and i didn't. okay. good evening, everyone. hello. how high is everyone? good tonight. hi. my name is wendy wasserman and i'm the marketing director here at politics and prose. we are here to talk about eliza scidmore with diana parsell. i'm really excited about it. i'm curious how many people have gone to see the cherry blossoms? say over the past few days how many people got caught in that traffic? over the past few days? that was bananas, right? and as washingtonians, we all know that the cherry trees down at the at the bar, at the turtle bay, some are glorious. but the secret is they're better in the neighborhoods. right. so that's the secret. but thanks to eliza scidmore, we actually even have them.

so before we get to the meat of the evening, i just want to do some housekeeping. this is the time where i tell you to turn off your phones, but take pictures, do whatever you want, but nothing ringing or blaring or doing all those things. we have c-span here tonight. we're really happy about having them. we're also livestreaming on youtube, which is why we are at a microphone. i'm also some other housekeeping things, if you like what you hear tonight and and we know that you do. and we're so happy that you're here in the store as you know, we have events just about every night. so we have a little cheat sheet of a calendar here. so please come back. it is women's history month. even though it's towards the end of it, we still have some more juicy things coming up and a few other cute little housekeeping things. what's going to happen here? so i'm just going to introduce diana for a few minutes. she's going to talk she's a one woman show tonight, which is

kind of remarkable. all we usually have to discuss it, but she's brave enough to go out on her own. she's going to talk for a good 20, 30 minutes, tell you everything you need to know about this woman you didn't know anything about. but now you're going to be totally obsessed with that. would be me, the book. that's my feeling about the book. and then afterwards, there's going to be we're going to ask you if you have any questions as to do some q&a right here. there's a microphone behind this pillar. we do ask you to come up here and ask your questions through the mic for a couple reasons. first of all, so diana can hear them, that's really important. and also so there are captured on video with the audio. okay. any other housekeeping? oh, and the main most important thing is, you have to buy the book, right? like that's why we're all here. and after we do the q&a, diane is going to sign up. yeah, so that's pretty cool. and this is one of the few in-person and events that she's doing. so get it while you can.

and i have to say i'm very excited about the cherry blossoms. i even got my nails done to celebrate the cherry blossoms, which i never do. and for some reason, i was thinking that this year felt more cherry blossom me than previous years. and i don't know what it is, but i do know that 111 years ago today, this day, first lady nellie taft and the japanese ambassador at the time, and a small official delegation were in patel mc park with their shovels doing the digging and planting those cherry trees that we now see varieties have since. and that was the beginning of what became sort of the famous cherry tree grove and also on hand that day was the heroine of her book a eliza scidmore, which was the name on everyone's official washington. then. but for some reason we don't know her now. and that's what i'm really excited to hear about. she was everywhere during the gilded age. she was writing in alaska and

china and japan and europe. and when she would go thing places, things would happen. i call her zelig. you call her forrest gump, but she was also prolific beyond belief and she was actually publishing nearly every day in newspapers and magazines and she also helped found national geographic and lots of other things. i really don't understand how she did it all then, and i really don't understand why we don't know more about her now. so i'm really grateful to diana for writing this book. so diana herself is a former journalist who worked at a national geographic, which of course, is another title, eliza scidmore. and she was also at the national institutes of health and the american association for the advancement of science and the washington post. she lives here in town, and we are so happy to have her tonight. so janice and mike's all yours. thank you, wendy. now it's it it's really a

delight to be here. i mean, politics and prose is pretty special to any author, and we all know that. and so i felt quite honored to be invited to be here tonight. wendy stole my introduction a little bit because i wanted to start by telling you today is really a special day because it was exactly 111 years ago today that the first trees were planted out of a batch of 3000 trees that were down dated from japan. and i'm going to tell you that story a little bit, but i want to, again, kind of reiterate what she told you about eliza scidmore. this is the most amazing woman you've never heard of and why i if we have read so much about this, why you haven't read it, but i'd been living with her for almost ten years. why haven't we know more about

her? she was a critical figure in being the upbringing, the cherry trees to washington, and she had a remarkable career. apart from that. and then she essentially kind of disappeared for a century. so why has that happened and how did i discover her? well, it wasn't here in washington. i was working in indonesia about 15 years ago. and i bought a book, a reprint of an 1897 travelog called jaw the the garden of the east by someone named e r sid moore. and i read this book and i was very impressed at how it held up for a century. a lot of the things i read in that i had seen myself, the descriptions were very vivid, it was very informed and i found the voice quite engaging. and so i naturally wondered, who

was this guy and what took him to a job a hundred years ago? so i went to wikipedia and did a quick search and i was totally blown away. there were not many details about her, but it told me that the author was an american woman named eliza scidmore, or that she had written seven travel books, that she was the first person elected to the board of national geographic. in 1892, and then i read that she is widely credited as being the person who introduced the idea of bringing cherry trees to washington. and how had i never heard of this woman? i had lived here over 30 years. i went to see those trees every year and i had never heard the name eliza skidmore, so i was naturally curious. i was curious for one thing about her involved and in the

trees, what inspired her? how did that come about? but it was also her story as a woman that intrigued me. how in the world did a woman of her era manage to achieve all the things she did? so when i set out to find out more about her, it was personal curiosity i did not have in mind at the time writing a book. i didn't know if that would be enough to write a book. i had never written a book, but it was her story that i got deeper and deeper into. i was astonished at the amount of information i found now. at first it was very slow going. i went to the library of congress, didn't find a lot. she appeared in by a graphical index is about two dozen which told me she was a pretty important person in her day i found copies of her seven books. the original copies i found kind of a handful of her journalism, but there was nothing on her

personal life and there was no biography. so i started simply piecing clues together and following them, seeing where they would take me. and i spent a couple of years going down to the library, congress three days a week, and just digging. and for a while i didn't find a lot, but then i had a huge breakthrough. one day i don't know how it was a couple of years into the research when i discovered that she wrote her journalism under a pen name. so i had been doing these searches and they had eluded me because of the name. once i discovered that she wrote under her middle name rahama, which was her middle name and her paternal grandmother's name. it's a biblical name. once i started searching, i found a flood of material, and in the end i uncovered almost

800 newspaper and magazine articles eliza scidmore wrote in her lifetime. but the things that i that were two things in particular that really that i found quite surprising and the first one was her record as a journalist. she became a journalist at the age of 19. in 1876. think about that. 1876. and this was well before women started going, going to work for newspaper papers, like in the 1880s. that's when they began to be hired in significant numbers. but it was quite interesting to find that there was a very vibrant group of women correspondents in washington, dc during the gilded age. so after the civil war, the newspaper owners were trying to

attract more readers. and one of the things they were doing was to run more women's news. but they also wanted women correspondents because, of course, you know, from the gilded age that that was kind of extravagant in washington. there was a lot of entertaining. and you had all these millionaire politicians that were trying to outdo one another. so the entertaining was lavish and they felt the editors felt we need women that can describe the cut of a bulk down and who knew all these intricate social protocols of entertaining in washington. so there were a couple of dozen women in washington writing for newspapers around the country. and we're not talking just boston or philadelphia or new york. they were from sacramento and albany and syracuse. so a couple dozen of them, and they were some were actually credentialed to the press galleries on the capitol hill.

well, this was stunning to me, because i'd never heard any of this. and it was a credible story of washington history that we've really not heard much about. well, the interesting thing about eliza was she got a job then working as a society columnist for a newspaper in st louis. she wrote for them for about ten years, but she did something a little different because the society season ranged from. around december 1st when congress started meeting until lent. that's when the whole social season occurred. but come summer, everybody left town. the people with money went off to their homes and their country homes and their resorts. so what allies did was she started traveling, she crisscrossed the country several times. she would report on destinations that most americans of course,

would never see in their lifetime time. so by doing this, combining society reporting and travel writing, she ended up making more money than some men in washington. so she was you know, it's an indication of her enterprise and just her hard work ethic. so in one of these trips that she took, she loved california. she went there several times. she went to alaska. in 1883. now, alaska had only been part of the united states for 16 years. people in america knew nothing about alaska. eliza wasn't speier by john muir. he had he had an interest in glaciers. and so in 1879 and 1880, he made two trips to alaska to study glaciers as he traveled around the area in a canoe with the

assistance of, you know, half a dozen native americans, native alaskans. and so eliza read about his travels. and so she decides she's going to alaska. so she goes off to alaska on a mail steamer that was the only way to get to alaska in those days was to take a mail steamer and to go up the thousand mile passage that takes you from puget sound all the way up to the alaska panhandle. so she did that and that journey turned out to be historic because her captain of her ship decided to take a detour. and that detour was up into glacier bay, a ship had never carried tourists up into glacier bay before. so she was one of the first people ever to set sight of muir

glacier or oh, it was later named for john muir. i mean, other than him. so the point was she went back the following summer and repeated that trip and then she turned her dispatches. into the first travelog on alaska. so that book was in 1885, and she went on to write about alaska for about 15 years. she wrote a second even more, comprehend two book. so together she was with these books she and mew, or were the people that really promoted tourism to alaska for the first time in the late 1890s? so this is part of her legacy and it's a pretty big one. okay, so now we get to the next milestone in her story. she goes to alaska. i'm sorry, she goes to japan for the first time. and that happens in 1885. the same year that her alaska book came out.

so why japan? well, she had a brother who was in the consular service. he spent most of his 39 year career in asia and most of that time in japan. so in the summer of 1885, eliza and her mother went off to visit george in japan, and it became life changing for both of them. so mrs. skidmore decides to live in japan with her son and so what this does is it gives eliza a part time home in japan. she started writing about japan. she wrote a very influential book on japan that was published in 1891, and she became recognized in america as an authority on japan, a country that people in america knew almost nothing about at the time. besides having this part time home in japan, she had a base

for traveling around larger asia, so she ended up writing books on java, japan, china, india. she wrote for many major magazines of the day, and so she just had an extraordinary record. and i one of the fun things in the book is to find some of these episodes where she suddenly turns up like in the philippines after the spanish american war in 1899 and the day she arrives, there was an insurrection. and it's like, you know, this can't be true because i keep reading these things and this is why i have compared her to a forrest gump of her day that she rubbed elbows with lots of famous people and she was, i witness to many historic events. so she became an expert on japan. and of course, that is where she

got the idea for the cherry trees. a couple of other things about her. she became, as i've already mentioned, the first woman elected to the board of national geographic. the geographic had been founded in 1888. she joined, i think, in around 1890. and they were so impressed by her reporting, her pioneering reporting on alaska that they elected her the secretary of the society, which made her the first woman ever to serve on the board. she took up photography about this time in her life. kodak had just invented the into the box camera in 1888. so the first evidence i found was her in 1890 on a trip to alaska, taking photographs of john muir at his cabin that he built in muir glacier.

not only did she photograph muir, she developed a friendship with him and his wife. she even went for a month and stayed in his cab and with a group of friends. so this woman, she she didn't waste any opportunities. so anyway, she went on then to write for the geographic. she wrote about a dozen articles and she contributed many photographs over the years. some of some of them were hers. others were a photograph that she collected in her travels. but she was the most important figure, the most important female figure in the early history of national geographic. she became an activist in the early conservation movement. and this grew out of her relationship with john muir. he was emerged at this time as the figurehead of the us conservation movement and allies, was right in there writing about it. she wrote a couple of very

influential articles on wilderness preservation. she was an activist in helping to have mt. rainier turned into a national park. finally, this is one of the other things that shocked me in my discovery of her is that i realized, or i came to find out that a number of scholars credit her as one of a handful full of western traveler writers authors who opened try to mass tourism at the end of the 19th century. so i knew she wrote a book on china and i thought, oh, i could kind of, you know, wrap that up in a page and a half. but as i started finding these letters that she's writing to her editor, it was amazing because she went to china probably a dozen times and she had her finger on the pulse of all kinds of turmoil that was

happening, happening in china at the time. and so she wrote her book on china, and it was published the summer of 1900. at the same time, the boxer rebellion was happening in packing. so this was a woman who was just so on top of things. so so the the part about china ended up having to be a whole chapter because there was just so much there. so she astounded me as, as i think you can tell. and it ended up taking me ten years to write her story and part of that was the constant discovery and i know that this book is only the beginning of her story. it's very heavily footnote i did because i felt an obligation to document my sources because other scholars and researchers can now take those sources and

take the story further. there are lots of questions, of course, that i can't answer about her and the one that always comes up. did she have any romantic relationship? so and i can't answer that. i don't. i suspect not. i think she was a spinster her. but i look forward to maybe somebody coming up with some more enlightening answers to that question. so her involvement in the cherry trees, how did that come about? a lot of people were involved in that and the story has really gotten kind of muddied over the years because it's a complicated story. there were many people involved. it happened over many years. that were more than one batch of trees, as you may have heard. if you know anything about the history so it's all been kind of confusing over the years. so part of what i was trying to

do in the book was to sort out those events to the best i could based on the available evidence to find out the origin of the cherry trees. and one of the interesting things i discovered is that eliza scidmore journalistic career was very heavy, influential in shaping her vision of the trees as we know them today. i've already told you she went to japan in 1885 for the first time, so it was some time in the 1880s that she got this idea that washington should have some cherry trees. she loved them. she called them the most beautiful thing in the world. and she said, why don't we have these in american cities and parks we need to introduce americans to these trees. and what better place than in the nation's capital, which had this growing tourism? but there was an interesting that happened when i was

researching the book and i was reading about her career as a correspondent. and i came upon one of her columns and it was published in november 1883, and this was before she'd ever gone to japan. so she describes for these readers and st louis for the paper she's writing for how she went off to the national mall to report on this new project that the army corps of engineers had just started to turn this swampy area down by the washington monument into a public park. it was a big wasteland. the potomac river would come almost up to the base of the washington monument. people complained about it for years. it was nasty. it was smelly. so they finally said, we are going to fill in this land and create a public park. she goes down to the national mall on this day in november.

1883. she rides to the top of the washington monument, which is still under construction, and she has to ride the platform elevator, which the workmen use to carry the materials to the top. and it was this platform elevator that had a cage, an open sided cage, which had pulleys that would swing out and and drop these stones into place. so she she rides this to the top and describes guides that she gets to the top. and then later she she looks down and she sees this area. that is just the beginning of potomac park. and she said in her column, one day, this is going to be the largest and most beautiful park in the city, a place of magnificent use in future administration says. so this tells us that by the

time she went to japan a few years later, she already had in the back of her mind an idea of a place in washington that would be perfect for a park, cherry trees, so that forced me to kind of rewrite the whole structure of my book because i thought, oh, i can, you know, the last third of the book will be about the cherry trees. but suddenly this pushes that story because then we begin to see the evolution of her vision. so she came back to washington and she goes to the to the men that are in charge of the parks, the city's parks, the army corps of engineers. and she suggests that you should plant cherry trees along the potomac. and they listen to her. they heard her out and then they ignored her. these were army corps of engineers, air officials. they had been trained at west point. they were very convention know in their ideas of what the

landscaping should be for a public park and it didn't include cherry trees. these were exotic, you know. so eliza kept at it and she tried probably at least three times over the years, over a period of 20 years. finally, the break came in 1909, when mrs. taft came to the white house. so helen taft and william howard taft were very interested in the development of potomac park. by this point, the land had been filled in and they're starting to develop the park. they were quite advocate cuts of this project because they both believed in the idea of having a large, beautiful park for public recreation. so, mrs. taft, who had been trained as a musician, decided she was going to build a bandstand down along the river and that it would be a place for public concerts and that it with people from all walks of life around the city, could come

there and enjoy the music. well, this sounded a whole lot like what i had already been proposing in terms of creating a cherry tree park along the river. so once she heard about mrs. taft's plans, she sent her a note seeking her encouragement to include cherry trees. and helen taft, who had actually lived in japan for a while. she had a great appreciation of japanese culture, jumped on the idea so suddenly these two women are partners in this project. so it was very exciting for me to find some documents in my research that i hadn't seen published anywhere else that told me eliza scidmore was the intermediary between mrs. taft and the japanese, who eventually offered to donate several thousand trees to the project. so there were letters that

showed where eliza's writing to the the japanese consul in new york city and saying, i just came from a meeting at the white house with mrs. taft, and she would love to accept your offer of these trees. so, of course, if you know the story at all, you know that the first batch of trees came, they were found to be infested. 2000 trees and they ended up destroying the entire batch. they were burned on the grounds of the light of the washington monument, where the usda had had storehouses. but the japanese were gracious. they came back and they said, we will send a replacement batch, which they did groan under pristine conditions. so that took another year and a half or two years. so finally in the spring of 1912, this replacement batch of trees arrived in washington and

as wendy has already told you, march 27th, the 111 years ago today, helen taft organized a little dedication ceremony for the planting of the first of those trees. mrs. taft invited the japanese ambassador and his wife and eliza scidmore, so she was in her fifties when she finally saw the realization of this dream that she had had at that time for almost 30 years. so i'm going to stop there. i think that's kind of giving you the basics. and we certainly want to have time for questions. so i'm not going to actually do a reading from the book, but i hope you enjoy the book. she was an amazing person and it's what enabled me to live with her for ten years was this constant process of discovery to keep finding out these things about her. and i can't wait till i learn

more once people now have the beginnings of of the records and the documents that will lead us into even greater knowledge about her. so thank you. and i thank you so much for that talk. i'm curious with, uh, her history as a foreign correspondent in china and indonesia and all these other places, i know at the time there was a lot of the imperialist attitude. yes. from the west towards these places. so i was wondering to what extent did she buy into those or push back against those or engage with both? she was quite a humanitarian in her outlook, and i do see that

in a lot of her writings that she. but she also was a product of her day. so she she did also at times have the same imperial ascetic attitudes that that the west was superior. and so i do kind of address that a bit in the book that that she uses some language that we kind of find appalling today. she expresses some attitude that are that, you know, would be considered racist, but at the same time, there are situations where you can see that she was very much humanitarian and. as an example, she early in her career, there was a lot of criticism of the chinese laborers on the west coast, and she was appalled by that. you know, she said these are hardworking people and on and on

and on. but then she went to china and she was really appalled at the conditions in china. so i think the distinction one of the big distinctions is that she was quite a egalitarian when it came to individuals, but i think she in many cases was really appalled by the institutional, you know, the institutions, for example, in china that were holding the people back. and this kind of thing. so she was a great believer in human advancement and so she kind of had these dual attitudes based on the situation. and so it's not a clear cut. it's not a clear cut attitude. it's it's nuanced. thank you. yeah. look, concerning that first shipment of trees. yes. do you have any correspond or like editorials written by her

and in fact, how that went over on both sides? i don't have so much from her, but i did read all the correspondence with the state department on both sides, the japanese and the americans and the u.s. department of agriculture, which is the one that inspected the trees. they said, oh, these have to be destroyed. they are going to be a threat to u.s. agriculture and so it went back and forth. and in the end, the the japanese were very gracious and they said, we understand the need to do this. and so, you know, we wouldn't have wanted to to create any problems. so we know it's difficult, but but but we appreciate the situation. so it was. thank you. yeah. diana, it's great to be a part of this culmination of more than a decade of work and, you know, both members of the library of congress, women's history roundtable and people talking about women who need to be discovered and to the extent to

which you're comfortable, i know that when you first explored this topic, it was sort of pitched to the 100th anniversary and, you know, as you dug in, you obviously found a lot, many more things interesting about this woman. and to the extent to which you're comfortable commenting on your research, you know, process and the years of trying to get this book published, i think people might be interested. yeah, the thing was, sarah and i are in a we were in a women's history discussion group at the library of congress and so when i went there and i started researching more, it was like, why are there no records? why are these records so scarce? and these women who were, you know, experienced in women's studies said for throughout history, women's lives were thought not worthy of being documented and they said a lot of women's history turns up in the papers.

some of the men in their lives that it will be filed away in a file folder that says other material and this happened in my case. i ended up finding records about her at about two dozen different institutions and so a lot of them had been overlooked. some of the journalism had been overlooked because the research methods changed over the years. we have a lot more digitized people. thank you. can find it all on the internet and that is so wrong. but what the internet can do is can give you an index to collections here or there and you can use these a search techniques to begin to find records. her newspaper records she had written for this newspaper 100 years ago, that was newspaper records existed, but they were coming up in my search until i found them in databases at the library of congress. so it was a it was a collection of techniques. but i understand that this is a huge, huge

problem in researching women's lives. diana, congratulations on day. thank you. greg, your book one question i have is david fairchild. yes. we talked about how he fits into the cherry tree journey. yes. david fairchild held and i kind of was going to put him in my top at it. and he always comes up because david fairchild was a botanist at the u.s. department of agriculture. he made his name by becoming a plant explorer. so what this meant was that he would travel around the world looking for new and non-native variety and species of plants that could be imported to the united states in order to expand the agricultural crop and the horticultural crops. so, david fairchild and he he knew eliza, by the way, he had gone to java about a year or so

after she did, and she wrote her book about that time in 1897. he admired her as a person, very knowledge, rebel on plants and. he even at his office, arranged to have her appointed an official collaborator here in the collection of plant specimens from china and japan. and as he wrote in the letter that i saw to his boss, he said, no body knows more people in china and japan than miss skidmore. but he and one of his trips. around 1902 or so independently discovered japanese cherry trees, and he was quite taken with them as well. so he began studying them. he brought them to his home in chevy chase. he had a hundred or so imported to study them and to see how they would do here in the washington area. so eliza and the fairchild

childs, he and his wife, they became allies and they he organized a publicity campaign in 1908, i believe it was, to try to bring the cherry trees to washington. and they both kind of pursued this idea at the same time. and it's an interesting part of the book. i found evidence that they wrote to mrs. to our allies and wrote to mrs. taft at the same time. david, david fairchild was sending a letter to the army corps of engineers, park officials. and i found out that his letter sat on the desk for two weeks. and in the meantime, mrs. taft jumps into this project and runs with it. so it was interesting there, and i'm saying in the book, i don't know if they were acting in concert or whether they were acting in competition that is an open ended question.

and that's how i had to leave it in the book. but this is the david fairchild situation and it seems from the chorus, it seems from the records over the years there might have been a little bit of bad blood over the years because neither one of them referred much to the other's contribution. so speculating there. but that's kind of my take on it. i want to say congratulations and thank you. you, on behalf of those of us who come from the tourism industry, i can't even tell you how exciting it is to have a book about eliza. some of us do know about her and we talk about her as as we can, but wow, this is so great. so thank you. thank you. thank you. and i'm just curious curious if you as the traveler that she was there's a lot of comment about her trips to asia. did you find any evidence of her traveling to places like latin america or africa? no, i did not. i did not. she went to europe a good bit always. and i didn't mention that she

became quite an art collector, a collector of asian art, and she ended up having a collection of around 250 pieces in. some of them were pretty valuable oil and they were sold at auction late in life. she went to europe a number of times and early in her career especially, i have evidence that she went to europe several times and then later in her life she went to europe. she it turns out, was a ninth generation american. her ancestors in england date back to cid, the scudamore hours date back to the 11th century. and there was a manor house in england that is still it's no longer in the family, but it was until not too long ago. there's a picture of it that i was so excited to find that i included in the book so late in life. she she went back to england after the war. she actually did a little bit of reporting for she from several

wars but not not as a war chorus fondant but as an observer to war. the russo-japanese war the sino-japanese war. she was in washington during the civil war, the spanish-american war. she's in the philippines and then world war one, she was still reporting during world war one. and she did a lot of reporting on the red cross and their relief efforts in in europe. so she goes to europe late in life and she actually moves to europe late in life. part of this came there was a an act that was passed in 1924 that excluded the japanese from being allowed citizenry in the united states. this exclusion act. and she was appalled by that that. she was considered by then quite a friend of japan and the emperor of japan actually gave her a medal, the highest

civilian medal for her for favorable reporting on the and because she was considered a friend of japan. so she went to europe and she moved to geneva, switzerland. she became a fan of the league of nations, and she died in europe in 1928. and then her ashes were carried to yokohama, where her mother and her brother were buried. so this is part of the reason she's disappeared. yeah, yeah. she just kind of disappeared. and you would? and i did come across things would say, oh, she was the one who introduced the idea. but then it kind of got and then her her whole history really kind of got overlooked for a century. other questions. all right. it's okay. it seems so unusual during that

time frame for there to be a single woman traveling. did did you encounter any evidence of resistance to that? no, i didn't find any evidence of resistance. she talks in her travels. she will mention my friends and i or whatever. she never identifies who she's traveling with. there are times when it's clear that she's probably traveling with her mother at other times she's traveling with friends. there is there were episodes later in her life when it was clear she was traveling on her own with a a local native. and that was one where she got so annoyed with him, she sent him home, i think it was at one of her trips to china because she found him so annoying that she just, you know, but she would hire interpreters and she would hire people to accompany her. so i think it was little bit of both that it was unusual for women to travel as younger

women. but later in her life, she you know, she was a very established, authoritative person. and i think it was it was less unusual. but she did have help wherever she traveled. you know, i can't tell you that she spoke the japanese language. she she had assistants. and, of course, her brother being in japan meant she had access to these diplomatic privileges. so if she's collecting art, she can ship at home a lot cheaper than you or i could have at that time. so this kind of helps explain some of the situations that enabled her to travel places that a lot of people in japan would not have gone to. i chuckled when you said that they made her secretary of the national geographic board. the traditional role for a woman. did you come across any tension or or, you know, in terms of her her role with, you know, the

leadership of the job? i didn't. and, yes, we can say it's because she was a woman, but she was a good writer. i mean, what better person to elect as a secretary of your organization? she was also quite a go getter and she was quite a defender. there were there was an incident in the book where it it has to do with when the national geographic sends an expedition on their very first expedition to to alaska. so she gets of this and she these guys come back from this expedition, up this mountain, and they're trying to ascertain whether it's the highest peak in north america or whatever. and and they come back and they're going back to washington that fall to report their findings. well, one of the guys in this group, and he was one of the people on the expedition, he kind of blows the cover because instead of waiting to report those events, she, he he he

starts blabbing to the press in california. and it's all over the newspapers about this young typographer who was getting all the credit instead, the scientist who led the expedition. she was furious about this. and she's writing in her column, you know, there should be respect among science, civic organizations as much as there are between people. and so she's kind of nailing this guy in her column. so here she is defending it. and they the guy, the scientist who's on her, she was defending. so she calls up her friends at ap and says hey, you need to interview this scientist. and they did. and on a call and comes out a column and a half in newspapers around the country giving credit to the actual scientists who led the expedition. so people in georgia, she's this great defender of the geographic and she became you know, so it's clear to them this is a woman who gets things done.

and when you think about an organization like that, that depends on volunteers. she was the right person at the right time. so she she a very important person in the geographic over the years. i can't even tell you. can you expound a little bit on her involvement with the national geographic ic and the photography department, and wasn't she also involved in the creation of the yellow logo? no, i haven't heard that she when she was so she starts, you know, she has this relationship with the national geographic for over about 20 years, 25 years, i guess. but she doesn't really start writing for the she did write a few things about alaska for them before the turn of the century, but her most of her work with the geographic came after the early 1900s. and one of the reasons for that is that they got a new editor

and he changed the format. in 1905. you saw this because up until then, the national geographic was a pretty scientific journal. it could really boring these people that were putting it out were scientists, they were geologists and they were writing these really boring articles. so in so alexander graham bell became the second president. he said, we have got to change this magazine. if we are going to attract people to become members of the geographic, we've got to do something about this lousy magazine. and he believed in pictures and he said, we've got to have pictures. pictures will make people a readers excited. so his son in law becomes the editor of the geographic and he introduces in 1905, kind of by the pictorial format. he finds that he's got this issue coming out and it's got 11 blank pages and he says, oh, what am i going to do? well, he had this package of photographs that had come across his desk that were these four

photographs from tibet. he runs 11 photographs on tibet, each one a full page. this is just never been done before. and people were so excited that the magazine just took off overnight and the membership just soared overnight. so now this guy, grosvenor, gilbert grosvenor, has struck this formula that is going to be the format of the national geographic for the next century and so he needs photographs. he's got to fill these pages. so he has allies. she's traveling in japan and china and korea, and he's got her out there looking for photographs. so she took a lot of photographs for the magazine. but what i found, her legacy, is that she acquired photographs. she would get them from all kinds of different sources and she'd say, here's a packet of 15. and he'd say, oh, love them, i

want more. and then, you know, she'd say, here's a packet of 90. and she was having some of these colored hand-colored. and so this is the period when the national geographic for the first time started running color photography. and she said, you got to start running them in color. you know, you're wasting this opportunity and it took a while because of the technology and the cost, but they did they so she was really right in there working closely with him and that that really is her legacy with the magazine. there's a lot of history in this book. there's so many stories and i ended up having like 20 chapters that it's like, well, i you know, i'm not going to go i'm not going to cover that or i'm just going to cover that in passing. and i would get into it. and her correspondence had ended up there were a couple where she had i found letters that the geographic but the real valuable

records were about 160 letters that she wrote to her editor in new york city at the century magazine. and she became a writer for the century magazine. it was considered the top magazine of its day, the think magazine that everybody read from presidents on down. so so she was one of their leading writers. and that's where she published a lot of her work and her letters to her editor that i found at the new york public library. oh, my god. they were fun to read because she's opinionated. she's telling, you know, where she's going and they're gossipy. so they were a lot of fun and they were a really important source in this book. hi. she looks rather formidable on her cover picture. did she have a sense of humor and what would she definitely have to do or what? what kind of personality? she definitely had a sense of humor and she was precocious from childhood. she actually grew up here in washington. she came to washington and as a

child, she'd been born in iowa, spent her early years in wisconsin, some wonderful gossip up in the book where her mom's story up being quite interesting. mom had three marriages and two of them were failed marriages, including a divorce in 1848. and when i found the evidence of this divorce, it was just so like amazing because i knew there was something questionable about this middle marriage. well, then the third marriage is the marriage to eliza's father. so when that fell through in the middle of the civil war, mom comes to d.c. eliza, grows up here. so she is raised by her single mother, she and her brother here in d.c., mom ran a boarding house, i think, and she got a job at the u.s. treasury. so eliza went to georgetown visitation for a couple of years and then she went to oberlin. but for a while she didn't graduate. but the thing her was she was so

precocious that when she went to georgetown visitation, i found the academic records on her and she was only there like i could only find records for couple of years. she she might have gone there longer the first year she went, there were records to show that got high marks. she got prizes for reading and spelling and geography. she told an interviewer late life that as a child she loved playing with maps and a globe. i was always planning journey, she said. so this was something that interest her. this idea of the world from a very young age. but she later, you can see in many of these letters that i referred to that she is witty and she had a tendency to dramatize things and to exaggerate things. but i think she must have been a whole lot of fun to hang out with because she seemed to just have friends everywhere. she went to dinner.

she had such yes, yes. and that was the thing about her is that she had friends in high places and yet she would be off traveling under what we would consider extraordinarily primitive, almost conditions. so she had this ability to to ease her way between different worlds. but she seems to have been a very likable person and a very there was a very moving letter after her death where her friends are saying, i can't believe that we have lost this wonderful son, a optimistic person. and so you you kind of see that comments like that in some in some various correspondence that tell you that how my tired and well-liked she was, how she was probably a pain in the -- a lot of the times because she was a very strong woman. but she also i think it was a very likable person.

yeah. yeah. so i was curious as well when she was persuading the army guys to try and add the territories to the tidal basin. there must have been a lot of botanical concerns there about, you know, could these trees survive in the d.c. climate? and so i'm wondering, like, where did she get her knowledge on botany from and sort of how did she she she traveled quite a lot in japan, and she wrote a good bit about botany, a different botanical topics there were she wrote about japanese gardens. she she wrote a very definite of article in the century magazine about cherry trees, where when they became clear that washington was going to get cherry trees, she wrote, probably the most important article that had been published at that point, because americans knew nothing about cherry trees.

and this was full of history about the cherry trees and and about how about what talented gardeners, as the japanese were and how she called the wizards necromancers, that they were wizards who could take something in nature and transform it and the cherry trees were an example. but she just she picked up her knowledge over the years. but the fact that david fairchild was even impressed with her knowledge of plants is an indication it was research. you know, she's just somebody who was curious and she found out things which which became quite clear. and in whatever she wrote, she studied it to she took up this interest in japanese morning glories and she ended up writing she starts growing them at their house in japan and she ends writing a 35 page scientific paper that she delivered to the japan society in london and then

had this published in it's in its journal. so just goes to show she was like a dog, you know, she, she chew on this bow and, and keep at something which tells us about her persistence in not quitting that idea on the cherry trees. yeah. thank you. thank you all. thank you all for