William Conklin Cusick (February 21, 1842 – October 7, 1922) was an American botanist who specialized in the flora of the Pacific Northwest.
[4] His grandfather, Henry Cusick, immigrated to the United States from northern Ireland sometime after the Revolutionary War.
[3] His family settled on a 320 acres (130 ha) tract of land near Kingston in Linn County, Oregon.
[4] Even though his father was a farmer, Cusick received a good education, attending a country school in Illinois from age four to eleven.
At age 20, he was enrolled at La Creole Academy in Dallas, Oregon, where he continued his education for a year and a half.
He served as a sergeant in the 1st Oregon Infantry stationed at Fort Lapwai, Idaho, as part of the Quartermaster Corps.
Inspired by this meeting, Cusick began sending specimens to Asa Gray at Harvard in 1878.
That season he collected in the Powder River area, south to Malheur County, the Grande Ronde Valley, Cornucopia, and Hurricane Creek.
He was finally able to find some buyers during the winter of 1882 after communicating that summer with Harry Patterson, a printer of botanical labels from Oquawka, Illinois, who was also a collector.
His passion was rekindled in 1896 by the correspondence and encouragement of Charles Vancouver Piper, then botany professor at Washington State College.
Sometime during his stay in Eugene, the curator of the University of Oregon herbarium, Albert R. Sweetser, offered to buy Cusick's collection, which by that time included over 10,000 sheets.
At this point, Cusick was no longer able to conduct long collecting trips because of his deafness and poor eyesight.
In February 1916, he underwent cataract surgery, but these operations were largely unsuccessful and he remained mostly blind.
[16] Piper, now working for the Agriculture Department in Washington D. C., wrote to Cusick in 1916, hoping that he could help clear up some of his more obscure collection locations.
In attempt to facilitate this process, Piper sent his colleague, Willard Webster Eggleston, to visit Cusick.
Cusick, although quite deaf and mostly blind, was inspired by the visitor and insisted that they go to Strawberry Lake to find a certain red monkeyflower.
Two years later, in 1918, Eggleston invited Cusick to be a part of a team that would survey the flora of the Blue Mountains.
Piper visited Cusick one last time in the summer of 1921 and they went on a short collecting trip to Hot Lake outside of Union.
[17] Cusick suffered a stroke in the fall of 1921 and shortly thereafter wrote to Washington State College to offer them his second collection for $500.
He was visited by Harold St. John, the curator of the college's herbarium, and they talked at length of collecting and botany.
His outstanding work in botany was well known and understood by botanists of America and Europe, yet his neighbors were hardly aware of his greatness.
[21] His personal relationships with Gray, Piper, Watson, and others helped his influence among the botany world as they and many others after them named plants after him.