John Kirk Townsend (August 10, 1809 – February 6, 1851) was an American naturalist, ornithologist and collector.
Townsend was a Quaker born in Philadelphia, the son of Charles Townsend and Priscilla Kirk. He attended Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania and was trained as a physician and pharmacist. He developed an interest in natural history in general and bird collecting in particular. In 1833, he was invited by the botanist Thomas Nuttall to join him on Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth's second expedition across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Townsend collected a number of animals new to science. These included birds such as the mountain plover, Vaux's swift, chestnut-collared longspur, black-throated gray warbler, Townsend's warbler and sage thrasher, and a number of mammals such as the Douglas squirrel; several of these were described by Bachman (1839) from samples collected by Townsend. Townsend collected skulls of indigenous people, procured by stealing them from graves.
Family
John Kirk Townsend was the son of Charles Townsend and Priscilla Kirk, he had five brothers and four sisters. His sister Mary, a naturalist with an interest in entomology, wrote a popular book called "Life In the Insect World" in 1844. Mary and another sister, Hannah, wrote The Anti-Slavery Alphabet in 1846, which was sold at the Anti-Slavery Fair in Philadelphia.
Oregon
While at Wyeth's Fort William in Oregon, Townsend served as the appointed magistrate to the first public trial by Europeans in Oregon.
This occurred when the post's gunsmith, Thomas J. Hubbard, attacked and killed the fort's tailor in an argument over a young native girl.
On his return, Townsend wrote The Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands (1839). This is a narrative of a journey by Wyeth's expedition over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean between 1834 and 1835.