Charles Russell Orcutt

Charles Russell Orcutt or C.R. Orcutt (born 27 April 1864 in Hartland, Vermont; died in Haiti 25 August 1929) was a noted naturalist sometimes called "cactus man" because on many expeditions he found new species of cacti.^[1] He moved to San Diego in 1879. He worked with his father, collecting plant specimens in the San Diego area and Baja California. His travelled there with Charles Christopher Parry, Cyrus Pringle, and Marcus E. Jones, with whom he learned to properly catalog, collect, and preserve specimens. The genus Orcuttia and variants are named for him.^[2] In 1884 he began The West American Scientist, which he irregularly published until 1919. He began to be referred to as witty and as a hopeless eccentric. The year 1892 proved significant for him as his father died and he married a doctor from New York named Olive Lucy Eddy. She was the first woman to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree at the University of Michigan’s Homœopathic Medical College at Ann Arbor, 30 June 1882. Her medical practice did much to support them and with her sister Clara she published a magazine titled Out of Doors For Women. The couple had four children.^[3]

At first Orcutt collected primarily plant specimens, but his interest began to shift from botany to conchology (Eugene Coan identified Charles as a “pioneer malacologist”).^[4] He is credited with discovering at least three new Mollusca: Black abalone subspecies Haliotis cracherodii bonita and Haliotis cracherodii rosea, and Haliotis corrugata subspecies diegoensis. A new genus he found was named after him: Coralliochama orcutti.^[5] He went on expeditions, often alone, to El Sauzal, Punta Banda, and as far south as Misión San Fernando Rey de España de Velicatá. He shipped a huge collection of fossils he gathered in San Quintín Bay to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. His Baja trips continued through 1919. He also traveled in Texas, Arizona, Mexico and Central America. By 1922, Charles seldom returned home, spending time in Jamaica and Haiti.^[6] He maintained a residence in Jamaica in 1927 and in 1929 the Smithsonian Institution funded him for work in Haiti. After seven month of work there, he was exhausted and ill and stayed with an American embassy official in Jérémie until he was hospitalized. He died of malaria on the morning of 25 August 1929. He is buried in Port-au-Prince.

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