Clinton Hart Merriam

Clinton Hart Merriam was born in New York City in 1855 to Clinton Levi Merriam, a U.S. congressman, and Caroline Hart, a judge's daughter and a graduate of Rutgers Institute. The name Clinton, shared by both father and son, was in honor of New York governor DeWitt Clinton, whom the Merriam family had connections with. Although born in New York City, where his parents were staying the winter, the family home and place where Merriam spent his boyhood days was "Locust Grove," a homestead in Lewis County, New York. It was located near the Adirondack Mountains, where Merriam's interests in the natural world flourished. In June 1872 Congress had appropriated another $20,000 for completion of the notable Hayden Geological Survey of 1871. It had contributed to the founding of Yellowstone National Park. Following the expedition, Lt. George Wheeler, a rival of Hayden's in surveying the American West, tried to poach Merriam for his own survey, putting Merriam in the midst of an old feud between the two explorers. Again Professor Baird stepped in on behalf of Merriam, resolving the issue by recommending that Merriam return to school to prepare for college. Among the faculty there, Merriam received instruction from such prominent figures as Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, Sidney Irving Smith, and Daniel Cady Eaton. During this time, Merriam published a short paper entitled "Ornithological Notes from the South," following a trip to Florida with his father. Around this time, Merriam also published "A Review of the Birds of Connecticut," significant in that it recognized that the distribution of birds' ranges is governed by temperature during the breeding season; as well as a number of short papers from observations of birds near his Locust Grove house. In 1878, while at medical school, Merriam helped organize the Linnaean Society of New York and served as its first president. Merriam also was an early member of the Nuttall Ornithological Club and an early contributor to its bulletin. Merriam graduated with his M.D. from Columbia University in 1879 and returned to Locust Grove to practice medicine. == Medical career and continued study of wildlife ==

From 1879 to 1885, after earning his M.D., Merriam returned to Locust Grove to practice medicine as a country doctor, becoming quite successful in the endeavor. In 1883, growing interest in ornithology in the US precipitated the formation of the American Ornithologists' Union, modeled after the then-established British Ornithologists' Union. So intensive were Merriam's plans for his committees that they exceeded the resources of the Union, and Merriam's father, with support of a New York senator and Professor Baird, secured a congressional appropriation of $10,000 to hire a chief ornithologist and establish an ornithology section under the Division of Entomology, within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The formation of this political position, which Merriam would soon fill, would mark Merriam's transition from medical practitioner to career scientist. ==Zoology==

In 1886, he became the first chief of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy of the United States Department of Agriculture, predecessor to the National Wildlife Research Center and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1883, he was a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union. He was one of the original founders of the National Geographic Society in 1888. He developed the concept of "life zones" to classify biomes found in North America along an altitudinal sequence corresponding to the zonal latitudinal sequence from Equator to Pole. In mammalogy, he is known as an excessive splitter, proposing, for example, tens of different species of North American brown bears in several genera. In 1899, he helped railroad magnate E. H. Harriman to organize an exploratory voyage along the Alaska coastline. Some species of animals that bear his name are Merriam's canyon lizard (Sceloporus merriami ), Merriam's wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo merriami ), the now extinct Merriam's elk (Cervus elaphus merriami ), Merriam's pocket mouse (Perognathus merriami ), Merriam's chipmunk (Tamias merriami ), and Merriam's ground squirrel (Urocitellus canus ). His detail-oriented taxonomy and thorough field work were influential with zoologists for many years. == American mammalogy ==

He began his career in natural science, at the age of 16, with an 1872 Harden Survey. At 18, he published a report of his biological studies on mammals and birds. Following his induction into natural sciences, Merriam studied at Yale and received his M.D from Columbia in 1879. After college he began a brief career in medicine, but in 1883 his early fascination with the study of mammal species was revived, and he became one of the founding members of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1883, where he continued his studies on different species of mammals. The first term he coined was Atophyrax bendirii in 1884. With his growing reputation in the natural science sphere, he became close friends with future president Theodore Roosevelt (after whom he named the Roosevelt elk) and, at the age of 30, was asked to take charge of the newly established section of ornithology in the Entomological Division of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1885. This later became known as the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1905. Heading the Bureau for 25 years, he became a nationally known figure and improved the scientific understanding of the birds and mammals of the United States. As head of the Bureau, Merriam inaugurated the North American Fauna series, in which he described 71 new species and several new genera of mammals. After revising brown and grizzly bears of North America, he named an additional 84 species. Merriam visited the Colorado Plateau in 1889. He published the results of a biological survey of the San Francisco Mountain region and desert of the Little Colorado in 1890, including the idea of "life zones" he had developed on the expedition. Merriam's concept of seven altitudinal "life zones" distinguished by differences in temperature and humidity was an important idea. In 1899, he helped organized the Harriman Alaska Expedition, with Edward Harriman, in which they explored coast of Alaska for two months, from Seattle to Siberia. Subsequently, he was named president of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1902. That same year, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. Circa 1910 he began to focus on the ethnology of the peoples native to California. ==Native Americans==

During Merriam's multiple trips to western North America to research and catalog biological organisms, he came to rely on the indigenous "locals" (Native Americans) for valuable information about the mammals he was studying. Through these inquiries and encounters, Merriam tried to learn Native languages to communicate with his contacts. He also became fascinated with the Native American cultures of California. As the North American Indian populations decreased dramatically in the late 19th century, Merriam realized that the people, languages, culture, and knowledge of these diverse tribes was being lost. He became determined to collect information about the Native American tribes of California before it was too late. Merriam stunned his colleagues in East Coast academic institutions by abandoning his career in mammalogy for anthropological and linguistic field work, for which he had no formal training. When Merriam's friend Harriman died, his widow offered Merriam an open academic grant and encouraged him to study whatever he pleased. Funded by the Harriman family, Merriam's focus shifted to studying and assisting the Native American tribes in the western US. His contributions on the myths of central California and on ethnogeography were noteworthy. Merriam is credited for collecting in his field notes a vast amount of information on the languages and customs of tribes that would otherwise have been unstudied. Merriam published many papers on his findings, and used his findings to advocate for California tribes; the majority of his field notes remain unpublished, and are largely stored in the basement of the University of California Berkeley Anthropology Museum, where they were transferred from The Smithsonian Institution, Merriam's academic home base. == Personal ==

Merriam married Virginia Elizabeth Gosnell, his secretary at the time, on October 15, 1886. His grandson Lee Merriam Talbot (1930–2021) was a geographer and ecologist who was among the IUCN team which rediscovered the Persian fallow deer in 1957, and served as secretary general of the IUCN from 1980 to 1983. ==See also==