Biography

American geologist and naturalist. Samuel Buckley was born on his family's farm in West Dresden, New York, and educated at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. His mentor at college was Dr Joseph Barratt, a local physician from England who taught a course in botany and regarded Buckley as one of his most promising pupils. Under Barratt's influence, Buckley started a herbarium with plant collections from upstate New York and Long Island.

After graduating with an MA degree in 1836, he collected in Illinois, Missouri, Virginia and Kentucky, seemingly with a view to earning his living as a natural history collector. He moved to Alabama in 1839 but was unable to make ends meet. Although reduced to teaching, he continued to collect extensively in the southern states during his six-week vacations and was one of the first botanists to explore the southwestern Appalachians. He had already established contact with the luminaries of contemporary American botany – John Torrey, Asa Gray, William Darlington, and Moses Ashley Curtis were regular correspondents – and was an early acquaintance of George Engelmann, whom he introduced to Torrey. He seems not to have been much liked or trusted by the authorities he consulted. They complained to each other about the condition of his specimens and the quality of his descriptions. Curtis grumbled that although his shipment included several new things it was "one of the meanest parcels of specimens I ever saw. Are all his collections so?" Englemann described them as "dried like hay".

For his part, Gray appears to have been more concerned about Buckley's abilities as a taxonomist. In the early 1860s, he wrote a disparaging review of Buckley's publications on his discoveries from Texas. A few years later, for Buckley's obituary, Gray moderated his criticism: "His zeal in botany and his knowledge of the plants of the Southern States in their native habitats were great; his opportunities and training for doing descriptive botanical work were not the best."

In winter 1842, Buckley came to New York at Torrey's invitation to work on his plant collections and to attend Torrey's lectures at the medical school. He brought with him the 80-foot skeleton, recently unearthed by him on a neighbour's farm in Alabama, of a Zeuglodon, for which he hoped to find a buyer. He also nurtured hopes of accompanying Audubon up the Missouri River or Frémont on his expedition to the West, but both men turned him down as a companion. Instead he made a disastrous trip to the interior of Florida in the summer of 1843. Afterwards he disappeared from the scientific scene for nearly a decade while he worked on his father's farm in upstate New York.

In 1856 a move to Ohio reignited his interest in plants. Once more, through exchange and collection, he resumed work on his herbarium. In spring 1857 and summer 1858, he collected plants and measured peaks in Tennessee and North Carolina. He visited Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Minnesota in 1859 and joined the Geological Survey of Texas in 1860. During the Civil War, Buckley worked on his collections from Texas at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. In 1866, a year after the war ended, he returned to Texas where he held the post of State Geologist for several years, an appointment which was not unmarked by controversy. He eventually returned to farming. In the last years of his life, between 1878 and 1883, he made a number of collecting trips in northern Mexico. His Mexican collections were subsequently described by N.L. Britton. He is commemorated in Buckleya distichophylla Torr., which he discovered in Appalachia.

Sources:
L. Dorr, 1993, "'That Land of Flowers, Swamps, and Alligators': S.B. Buckley’s 1843 Trip Up the St Johns River, Florida”, Brittonia, 44(1): 1-13
L. Dorr, 1997, “Botanical Libraries and Herbaria in North America 4: The Samuel Botsford Buckley, Rebecca Mann Dean Mystery", Taxon, 46(4): 661-687
A. Gray, 1885, “Botanical necrology for 1884. Samuel Botsford Buckley.” American Journal of Science and Arts, 29: 171-172
R.H. Petersen, 1989, “Samuel Botsford Buckley’s expedition into the southern Appalachian Mountains in 1842, with additional biographical notes”, Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden, 49: 1-10
A.R. Roessler, 1875, Reply to the charges made by SB Buckley, State Geologist of Texas, in his official report of 1874 against Dr BF Shumard and AR Roessler:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/landscapes/publications/txu-oclc-6527052/issue.html.