Over her father's fierce objections, Mary Vaux married the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott, who was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1914, when she was 54. In 1887, on her first transcontinental trip via rail, she wrote an engaging travel journal of the family's four-month trek through the American West and the Canadian Rockies. On these trips, Vaux became the first women to accomplish the over 10,000 feet ascent of Mount Stephen. She spent many years exploring the rugged terrain of the Canadian Rockies to find important flowering species to paint. ![]() Asked one summer to paint a rare blooming arnica by a botanist, she was encouraged to concentrate on botanical illustration. During this time she became an active mountain climber, outdoors woman, and photographer. After 1887, she and her brothers went back to western Canada almost every summer. In 1880, at the age of nineteen, Vaux took on the responsibility of caring for her father and two younger brothers when her mother died. The trips to the Canadian Rockies sparked her interest in geology. During the family summer trips, she and her brothers studied mineralogy and recorded the flow of glaciers in drawings and photographs. When she was not working on the family farm, she began painting illustrations of wildflowers that she saw on family trips to the Rocky Mountains of Canada. After graduating from the Friends Select School in Philadelphia in 1879, she took an interest in watercolor painting. ![]() Mary Morris Vaux was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy Quaker family. She has been called the "Audubon of Botany." ![]() Mary Morris Vaux Walcott was an American artist and naturalist known for her watercolor paintings of wildflowers.
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