Edward William Nelson was an American naturalist. He was one of the pioneer group of American naturalists to whose lot it fell to work in many and widely scattered parts of North America at a time when, biologically at least, those areas were practically unknown territory.
Background
Edward William Nelson was born on May 8, 1855 in Amoskeag, Manchester, New Hampshire, United States. He was the eldest of the two sons of William and Nancy Martha (Wells) Nelson. When he was still a small boy the family moved to Manchester. At the outbreak of the Civil War his father enlisted and his mother entered a Baltimore hospital as a nurse, the two sons being sent to live with the mother's parents on a farm in Franklin County, New York. His father was killed toward the close of the war, and the mother took the boys to Chicago, where she opened a small dressmaking shop, a venture which proved successful.
Education
Edward received his early education in a local school. In 1872 he entered the Cook County Normal School, from which he graduated in 1875. He entered Northwestern University but left before the first term was over to accept a teaching position at Dalton, Illinois. Nelson entered Johns Hopkins University in the autumn of 1876 for a special course in biology. In 1920, Yale University conferred on him the honorary degree of master of arts, and George Washington University doctor of science degree.
Career
Nelson had always been keenly interested in outdoor life, and in the summer of 1872, to aid recovery from an attack of blood poisoning contracted in skinning birds, he joined Edward D. Cope and Samuel Garman on a field trip to Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. The collections which he made on this trip were purchased by the Chicago school he had attended.
To secure greater opportunities to pursue the career of a naturalist he went to Washington to see Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. No position being open to him at the time.
Early the next spring he accepted a chance to do field work in Alaska.
His field work, which covered more than twenty years, extended from arctic Alaska to every province and state of Mexico.
In the spring of 1877 he embarked on his first great expedition, to arctic Alaska, where he remained for a number of years and amassed enormous quantities of material and information on the biology and ethnology of that great area. His published reports on this work became classics in their respective fields. The two main reports deal with the birds and the Eskimos of Alaska, respectively, and may be found in Report upon Natural History Collections Made in Alaska between the Years 1877 and 1881 (1887).
On his return to Washington, Nelson contracted tuberculosis and was invalided to the dry climate of Arizona, where he gradually recovered and subsequently made collections in various parts of the Southwest.
At the beginning of 1892 he was instructed to proceed to Mexico for a trip of about three months under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture. Upon his return to Washington his time became taken up with administrative duties, and the reports on the great Mexican collections did not progress as otherwise they would have.
Although he was the author of many papers describing new genera, species, and subspecies of animals, often in collaboration with his colleague, E. A. Goldman, his complete reports were never finished.
After his retirement in 1927, he worked on his Mexican collection until his death from a heart ailment.
