Through the Brazilian Wilderness | Page 2

he found out that we
intended to go up the Paraguay and across into the valley of the
Amazon, because much of the ground over which we were to pass had
not been covered by collectors. He saw Henry Fairfield Osborn, the
president of the museum, who wrote me that the museum would be
pleased to send under me a couple of naturalists, whom, with my
approval, Chapman would choose.
The men whom Chapman recommended were Messrs. George K.
Cherrie and Leo E. Miller. I gladly accepted both. The former was to
attend chiefly to the ornithology and the latter to the mammalogy of the
expedition; but each was to help out the other. No two better men for
such a trip could have been found. Both were veterans of the tropical

American forests. Miller was a young man, born in Indiana, an
enthusiastic with good literary as well as scientific training. He was at
the time in the Guiana forests, and joined us at Barbados. Cherrie was
an older man, born in Iowa, but now a farmer in Vermont. He had a
wife and six children. Mrs. Cherrie had accompanied him during two or
three years of their early married life in his collecting trips along the
Orinoco. Their second child was born when they were in camp a couple
of hundred miles from any white man or woman. One night a few
weeks later they were obliged to leave a camping-place, where they had
intended to spend the night, because the baby was fretful, and its cries
attracted a jaguar, which prowled nearer and nearer in the twilight until
they thought it safest once more to put out into the open river and seek
a new resting-place. Cherrie had spent about twenty-two years
collecting in the American tropics. Like most of the field-naturalists I
have met, he was an unusually efficient and fearless man; and
willy-nilly he had been forced at times to vary his career by taking part
in insurrections. Twice he had been behind the bars in consequence, on
one occasion spending three months in a prison of a certain South
American state, expecting each day to be taken out and shot. In another
state he had, as an interlude to his ornithological pursuits, followed the
career of a gun-runner, acting as such off and on for two and a half
years. The particular revolutionary chief whose fortunes he was
following finally came into power, and Cherrie immortalized his name
by naming a new species of ant-thrush after him--a delightful touch, in
its practical combination of those not normally kindred pursuits,
ornithology and gun-running.
In Anthony Fiala, a former arctic explorer, we found an excellent man
for assembling equipment and taking charge of its handling and
shipment. In addition to his four years in the arctic regions, Fiala had
served in the New York Squadron in Porto Rico during the Spanish
War, and through his service in the squadron had been brought into
contact with his little Tennessee wife. She came down with her four
children to say good-by to him when the steamer left. My secretary, Mr.
Frank Harper, went with us. Jacob Sigg, who had served three years in
the United States Army, and was both a hospital nurse and a cook, as
well as having a natural taste for adventure, went as the personal
attendant of Father Zahm. In southern Brazil my son Kermit joined me.

He had been bridge building, and a couple of months previously, while
on top of a long steel span, something went wrong with the derrick, he
and the steel span coming down together on the rocky bed beneath. He
escaped with two broken ribs, two teeth knocked out, and a knee
partially dislocated, but was practically all right again when he started
with us.
In its composition ours was a typical American expedition. Kermit and
I were of the old Revolutionary stock, and in our veins ran about every
strain of blood that there was on this side of the water during colonial
times. Cherrie's father was born in Ireland, and his mother in Scotland;
they came here when very young, and his father served throughout the
Civil War in an Iowa cavalry regiment. His wife was of old
Revolutionary stock. Father Zahm's father was an Alsacian immigrant,
and his mother was partly of Irish and partly of old American stock, a
descendant of a niece of General Braddock. Miller's father came from
Germany, and his mother from France. Fiala's father and mother were
both from Bohemia, being Czechs, and his father had served four years
in the Civil War in the Union Army--his Tennessee wife was of old
Revolutionary stock. Harper was born in England, and Sigg in
Switzerland. We were as varied in religious creed as in