a living. He did not fret under delays, he did not yield to obstacles, and he expected no rewards.
The book describes 3,150 species—2,370 flowering plants and 780 trees, shrubs, sedges and rushes, all of which he saw for himself before they were recorded on his pages. Of these, 89 had not before been identified or classified by other scientists. This field work was described in an article in the Oregonian in 1904:
The collection of this vast amount of material has occupied the greater part of the time of the author during the summer seasons for over 20 years. During this long period many severe and tedious trips had to be made to mountain slopes and out-of-the-way sections where it not infrequently happened that the night had to be spent in a spot where the only shelter to be obtained was beside a convenient log, or under the friendly boughs of a Douglas spruce. Mr. Howell had all the patience and perseverance necessary to sustain him through these long-continued and unremitting labors and hardships without once faltering in his design, and it must be remembered that it was purely a labor of love, without hope of any remuneration at the end worth considering, and practically without any aid except the sympathy and encouragement at all times of his friend, Martin Gorman, also a botanist and ardent student and lover of the science.
He returned from these solitary wanderings with his loaded knapsacks to the lonely labor of classifying and describing what he had found, and still after the manuscript was ready his single-handed work was not at an end. Because of his poverty he could not hire skilled printers who could set the technical matter with its numerous abbreviations and symbols, and unskilled printers could not do it.
