Leiberg Carrie - The dreamer and the doctor: a forest lover and a physician on the edge of the frontier

Although many botanists pronounce the Leiberg name with a long i, oral accounts from around Lake Pend Oreille testify that neighbors always called them John and Carrie LEE-berg. As with other aspects of this book, local knowledge wins the day.

All common plant names are taken from the USDA PLANTS database. Those interested in current Latin taxonomy can match the equivalent names at Plants.USDA.gov.

Place names can be traced on the USGS web site at GeoNames.USGS.gov.

T here was a moment in August of 1890 when John Leiberg almost became a widower. My wife has been very ill, he wrote to a friend. Did not expect her to recover. For days on end, he acted as doctor and nurse during a constant vigil in their tidy cabin beneath imposing mountains at the southern tip of Lake Pend Oreille.

The lake provided a magnificent setting at a juncture that held uncertainty and promise for the couple. The Leibergs were both in their late thirties that summer, and both had left behind other lives in the Midwest. John, one among hundreds of prospectors trying to cash in on various mining booms around the region, had invested three years of hardscrabble work with no guarantee of any return. Carrie was a physician who practiced a difficult art in a place with minimal medical resources. Idaho had just been granted statehood that July, and their part of the new state was changing fast. Towns along the nearby railroad were coming into their own as centers of agriculture, logging, and mining supply. Hotels were rising along scenic Panhandle lakeshores to serve tourists. Efficient rail routes encouraged Carrie to set up a practice along a spur line and allowed John to communicate regularly with consultants on the other side of the country.

John was the more visible member of the couple, a talker who traveled far and dreamed of leaving a scientific legacy. He not only read widely in multiple languages but also absorbed local knowledge from the spectrum of people who crossed his path. He pursued plants with a sensual joy, pressing his face into rain-soaked mosses to capture their essence. In the mineral realm, he struggled mightily to find tangible wealth among the rocks. He was a man who embraced the freedoms of Western life while lobbying vehemently for regulations on public lands. I have the preservation of the forests much at heart and so write of it, he told a friend. Alas here I am but one in a multitude.

Carrie Leiberg left a much quieter imprint than that of her husband. While reams of his thoughts rest in various archives, only a dozen or so examples of her writings are known, and not a single letter between the two of them has ever come to light. Yet it is clear that she nurtured a personal ambition that matched his, as well as a complementary skill set. Along a trail of correspondence, herbarium sheets, medical journals, newspaper clippings, and court proceedings; of fruit trees, assay pits, alpine ridgetops, and faint oral memories, the Leibergs emerge as a modern couple at the ragged end of frontier times. They were forced by circumstances to live apart for long stretches, yet always aching to reunite; fully committed to the place where they landed, yet prepared to depart for new lands and start all over again. You can send anything else to my wife exactly as to me, John once wrote when he knew he would be out of touch for a while. We are one in all affairs in life.

John did not provide any details concerning Carries illness that August, but two months after the crisis passed, he reported that she was improving a little bit every day. She lived on to face the world beside her husband for another quarter century, through a dizzying variety of situations. We try to bear good or ill fortune as bravely as we can, she wrote. That philosophy would be put to the test as Carrie and Johns quest for good fortune propelled their saga far beyond the lakeside cabin where Carrie languished in bed that summer of 1890, waiting for the scales to tilt.

Fossil ginkgo leaf

CHAPTER ONE

FIRST RIDE

T he story begins in Malm, the busy Swedish port where Johan Bernhard Liberg was born in 1853. My father was a sea captain, he wrote, and the first remembrance I have of anything in this world was one morning being carried out in my mothers arms from the cabin on deck. There are few things I love better than the heaving ocean. As a boy, he apparently endured a conventional education under teachers he remembered as aged and intimidating: How my heart used to thump against the ribs when brought before one of these solemn old owls to be examined on some abstract problem in Latin or Greek grammar or some equally useless point in geometrical loreproblems that the mind of a boy could grasp about as well as a pig can understand the mystery of the nebula in Orion. At some point in his youth, he escaped those owls to spend two years sailing with his father, who was hunting pirates among the islands of the South China Sea. For the rest of his life, Captain Libergs son would remember the excitement of visiting remote parts of the world and yearn for more. That appetite for adventure might explain why Johan joined a wave of Scandinavians departing for the New World soon after he graduated from secondary school in 1868. His emigration record classified him as a