Early Life
Amor de Cosmos was born William Alexander Smith in Windsor, Nova Scotia to United Empire Loyalist parents. His education included a stint at King's College in Windsor, following which, around 1840, he became a mercantile clerk in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There he joined the Dalhousie University debating club, and came under the influence of the Nova Scotia politician and reformer, Joseph Howe. In 1845, he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in 1852 he emigrated to Kanesville, Iowa where he established a daguerreotype gallery. But the following year the lure of the California Gold Rush beckoned, and Smith continued west, heading overland to Placerville, California. Here he set up a new studio and prospered taking pictures of the miners and their operations. Joined by his brother, the pair moved northwest to Oroville, California, where they engaged in various unspecified entrepreneurial ventures. In 1854, Smith successfully petitioned the California State Assembly to have his name changed to "Amor De Cosmos" (inaccurately translated as "Lover of the Universe"), to pay tribute, as he said, "to what I love most...Love of order, beauty, the world, the universal."
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