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What would you do after a gold rush? In the years following the gold rush of 1848, attention spread north to the Washington Territory. Within 5 years, ethnologist George Gibbs (1815-1873) had joined the Pacific Railroad Survey, hired to study both the ethnology and the geology between the 47th and 49th parallels. In 1857, he joined the Northwest Boundary Survey as interpreter, geologist and naturalist. Team up with other volunteers to transcribe his diary-like descriptions of tree populations in the Washington Territory include the Rocky Mountains, Spokane and Kootenay Rivers. George Gibbs (1815-1873) was an ethnologist and expert on the language and culture of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. A graduate of Harvard University, Gibbs moved west during the gold rush of 1848 and eventually secured the position of Collector of the Port of Astoria, Oregon Territory. From 1853 to 1855, he was a geologist and ethnologist on the Pacific Railroad Survey of the 47th and 49th parallels under the command of Isaac Stevens. In 1857, Gibbs joined the Northwest Boundary Survey and served as geologist, naturalist, and interpreter until 1862. The last decade of his life was spent in Washington, D.C., where he undertook studies of Indian languages under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution.

Could you keep focusing on your research if war was breaking out around you? The second volume of naturalist Bohumil Shimek begins on 23 July 1914 with him rushing to the Botanical Garden in Halle, Germany just five days before the start of World War I. In his entry that day, he observes a felled oak tree whose growth measurements were linked to major military events as far back as the Westphalian Peace in 1648. Two weeks later, Germany declared war on France. Despite this, Shimek continued his research in central European botany, traveling in Germany and Austria-Hungary Empire until early September. His diary entries carefully note his botanical work along with keen observations of the changes happening around him. Please help us transcribe the second half of Shimek's diary, written mostly in English with just a little Czech. The first volume is here. Bohumil Shimek (1861-1937) studied civil engineering at the State University of Iowa (SUI), where he received a C.E. degree in 1883 and an M.S. degree in 1902. He served as railroad and county surveyor for Johnson County, Iowa, 1883-1885, and taught sciences at Iowa City High School, 1885-1888. From 1888 until 1890, Shimek was an instructor in zoology at the University of Nebraska. From 1890 to 1932, he taught botany at SUI and served as the head of the Department of Botany, 1914-1919. In 1914, Shimek was an exchange professor at Charles University in Prague. Shimek was also Curator of the Herbarium, SUI, 1895-1937; President of the Iowa State Academy of Sciences, 1904-1905; a geologist for the Iowa State Geological Survey, 1908-1929; and Director of the Lakeside Laboratory, Lake Okoboji, Iowa. Shimek's interest in the natural sciences and geology covered many areas, but he was mostly known for his study of loess, loess fossils, and fossil malacology in Iowa and the prairie states. He was the author of the term, Nebraskan, which is used to describe the layer underneath the Aftonian interglacial deposits.