Individual

Go to List of Family Names Go to List of People    < Previous Next >

Birth:          27 Feb 1877 Okla.
Death:          1939 

Notes
1900 in Pasadena, Cal.
awt Tallman
1910 in Oakland Twp., Alameda Co., Cal. museum director
1920 in Berkeley, Alameda Co., Cal. university professor

From http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Grinnell/Grinnell.html
Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939) was Professor in Zoology and the first Director of the 
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley. He was one of the great naturalists of 
his time. His main area of study was that of the formation of species in nature. 
Most of his work was in western North America, particularly in California, where he led 
many extensive expeditions. He was also a visionary, who could see that the rich and 
unique vertebrate fauna of California was under siege from increasing impacts of 
human population growth and unsustainable land use practices.  His response was to 
amass an extraordinarily detailed record of the distribution and natural history of birds, 
mammals, reptiles and amphibians, backed by specimens, field notes and photographs. 
 

Much of the value of this work, he said, lied in the fact that "after the lapse of many 
years, possibly a century, the student of the future will have access to the original 
record of faunal conditions in California”.  
This project commemorates and builds on the groundbreaking work of Joseph Grinnell 
as we approach the celebration of the Centennial of the Museum of Vertebrate 
Zoology (in 2008). 
 
From http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/mvz/history/Grinnell.html:

Joseph Grinnell was a biology teacher at Throop Institute in Pasadena, California (now 
Cal Tech) when Annie M. Alexander met him for the first. In Grinnell, Alexander sensed 
that she had found a field biologist who shared her vision, 

"...someone interested not only in bringing a collection together but with the larger 
object in view, namely gathering data in connection with the work that would have 
direct bearing upon the important biological issues of the day." 
Alexander's desire to create a museum of vertebrate zoology dedicated to the pursuit 
of "pure science", coincided with Grinnell's ambition to establish a systematic 
research center on the West Coast that would correspond in importance to the major 
natural history museums of the day. Known for his keen powers of observation in the 
field, Grinnell felt that an in depth understanding of the vertebrate communities of 
California would lead eventually to an understanding of the biology of its organisms, 
the environment, and of evolution. His theory of the "ecological niche", published in 
1924, has proved to be one of the organizing principles of nature. 

Grinnell was instrumental in shaping the philosophy of the National Park System and 
his commitment to wildlife protection and conservation was borne out most visibly 
through his research in Yosemite National Park during the first two decades of this 
century. Joseph Dixon and Harold Bryant both perpetuated Grinnell's philosophy when 
they went to work for that organization. 

Grinnell served the the MVZ's Director from 1908 until his death in 1939. His 
intellectual achievements and his skill as an editor, coupled with his organizational 
and leadership capabilities, all contributed to the Museum's rapid growth and success. 
But perhaps his greatest contribution to evolutionary biology is his academic lineage, 
the graduate students that he trained and their academic progeny, who have 
continued to shape the development of vertebrate systematic, ecological and 
evolutionary studies in North America and around the world to the present day.

From http://alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200605/yosemite6.asp

It began, his wife Hilda believed, on the Great Plains. Grinnell was born February 27, 
1877, in Indian Territory, on the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Indian Agency in 
Oklahoma. His father, Fordyce Grinnell, was the agency physician. By 1880, Fordyce 
Grinnell was in the Dakotas tending the health of the Oglala Sioux of Chief Red Cloud, 
and little Joe Grinnell was growing up among Sioux playmates. “Undoubtedly his 
senses were quickened by association with these alert comrades,” Hilda Grinnell wrote 
of her husband. “The well-trained ear and quick eye which in later years made the fine 
field naturalist received in the Dakotas their first conscious training.” 

Patton believes that this early Sioux period did not just hone Grinnell’s senses; it 
shaped him conceptually as well. “He spent his boyhood out with Indian boys, learning 
about nature through their eyes,” Patton says. “The Indians had, of course, a totally 
different view of the world, a different framework than a typical Western man.” 

Little Joe Grinnell, at five years old, was a favorite of Red Cloud himself. Red Cloud, 
Makhpiya-Luta, the son of a Brulé father and an Oglala mother, was the greatest of 
Sioux chiefs. He had spent much of his young manhood at war with the Pawnees, 
Crows, Utes, Shoshones, and with other Oglalas. When still very young, he became 
the preeminent warrior of the Bad Faces Clan, with a reputation for ruthlessness. In 
the mid-1860s, 15 years before he met young Joe Grinnell, Red Cloud orchestrated the 
most successful war against white men ever conducted by an aboriginal American. In 
one battle, during his siege of Fort Phil Kearny, Red Cloud wiped out the entire 
command of a precursor to Custer, the hotheaded Captain William Fetterman. A relief 
detachment from Fort Phil Kearney found Fetterman and 49 of his soldiers dead and 32 
others missing. When news of the slaughter reached the fort, the commander, Colonel 
Carrington, ordered all the women and children into the powder magazine, posted an 
officer there with instructions to blow the place up should the Indians breach the 
defenses, then set out to find the missing 32. He succeeded, unhappily, discovering 
them all dead, scalped, and stripped naked. 

On the slopes of Mount Lyell, far from the smog of her native megalopolis, remote from 
the light pollution of the nearest town, at an elevation she had earned the old-
fashioned way, by foot, Hanna Shohfi gazed up through the thin, dry air and 
contemplated the unfiltered glitter of a hundred billion stars. Chow was startled as she 
swore a sudden, fierce oath. 

“How is my little friend Joe?” Red Cloud dictated, 20 years later, in his letters to the 
Grinnells, who by the early 1880s had left the Dakotas for Pasadena, California. 

Given the chief’s fondness for this one small white boy, it seems a bit alarmist, in 
retrospect, that Colonel Carrington should have ordered all the women and children 
into the powder magazine. 

But then again, perhaps not. “My sun is set. My day is done. Darkness is stealing over 
me,” Red Cloud announced in 1903, in a farewell address to the Lakota people. 
“Before I lie down to rise no more, I will speak to my people. Hear me, my friends, for it 
is not the time for me to tell you a lie. The Great Spirit made us, the Indians, and gave 
us this land we live in. He gave us the buffalo, the antelope, and the deer for food 
and clothing. We moved our hunting grounds from the Minnesota to the Platte and 
from the Mississippi to the great mountains. No one put bounds on us. We were free 
as the winds.” 

In 1822, when Red Cloud was born, those hunting grounds he describes—the high 
plains between the Mississippi and the great mountains—teemed with buffalo, and 
antelope roamed, and white men had yet to appear. By middle age, the chief had seen 
the buffalo vanish completely, the antelope sharply reduced, and his own people 
confined. If we are to search for the source of Joseph Grinnell’s sense of faunal 
change, his apprehensions about extinction, his notion that the import of his 
collections would not be realized for a century, we may need go no farther, perhaps, 
than that eloquent old graduate of the Bad Faces Clan. 

“they were used to being outdoors,” Patton said of Grinnell and his generation of 
naturalists. “They had to walk everyplace they went. And there was much more 
outdoors, then, for them to be out in. They were also used to being observers. They’d 
walk, say, from a home up on Dwight Way down to campus, and there was lots of 
natural history for them to observe. Another thing they did—and this was part of 
Grinnell’s legacy—they recorded what they observed. They recorded it in a 
standardized journal format. When you do that, it causes you to start to muse about 
what it is you’re seeing. It requires you to go to the next step—other than just saying, 
‘Oh yeah, there’s a fox squirrel over there.’” 

We spoke of the old-time naturalists. Darwin. Wallace. Steller. Von Humboldt. Patton’s 
hero is Alfred Russel Wallace, the father of zoogeography, who happens to be a hero 
of mine too. They were giants in those days, Patton and I agreed. They were great 
generalists. They were curious about everything and they felt qualified to investigate 
it—whether it was zoology or botany or geology. They wrote well. They all could draw. 
They sometimes spent years in the field between visits home. And then the next 
generation, among them Grinnell and his disciples Storer, Dixon, Taylor, and Camp. 

“They made them differently in those days,” I suggested to Patton. “A different kind of 
man.” “No question about it,” Patton agreed. “And it makes me nervous. I’m a good 
naturalist. I’ve spent a lot of time in the field, but I couldn’t hold a candle to any of 
those people. Couldn’t hold a candle. My mind is too filled up with other kinds of crap. 
It doesn’t have the freedom. Today we’re scatterbrained. We’re trying to multitask 15 
different things, even when we’re out in the field with nothing else to do but run a 
trapline.” 



Parents
GRINNELL Fordyce (Apr 1844 - )
PRATT Sarah Elizabeth (9 May 1851 - 6 Jul 1935)

Siblings
GRINNELL Joseph (27 Feb 1877 - 1939)
GRINNELL Fordyce (17 Jun 1882 - 20 Jul 1943)
GRINNELL Elizabeth J. (25 Dec 1883 - )

Marriage To WOOD Hilda (1883 - )
    m. 1905 

Notes


Children by WOOD Hilda 1883 - 
GRINNELL Willard Fordyce (1906 - 5 Jun 1983)
GRINNELL Mary E. (1908 - )
GRINNELL Stuart W. (1910 - )
GRINNELL Richard A. (1919 - )

Produced by Fzip 1.7 2/10/2021