Abstract This article focuses on the description and naming of cacti to study the work of the U.S. American botanists who used the U.S.-Mexican War to explore the Chihuahuan Desert. Cacti were present to the north and east of borderlands deserts, but they inhabited those deserts in much greater variety than they did in previously held parts of the United States. They thus became emblematic of borderlands spaces as the northern section of the region was alienated from Mexico, the country that contains the world’s largest number of cactus species. As part of that process, many of the cacti of the Chihuahuan Desert received Latin names for the first time through the efforts of field collectors Friedrich Adolph Wislizenus and Josiah Gregg, who reported to the man who emerged as the nation’s foremost authority on the family, George Engelmann. This article argues that the U.S.-Mexican War created the conditions for an unbounded approach to botanical exploration, distinct from the better-known botany associated with the marking of the new boundary after the war. It demonstrates, moreover, that the practitioners of the botany of war fully participated in the attitudes of Manifest Destiny that helped drive the war effort as they appropriated borderlands cacti. In doing so, their botanical work, and their attention to cacti in particular, amplified the imperial gaze by helping to make legible an exotic desert landscape that would transcend the emerging boundary.
Samuel Brunk (Thu,) studied this question.