William’s 1846 death in Neath in South Wales provided both funds and unfinished surveying work to complete. When he reached age 21, he once more shared lodgings with John in London but was on his own looking for employment. Brother John, however, would later find a different influence–America.Īlfred soon moved in with his eldest brother, William, also a surveyor, and began to learn what had become the family trade. At that venue, Alfred heard utopian thinker Robert Owen and became a convert to socialism. There, the brothers would nightly frequent a workingmen’s club where books and lectures on philosophy provided the entertainment alongside games such as dominoes. When Alfred was 14, he joined John in London. As a teenager, John was apprenticed to a London builder and became an accomplished carpenter while also learning surveying. Alfred noted that “John was of a more mechanical turn than myself.” John would build toys and Alfred would admire his skill and assist him. But they differed in personality and interests. Both young men would grow tall, about six feet, and lean. John was important to Alfred as older brother, mentor and role model (“my chief playmate and instructor,” as Alfred put it). “If my brother had not been there,” Alfred wrote in his autobiography, “it is quite possible that I might have been drowned.” If not for John Wallace, the history of the theory of evolution would have lacked one of its major players. Unable to swim, he sank under the surface and swallowed water. The brothers and several schoolmates were about to bathe in the River Beane when Alfred was unexpectedly pushed into the water. It was there, when Alfred is seven, that our story nearly ends before it begins. The middle-class family of modest means (their father, Thomas Vere Wallace, was an occasional teacher and librarian) later moved to Hertford. Alfred, the youngest, was born in 1823 in Usk, Monmouthshire. John was born in 1819, the sixth of nine children, in St. Primary sources include the 1908 Revised Edition of Alfred’s autobiography, My Life: A Record Of Events And Opinions (Chapman & Hall, London), contemporary newspapers, and a handful of private letters courtesy of the collection of the Natural History Museum in London which are referenced here for the first time anywhere. This article marks the first account to detail Calaveras County’s connection to the more widely esteemed Wallace brother, without whom the theory of evolution might never have become popularized in the late 19th century. Then, in 1887, Alfred came to California and the two brothers not only saw each other for the first time in four decades but Alfred visited Calaveras County to write about the Big Trees. Alfred became one of the most famous naturalists of his time, the man who–if Charles Darwin had not existed–might today be credited with the theory of evolution, with Wallacism taking the place of Darwinism. John became San Joaquin County Surveyor, chief engineer of the San Joaquin & Sierra Nevada Railroad and the namesake of the Calaveras County town of Wallace. John emigrated from England to Gold Rush California younger brother Alfred ventured to the Amazon to collect butterfly specimens. For nearly 40 years, brothers John and Alfred Russel Wallace were separated by an ocean and a continent.
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