George Kruck Cherrie

Who was George Kruck Cherrie?

George Kruck Cherrie was an American naturalist and explorer.

Cherrie was born in Iowa. He took part in about forty expeditions, mostly to Central and South America, including Theodore Roosevelt's South American Expedition of 1913–1914, when Cherrie was collecting specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. In 1915, he went to Bolivia with the Alfred Collins-Garnet Day expedition.

Cherrie recounted his experiences in his memoir Dark Trails: Adventures of a Naturalist. He is commemorated in the names of a number of animals, including the Cherrie's Tanager.

In 1927, the Boy Scouts of America made Cherrie an Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was give to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". The other eighteen men who were awarded this distinction were: Roy Chapman Andrews, Robert Bartlett, Frederick Russell Burnham, Richard E. Byrd, James L. Clark, Merian C. Cooper, Lincoln Ellsworth, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, George Bird Grinnell, Charles A. Lindbergh, Donald Baxter MacMillan, Clifford H. Pope, George Palmer Putnam, Kermit Roosevelt, Carl Rungius, Stewart Edward White, and Orville Wright.