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By Susan McCarthy Annie Alexander is one of Cal’s most obscure benefactors. No gates, pavilions, or halls are named for her. The museums she brought into being do not bear her name. Long after she died, someone named a map room after her, but only because she wasn’t there to object. In Alexander’s lifetime (1867–1950), when she wasn’t looking, biologists and paleontologists named 17 species and subspecies after her, including Ursus alexandrae, an Alaskan bear; Ectosperma alexandrae, a previously unknown genus of grass; and Shastasaurus alexandrae, a fossil ichthyosaur. But whenever she caught them at it, she put a stop to it, writing to zoologist Joseph Grinnell, “Don’t name the gopher... after me. I have a funny feeling about things being named after me, just would rather they weren’t.” Alexander created Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) in 1908, and supported it for many years. In appointing Grinnell as curator, she launched the career of one of the great evolutionary biologists of the time. In 1921 she also created the Museum of
When Barbara Stein arrived at the MVZ in 1985, as a curatorial assistant and researcher, she was told tales of the legendary Miss Alexander. Who was this mysterious woman, Stein wondered, whose name was on no plaques, but on the tags of thousands of specimens? The museum had just one formal portrait of Alexander (she posed on condition that it not be displayed in her lifetime), and another photo of a woman in a long skirt carrying a rifle, which was said to be Alexander, who was rumored to have shot unnumbered bears.... Stein didn’t pursue her questions until 1993, when a colleague volunteered her to present a talk on Alexander for a seminar on the history of women at Cal. “I realized that all the apocrypha I had heard over the years wouldn’t suffice,” says Stein, who promptly dived into the archives. She learned that the rifle-toter in the photo on display in the MVZ was not Alexander, but found other photographs—including one showing Alexander with rifle and pistol on a 1901 expedition to Oregon. (Nor had Alexander shot all those bears.) Several more talks followed, and eventually Stein wrote the biography On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West, to be published in October by UC Press. Alexander was born and raised in Maui, the daughter of Samuel Alexander, was a founder of the C&H Sugar empire. In 1883, the Alexanders moved to Oakland, Samuel noting, “There is perhaps no country in the world better calculated to develop independence of character than California.” It worked for Annie, though the form of her independence took some time to appear. In 1887, Alexander went to a seminary for young women in Massachusetts for two years. She studied everything from French and Roman history to dress-cutting, but no science. After studying languages and drawing in Europe, she returned home with eyestrain and migraines, and was told to give up close work. In ensuing years Alexander traveled with her family, sailing to Asia, bicycling through Europe, and camping in the Sierras with her childhood friend Martha Beckwith. It was perhaps to keep up with Beckwith, who studied anthropology with Franz Boas and later taught at Vassar, that Alexander began auditing a paleontology class at Berkeley in 1900. The class was taught by John Merriam, famous for his exciting lectures, and Alexander was entranced. She went on fossil-hunting field trips to such remote locations as Los Gatos and Mount Diablo. Within a year she was funding field trips, paying for equipment, salaries, and the charges for shipping thousands of pounds of fossils back to Cal. The field trips became more ambitious. Alexander declined Merriam’s offer to accompany him and his wife on a fossil-hunting expedition to Shasta County in favor of organizing her own expedition to Fossil Lake, Oregon. The cause of her reluctance to go on Merriam’s trip may be hinted at in a letter to Beckwith: “I had the disagreeable feeling that he ascribed a good part of my interest in the work to personal interest in himself…. I believe he now respects me thoroughly.”
Life in the field was arduous, but Alexander loved it. “I like it more and more, this study of our old, old world and the creatures to whom it belonged in the ages past,” she wrote. Alexander’s interest soon expanded to include living creatures, and so she organized an expedition to Alaska to collect specimens of the fauna there. Alexander lived at home, and she seems to have had money to spend as she liked, although her family showed no great interest in her new-found vocation. When she started collecting skulls, she sneaked them up to the attic, and later had a room built in the garden to hold her various collections. But when they travelled to Africa, her proud father wrote that if a lion attacked him, he was confident that “Annie will seize it by the tail and sling it 20 feet away.” In 1907, Alexander wrote to UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, offering a deal. If the University would “erect a galvanized iron building furnished with electric light, heat, and janitor’s services and turn it over to my entire control as a Museum of Natural History for the next seven years, I will guarantee the expenditure of $7,000 yearly during that time for field and research work relating exclusively to mammals, birds, and reptiles of the West Coast.” The specimens would become University property. After some back and forth (the regents said they couldn’t let Alexander have complete control; she withdrew her offer; they gave her complete control), the scheme went forward, and the building went up in Faculty Glade. She settled on Joseph Grinnell for the museum’s director, though he was years away from completing his Ph.D. and was “languishing” as an instructor at Throop Polytechnic (later CalTech). She respected his scientific intelligence and energy, and knew she could work with him. Luckily, she dismissed his suggestion that she found a museum at his undergraduate alma mater (Stanford) instead of at Cal. Alexander kept a knowledgeable eye on the finances of the new Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, but scientific control was Grinnell’s. Alexander did not consider herself a scientist—she was emphatic that she only “audited” classes, refused to have her name added to papers and, when Grinnell suggested she write a manuscript on the systematics of bears her expedition had collected, she replied, “I haven’t mental vigor enough to pursue any study alone and would have to put myself under someone’s guidance…. It would not be science.” Alexander faced a difficulty her peers did not: it was improper to be the only female on an expedition. She might have risked opprobrium for herself, but she was unwilling to expose male collectors to gossip on her account. She sought out women to accompany her, but none lasted for more than one or two trips. In planning her 1908 expedition to Alaska, Alexander asked Grinnell for his advice. He replied that he could think of no female but herself up to the hardships, and described other women he knew to be interested in natural history as “parlor naturalists, ‘opera-glass’ observers who get as far as Yosemite by stage occasionally!” Irked, Alexander wrote that she regretted his “evident contempt for women as naturalists,” declaring herself willing to be the only lady in the party. But just a week later she wrote that she’d found “a little friend who wants to learn how to put up specimens and to take notes…. She is a dandy girl but I never dreamed her folks would let her go.” The “little friend” was Louise Kellogg, who became Alexander’s lifelong companion. Stein reports that when she asked Alexander’s niece how the two had met, she said simply, “Well, it was inappropriate for a woman to go out in the field by herself, so the family found Louise.” Stein is reluctant to shift the focus away from Alexander’s contribution to science onto her personal life and relationship with Kellogg. Interviews convinced her that they had a “romantic friendship,” with or without sex. Kellogg was a college graduate with teaching experience (and she could play the ukulele) who took to field work naturally. One researcher wrote to Grinnell, “You never saw anything like the way they work.” Not only did the two women collect and preserve specimens, they noted the habitat where the specimens were found, sometimes taking soil samples or preserving stomach contents.
Their understanding of what they were finding was excellent, so they were able to spot anomalies. Stein lauds Alexander’s “ability to find pocket gophers in areas where nobody had found them before, and where they were thought not to exist, or in areas that were thought inaccessible or inhospitable.” One of the MVZ’s unusual strengths, besides a concentration on West Coast fauna, is its possession of “large series of specimens collected throughout a broad area, and repeatedly sampled over time,” Stein says. With large samples, “you have the ability to do analyses with statistical significance. You can split them up by sex and age and actually make meaningful statements.” This is in no small part thanks to the efforts of Alexander and Kellogg. In 1910, when Alexander wrote to Grinnell that they had collected 75 song sparrows from the east side of Vancouver Island, he wrote back that he was “astonished,” and could they get some from the west side, to examine local variation? Such series made Grinnell’s studies of speciation possible and contributed to his production of classic papers on systematics, notably on the ever-fascinating pocket gopher. In 1921, Alexander established the Museum of Paleontology, and though it received funding comparable to that of the MVZ, it was never as dear to her heart—it never had a director with whom Alexander could work closely, nor were Alexander’s and Kellogg’s specimens as valuable, too often consisting of “miscellaneous and unimportant fragments.” After Grinnell’s death in 1939, Alexander continued to support the MVZ. Stein interviewed people who were graduate students in Alexander’s lifetime and who recall the awe inspired by her visits. “They were banished to their offices,” says Stein. “All the blinds were pulled to their exact right height. There was not a paperclip out of place if ‘Miss A’ was coming.” Alexander and Kellogg shifted their emphasis to plants, which they sent to the University Herbarium. They became, of course, superb plant collectors. In 1947 they swooped down on Annetta Carter, a senior herbarium botanist who was somewhat bitter about never getting to go out to do field work, and carried her off to collect plants in Baja California. Carter wrote about the expedition in a 1949 California Monthly article, with a picture of Alexander’s Dodge Power Wagon—a civilian model of a World War II weapon carrier, with four-wheel drive and eight speeds, which was painted orange—but none of Alexander herself. To those stunned at the sight of the Misses Alexander, Kellogg, and Carter in the orange Power Wagon, who asked whether they were not afraid to go to Cabo San Lucas and back without a man, they replied, “Somos tres mujeres sin miedo”—“We are three women without fear.” Alexander was 80. This was her last expedition. The woman who preferred to make gifts as “a friend of paleontology,” once wrote to Beckwith that she believed that “getting knowledge first hand is the real exciting and worthwhile thing in life.” |
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