Josiah Gregg

Josiah Gregg (19 July 1806 – 25 February 1850) was a merchant, explorer, naturalist, and author of about the American Southwest and Northern Mexico regions. He collected many previously undescribed plants on his merchant trips and during the Mexican-American War after which he went to California. He reportedly died of a fall from his mount due to starvation near Clear Lake, California, on 25 February 1850 after a cross-country expedition which fixed the location of Humboldt Bay.

Josiah Gregg was born on 19 July 1806 in Overton County, Tennessee, the youngest son of seven children of Harmon and Susannah (Smelser) Gregg. Six years later his family moved to Howard County, Missouri. At age 18, Gregg was a school teacher at Liberty, Missouri until moving again with his family to Independence a year later in 1825. In Liberty, he studied law and surveying until his health declined from "consumption and chronic dyspepsia" in 1830.

Because of his failing health, Gregg followed his doctor's recommendation and traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico on a trail beginning at Van Buren, Arkansas in a merchant caravan in 1831. Once in what would become New Mexico Territory in 1850, Gregg worked as a bookkeeper for Jesse Sutton, one of the merchants of the caravan, before returning to Missouri in fall 1833, but by spring he was back on the road to Santa Fe, this time as wagonmaster of a caravan and Sutton's business partner. Gregg brought the first printing press to New Mexico in 1834, selling it to Ramon Abreu in Santa Fe where it was used to print the territory's first newspaper.

By 1840, Gregg had learned Spanish, crossed the plains between Missouri and Santa Fe four times, traveled the Chihuahua Trail into Mexico, and become a successful businessman. On his last trip from Santa Fe eastward, he decided to take a more southerly route across to the Mississippi River. Leaving Santa Fe on 25 February 1840, he was accompanied by 28 wagons, 47 men, 200 mules and 300 sheep and goats. In March the caravan was attacked by Pawnee near Trujillo Creek in Oldham County, Texas, and a storm scattered most of his stock across the Llano Estacado but the group continued eastward through Indian Territory to Fort Smith and Van Buren. In the early 1840s Gregg briefly lived in Shreveport, Louisiana.

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