Meigs, Peveril, 1903-1979

American geographer who specialized in arid and arctic zones and tide mills, Meigs received a Ph. D in 1932 from the University of California, Berkeley, for his study of the Dominican missions of northern Baja California.

BIOGRAPHY

Peveril Meigs, III was born in Flushing, New York, on May 5, 1903. His family moved to Santa Barbara, California, and Meigs later attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an A.B. (1925) and a Ph.D (1932) in geography. As an undergraduate studying with Dr. Carl Sauer, Meigs became interested in Baja California and planned his first trip to the peninsula in the summer of 1925, accompanied by fellow graduate student C. Warren Thornthwaite.

On his first trip, Meigs and Thornthwaite travelled as far south as San Fernando de Velicata and visited David Goldbaum in Ensenada, the Johnson Ranch in San Antonio del Mar, the Hamilton Ranch, the flour mill and saltworks at San Quintin, the Meling Ranch, and the mining center of Real Del Castillo. They also made a long stay in the town of El Rosario, a brief tour of Mexicali and visited the Dominican mission sites of San Fernando, El Rosario, Santo Domingo, and San Pedro Martir.

Meigs returned to Berkeley as a graduate student in the fall of 1925, presented his photographs to a seminar in geography and stimulated interest in the peninsula among graduate students and faculty, including Dr. Oscar Schmieder, who went on to study the Russian colony in the Guadalupe Valley. In the summer of 1926, Dr. Sauer, Meigs, and graduate students Sam Dicken and Fred Kniffen embarked upon a second trip that retraced many of the destinations of the first and concentrated on Dominican mission sites. Sauer and Meigs returned and published "Site and Culture at San Fernando de Velicata," the first installment in a Baja California series published by the University of California Press. Sauer served as Meigs's advisor as he continued his graduate studies and began work on his dissertation.

Meigs returned to Baja California each summer for the next three years, focusing on the history and geography of the Dominican missions and the native populations surrounding them. In 1927, Meigs was accompanied by Horace Byers, a Berkeley undergraduate interested in making meteorological observations. In 1928, Meigs, under the direction of Dr. A.L. Kroeber and accompanied by his wife Yvonne, spent several weeks living with and studying the Kiliwa Indians in Valle Trinidad. He was joined by his brother Stewart on a similar trip in 1929.

Meigs returned to the peninsula to complete his studies of the Kiliwa Indians in 1936. The results of these studies were published in 1939 as "The Kiliwa Indians of Lower California."

Following several teaching apppointments in California and Louisiana, Meigs served as a geographer with the Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945) and the Arctic Institute of North America (1948-1949). While he spent most of his professional career studying the physical geography of arid and arctic zones, Meigs returned to his Baja California studies in the 1970s, publishing several articles in PACIFIC COAST ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY that reexamined his earlier field work.

Peveril Meigs died September 16, 1979, in Wayland, Massachusetts.