C. L. Starks

At nine o’clock on the morning of October 7, 1933, a small truck arrived at the Steinhart Aquarium, in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco. It had come from the east side of the Sierra, and it carried live trout, the second load that week. Walter Thornburg, of the state Division of Fish and Game, gave the trip two sentences.

“We left Fish Valley October 5 and on the sixth we started for San Francisco with the fish on a small truck and delivered them at nine o’clock on the following morning without the loss of a fish. They were all full of pep.”

The man who printed the letter was John Otterbein Snyder, a Stanford ichthyologist.

I have made that drive. Five to six hours from the trailhead below Llewellyn Falls to the city. The first twenty-five minutes are dirt and gravel, up and down hill and across two creeks, on a road called Golden Gate, after the gold mine it passes, where the castings of a ten-stamp mill lie rusting in the sage. From Coleville on, it is pavement. They went overnight, in a small truck, over a pass Thornburg does not name, and did not lose a fish. That seems like good time to me.

The trout were new. Snyder named them that November, Salmo seleniris — “for a fancied resemblance of its evanescent tints to the lunar rainbow” — and he wrote that the fish was “found only in the little streams of Fish Valley,” in Alpine County. He had a difficulty, and he printed it. “No two observers agree in a description of its colors, tints and shades, some of which seemingly come and go with every changing whim of the fish.” Fish Valley is fourteen miles by pack trail from the road at Pickle Meadow. Snyder: “Because of the inaccessibility of Fish Valley, it was found necessary to catch and transport living fish to some place where the artist might make a satisfactory study of them.”

His article names one artist. “The outstanding characteristic of this trout is the color, well portrayed in the reproduction of a painting by Chloe Lesley Starks.” She was sixty-six.

She painted the fish that is on the cover of this book. Her painting was reproduced as the frontispiece to Snyder’s eight pages in California Fish and Game, April 1934. Beneath the fish, in light sans capitals, the printer set PIUTE TROUT SALMO SELENIRIS SNYDER: his type, the scientist’s words. Hers are in the lower right, brushed into the pale wash the fish floats on. C L Starks.

She was born Chloe Lesley, in Ohio, on December 17, 1866. She entered Stanford in 1893, two years after it opened; Edwin Chapin Starks entered with her. The university’s president was David Starr Jordan, who studied fishes, and both of them worked for him. Edwin studied fish skeletons. She drew them. Her earliest dated work that I know of is a set of crayon drawings made at Friday Harbor, on Puget Sound, in the summer of 1895. One is signed, lower left, C L Starks.

In April 1897 the student paper listed Jordan’s new book, “a fiction describing the habits and environment of the fur seal,” and added: “It is illustrated by Miss Chloe Lesley.” The book is Matka and Kotik, and there are thirty-three pen drawings in it. In his preface Jordan calls her “a student in Zoology in Leland Stanford Jr. University.” She was thirty. On June 3 she married Edwin. In October the paper’s Atlantic Coast notes had this: “Mrs. Lesley Starks is doing some drawing for the Fish Commission.”

In 1900 the notice that made him “curator of the museum” said: “Mrs. Starks, who was also at Stanford for a time, is to be the artist of the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory.” In 1901, on page 79 of “A Review of the Gobioid Fishes of Japan,” in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum, under the twenty-seventh species, the authors set a new genus and gave its etymology in one line. “Named for Mrs. Chloe Lesley Starks, artist and naturalist.” The genus is Chloea. The authors were David Starr Jordan and John Otterbein Snyder.

In 1902 she joined the faculty — “ex-’97, and instructor in Drawing,” the paper said.

She taught for thirty years. She also painted. In 1914 the Society of Western Artists catalogued her number 94, Monterey Sand Dunes, and gave her schools: Stanford; the Corcoran, in Washington; the Colarossi Academy, in Paris.

She reminds me of my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Shepard, and it is easy to find her without the caption. The students are dressed for 1927: bobbed hair, a cloche, three-piece suits. She is sixty, in the middle of the front row, in a loose pale dress with a long patterned scarf hung open down the front, smiling as if the photographer were a friend. Nothing she has on belongs to that year.

In September 1928 The School Arts Magazine gave a full page to block prints “designed by Students of Chloe Lesley Starks, Stanford University.”

On March 29, 1932, the student paper printed the names of the professors “to go on emeritus list in September.” “Dr. John Otterbein Snyder, professor of zoology. Edwin Chapin Starks, associate professor of zoology. Mrs. Chloe Lesley Starks, associate professor in the division of graphic arts.” On the fourth of January the paper reported that Edwin had “died suddenly at his home, 1115 Ramona street, December 30, from a heart attack.” The same column: “He married, June 3, 1897, Chloe Lesley, who had entered Stanford at the same time he did. She has illustrated many of his publications.”

In October 1933, nine months after Edwin died, the trout came out of Fish Valley in two loads. When Snyder’s article went to press, he noted of the trout in the aquarium: “At this date, these fish are still on display and in fine condition.” The painting was finished. The plate is in the same issue. In 1940 Snyder published “Trouts of California” in the same journal, and the Piute trout is Plate IV, the same image, signed C.L.Starks. The other plates are unsigned.

She died on March 16, 1952, in Santa Clara County, at eighty-five. The Stanford Daily ran nothing. The Palo Alto Times ran her obituary the next day.

The California Academy of Sciences lists among its archives a collection called “Starks (Chloe Lesley) illustrations of fish.” Its aquarium is where the trout were taken so that she could study them. Its Proceedings printed their name in November 1933. Its collection holds the type specimen. I think the painting is there. I have not seen it.