Recollections of a Museum Collector

In the 1940s at the urging of his friend and colleague Karl Schmidt of the Field Museum in Chicago, Charles Barber (1876-1954) penned the stories of his time as a museum collector in the American Southwest, Mexico and Guatemala. These are the stories of a young man whose first trip west in 1894 turned into a lifelong pursuit of natural history, zoology and paleontology. The majority of his recollections cover the time period from 1903 through 1908, which were the years when he was employed by the Field Museum. Charley ultimately came to the realization that he was preserving not only a bit of the history of field collecting, but also the memories of his mentors and colleagues and the life that he and his contemporaries led. These previously unpublished manuscripts are a fascinating look into the life of the exacting natural scientist who often had to rely on none but himself for survival in remote and dangerous settings.