WIED, MAXIMILIAN ZU

(b. Neuwied, Germany, 23 September 1782; d. Neuwied, 3 February 1867)

natural history, ethnology.

Alexander Philip Maximilian, prince of WiedNeuwied, was the eighth child and second son of Prince Friedrich Karl, the ruler of a small principality near Koblenz in Rhenish Prussia. His mother encouraged his interest in natural history when he was a youth, and in later years he became a student of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, from whom derived Wied’s interest in studying man as an object of natural history.

Wied had planned to visit America in 1803, but the political and military confusion of the Napoleonic era prevented the trip. He served with the Prussian army at the battle of Jena, during which he was captured by the French, He was exchanged and returned to Neuwied. Resuming military service, he rose to the rank of major general and was with the allied army when it entered Paris in 1814.

As soon as possible after the cessation of hostilities, Wied retired from active military service and began to pursue the study of natural history. With the United States in the process of recovering from active military service and began to pursue the study of natural history. With the United Stated in the process of recovering from the War of 1812, he postponed his trip there and sailed instead for South America. His two-year journey along the coast of Brazil enabled him to observe the primitive Indian tribes of the Brazilian forests and to record the manners and life styles of the Purí, Botocudos, Patachos, and Camacans. In his journals Wied noted the distinctive native flora and fauna of the region between Rio de Janiero and Bahía. After returning to Germany, he arranged his collections and prepared his notes for publication: Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 bis 1817 (1820–1821). This work, soon translated into Dutch, French, and English, established his reputation as a naturalist.

In 1832 Wied sailed for the United States, intending to compare the Indians of South America with those of North America and to journey as far west as the Rocky Mountains in order to examine the flora, fauna, and aboriginal peoples of the trans-Mississippi area. He was accompanied on this trip by the young Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who had been hired by Wied to illustrate his scientific journals. After spending some time in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Wied crossed the Appalachian Mountains and wintered at New Harmony, Indiana, where he met Thomas Say, Charles Alexandre Lesueur, and William and Robert Dale Owen.

In the spring of 1833, Wied received the support of the American Fur Company and was allowed to travel up the Missouri River on their steamers. At Fort McKenzie, below the great falls of the Missouri, he began his investigation of Indian life, collecting data about Indian languages; he later published vocabularies for the Arikaras, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Mandan, and Siouxtribes. Besides studying Indian life, Wied collected plant and animal specimens. With the approach of winter, he returned to Fort Clark on the Missouri, where he remained until the spring of 1834, making an intensive study of the Mandans. Wied’s studies of the Indians of the upper Missouri are characterized by a sincere attempt to portray them not as savages but as civilized individuals with acquired skills and mores ideally suited for life in a wilderness. His detailed ethnographical description of these tribes assumes additional importance when it is noted that the smallpox epidemic of 1837– 1838 destroyed several of these tribes and substantially reduced the populations of others.

Wied returned to Europe in the summer of 1834. Although many of the animal and plant specimens that he had laboriously collected were lost in a river accident, he published a meticulously edited and handsomely illustrated account of his travels in the American West in his Reise in das innere Nord-America in Jahren 1832 bis 1834.

The rest of Wied’s life was devoted to cataloging and studying the specimens he had collected on his trips to North and South America. His primary contribution to science was his detailed ethnographical descriptions of the native tribes of Brazil and the upper Missouri, for he sensitively recorded a way of life that was soon to disappear. His zoological collections were purchased by the American Museum of Natural History. In the field Wied was a skilled observer who carefully recorded the dimensions and habitat of the flora and fauna he collected. Nevertheless, his ethnographical observations are the more valuable aspect of his work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Wied’s account of his trip to Brazil is in Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 bis 1817, 2 vols. (Frankfurt. 1820–1821), and Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte von Brasiliens. 4 vols. in 6 (Weimar,1825–1833). His account of his American tour, with beautiful plates by Karl Bodmer, is in Reise in das innere Nord-America in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834, 2 vols. and atlas (Koblenz, 1839–1841). An English trans. of this work was published in Reuben Gold Thwaites’ Early Western travels 1748–1846, XXII–XXV (Cleveland, 1906). Wied’s scientific papers are listed in Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers, VI, 357–358, and VIII, 1235. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has a collection of Wied papers that includes MS diaries, correspondence, a scientific journal, and the originals of many of Bodmer’s paintings.

II. Secondary Literature, There is no definitive study of Wied’s life and work. For general surveys of his life, see Vernon Bailey, “Maximilian’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832 to 1834,” in Natural History,23, no 4 (July–Aug. 1923), 337–343; the very popular account in Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri (New York, 1947), 133–146: and Joseph Röder, “The Prince and the Painter,” in Natural History,64, no. 6 (June 1955), 326–329. For a more detailed account consult Philipp Wirtgen, Zum Andenken an Prinz Maximulian zu Wied, sein Leben und wissenschaftliche Thätigekeit (Neuwied–Leipzig, 1867); and Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, XXIII (1886), 559–654.

Phillip Drennon Thomas