Owen, David Dale

OWEN, DAVID DALE

(b. New Lanark, Scotland, 24 June 1807; d. New Harmony, Indiana, 13 November 1860), geology.

Owen was the son of Robert Owen, the utopian philanthropist and progressive mill owner, and Anne Caroline Dale Owen. He was educated at home in the classics, mechanics, and architectural drawing and, from the age of seventeen to twenty, at P. E. von Fellenberg’s “progressive school” in Hofwyl, near Bern, Switzerland, at which he studied the classics, music, drawing, chemistry, and natural history. He then spent a year in Glasgow, studying principally chemistry under Andrew Ure at the Andersonian Institution. In 1825 Owen’s father and William Maclure purchased the village, factories, and lands of New Harmony, Indiana, from George Rapp. In 1828, Owen came to New Harmony, which remained his home for the rest of his life. With Henry D. Rogers he went back to London in 1831 to study chemistry, then returned to New Harmony in 1833 and studied medicine in Cincinnati at various times from 1835 to 1837. He graduated in 1837 and used the title of doctor, although he never practiced. His medical training was to gain more scientific background, especially for his developing interest in geology. He spent part of the summer of 1836 as assistant to Gerard Troost, state geologist of Tennessee. He married Caroline Neef in 1837.

When the Indiana Geological Survey was established in 1837, Owen was immediately appointed state geologist. Always mindful of the practical application of science, he made a regional survey to determine the major rock divisions, the limits of the coalbearing rocks, the iron ore deposits, and building stones. He was the first American to use the term “Carboniferous” in the present restricted sense. He also recognized the Cincinnati arch just east of Indiana, a structural axis that controlled the westwarddipping strata in Indiana. Owen’s Indiana reports led to his appointment in 1839 to explore the United States mineral lands of the Dubuque lead district in southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Iowa, and northeastern Illinois, then the most important lead mining area in the country. Aided by John Locke and a corps of 139 assistants, in two months Owen covered 11,000 square miles; he presented maps in February 1840 and a report in June 1840. The expertly colored geologic maps and sections, the sketches of topographic features, and the lithographic fossil plates, all by Owen, added greatly to the value of the report.

In 1847 Owen was appointed to survey the mineral lands of the Chippewa land district, an area extending from northeastern Iowa and southern Wisconsin to Lake Superior. In his report, presented the following year, he correctly analyzed the stratigraphy and structure and paid particular attention to the economic geology. Owen and his assistants continued explorations into Minnesota and to Lake Winnipeg, then into Iowa and the South Dakota Badlands. The resulting report (1852) included an atlas of maps and plates engraved from sketches by Owen and his brother Richard. The most sumptuous American geological publication to that time, it is still of great significance.

Appointed state geologist of Kentucky in 1854, Owen not only made detailed geologic, chemical, economic, and soil studies but also constructed base maps. His medical training enabled him to relate certain diseases to soil and mineral types. After Owen’s part in the Kentucky fieldwork was completed and the third volume of the surveys was published, he accepted an appointment as state geologist of Arkansas in 1857, at very little salary, for the opportunity to examine unknown territory.

In 1859 the Indiana Geological Survey was reactivated and Owen was appointed state geologist, with the understanding that his brother Richard, who had long been associated with him, could begin the fieldwork while Owen was completing the second volume of the Arkansas survey. But Owen, who had long suffered from recurrent malaria, was seized by other ailments, including acute rheumatism, and soon became practically immobilized. Nevertheless, he dictated the last of the Arkansas report to two secretaries and completed the work three days before he died.

A superb field geologist, Owen attracted and retained capable assistants who could lead his field parties and could also contribute important parts of the final reports. In a day when verbosity was not uncommon he wrote in a lucid, well-outlined, compact manner and completed the writing and editing of his reports in remarkably short time. He was a talented artist; and his works contain hundreds of maps, sections, and diagrams and scores of lithographic plates, some of which are today sought by collectors.

Owen’s reports contain meticulous and accurate descriptions, reasonable analysis of origin, and wide correlation with American and foreign strata; they also introduced to America some of the terminology for Paleozoic systems used today. A skilled chemist with a knowledge of mechanics and a naturalistphysician, he produced geological writings ranging through paleontology, stratigraphy, mineralogy, and structure. Above all he related economic resources to geology in a way that endeared him to “practical” men and to legislators.

Many of his assistants and associates, some of whom received their first geological experience under him, become important geologists: Robert Peter, F. B. Meek, Richard Owen, John Evans, J. G. Norwood, E. T. Cox, C. C. Parry, Benjamin F. Shumard, G. C. Swallow, Peter Lesley, Charles Whittlesey, and John Locke.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Owen’s major works are Report of a Geological Reconnaissance of the State of Indiana, 2 pts. (Indianapolis, 1838–1839); Report of a Geological Exploration of Part of Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois … (Washington, 1840–1844); Report of a Geological Reconnaissance of the Chippewa Land District (Washington, 1848); Report of a Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1852); Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky, 4 vols. (Frankfort, Ky., 1856–1861); and Report of a Geological Reconnaissance… of Arkansas, 2 vols. (Little Rock, 1858; Philadelphia, 1860). One of the most significant of his many short papers is that read before the Geological Society of London in 1842, “On the Geology of the Western States of North America,” in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 2 (1846), 433–447, with an important map and correlation of English and American Paleozoic rocks. Scores of papers, reviews, and short reports that form additional records of his travels and activities are listed most completely in Hendrickson (see below). Each larger report contains a long introduction describing the establishment, organization, associates, progress of the fieldwork, and publications. The body of most reports gives an account of day-to-day activities, which together form a detailed “scientific biography.”

In addition to the bibliography of Owen’s publications in Hendrickson see those in J. M. Nickles, “Geologic Literature of North America 1785–1918,” in Bulletin of the United States Geological Survey, no. 746 (1923), 804–805; and detailed and annotated lists in Max Meisel, A Bibliography of American Natural History (New York, 1929), see III, 633, for the many entries. J. B. Marcou, “Writings of D. D. Owen,” in Bulletin. United States National Museum, 30 (1885), 247–251, presents a partially annotated list of fossil genera and species described by Owen and his associates.

II. Secondary Literature An excellent biography, with a portrait of Owen and extensive bibliographies of his publications, of source materials, and of related documents and publications is W. B. Hendrickson, David Dale Owen, Pioneer Geologist of the Middle West (Indianapolis, 1943). Caroline Dale Snedecker, a granddaughter of Owen’s, relates much personal history and includes interesting illustrations in The Town of the Fearless (Garden City, N. Y., 1931). Various obituary notices, most of them listed by Hendrickson, were published at intervals after Owen’s death. William E. Wilson, in The Angel and the Serpent, the Story of New Harmony (Bloomington, Ind., 1964), gives the best account, with many illustrations and portraits, of Robert Owen and William Maclure at New Harmony and the later activities of Robert Owen’s family. The “Obituary Notice,” in Fourth Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky (1861), 323–330, is of especial interest and value because it formed the basis for later obituaries. The unsigned obituary by one of the editors (Benjamin Silliman, Jr.?) in American Journal of Science, 31 (1861), 153–155, has information on scientific associates and an evaluation of Owen’s work by an editor who published many of his papers. A very brief sketch by N. H. Winchell(?) with a portrait is in American Geologist, 4 (1889), 65–72. The account by W. J. Youmans in Pioneers of Science in America (New York, 1896), 500–508, is mostly derived from Winchell. That in H. A. Kelly and W. L. Burrage, Dictionary of American Medical Biography (New York-London, 1928), 927–928, adds little new material.

G. P. Merrill, in First One Hundred Years of American Geology (New Haven, 1924; New York, 1962), 194–200, 217–218, 271–275, 321–323, 365–367, has summarized Owen’s geological contributions and reproduced important illustrations. Merrill’s article in Dictionary of American Biography, XIV, 116–117, is a summary of these longer notes. See also National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, VIII, 113. A number of biographies of geologists contain considerable information on Owen’s association with them (see list in Hendrickson, pp. 160–164). Charles Keyes, “The Transplantation of English Terranal Classification to America by David Dale Owen,” in Pan-American Geologist, 34 (1923), 81–94, is a fulsome description with some minor inaccuracies of Owen’s introduction of English names for Paleozoic periods in which the strata of the Mississippi Valley were deposited. Sir Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America, II (London, 1849), 269–274, recounts his visit to Owen at New Harmony and his excursions to see Wabash Valley geology.

George W. White