On September 10, 1834, the Nathaniel Wyeth (1802-1856), Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859), John Kirk Townsend (1809-1851), and their fellow explorers reached the most turbulent portion of the Columbia River. The stretch was known as the Dalles and was located where the Walla Walla River joins the Columbia River just south of present-day Pasco, Washington. In the places where the river narrowed to as little as 15 feet, the water churned like in “an enormous cauldron.” Dams have since been installed in the Columbia River that have turned the Dalles into little more than motionless pond water.
Prior to damming, any number of explorers and settlers risked their lives attempting to navigate the falls and white water of the Columbia River rather than attempt equally dangerous and time consuming portages. The Wyeth party opted for the water route and traded their horses for canoes. For the next two days, the Wyeth part sailed in the canoes like “a seagull.” Once through the Dalles and onto gentler waters, Thomas Nuttall hovered for hours over fires drying “nearly a thousand new species of American plants.” Townsend maintained a “bale of birds, which was equally exposed to the action of the water, escaped without any material injury.”
Continuing down the Columbia, Thomas Nuttall and John Kirk Townsend continued to add to their specimens of plants and birds, among which was a bird that Mark Catesby (1663-1749) first called the Little thrush (Turdus minimus). Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) renamed the Little thrush in American Ornithology the Hermit thrush (Turdus solitarius). When Charles Bonaparte (1803-1857) revised American Ornithology, he changed the binomial for the Hermit thrush to Turdus minor. In A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada, Thomas Nuttall applied Turdus minor to the Little or Hermit thrush. John James Audubon was well acquainted with the Little or Hermit thrush through his numerous outings along the Mississippi River during the spring and summer months and when exploring the “the darkest, most swampy, and most secluded cane-brakes.”
Since the specimen that John Kirk Townsend collected along the Columbia River was much too small to be a Little or Hermit Thrush, Audubon named the bird a Little Tawny Thrush for the first edition of Birds of America. But then the scientific name that Audubon used for the Little Tawny Thrush was the same as the one that he used for the Little or Hermit Thrush: Turdus minor. For the octavo edition of Birds of America, Audubon re-named the Little Tawny Thrush a Dwarf Thrush (Turdus nanus), while the name for the Little or Hermit thrush (Turdus minor) has since been changed to the Hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus). There are no records of the Dwarf Thrush other than the one John Kirk Townsend found along the Columbia River.