Col John James Abert
Who is the original Abert that I have co-opted as my own moniker?
Col John James Abert (1788-1863), that’s who.
As much of US history goes, the story begins out east before moving west. Born in New Jersey, and a West Point graduate, John Abert joined the D.C militia for the battle of 1812 and was a topographical engineer for the Army by 1814. Over the next decades, he built a team of officers responsible for mapping and exploring the lands west of the Mississippi River. Recall that the Louisiana Purchase happened in 1803 and it extended from the Mississippi right to our doors here in the Foothills. The maps vary on just exactly where the Western boundary lines lay, but if you live here in the Colorado Foothills, you can consider that your land is a part of the western edge of the Louisiana Purchase, the wild frontier.
This was a massive area to get a handle on mapping and understanding just what these lands held. There were far more expeditions than Lewis and Clark, and Col John Abert’s officers did their part. Back in 1818, the Topographic Bureau was under the Corps of Engineers which was all under the US War Department. Abert became head of this bureau, a whole 6 men, in 1829. It sounds like oppressive bureaucracy was just as prevalent in the new America as it is now and Abert proposed to Congress to move the Topographic department out from the Corp of Engineers to its own department of the Army, the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Soon, they had 36 men comprised of the best soldier-scientists Abert could round up. He attained the rank of Colonel in 1838 and continued his work until his retirement in 1861. Abert was prominent in a number of legal, scientific, and geographical societies, a leading thinker of his day.
So, what does this have to do with cute, tassel-eared squirrels? Did John Abert find a squirrel and hold it up and declare, “Behold! The Abert Squirrel!”? Yeah, no. I can find no documentation that John Abert ever left his busy, eastern government offices, and even if he was a part of long expeditions, it doesn’t seem he came this far west. It was a physician on the Sitegreaves Expedition (San Antonio, TX to San Diego, CA), Samuel Woodhouse, that first ‘collected’ (caught, killed, classified, and shipped to DC) a tassel-eared Squirrel, in 1851, near Flagstaff, AZ, an area noted for Ponderosa Pines and the tassel-eared squirrels. In trying to differentiate this squirrel, he named it Sciurus Aberti in honor of Col John Abert, head of the Topographical Corps and his top boss. Woodhouse did name a scrub jay and a toad after himself, but other discovered species he named after various prominent people.
The 1800s were a giddy time of discovery and exploration of this wild frontier and there was much to learn before opening up these lands for settlers to move into. The sheer volume of forests and animals from bison to tassel-eared squirrels excited a nation’s interest and would soon bring in the trappers, traders, soldiers, lumber teams, and families to these lands. Winter is a good time to delve into these histories, so there will be more posts to come about how we all got here. For less than 200 years of documented history, there is a lot to it. Geologic history will take us back to some of the oldest rocks on earth, so stay tuned!
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Abert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_Topographical_Engineers
- The Natural History of Tassel-Eared Squirrels, Sylvester Allred, University of New Mexico Press; Illustrated edition (May 15, 2011)
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