Walcott," Smithsonian American Art Museum, http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist–bio.cfm (January 10, 2005).

"Mount Mary Vaux," Peakfinder.comhttp://www.peakfinder.com/peakfinder.ASP?PeakName=mount+mary+vaux (January 10, 2005).

"The Vaux Collection," Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies,http://www.whyte.org/recent/vauxheritage.html (January 10, 2005).