Page 96 - Early Naturalists of the Black Range

Charles Wood Irish
Irish was a botanist, geologist, and astronomer, who collected plants in the Mimbres in 1878 (no specific dates on specimen sheets).
Most of the naturalists who worked in and around the Black Range were here for relatively short periods and went on to live (generally) very successful lives. Irish is an example of someone who passed through and went on to greater success elsewhere. The following is from the September 29, 1904, issue of the Reno Evening Gazette.
When Irish did his collecting in the Mimbres Valley he was probably working on a project for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. His diaries from this period are maintained by the University of Iowa Libraries.
Francis H. Snow
In August 1881, Snow, who was a professor at the University of Kansas, led an “expedition” to southwestern New Mexico. In addition to Snow, the expedition included another professor from the University (H. S. S. Smith), L. L. Dyche (a natural history assistant), and Snow’s twelve-year-old son.
They collected butterflies and moths in Water Canyon, twenty- five miles west of Socorro, until their “work of the month was seriously crippled by a hostile incursion of the murderous Apaches, who compelled us, after only five days of successful collecting, to abandon the locality”. (In 1894 he returned to the same basic locale.) After this they collected for a day in Deming and later at Socorro. The Kansas Academy of Science published the list of their collected specimens (from 1881 and 1882, from Water Canyon and other sites in New Mexico) as “Lists of Lepidoptera and Coleoptera...”. They collected specimens of 829 species, 70 of which were newly described.
Snow made collecting trips throughout the west, sometimes revisiting previously surveyed sites. In August 1884 he collected at Walnut Canyon, twelve miles north of Silver City and 3 miles west of the Continental Divide. “Lists of Lepidoptera and Coleoptera Collected ... 1884” is a listing of specimens from throughout the state, including Walnut Canyon.
Abaeis salome, Salome Yellow collected by F. H. Snow in August 1884 at Little Walnut Creek, Grant Co., NM. Specimen in Snow Entomological Museum, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.
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