John Macoun
Macoun, John (1832-1920) was an Irish-born Canadian botanist and naturalist whose explorations of the terrain and vegetation of Canada contributed to the young nation's agricultural and transportation development.
Macoun was born in 1832 in County Down, Ireland. His family moved to Seymour Township in Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) in 1850. In 1856, he became a teacher and taught at small country schools and in Belleville. He became a professor of natural history at Albert College in Belleville in 1868.
In 1872, Macoun joined an expedition seeking the best route for a transcontinental railroad. They traveled through Edmonton to the Pacific Coast, along the Peace and Fraser rivers. Macoun made four additional trips to explore the terrain of the western tracts.
When the British explorer John Palliser visited the area around Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1857, he reported that it was unfit for farming. But in 1880, Macoun realized the Regina plains would make fertile, wheatlands. He promoted the agricultural potential of the region when others believed that the soil was too acidic and conditions too desertlike. His report persuaded the Canadian Pacific Railway Company to build its transcontinental railroad across the area. The railroad, completed in 1885, followed a route that paralleled the Canada-United States border.
In 1881, Macoun was appointed to the Geological Survey of Canada, serving as botanist, assistant director, and naturalist.
Macoun founded the Dominion Herbarium, contributing to it his personal collection of nearly 100,000 plant specimen sheets.
In 1882, he was made a charter member of the Royal Society of Canada. He wrote Catalogue of Canadian Plants (1883–1902), Catalogue of Canadian Birds (1900–1904), and other publications.
In 1912, Macoun moved to Sidney, British Columbia, spending his last years living on Vancouver Island studying its plant life. He died July 18, 1920, in Sidney. Many species and varieties of organisms are named after Macoun.