Father Louis Nicolas and the natural history of Wisconsin

Author / Creator

Edmonds, Michael, 1952- author

Available as

Online

Summary

Few people know that a seventeenth-century priest stationed on Lake Superior created the first book on Wisconsin's plants and wildlife. It's not only the first book about North America's flora and ...

Few people know that a seventeenth-century priest stationed on Lake Superior created the first book on Wisconsin's plants and wildlife. It's not only the first book about North America's flora and fauna; it also shows how strangely our ancestors thought about nature. Father Louis Nicolas was born in 1634 in the south of France and began training as a missionary at age twenty with the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), setting off in August 1667 for Mission Saint Esprit, on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay. But Nicolas was more interested in worldly matters than spiritual ones. He spent much of his time traveling around the western Great Lakes, sometimes for days at a time, to study wildlife and urge hunters to kill beaver for the French. Between 1678 and 1689, roughly, Nicolas described 335 North American plants and animals in a large notebook filling 196 pages, with a second notebook containing seventy-nine large-format pages with 180 pen-and-ink drawings. As an artist, Nicolas was certainly no Rembrandt or Audubon, but his sketches have a naïve energy that still pleases the eye. Many of his animals, such as the quizzical owls and smiling dolphin, wear vaguely human expressions. Despite his limited artistic ability, Nicolas included enough detail to define each species' characteristic features, and most are easily identifiable. Taken as a whole, the sketches include not only the earliest illustrations of Wisconsin wildlife and plants but also some of the most charming.

Show More