Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, Early Chronicler of Plants, Rocks, Rivers, Mounds, and All Things Wisconsin by Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes (review)

Increase Allen Lapham was a key figure in nineteenth century Wisconsin. As Americans were exploring and exploiting the Midwest for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century, Lapham joined the settler colonial process as an early scientist, helping to make meaning and construct knowledge in this newly opened land. Characteristic of his era of generalist scientists, he was an “all-in-one botanist, zoologist, meteorologist, geologist, archaeologist, and naturalist,” with “a keen all-encompassing eye” (349). Bringing his impressive skills to Wisconsin territory, he helped to found early scientific and academic institutions, authored key scientific publications, and brought the midwestern landscape and its natural features into the scientific conversations of nineteenth century America. As Bergland and Hayes show in this impressively written and rich biography, Lapham’s impact on scientific knowledge in the early Midwest was huge. This is the first full-length biography of Lapham and thus the first to consider Lapham’s life before his important career in Wisconsin. The biography is based on Lapham’s papers, and also on a crucial previous work—the 1,500-page edited transcript of Lapham’s papers, made after his death by his daughter Julia. The authors’ careful use of intimate sources provides great access into Lapham’s life and career. From his journals, Bergland and Hayes reconstruct Lapham’s activities in rich and satisfying detail, from his early education to his successes and setbacks. At the same time, close reliance on these sources sometimes commits the authors to a fairly uncritical view of Lapham that neglects wider contexts for understanding his life and its larger significance.

The book succeeds impressively as an account of Lapham’s remarkable and fascinating career. Born in New York to a Quaker canal engineer and carpenter, Lapham learned about rocks as a young boy by living next to canal ditches. He began a remarkable self-education by subscribing to Yale professor Benjamin Silliman’s Journal of Science at the age of fifteen. Starting his own career as a canal engineer on construction projects in New York, Kentucky, and Ohio, he pursued botany and natural history on the side, nurturing his passion by writing geological papers that he sent to Silliman, as well as in conversation with his brother Darius. The authors treat the young Lapham as an astonishing intellect with massive ambition and somewhat inexplicable motives. As they write, “his mind needed . . . scientific knowledge the way his body needed meat and bread” (36).

By the 1830s Lapham had helped to found historical and philosophical societies and a geological survey in Ohio. In 1836, however, he joined a land speculator and early Milwaukee promoter and headed west to work as a surveyor and engineer on the proposed Milwaukee and Rock River Canal. Economic downturns in the 1830s ruined his early plans, but he nevertheless settled permanently in Wisconsin, where he found a new field for scientific endeavor. He went on scientific explorations around the state, building a huge botanical collection, and sending specimens to eminent natural historians like Silliman and Asa Gray at Harvard. By 1844, he published a Geography of Wisconsin, which launched his most consistent career as a writer. Fascinated by Indian mounds he discovered on his travels, he wrote Antiquities of Wisconsin in 1855. But his outsider status made his scientific career precarious. His planned catalog of American grasses went unfunded. And while he helped to found the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Geological Survey, he did much labor without compensation, eventually developing resentment for the way his work went underappreciated. Although his pioneering storm-warning system (precursor to the National Weather Service) finally gained him a steady salary, Lapham often worked for nothing and only achieved financial stability late in life. For the authors, a great theme of Lapham’s life is his selfless...