Richard Cotter

Richard D. Cotter (September 17, 1842 – March 12, 1927), also known as Dick Cotter and R.D. Cotter, was an Irish born American member of the first California Geological Survey.

He was orphaned at a young age and emigrated to the United States in 1850 with his brother John, who moved to Bowling Green, Missouri. There were at least four other siblings - Jeremiah and James Cotter, Mary Cotter Leahey and Elizabeth Cotter Kennedy. Cotter and his siblings were taken in from an orphan's home and educated by John C. Sutton, a St. Louis, Missouri blacksmith, farmer and inventor of the Sutton plow.

At the age of 18, Cotter asked Sutton for permission to go west and seek his fortune in the gold mines as some of the Suttons had done. Instead, scouts of the Whitney Surveying party offered him a job and Cotter took a position as packer on the California Geological Survey under Josiah Whitney from 1862 to 1864. Hired as a packer, Cotter did not actually know much about packing, but caught on quickly.Clarence King called Cotter "our man-of-all-work, to whom science already owes its debts". and described him as "Stout of limb, stronger yet in heart, of iron endurance, and a quiet unexcited temperament, and better yet, devoted to me, I felt that Cotter was the one comrade I would choose to face death with, for I believed there was in his manhood no room for fear or shirk." and, "in all my experience of mountaineering I have never known an act of such real, profound courage as this of Cotter's." In the Exploration of the Sierra Nevada, Francis P. Farquhar describes Cotter as, "an indomitable mountain-climber whose Services were of great value in more than one branch of the work".Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous states was first discovered in July 1864 by Clarence King and Richard Cotter.

After Cotter completed the mapping in Yosemite late 1864, he signed up to work on the Western Union Telegraph Expedition to British Columbia and Alaska, with the goal of providing a telegraph link from Asia through Alaska by way of Bering Strait. In 1866 Richard Cotter and J.T. Dyer made a very hazardous and successful exploration of the country between Norton Bay and the mouth of the Koyukuk River on the Yukon. The project was abandoned in July 1866, when completion of the submarine Transatlantic telegraph cable established a link from the United States to Europe. However, the public interest stimulated by the Alaskan project is credited with influencing the purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire on March 30, 1867, for $7.2 million.

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