“By education, Pumpelly was a geologist and by temperament an explorer in the nineteenth-century swashbuckling sense. Belatedly following Davenport�s clues, I�ve read a biography by Peggy Champlin, Raphael Pumpelly: Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age (University of Alabama Press, 1994). Her Pumpelly is chronically and restlessly industrious. […] Born in Owego, N.Y., he graduated from the Technische Universit�t Bergakademie Freiberg in Germany. At age nineteen, he lived among the shepherds in the mountains of Corsica. After mining in Arizona, he worked as a surveyor in Japan, China, Mongolia and Siberia, and later in Michigan and Missouri. He taught mining science at Harvard. He explored the Dakota, Montana and Washington territories. In his sixties, he visited Turkestan for the Carnegie Institution, employing what Champlin calls �the methods of geology, physical geography, climatology, archaeology, and anthropology in an interdisciplinary study of the effect of the environment on the development of a primitive culture.� And he wrote about his travels in scholarly treatises and popular exploration narratives. It�s easy to see why Davenport would admire him, share his disenchantment with academia and judge Pumpelly the �last of the real Americans.� Yet again, Davenport proves himself the truest of teachers. Without his example, Pumpelly would have remained for me a cipher with a funny name. In his essay on Louis Agassiz, collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), he writes:�The obscurest subject in the curricula of American colleges is the intellectual history of the United States. Like American history itself, intellectual achievement has been stylized into an episodic myth in which the mind has no real prominence. Patrick Henry has become a single sentence; John Randolph has disappeared. The American scholar [Raphael Pumpelly] who found in his eightieth year the vestige of mankind�s first cultivation of cereals is as unknown to American history as the tactician who drove Cornwallis into Washington�s hands.�In the same essay, Davenport places Pumpelly among the scholars �whose neglect is disturbing to contemplate.�
(from The Last of the Real Americans on Anecdotal Evidence.)
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