[1] Nuttall was born in the village of Long Preston, near Settle in the West Riding of Yorkshire and spent some years as an apprentice printer in England.

Nuttall was accompanied by the English botanist John Bradbury, who was collecting plants on behalf of Liverpool botanical gardens.

Nuttall and Bradbury left the party at the trading post with the Arikara Indians in South Dakota, and continued farther upriver with Ramsay Crooks.

In 1834, he resigned his post and set off west again on an expedition led by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, this time accompanied by the naturalist John Kirk Townsend.

On the Pacific coast, Nuttall heard of the ship Alert leaving San Diego in May 1836, bound for Boston.

It is here that he encounters Richard Henry Dana Jr., a former student of his at Harvard who had set sail from Boston on a two-year voyage to the California coast at about the same time Nuttall had begun his expedition.

Dana writes in his memoir, Two Years Before the Mast (1840), of his amazement at seeing his old professor "strolling about San Diego beach, in a sailor's pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells.

"[6] Nuttall was taken on the Alert as a passenger along with many of his flora and fauna specimens, which he brought back to Boston to be cataloged and preserved for posterity.