A Doctor and A Botanist Whose Passion Shaped Public Lands of the West

In his new book The Dreamer and the Doctor: A Forest Lover and a Physician on the Edge of the Frontier author Jack Nisbet recreates turn-of-the-twentieth-century Northwest, where the lives and passions of an American physician and her Swedish naturalist husband helped shape a territory on the cusp of change.

Dr. Carrie Leiberg, a pioneer physician, fought hard for public health while nurturing both a troubled son and a fruit orchard. Her husband, John Leiberg, was a Swedish immigrant and self-taught naturalist who transformed himself from pickax Idaho prospector to special field agent for the US Forest Commission and warned Washington DC of ecological devastation of public lands. The Leiberg story opens a window into the human and natural landscape of a century past that reflects all the thorny issues of our present time.

Jack Nisbet is the author of several collections of essays that explore the human and natural history of the Northwest, including Purple Flat Top, Visible Bones, and Ancient Places. He has also written award-winning biographies of fur agent and cartographer David Thompson (Sources of the River) and naturalist David Douglas (The Collector).

“Jack Nisbet’s The Dreamer and the Doctor is a textured, insightful history of the waning frontier days of the American West that reads like a novel. The featured couple, a female doctor and an obsessed botanist, provide an unusual lens to a time that is both familiar and antique, a time when science and medicine were rapidly evolving but were still intensely personal. Entwined in the narrative are the roots of the battle for Western public lands, the impact of federal science, and a growing awareness of the impact of forest fires.”
—Kirk Johnson, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History