Chapter Ten
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, BARNUM BROWN DID not know where he belonged. As a child, the answer had always been simple: anywhere but on the farm. He spent his time at college obsessed with rising above the life expected of him, willing himself to find fossils that would open a path beyond Kansas and into the wider world. Now, having secured a toehold on his dream only to fail to keep up with a rival at a crucial moment, some of the first pangs of doubt began to creep into his conception of himself, taking over the space once occupied by his desire to be more than he was.
He had every reason to feel cast aside. At the start of the 1901 field season, Brown looked forward to returning to South Dakota, where he planned to redeem himself through the discovery of a Triceratops skull. Osborn, however, ordered him to Flagstaff, Arizona, to assist an expedition headed by the Smithsonian Institution that was searching for fossilized pine cones near the Grand Canyon (“great quantities of fossil wood” were available, Brown later wrote in a letter to Osborn, not quite concealing his lack of excitement at searching for something plentiful while far from the action). For dinosaurs, Osborn turned instead to George Reber Wieland, who had recently completed his doctorate at Yale. Wieland had once caught Marsh’s attention after he uncovered a complete skeleton of Archelon ischyros, which at fifteen feet long was the largest turtle ever known to exist. He worked at the Peabody alongside Marsh until the professor’s death in 1899, and now seemed in the best position to take over his mantle.
A short man with a booming voice and an infectious sense of purpose, Wieland easily wore the qualities Brown lacked: an Ivy League degree, a comfort with his status that allowed him to interact with Osborn on an equal level, and an ability to convince himself and everyone around him of his worth even when evidence was lacking. Osborn was so taken with Wieland that he readily accepted his steep demand for a salary of $150 per month, a rate nearly double what he paid more experienced collectors such as Granger. “I regret to tell you how important the financial side is for me,” Wieland wrote to Osborn before agreeing to work for the American Museum that summer. “I wish you could feel disposed to name some better sum as wages, for I expect direct results.” To justify his rate, he hinted that he had a lead on a Barosaurus, a plant-eating sauropod that can be distinguished from the more common Diplodocus by its longer neck and shorter tail, though no one has ever found its skull. Osborn placed Wieland in charge of the museum’s dinosaur expeditions that summer, demoting field collectors who had been with the American Museum for several summers. “[Wieland] is very confident of success . . . you will therefore refer matters to him,” Osborn wrote to Granger, adding that Wieland “seems to be a thoroughly nice fellow and I do not anticipate any friction.” The new leadership in the field reflected Osborn’s unflinching demand that his prospectors find specimens that surpassed those collected by the Carnegie and Field museums, restoring the American Museum—and by extension, his own reputation—to its rightful place atop its competitors.
Wieland took charge of a party that reached the village of Hulett in northeastern Wyoming on May 15. There, he established a makeshift camp on the west side of Devils Tower, a nearly vertical shaft of igneous rock that rises 867 feet above the surrounding forest of ponderosa pines and the banks of the nearby Belle Fourche River. The picturesque location was once the seabed of a shallow inland sea that began retreating 195 million years ago, leaving behind bands of dark red sandstone, maroon siltstone and gray-green shale that in certain areas date to the Jurassic period, some 135 million years ago. Approximately 50 million years ago, an immense shaft of magma—whether coming from a sudden explosion of a volcano or the slow result of millions of years of erosion—pushed up through the rock layers, leaving Devils Tower behind. Though it is built of hard rock, the shaft of the Tower is marked by long columns of what look like folds, leaving the impression that it is a giant drip castle made by a child on a sandy beach. Sacred to Plains Indians tribes, the formation was given its current name when Colonel Richard Dodge, a U.S. Army commander in charge of an 1875 military expedition, decided to translate what “the Indians call . . . ‘Bad God’s Tower,’ ” he wrote.
Wieland left New York having convinced Osborn that an impressive dinosaur specimen would be in his hands by the end of the summer. Yet over his first days in Wyoming, his bluster ran into the reality of the wilderness. The party found nothing while surveying the immediate vicinity of Devils Tower, undercutting Wieland’s theory that the shaft of rock would contain fossilized sediment from several different ages and leave plentiful fossils exposed. He expanded the search more than twenty miles downriver, without meeting any success. The grind of digging and surveying and climbing over dangerous terrain only to come up empty-handed began to wear on the team. Each day that ended the same way let a little more air out of the bubble of inevitability that Wieland’s boasts had built around himself. One Sunday in camp, a field collector killed a rattlesnake with his boot heel and saved its skin, making it the first and only specimen the expedition collected.
After two weeks, Wieland turned the party around and built an elaborate camp near the base of Devils Tower in preparation for a visit by Osborn, who was touring all the museum’s fossil digs that summer from the luxurious comfort of a private Pullman car complete with a personal attendant and chef, which was a gift from the president of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. He had to leave them all behind to reach Hulett, however, which at the turn of the twentieth century remained too remote for modern travel. In Deadwood, South Dakota, Osborn boarded a train he called “as primitive . . . as you ever saw” to head deeper into Wyoming. At the end of the line, he boarded a boxy stagecoach that jostled and bumped as it took him the remaining thirty miles over the Black Hills. Osborn rarely braved such conditions. The fact that he was willing to travel to Devils Tower without the assurance that a valuable dinosaur had been located underscored not only his trust in Wieland, but his increasing desperation. “I am greatly interested in this camp for upon its success depends a large measure of our record for the season,” Osborn wrote in a letter to his wife.
Wieland was not in camp when he arrived, the sort of unintentional slight that Osborn did not easily forget. Once Wieland returned, he hurried to take Osborn on a tour of what he had identified as potential quarry sites, trying to paint with words a more successful picture than the lack of fossils revealed. Each spot was overgrown with trees and grass, showing no evidence that Wieland had blasted or begun stripping off the top layers of soil and rock. Osborn, who had never conducted a dig on his own yet had toured enough of them to know what he should be looking at, grew enraged at the lack of progress. In full view of the members of the expedition, Osborn warned Wieland that he was not only wasting his valuable time, but putting the future of the American Museum in doubt with a wasteful expedition that had nothing to show for its great expense. Stung by the criticism, Wieland offered to resign on the spot. Osborn refused, unwilling to accept failure. He spent another night in camp, hoping for a miracle, before deciding that he had had enough. He suffered another five-hour stagecoach ride through a driving rainstorm to the nearest train station. Once there, he canceled the remaining stops on his tour of the West and headed immediately back to the East Coast, where fewer bad surprises lurked.
Sitting in his private Pullman car, Osborn searched for a way to fill a hole that seemed to get deeper by the day. The Carnegie Museum had but one multimillionaire to please; he had all of New York’s aristocracy. That year, John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil monopolized the oil business in the United States and made him the wealthiest person in the nation’s history, had been elected a patron of the museum. Alongside him were the most influential and powerful men in the country, including railroad magnate George Foster Peabody, Archer Huntington—the adopted son of Collis Huntington, who had helped build the first transcontinental railroad and loomed as one of the most important figures in California—and Jacob Schiff, one of the most influential bankers of his era.
All wanted something to show for their money, a prize that proved the institution they had chosen to support was truly the best in the world. That spring, the museum’s Department of Mineralogy opened a new exhibit made possible by Osborn’s uncle J. P. Morgan, which included a stunning display of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. Tiffany & Co. had originally collected and prepared the stones for the Paris World’s Fair, helping to cement its reputation as the premier jeweler in America, if not the world. Once the fair was over, Morgan purchased the lot for the museum, a transaction he found far more palatable than funding another summer of dinosaur hunts that might turn up nothing. While few things could elicit the same awestruck response from the public as dinosaurs, the difficulty of finding huge bones opened the door to the question whether it was reasonable to assume that there were other specimens out there waiting to be discovered. Morgan, for all his millions of dollars in donations, had yet to see a complete dinosaur mount displayed on the museum’s floor. Another year or two without results threatened to plant doubt in the minds of donors that dinosaur digs were a fool’s errand, a search for something too strange and obscure to be worthy of serious attention.
With each day that passed, Osborn felt his place slipping further in the hierarchy of the museum. That year’s annual report did not mention his Department of Vertebrate Paleontology until the twenty-sixth page, putting it behind updates on the museum’s search for signs of ancient human life in New Jersey and news of a gift of more than one thousand butterflies to add to its permanent collection. When the report finally did turn to his department, it seemed to further broadcast his anxiety. “Professor Osborn not only contributed largely to the maintenance of field expeditions, as shown in the Treasurer’s Report, but also spent his entire salary in promoting the work of his department,” the report noted, revealing that Osborn had once again resorted to tapping his family’s money in order to bolster his position. What was worse, there was little promise that things would turn around soon. While other museums were readying their displays of giant dinosaur bones, Osborn could only announce that his department was finishing a painted mural of ancient horses to display in the year ahead.
The train rattled east, bringing Osborn back to face the judgment of the only people he felt mattered. It would still be at least a year or two before the Diplodocus fossil discovered by Brown would be mounted for exhibit, and he had nothing to fill the gap. Over the long hours alone, he went over his options. It was clear that Wieland was not the answer he had been looking for. (Indeed, that summer marked one of the last times that Wieland would venture into the field to search for dinosaur fossils; after his falling-out with Osborn, he eventually returned to Yale and established a long career in the lower-stakes world of paleobotany, focusing his research on the palmlike plants known as cycads.) In his place, Osborn turned to William Reed, who remained a one-man marketplace for fossils after his deteriorating relationship with Holland prompted him to quit the Carnegie. “Still I am out for bones,” the aging prospector wrote in a letter to Osborn that summer. “I have had good luck so far and found two things that I think you may want . . . everything I get is for sale.” Osborn decided to take him up on the offer, and soon wrote to Wieland to inform him that his ill-fated Wyoming expedition was over. “I fear the Black Hills is a failure. . . . We have had poor luck and must make the best of a bad situation,” he wrote.
He ordered Granger to leave Devils Tower and ride three hundred miles south to Como Bluff, where he was to inspect Reed’s quarry and report back on its condition and possible worth. A few weeks later, Granger wrote with word that the site contained “first class” bones of an Allosaurus and a Stegosaurus that were still embedded in the rock, along with a few outcroppings of indeterminate fossils that suggested the presence of others that would be revealed with more effort. “There might be some excellent things here,” he wrote—a clear break from his weeks alongside Wieland, which had yielded nothing more exciting than a skull of a Brontosaurus that proved unsuitable for exhibition because of damage caused by gophers burrowing beneath it.
Osborn soon approved four hundred dollars to buy the quarry, though it did not salve his wounded ego. Nothing the American Museum had found compared with the Diplodocus now in the possession of the Carnegie Museum. Even its scientific name, Diplodocus carnegii, reminded Osborn of his failure. He wanted nothing more than to bring Hatcher over to the American Museum and have him repeat his past successes. Perhaps then Osborn would be in a position to name a new species after his uncle J. P. Morgan, presenting his benefactor with an immortal gift that no material wealth could match. He yearned to blaze a trail in science, to bring honor to the family name. Instead, he was left retreading the work of others, dependent on a mercenary for fossils that summer. But, after paying Wieland’s exorbitant fee, Osborn was not in a position to dangle enough money in front of Hatcher to pry him away from the Carnegie.
His hope was that he could wait and allow Hatcher’s caustic personality to make his tenure at the Carnegie Museum a short one. Over the winter and spring, the veteran collector spent his first prolonged time in Holland’s company as he familiarized himself with the Carnegie’s collection and its exhibition plans. The two men—both single-minded in their pursuits, both convinced that they were intellectually superior to the other—clashed almost immediately, in person and in public. Hatcher took to writing scientific articles that focused on small errors in Holland’s latest works, and was not shy in letting him know of his diminished opinion. “I am also much affected by the further abuse you saw fit to administer on Nov. 28, when you called me a jack-ass and a d——d fool,” Hatcher wrote to Holland in a monthly progress report. “Such language, it seems to me, cannot but tend to destroy the harmony, enthusiasm & interest so essential to the welfare of the institution.”
Though his own personality was likely to inflame Hatcher even more, Osborn believed he could convince the collector to trade one millionaire for another and come to the American Museum the following year. That would end all of these false starts, and finally bring in the gargantuan specimens that Osborn had grown to view as evidence of his own self-worth. He made a point of meeting with Hatcher in late summer, and came away hopeful that his problems would be solved. “I . . . look forward with great relief to next year when Hatcher can do the working and the planning for these expeditions,” Osborn wrote in a letter to his wife. “It will be a grand thing getting him in the [American] Museum—he is anxious to come and I think we will get on smoothly.”
Until then, he had to make do. To calm his sense that he was falling further behind, he sent Brown on small scouting missions late in the summer to investigate some of the dozens of unsolicited tips that the museum received each year. A high school principal named Willis T. Lee, who met Osborn in Wyoming during the Fossil Fields Expedition, wrote to tell him that he knew of a Jurassic outcrop on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, not far from his hometown of Trinidad, Colorado. Brown spent four days searching along the Animas River and came away with scattered bones but nothing significant enough to justify a full expedition. Though happy to at least be back in the dinosaur hunt after half a season searching for prehistoric wood, Brown yearned for a chance at finding the giant fossils that would redeem him. The Brachiosaurus that the Field Museum was still in the process of excavating was in Colorado, increasing the chances that there would be other impressive finds in nearby fossil beds. Brown longed to follow his instinct and explore rather than hunt down another dead-end report from a rancher who had likely confused a dinosaur fossil with the remains of a steer, yet felt he could only hint at it. “I don’t know Riggs’s exact locality,” Brown wrote to Osborn. “It must be rich from the newspaper stories. I wish we might have a show at it.”
Neither Brown nor Osborn knew at the time that the quarry, and indeed Riggs himself, would soon be available. The Field Museum was in the process of cutting its funding for dinosaur collecting in favor of geology, the preferred field of the museum’s director. Riggs’s dinosaur, which was at the time the largest specimen ever found, would stand as the last major dinosaur addition to its collection until nearly the end of the twentieth century. Paleontologists working at the museum protested the cuts to no avail, unable to convince their administrators that the coming era of mounted dinosaur displays would forever change how the public interacted with science and the popularity of natural history museums as a whole. “The authorities of the . . . Museum do not seem to appreciate the fact, for fact it is, that paleontology is becoming the chief interest in nearly all the great museums of the world - its absence will one day be greatly regretted,” wrote Williston, Brown’s one-time professor, who was collecting for the Field museum that season.
Osborn did not bite at Brown’s unspoken request to hunt for a trophy specimen of his own. Instead, he ordered Brown to remain in eastern Colorado and collect the fossils of prehistoric mammals. Brown was not in a position to argue, so he directed his ambition back into his work. He soon found the skull of a three-toed precursor of modern horses known as a Protohippus, as well as impressive full skeletons of a prehistoric antelope and an extinct horse known as Hypohippus, which was distinguished by its long neck and short legs. (Both specimens remain on display in the American Museum.) His search continued until the end of August, when he shipped his finds to New York and began his own trip back to the East Coast. A brief visit to the family farm in Carbondale on the way fueled his ambition for another year in New York and hopefully another return to the field after two long, hot summers of disappointment.
Osborn, meanwhile, fell further into envy. It “has been a very costly season—with many disappointments,” he wrote in a letter that September. If only 1902 would bring a turn in his luck.