The present volume of our series is devoted to a reprint of Thomas Nuttall's Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, during the year 1819, with Occasional Observations on the Manners of the Aborigines, originally published at Philadelphia in 1821.
Nuttall was born in the market town of Settle, West Riding, Yorkshire, in 1786.[1] His parents being in humble circumstances, at an early age he was apprenticed to a printer, probably an uncle who was a member of that craft, in Liverpool. After a few years, becoming dissatisfied with his employer, he journeyed to London, where his pecuniary condition approached so near to destitution that he emigrated to the United States, arriving at Philadelphia in 1808, aged twenty-two.
In spite of the disadvantages which had beset him in his early years, a natural love for books and a faculty for application had by this time given him some knowledge of history, Greek, and Latin, and much of natural science, already his favorite study. Soon after his arrival in Philadelphia, he was seeking information relative to a plant which interested him, when he met Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton; the interview stimulated him to the botanical studies on which his fame as a scientist chiefly rests, and he soon began to make excursions, especially along the
- ↑ The chief source of information concerning Nuttall's life is a "Biographical Notice" prepared upon his death by Elias Durand, for the American Philosophical Society, and published in their Proceedings for 1859-60 (volume viii, p. 297). Other details are given in his writings, especially the Journal, and in Bradbury and Townsend, who were his associates on other expeditions (see volumes v and xxi of our series).
