Josiah Gregg was a merchant, explorer, naturalist, and author. He collected many previously undescribed plants on his merchant trips and during the Mexican - American War after which he went to California.
Background
Josiah Gregg was born on July 19, 1806 in Overton County, Tennessee. His parents were Harmon and Susannah (Schmelzer) Gregg, and he was a descendant of William Gregg, an Ulster Quaker who settled in Pennsylvania about 1682. In 1812, after three years in Illinois, the family moved to the region about Fort Cooper, on the Missouri, where two brothers of Harmon had also settled, and in 1825 moved further west to the neighborhood of Independence.
Education
Josiah had a fairly liberal education; he knew enough Spanish to enable him to read understandingly the archives of the Southwest, and he somehow acquired a knowledge of medicine and surgery that caused him to be dubbed a doctor, though he never engaged in practise.
Career
Ill health prompted him to seek the remoter frontier, and on May 15, 1831, he set out with a caravan from Independence for Santa Fe. His health returned, and he became a trader. During a period of more than nine years he made frequent journeys to Santa Fe, occasionally going on to Chihuahua.
In the winter of 1843-44 he finished the manuscript of a book on the Southwestern trade, and in the following spring, with a letter of introduction to John Bigelow, he journeyed to New York.
Through the influence of Bigelow, who became his close friend and to some extent retouched his manuscript, a publisher was soon found, and the book, under the title Commerce of the Prairies, was published in two volumes that summer. It had an immediate success. A second edition was published in the following year, a fourth in 1850, and a sixth, under a slightly different title, in 1857, as well as three editions in German in the years 1845-47. In the spring of 1846 he rode 1, 200 miles on horseback to join Gen. Wool’s army at San Antonio. To Bigelow he wrote that he had some sort of official appointment - “call it govt ag’t, interpreter or what you please”. After some months of service in Mexico he returned with Doniphan’s army, but was again in Mexico in the spring of 1848.
In 1849 he made his last journey to Santa Fe. From there he went to California, reaching the Trinity mines, in the northern part of the state, in the fall. He commanded an exploring party of seven men, which left the mines in November and after terrible suffering crossed the Coast Range to the Pacific. On the march in an effort to return with some of his men to the settlements, Gregg, worn out from hunger and exposure, fell from his horse and in a few hours expired.
Personality
He was a close and scientific observer and an avid reader, making copious notes of everything that interested him.
He was a man widely known and greatly esteemed for his many admirable qualities, and he seems to have had no enemies.