Chapter Nine
BROWN WATCHED THE TOWERS OF LOWER MANHATTAN grow larger as the steamship carrying him back from Europe passed through the Verrazano Narrows on June 10, 1900. He had been gone for sixteen months, and in that time the promise of New York had only grown. Its riches were larger; its population greater; its possibilities wilder. It was the jewel of the world’s fastest-growing economy, drawing the most talented and ambitious of a young nation. Nowhere else was the link between science and wealth as highly regarded, and nowhere else were the profits of an economy built on industry and machinery displayed as lavishly. Skyscrapers soared and mansions bloomed, each one a new ornament to prosperity. The American Museum was among them, an intellectual cathedral carved from the city’s wealth. Brown looked forward to spending several months reacquainting himself with the museum’s collection and making space for the specimens which he had collected over his long absence. And in his personal life, he planned to contact Marion, hoping that their relationship could rekindle after a long period of silence.
Within weeks, however, he was in the badlands of South Dakota and Wyoming.
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NEARLY AS SOON AS BROWN stepped off the boat, he found himself well behind in a race that he did not know had begun. When Brown last spoke with William Reed four years earlier, the veteran fossil collector was enjoying the novelty of steady employment with the University of Wyoming after his long and often prickly relationship with Marsh. Perhaps feeling generous to a young new collector, Reed had helped Brown locate the fossil beds where he uncovered the American Museum’s Diplodocus, and asked for nothing in return. There seemed to be little need. Through his work, the University of Wyoming built a collection of dinosaur fossils that rivaled any on the East Coast, while Reed seemed to finally have contentment within his grasp after a lifetime of chasing dreams.
What the university did not have, however, was money. Through his work in remote and challenging terrain, Reed had helped create a new economy dealing in large bones. Forever a prospector at heart, he ultimately could not find it within himself to accept the security of a regular paycheck when there was a flicker of a large payday ahead of him. “Our university is so poor that I am thinking of leaving it and selling my fossils in Europe or to some other American museum,” Reed confided in a letter to Marsh, hoping to spark his interest in a purchase. His funding dry and his reputation wounded after his behavior in the Bone Wars had fully come to light, Marsh was in no position to take Reed up on the offer. Reed, however, was not dissuaded. “The bones here are no. 1 in quality and some of them are monsters,” he wrote. Like a man already planning in his head how he would spend his winnings from a lottery, he confided to Marsh that he was “writing to several large museums . . . in hopes to work up a market for this material before spring.”
Invitations to tour his workshop and marvel at his discoveries soon reached newspaper reporters in every city with a major museum. The New York Journal, owned by newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, devoted a full page to announcing that “Most Colossal Animal Ever on Earth Just Found Out West.” The article appeared on December 11, 1898, just four days after Brown left the city bound for Patagonia. While Brown was battling seasickness, countless New Yorkers examined the newspaper’s illustration of a streetcar attempting to stop itself from crashing into the tail of a Brontosaurus standing on its hind legs as it peers into the eleven-story windows of the stately New York Life Building on Broadway. “When [the dinosaur] ate it filled a stomach large enough to hold three elephants . . . when it was angry its terrible roar could be heard for ten miles . . . one man cannot lift its smallest bone,” the paper reported. A portrait of Reed standing next to a femur taller and wider than his own body ran with the article, along with a drawing of what the beast’s skeleton would look like when fully assembled. In it, the dinosaur towers over a man standing underneath its belly, the size difference suggesting a dog and one of its ticks.
A copy of the article landed on the desk on one of the wealthiest men who ever lived and who, as luck would have it, was then in the process of trying to fill up a natural history museum he had recently established in the town that had made him rich. “Can’t you buy this for Pittsburgh?” Andrew Carnegie wrote in the margin of a copy of the article he forwarded to the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “Wyoming State University isn’t rich—get an offer—hurry.”
Andrew Carnegie had not always been interested in big things. The son of a handloom weaver and a shoemaker who emigrated from Dunfermline, Scotland, he dreamed as a boy of becoming a bookkeeper. With his uncle’s help, he got a job running messages for the O’Reilly Telegraph Company. There, he found that he was comfortable in the often violent and ruthless world of industry and willed himself into a larger life. By the age of twenty-four, his mastery of accounting and the complexities of the railroad schedules helped him rise to a position as a district manager at the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad.
Stuck with a body whose height did not match his ambition, he began wearing high-heeled boots and a top hat to make himself seem more imposing than his natural five feet suggested. By the age of thirty, he was running his own company, with several of his former bosses at the railroad as secret partners, and grew rich from now-illegal insider contracts which paid him handsomely to supply the company with raw material. By forty, he controlled steel companies, iron ore mines, oil wells, bond trading firms and bridge builders. He spent his days in a hotel suite in Manhattan, where he worked only a few hours each morning yet reaped unimaginable wealth. “Ashamed to tell you profits these days,” he wrote to a friend. “Prodigious!”
Carnegie was the rare captain of industry for whom each new blessing felt like a burden. Though seemingly every move he made in his business life proved in time to be the right one, he grew tired of the hunt for profit and tried to fashion himself into a man of culture, forging friendships with artists and intellectuals at home and in Europe. In his thirties, he resolved to “make no effort to increase my fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes.” Philanthropy, he argued, was “the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor.” Over time, he built 1,689 public libraries in the United States, set up a trust to pay the tuition of Scottish university students, funded pensions for American college professors, established a Hero Fund to award civilians who took extraordinary risks to save another person’s life, built a complex of four world-class museums in Pittsburgh and founded a think tank to promote international peace. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in an essay called “The Gospel of Wealth,” published in June 1889. A museum of natural history provided the unique prospect of increasing interest in science among those who had not had the opportunity or inclination toward formal education, fueling the sort of intellectual self-improvement that Carnegie saw as the key to future prosperity. In a city such as Pittsburgh, bursting with people who worked with their hands, a museum that did not “attract the manual toilers, and benefit them . . . will have failed its mission,” he wrote.
Dinosaur bones, especially those so large as to make an adult tremble, were exactly what he needed to bring in the masses and kindle their curiosity about the wider world. Though the field of paleontology had fully separated itself from geology and was becoming increasingly specialized as it branched off into what would become the subdivisions of paleobotany and paleoecology, a wide gulf remained between what scientists understood about the prehistoric world and the public conception of the deep past. The few displays of dinosaur fossils or their lifelike models in the United States and Europe positioned the creatures largely as million-year-old novelties, spending little time on the reasons why these extinct creatures mattered to science or our understanding of the planet. Dinosaurs at the time were largely considered spectacles and nothing more, as if their size overshadowed any need to explain their significance. Yet with a display of impressive extinct creatures in a museum setting—the larger the better—Carnegie believed he could nudge others along the same path that he had once walked. A childhood interest in the dismal science of accounting had unlocked the traits which he rode to fantastic wealth; for the child of an ironworker, there was no telling where the spark ignited by an exposure to dinosaurs and all they represented could lead.
William Holland, the director of the Carnegie Museum, knew almost nothing about paleontology. The son of missionaries who served in Jamaica, Holland trained at the seminary and worked as a pastor in Pittsburgh before turning his attention to entomology. Like his counterpart Osborn at the American Museum, his greatest strength was unwavering self-confidence. Doubt that he was the right person to lead a campaign for dinosaur bones seemed never to enter his mind, and he faced the world as if he were simply waiting for validation of his greatness. He contacted Reed shortly after the article in the New York Journal appeared and was told the dinosaur was not for sale. Not long after, however, Reed followed up with a letter saying that the University of Wyoming owned the specimen depicted in the article, but that he personally owned another quarry containing a fossil just as large, if not larger. Sensing his payday had finally come, Reed described it as “a good prospect, the best I have seen for many years,” yet stressed he was under a time constraint: his success at finding fossils had convinced the Wyoming state legislature to appropriate more funds to the university to expand its collection, and it would be difficult to turn the regents down if they offered a fair price. Unless Carnegie acted fast, he would lose his “chance to get this monster,” Reed warned.
Holland wrote back at once, laying out exactly what he wanted. “I am anxious to know from you how perfect this skeleton is likely to prove,” he wrote. “Do you think that it promises to be as perfect, for instance, as the skeleton of the Brontosaur which Prof. O. C. Marsh has at Yale? . . . I should like very much to obtain for this Museum a specimen as nearly perfect as possible of one of the huge saurians. . . . I should dislike however to enter the arena as a competitor for a mere fragment of these remains, no matter how large they may be, because I set our sights to erect one of the largest specimens in our Museum Hall.” Reed assured Holland that the fossils would prove to be exhibition-worthy. Holland boarded a train to Wyoming and presented Reed with a lucrative offer, which included a three-year contract to join the Carnegie Museum staff. Only after Reed signed the paperwork, however, did he disclose the fact that the University of Wyoming had an ownership stake in the quarry where his prospective dinosaur lay and it was not his to sell outright.
Not wanting to tell the world’s richest man that he had been bamboozled by a former shepherd with no formal education, Holland tried to buy his way out of the problem. He offered the university regents $2,000 for the fossil but was told that “it is the biggest thing on earth and we think that it is worth a hundred thousand dollars.” The rejection further convinced Holland that such an immense prehistoric relic belonged in a major metropolitan museum where the greatest number of people could see it, and not in the university collection of a lightly-populated state. Holland hired attorneys and bought up land and mineral rights, looking for a way to block the university’s claim to the material. Though he too wanted the dinosaur, Carnegie feared that Holland’s aggressiveness would turn into a public relations disaster that he could not afford. A battle between striking workers and hired private detectives at his Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel plant eight years earlier that left seven dead had severely damaged his reputation as a friend of the working class, and his focus on philanthropy was one attempt to bandage that wound. Holland turned to lobbying the state’s governor for assistance and made a second trip to Wyoming to pay local cowboys for any leads about other fossil outcrops. “We shall ultimately get possession of our coveted monster,” Holland wrote.
On a trip to New York to confer with Carnegie, Holland met Jacob Wortman, then on staff at the American Museum, and spoke with him about the difficulties of fieldwork in Wyoming. Wortman made such a strong impression on Holland that he offered him a job as a curator at the Carnegie Museum, where he would be free of the overbearing shadow cast by Osborn. Shortly after Wortman accepted, he traveled to Wyoming to check on the quarry holding Reed’s find. There he discovered that amateur workmen hired by the university had removed most of the fossils that Reed had identified and destroyed the rest. Holland tore into the university regents, who, he claimed, “do not know how to meet manly men in a manly way, but are as full of little narrow, petty jealousies as an egg is of meat.” Empty-handed, he convinced Carnegie to fund a full team of prospectors to Wyoming in the coming months, where he planned to have Reed find a fossil that would justify all the headaches he had already given him. “It is . . . of the utmost importance that our Museum should succeed in obtaining a fine display of showy things,” Holland told his field crew. “Mr. Carnegie has his heart set on Dinosaurs—‘big things’—as he puts it.”
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THE CARNEGIE EXPEDITION WAS NOT the only one descending on Wyoming in the summer of 1899. Aiming to open up travel on one of its least-utilized routes, the Union Pacific Railroad offered free passage to the state for a limited time to amateur prospecting teams from over two hundred colleges and universities. Known as the Wyoming Fossil Fields Expedition, the invitation promised “the fields are ample for all who wish to avail themselves of the opportunity to collect and create museums as large, if not larger than any that have been built up during the last quarter of a century.” For a brief instant, paleontology was no longer restricted to those who had the ability to foot the bill for travel to the far reaches of the country. The inherent advantage enjoyed by big city museums like the American Museum and the Carnegie would for the first time be tested on an open playing field, where skill and luck at uncovering fossils would matter more than a reservoir of money. “I cannot help thinking that this miscellaneous scrambling for dinosaurs . . . will be a misfortune,” Osborn noted, no doubt uneasy at having to participate in a competition in which his status did not give him an unfair advantage.
Soon, the wilderness was dotted with those who dreamed of finding dinosaur bones. Some were backed by money; a team from the Field Museum in Chicago could draw from a $1 million endowment donated by the department store magnate Marshall Field. Others were college students hoping that a find could secure a foothold for their career, or at the very least give them bragging rights when they brought something impressive back to campus. And there were still others—cowboys, drifters, down-on-their-luck gold miners—who only vaguely knew what a dinosaur was or how you would go about finding one, but who recognized that anything that brought so many educated people out to Wyoming must be worth something. They, too, joined in the chance to strike it rich.
In one summer in one of the most remote parts of the country, the dawning age of science, industry and professionalization faced off directly against the era of hard living, grit and luck it was replacing. “The old-time expeditions were staged in the real West, at a time when lack of means of transport . . . together with the very intimate contact every fossil hunter must have with his physical surroundings—with fatigue, heat and cold, hunger and thirst—made the research for the prehistoric a real adventure suited to red-blooded men,” a professor of zoology at the Massachusetts Agricultural College who prospected in Wyoming that summer later recalled.
Prospectors rich and poor descended on Medicine Bow, a desolate town on the plains whose train station, three saloons and twenty houses were the only permanent structures in the sweeping valley of sagebrush and stone. “Until our language stretches itself and takes in a new word of closer fit, town will have to do for the name of such a place as was Medicine Bow,” wrote Owen Wister, a Harvard graduate and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt whose novel The Virginian, published three years later, was set in what locals called the Bow, and is now considered the first Western. “I have seen and slept in many like it since. Scattered wide, they littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. . . . Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation’s first morning.”
Medicine Bow was a dusty and dirty remnant from a vanishing time. Ten years earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau had announced that the frontier was closed, ending the nation’s conception of itself as an ever-expanding force across the continent. Yet there still remained a large gap between what government officials considered settlement and what life was like on the forgotten plain. “We have no law here,” warned Holland’s landlady when he arrived to lead the Carnegie team. A member of the American Museum staff later confessed, “Medicine . . . is a little bit the worst town I have ever seen. . . . I would advise no one to spend a night here if he can help it.” It was a place where lawlessness could literally land in your lap. Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, a gang of outlaws and bank robbers famous for their brazenness, held up a train and dynamited its safe, containing what would now be worth more than $1 million, in the mountains outside of Medicine Bow shortly before the paleontologists—professional and not—reached town. Once the gang was safely gone, locals picked up the scraps for souvenirs. Holland was given one as a present his first night in town, and he promised to add it to the Carnegie collection.
The few rooms in Medicine Bow fit for human habitation quickly filled up with workers straightening and regrading the Union Pacific tracks spanning the prairie. Yet still more people came. Trains carrying more than one hundred members of the Fossil Fields Expedition arrived over the span of a few days. While most groups were small, those who could afford them brought along teamsters and cooks and field hands, swelling Medicine Bow’s population well past its capacity. Soon, nearly every flat place to sleep under a roof was claimed. A run on the town’s general store emptied it of every pickaxe, bag of flour, hammer and chisel. A professor from the University of Kansas who arrived a few days behind the crowd was shown to a room filled with mice crawling over a bloody mattress, prompting him to bed down in a railroad equipment shed instead.
Fossil hunters braved the dangers of Medicine Bow because of its proximity to the Freezeout Mountains, visible at the edge of the horizon. Smooth, gray and nearly treeless, the range is made up of sandstone and shale and conceals abundant beds of Jurassic fossils in a layer of rock referred to as the Morrison Formation. Named after the town of Morrison, Colorado, where it was first discovered, the Morrison Formation dates to about 150 million years ago, when what are now considered the badlands of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah were crisscrossed with rivers, streams and ponds.
In what was one part science and one part gold rush, teams of prospectors—some carrying the flags of their colleges or institutions, nearly all of them armed with rifles and other weapons—swarmed over the mountains and attempted to claim as many quarry sites as possible without knowing what they held. Those who should have never been in the mountains in the first place soon gave up, overheated and exhausted with nothing to show for it. Others tumbled off rocks or tripped over tree branches, their grand adventure cut short by a broken nose or busted ankle. Few knew how to read the rocks of the Morrison Formation. Success was largely a matter of matching small variations in color with knowledge of what the rock had once been. Dark gray indicated volcanic lava, which could be safely ignored. Grayish-green rock represented layers of siltstone, which likely had been the bottom of a river or a sandbar—exactly the sort of place where the body of an animal could wash up and become covered in sediment.
Even those who had a cursory ability to fend for themselves in the wild often came out empty-handed, unfamiliar with the curves of the mountains. Prospectors pushed deeper into the inhospitable terrain, hoping to shake themselves of the dilettantes and the desperate. The days “consisted in ‘looking out’ as much as one could cover of the rock formations exposed in canyons and gullies, prowling over the weathered slopes, and climbing along the steeper cliffs, watching always for the peculiar colors and forms of weathered bone fragments, following up every trail of fragments to its source, and prospecting cautiously with a light pick or digging chisel to see what, if anything, is left in the rock,” wrote William Diller Matthew, a curator at the American Museum who spent three weeks that summer in Wyoming. “Such a prospect came often as a blessed relief after hours of climbing and scrambling had reduced one to a state of staggering weariness. . . . Then supper, a pipe, and to bed, and the same routine repeated the next day and the next.”
The Fourth of July provided one of the few breaks in the monotony of the search, a clear reason for this particular day to be different from the rest. Throughout the big, open states that made up what was becoming known as dinosaur country, the holiday was considered a momentous event, one of the few outward signs that there could be any connection between this rough land and the crammed cities on the coast. Prospector camps were typically full of booze and hard living to begin with; the Fourth of July took it to another level, a chance to prove that the prospectors had shown restraint on every other night of drunken carousing.
While the other members of the Carnegie team downed liquor and beer, set off fireworks and gambled in camp, Reed set off alone to hunt, the noise of the camp serving as the breadcrumbs that would keep him from getting lost. He found antelope footprints and began tracking the animal. It was then that he noticed a bone sticking out of a rock. He began digging with the small tools he carried with him and realized that he had found something.
As the Carnegie team nursed their hangovers the following morning, Reed revealed that he had stumbled upon a section of what appeared to be a Diplodocus. The others joined him at the site, and it soon became clear that they were at the start of a major find. Onlookers from competing museums began to appear each day at the excavation site, drawn to the spectacle of watching an 84-foot-long prehistoric beast emerge chisel by chisel from the matrix of rock. Over the following weeks, the specimen revealed itself to be one of the most complete Diplodocus ever found, containing all major bones and a flawless skull. The team sent word to Holland, who seemed not to recognize how rare it was to find a nearly complete specimen and pressured Reed not to come back until he had secured the animal’s full set of bones. “My dear fellow, the rest is all there, and do not you forget it,” he wrote.
No amount of second-guessing could take away from the importance of the find. Though he was not personally responsible for uncovering it, Wortman was particularly pleased that the Carnegie, and not the American Museum, had claimed the most impressive discovery that summer. Not only that, but his team had recovered other fossils that would fill out the Carnegie’s halls faster than Holland had anticipated. “We have labeled our quarries and I do not apprehend any difficulty in holding them until we can get around to work them out,” Wortman wrote in a letter to Holland. “There are many parties here already and they are getting pretty short on bones. The quarry of the American Museum is turning out badly and they are looking for other locations. Me thinking [sic] they will get little. They lack experience.”
When news of the Carnegie’s find reached New York, Osborn arranged one of his rare trips to the field, unable to rest in the knowledge that his men were falling behind. He reached Medicine Bow a few weeks later and rode out on horseback to the quarry site. There, he dressed down Walter Granger, his well-liked and respected field foreman, and second-guessed every decision he had made. Among his worst sins in Osborn’s eyes was his decision to focus on a few sites rather than widen his approach and outwork his rivals to the point of exhaustion. “I reached here yesterday evening after an interesting ride across the plains and my arrival is on time for I find matters somewhat disorganized,” Osborn wrote in a letter to his wife. “We have just taken out a very fine specimen, but have no more in sight, while Dr. Wortman after two months of very bad luck has made a ten strike, finding an unusually fine skeleton, just what we needed, in fact. I shall put revived life into the party and thoroughly reorganize their work.” The element of luck in Reed’s discovery was not lost on Osborn, yet he could not accept that a rival was pulling ahead. The realities of camp life were too rough for him, however, and he left after a week to vacation in Colorado, where he continued to send letters to Granger with new commands.
The summer of 1899 proved to be one of the most influential concentrated efforts to dig out dinosaur bones in the short history of paleontology. The amateur collectors who braved the field thanks to the free passage given by the Fossil Fields Expedition unearthed more than two tons of fossils, scattering specimens to universities and colleges across the country, where they offered many people their first opportunity to see clear evidence of prehistoric life. The Field Museum, meanwhile, brought home to Chicago seventy-five dinosaur bones weighing a collective five tons, including the spine and pelvis of a Brontosaurus, twenty-five tail vertebrae from a Diplodocus, and the pelvis and foot of a Creosaurus, a predator now known as Allosaurus that grew up to 35 feet long and may have used its head as a hatchet, slamming it into prey and then ripping off flesh into a mouth filled with backward-curved teeth that prevented anything from escaping. For its efforts in the field, the American Museum amassed 131 bones for the collection, including half of a Brontosaurus skeleton. Above them all stood the Carnegie, which left Wyoming with most of the spine, pelvis, skull and eighteen ribs of the prized Diplodocus, as well as fossils of marine reptiles that expanded the breadth of its shelves. “We obtained a quantity of material which would have made the mouths of Cope and Marsh water,” Holland wrote in a letter to a friend.
For the first time since he pivoted his life to focus on paleontology, Osborn had come in second on a public stage. Though the American Museum had made several important finds, nothing in its haul could compare to the specimens obtained by the Carnegie. “We have had a successful season’s work, not brilliant this far,” Osborn confessed in a letter to a friend. What’s more, the Diplodocus the Carnegie brought home was both bigger and better preserved than the American Museum’s specimen that Brown had discovered two years earlier, leaving what had been one of the most important specimens in the museum’s collection diminished in Osborn’s eyes.
The relationship between Holland and Wortman deteriorated over the winter of 1899–1900, inflating Osborn’s hope that the threat of the Carnegie Museum would fizzle away. But things only got worse for the American Museum once Wortman left its rival. In Wortman’s place, Holland hired John Bell Hatcher from Princeton, putting an even more experienced fossil hunter in charge of expanding the Carneige’s collection of dinosaur bones. In his first months in his new job, Hatcher realized that the Diplodocus specimen uncovered in the summer of 1899 was not just immense, but represented a new species. He named it Diplodocus carnegii in honor of the museum’s founder. In a move that made the discovery sting all the more, Holland asked Osborn as a matter of professional courtesy to confirm Hatcher’s interpretation of the find. Holland knew that it was correct, yet could not resist forcing Osborn to publicly acknowledge another museum’s superiority. “When it comes to scientific proposition, you will permit me to say that I will bet on you every time against Osborn,” Holland wrote in a letter to Hatcher. “However, this is of course said confidentially.”
Holland wasted no time in declaring that the Carnegie Museum would soon put Pittsburgh on the world stage. “To the fame of Pittsburgh as the seat of some of the most Cyclopean industries of the age is being added reputation as a seat of learning,” he wrote. “Under the cloud of smoke, which attests the industry of her inhabitants, and is the sign of her material prosperity, live men who find their pleasure in exploring the wonders of the material universe, and the record of their discoveries and researches will from year to year be found in the Annals and Memoirs of the great Museum which the more than princely generosity of Mr. Andrew Carneige has called into being.”
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AS BROWN WALKED INTO the American Museum after eighteen months away, he knew little of the threat that the Carnegie Museum posed to him or his institution. He had left New York as the hero who found the museum’s first dinosaur fossil; he returned to learn that his discovery had been usurped by a larger, better-preserved specimen of a newly-recognized species which the man who left him behind in Patagonia had named in honor of the one person who could outspend the American Museum to obtain fossils. It was as if all of Brown’s fears had come true at once. He was missing when it mattered the most, and now his work uncovering mammalian fossils in Patagonia seemed inconsequential, the jaunt of an unfocused boy rather than the stern focus of a professional like Hatcher. His sense that time was passing him by was heightened after he visited his family on the farm in Carbondale on the way to the prospecting fields that summer and found his father “very feeble,” as he later wrote.
Should he not return with a comparable fossil that summer, Brown feared that Osborn would use his ample funding to find someone who could. He would not be the first person discarded by Osborn once he had served a purpose, nor the last. From his perch in New York, Osborn continually rode his field prospectors to be more aggressive, casting wide nets to lay claim to many quarries rather than honing in on any one site until it was clear it contained a major find. “So I say once more prospect, prospect, prospect, prospect,” Osborn wrote in a letter to Brown years later. “Granger was digging instead of prospecting when he let Wortman slip in and find that big Diplodocus.”
Brown set off to the badlands, hoping to find a Triceratops skull that would be fit for exhibition. He landed in the broken prairie of South Dakota, about forty miles west of the small city of Edgemont. There, he tracked streams branching off the Cheyenne River, following the path of a floodplain that existed 66 million years ago through modern-day cattle ranches. Over the following weeks, he found several broken fragments of Triceratops skulls, building a small collection of their horns, yet nothing that could be useful for the museum.
In Patagonia, he had had the freedom to explore where his curiosity took him. Now, he felt the presence of other collectors, even when they were hundreds of miles away. That summer, Hatcher was in Wyoming, where he was focused on not only unearthing the remainder of the immense Diplodocus first identified the year before, but was intent on drawing on Carnegie’s limitless funds to find further prospects before rivals from the American Museum or Field Museum could. “I do not care to have you . . . say anything to your [scientific friends] about our plans at present. . . . We do not care to be trailed, and we are keeping our plans quiet,” Hatcher wrote in a frank letter to Carnegie before he headed out to the field that summer. In Colorado, meanwhile, Elmer Riggs, a curator at the Field Museum working on a dig near Grand Junction, uncovered a thigh bone on July 26, 1900, which measured six feet ten inches in length, “longer by eight inches than any limb-bone, recent or fossil, known to the scientific world,” he wrote.
After word of Riggs’s discovery leaked out, newspapers across the country ran articles about what the Boston Journal called “The Monster of All Ages.” Riggs’s work on uncovering the rest of the beast—now known as a Brachiosaurus, a giraffe-like sauropod that was one of the few dinosaurs whose forelimbs were longer than its hind legs—became so much of a local attraction that he begged the townspeople to keep it to themselves. “There are half a dozen parties collecting fossils in the west who would eagerly turn to such a new region if they had wind of it. They must not have opportunity to learn, through the press or otherwise, until the end of the season when we shall have had time to prospect the valley and take the cream of it,” he wrote. Yet the tourists kept on coming, drawn by the slow process of unburying a giant whose existence defied the imagination. “I enjoyed having visitors and took pains to explain things to everyone interested, especially those of intelligence, but when the idlers began coming just to have some place to go, and souvenir fiends began prying off pecans whenever we were not around, it became tiresome,” Riggs wrote. “The souvenir hunters mean no harm to be sure, but as one man put it . . . they would ‘steal the halo off of Christ’s crown!’ ”
Brown, by comparison, worked alone and in obscurity. He continued his hunt throughout the long summer, covering hundreds of miles on horseback without any significant bones to show for it. Even in the wilderness, he learned of his competitors’ successes in dispatches from New York that reminded him of the stakes he was facing. “Report from Pittsburgh is that Hatcher has had a wonderful season’s work, sending back three car loads of fossils, if this is true, he has probably done better than we have,” Osborn wrote. Each day of failure compounded on the last until soon Brown questioned why he was there and whether his long luck had finally run out.
Then, on the first day of September, he uncovered a nearly complete duckbilled specimen the size of a rhinoceros. “It gives me great pleasure to announce to you the discovery of a Claosaurus,” Brown wrote to Osborn, no doubt hoping that his enthusiasm would paper over the fact that it was not as large or as impressive as the discoveries that summer by Hatcher or Riggs. Marsh had discovered the first known Claosaurus specimen in Kansas in 1872, diminishing Brown’s find in comparison to the newly-unearthed monsters in Wyoming. Still, it took him a full month to extract it from the sandstone. The fact that it proved to be an exhibition-worthy specimen did little to burst Brown’s ballooning sense of disappointment. He continued to roam the prairie, looking for the elusive Triceratops skull that he knew Osborn desired. Such a find would not only reinforce his standing at the American Museum after his long absence, but would maintain the reputation and relevance of the institution at a time when it appeared to be falling behind in the face of competition from titans who saw dinosaur fossils as a chance to prove their superiority to their counterparts in New York. Failure, meanwhile, would push Brown one step closer to losing all that he had worked for. He had claimed a foothold in New York, but he knew how precarious that position was.
He remained in the field throughout the fall, undeterred by the dropping temperatures. A sudden blizzard interrupted him one day in November, yet he refused to let the seasons hold sway. Osborn, normally content to benefit from the labor of others, told Brown that it was time to return to New York. “I have been fearing the snow storms would overtake you but I congratulate you upon the continued success of your work. . . . I think you had better pack up and come in as soon as you can.”
Still, Brown soldiered on. The obstacles only mounted. One morning, he woke up to discover that his team of horses had escaped from camp to look for warmth, forcing him to search for five days on foot before he finally found them fifty miles away. Later, when he began hauling some of his finds out from the field, his wooden wagon broke under the strain of two tons of fossils, collapsing the load but fortunately not breaking any of the bones in the process. “I got out of the wreck with only a few bruises,” Brown later wrote. Thanksgiving passed, and then Christmas, and then New Year’s, and yet Brown searched on.
A deep freeze in early January finally convinced Brown to return to New York. As the wind whipped around him, he loaded thirty boxes of fossils into a train car of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When some of the pieces of rock proved too large to fit inside, he helped railroad workers remove parts of the railcar’s door to make room. As the train trundled toward New York, Brown could not help but console himself with the thought that his luck would return in the spring and bring him to the elusive Triceratops skull. While he had gathered several important specimens over the extended prospecting season that had just passed, he had no trophies he could point to that would remind himself—and Osborn—of his value. He had let himself down in the field for the first time in his life, and he hoped that it would be the last.