Clinton Hart Merriam (December 5, 1855 – March 19, 1942) was an American zoologist, mammalogist, ornithologist, entomologist, ecologist, ethnographer, geographer, naturalist and physician.

[2] At the age of fifteen, Merriam's father took him to see naturalist Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution, who was impressed with the boy's collection.

[4] Beginning in Ogden and the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, the expedition pushed between the Teton Basin and up through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana and into the newly established Yellowstone National Park.

[2] Merriam followed Professor Baird's advice and prepared for college in 1872 and 1873 by attending Pingry Military School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

[7] Among the faculty there, Merriam received instruction from such prominent figures as Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, Sidney Irving Smith, and Daniel Cady Eaton.

[1] This interest in medicine and surgery led Merriam to move from Yale to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1877.

[1][10] During this time, Merriam invented scientific and surgical instruments as well as wrote a medical treatise, though the manuscript was unfortunately lost on the way to the printer.

[10] While practicing medicine, Merriam corresponded with his naturalist colleagues, and continued to build his collection of animal specimens, with a growing interest in mammals.

[1] At this time, Merriam became interested in the underlying questions of species distribution, and hired a clerk to search meteorological records and compute monthly mean temperature in preparation.

[1] Through these efforts he met Vernon Bailey, a farmer's boy from Elk River, Minnesota with an impressive ability to collect species considered rare at the time, such as the vole.

[1] Though the organization included such distinguished senior members as Spencer Fullerton Baird, George Newbold Lawrence, Charles Bendire, Elliott Coues, Joel Asaph Allen, and Robert Ridgeway, the young Merriam was elected secretary and treasurer of the newly formed organization and was appointed chairman of the Committee on Bird Migration and the Committee on Geographic Distribution and Economic Ornithology.

[18] He published the results of a biological survey of the San Francisco Mountain region and desert of the Little Colorado in 1890, including the idea of "life zones" he had developed on the expedition.

[20] During Merriam's multiple trips to western North America to research and catalog biological organisms, he came to rely on the indigenous "locals" (Native Americans) for valuable information about the mammals he was studying.

As the North American Indian populations decreased dramatically in the late 19th century, Merriam realized that the people, languages, culture, and knowledge of these diverse tribes was being lost.

Merriam stunned his colleagues in East Coast academic institutions by abandoning his career in mammalogy for anthropological and linguistic field work, for which he had no formal training.

Funded by the Harriman family, Merriam's focus shifted to studying and assisting the Native American tribes in the western US.

Merriam is credited for collecting in his field notes a vast amount of information on the languages and customs of tribes that would otherwise have been unstudied.

[1] Though he initially had qualms about her poor grammar and marrying beneath what he saw as his social level, he loved her and thought highly of her, ultimately encouraging her education.