Chapter Eleven
OSBORN SAT IN HIS OFFICE AS THE LOW WINTER SUN CAST long shadows over Manhattan. Horses pulling buggies clomped along the snow-dusted street outside his window, while men in black bowler hats walked arm in arm through Central Park with women ornamented by wide-brimmed hats crowned with feathers and roses. From his chair, Osborn could look at a calendar reading January 1902, and wonder what the new year would bring. He could faintly hear the sounds of construction coming from the forest of upscale apartment buildings growing across the Upper West Side in anticipation of the completion of the subway system, two years away. The coming era of luxury was epitomized by the twelve-story Dorilton, opening later that spring at the corner of Seventy-First Street and Broadway, whose grand scale and lavish ornamentation led the Architectural Record to call it an “aberration.” The building boasted separate servant and passenger elevators, filtered water, and a parking space for owners who possessed an automobile, a novel invention which was only then starting to appear on the city’s streets. (One of Manhattan’s first stand-alone “automobile stables”—a term that would soon give way to the modern “garage”—opened on East Seventy-Fifth Street that year, prompting a magazine called The Horseless Age to marvel “we have never heard of any [stables] being built solely for the use of automobiles.”) Further down Broadway, workers were putting the final touches on the Flatiron Building rising above Madison Square Park, its triangular frame prompting the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to say that “it appeared to be moving towards me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of a new America in the making.”
History felt like it was speeding up, bringing in an era when technology and science would dominate daily life. In the rush of the new century, the traditions of the past seemed to fall one by one to a new form of meritocracy built upon money, ushering in a time when wit and chance mattered more than connections. It was a time when the status enjoyed by the son of a railroad baron suddenly felt diminished, as the churn of the economy made past glories seem as inconsequential as a week-old newspaper.
While the world changed around him, Henry Osborn rested his future on dinosaur fossils, intent on building a collection of trophies that would stand as a monument to the millionaires who funded the American Museum—and reflect some of their glories back on himself. Without dinosaurs, the museum was likely to limp along in relative obscurity, becoming a relic as outdated and ignored as some of the dusty items on its shelves. Fewer than 400,000 visitors—the majority of them schoolchildren, who did not pay an entrance fee—walked through its doors that year, a number equal to less than 10 percent of the city’s population. Unless Osborn could find the sort of gigantic fossil that would draw paying crowds, the museum was on a path to a slow, stale death, forever dependent on the whims of the very rich for its survival. “In the absence of any large income, we have been obliged to depend upon the liberality of friends for the development of our collections; and this will of necessity continue until our endowment is largely increased,” its annual report warned that year.
Again, Osborn stretched for something to brag about to prove his worth. “Progress has been made in rearranging the collections so as to make them more intelligible to the public,” he wrote in the annual report, straining for relevancy. “New specimens of interest have been placed in the center of the hall, and attention is called to them by explanatory labels, diagrams and models.”
As to actual dinosaur fossils, the museum floor still held none. The partial Diplodocus that Brown had found was not yet fully prepared for exhibition. This process would repeat itself many times over Osborn’s career at the museum: one of his collectors would bring in something momentous, yet the slow and exacting work of fully restoring the fossils and preparing them for a lifelike display would be drawn out over a span of years. Marsh, for all of his thirst for recognition, had found the chore of building armatures and restoring fossils too difficult to attempt—one reason, perhaps, why he disparaged those who mounted specimens in realistic poses. Osborn knew that the path forward was through such displays, yet he felt time ticking away with no guarantee that he would last long enough in his position to be there when the specimens were finally finished. In place of the bones still stuck in the back rooms and laboratories of the American Museum, Osborn convinced the trustees to purchase Cope’s wide-ranging collection, which contained not only dinosaur fossils but those of prehistoric mammals and plant life as well.
When he felt cornered, Osborn tended to become more scathing and impetuous until he felt he had resumed his rightful place of superiority. Never a warm man, he turned colder as Hatcher continued to scorn his advances and poured salt in the wound with frequent friendly letters giving updates on his successes at the Carnegie. As Osborn planned for the summer prospecting season, he composed letters to his stable of collectors demanding that they ask more of themselves. “I hope you will push your work this summer with great energy and persistence, and accomplish fine results,” he wrote to Granger. “Put as much heart into it as you can, because that is the direct road to success in everything; and I have had the feeling during this last year that you have not put quite enough of this element into your work.” In a letter to Brown, he subtly highlighted the fact that, though he had been to Patagonia and back in the meantime, he had not found a significant dinosaur fossil since his first summer working with Wortman in Wyoming for the American Museum. “There is every reason to think that by careful inquiry among the natives, by making friends where you can, and by energetic prospecting, you may find something of real value,” he wrote.
He knew Granger would take the slights without question; Brown, he recognized, was a wild card, driven by the same need for validation as himself. He hastened to add that should Brown find something, he should be prepared to stay quiet about it. “If you are striking it rich we will not say very much about it, because if we do we shall probably have some companion next year. I think that our friends in other Museums do not hesitate to poach on our preserves,” he wrote.
He decided to send Brown once again on a mission for a Triceratops. The destination would be Montana, a state that was not yet known to hold abundant fossil beds. Most expeditions to date had centered on the proven fields of Wyoming, the Dakotas and Colorado, with each newly-discovered fossil bed usually lying within the same constellation as a previously-known site. Osborn directed Brown elsewhere largely on account of William T. Hornaday, the founding director of what is now known as the Bronx Zoo. Hornaday had explored Montana the previous summer with a photographer, intent on documenting the lives of blacktail deer in what would later be recognized as one of the first steps of the burgeoning conservation movement in America. In time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would direct the National Park Service to name a mountain peak in Yellowstone National Park after him, in honor of his role in preserving the American bison from extinction. Yet, like other scientists of his generation, Hornaday could not reconcile his appreciation of the wondrous variety of the natural world with the fact that non-European humans lived in it, and remained unapologetically racist—once dismissing the controversy over his decision to include Ota Benga in the zoo’s Monkey House with the words, “When the history of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.”
While traveling through Montana in 1901, Hornaday found himself in need of shelter and happened upon a friendly settler named Max Seiber, who offered him a room for the night. One evening became several, and Seiber showed Hornaday and his photographer around his vast ranch. He took Hornaday to “a spot nearby where he had found the badly weathered remains of what once had been a fossil skull, as large as the skull of a half-grown elephant . . . the skull was so badly weathered that nothing could be made of it, but near it lay several fragments of ribs in a fair state of preservation,” Hornaday wrote. When he returned to New York, Hornaday showed the photographs of the find to Osborn and Brown, who instantly identified them as the remains of the elusive Triceratops. The only problem was that Hornaday could not remember where exactly Seiber lived, nor did he have any means of contacting him.
With a map of Montana and Hornaday’s photographs to go by, Brown headed west, trying to find the location of the specimen and perhaps some of his lost self-confidence at the same time. Unlike the previous summer, which he had spent mostly in Arizona, he was once again on his own and free to follow his wits. He needed them. Montana stood as the largest haystack he had yet to search for a single fossil, an expanse stretching slightly more than 147,000 square miles over an area larger than Japan and nearly 60 percent larger than Great Britain. He knew that the Triceratops skull was there somewhere, and had the photographs to prove it. The hard part was retracing Hornaday’s expedition with few clues to go by. “It will not, however, be quite so easy to find it on the ground!” Hornaday warned in a letter that sat in Brown’s bag as he left New York on a train that once again took him toward the unknown. “But you will manage that.”
✢✢✢✢
NOT SINCE PATAGONIA HAD BROWN seen a place as empty as this. Montana joined the Union as the forty-first state in 1889, and when Brown reached it thirteen years later it had more livestock than people. Some six million sheep grazed on its plains, a population imbalance great enough to give each one of the state’s human occupants a personal herd of twenty-five should they want it. Brown rode the train as far as Miles City, a small settlement that was the doorway to his ultimate goal: the Hell Creek Formation, a series of ragged red and gray ravines and stark badlands that were once a coastal plain but had dried out to become a sun-bleached wilderness. Though it had been sparsely explored by prospectors, the few relics collected from the region had proven to be of extraordinary size and quality. If Hornaday truly had come across a well-preserved Triceratops skull in Montana, then Hell Creek would be the most promising place to start.
Of all the inhospitable places that Brown’s quest for dinosaurs had taken him, this was the most unforgiving. Hell itself would have been an improvement. The afternoon sun broiled everything in sight, while a haze of gritty dust perpetually hung in the air and choked the lungs of anyone foolish enough to try to breathe without a bandana covering their face. When it wasn’t too hot and dry, it was too wet and windy. Sudden, violent thunderstorms boomed through the wide skies, unleashing a flurry of hail, tornadoes and floods that dared a person to survive. If the land didn’t get you, then the animals would. Twisting, snarling ravines lurched across the badlands, hiding black bears, bison and rattlesnakes among outcroppings of rocks and fossils that date back more than 70 million years. In a land so barren, there was no hope of help if things went wrong.
The first known white explorers reached the region ninety-eight years before Brown. The Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, stumbled into the badlands in 1804 while following the path of the Missouri River in the hope that it would lead them to the Pacific. The place unnerved them like few others they encountered on their long journey across the continent, haunted by a sense of menace that could not be explained merely by the realization that they were surrounded by untold numbers of dangerous animals. They wanted nothing more than to leave. “I sometimes wonder that some of our canoes or perogues [sic] are not swallowed up by means of these immence [sic] masses of earth which are eternally precipitating themselves into the river; we have had many hair breadth escapes from them but providence seems so to have ordered it that we have as yet sustained no loss in consequence of them,” Lewis wrote in a journal entry on May 11, 1805.
When they could take a moment away from focusing on their own survival, they could not help but notice the strange rocks in the shape of bones that were jutting out of the earth. Officially, they were on an 8,000-mile expedition meant to find a waterway across the country, establish trade with the indigenous inhabitants and exert sovereignty over an area stretching from modern-day Louisiana to Montana, which the United States had purchased from France. Yet Thomas Jefferson, then the nation’s president, requested that they also keep their eyes out for a mastodon, an elephantlike creature that scientists now know became extinct roughly ten thousand years ago but which Jefferson believed might still be roaming the far side of the continent. He had become intrigued by fossilized mastodon teeth discovered at a place known as Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, which Cuvier, the French naturalist, had highlighted as evidence that some species die out and disappear from the Earth. Though he had no religious objections to Cuvier’s theory, Jefferson was not fully convinced that such a thing as extinction was possible in a rational, ordered universe. “In fine, the bones exist,” he wrote. “Therefore the animal has existed. The movements of nature are in a never-ending circle.” Following his curiosity, Jefferson turned to excavation and unearthed the remains of a “large lion-like creature” that he called Megalonyx—later identified as a giant ground sloth—in New Jersey and Virginia. No such thing still existed on the eastern seaboard; but then again, he reasoned, North America was a large place, and perhaps the Megalonyx and the mastodon had simply moved west before American colonists arrived.
Though the concept of a dinosaur did not yet exist, Lewis and Clark dutifully searched the landscape for intriguing stones or fossils and sent samples back to the White House. Jefferson soon opened a box containing a sampling of fish and mammal bones from Kentucky. Somewhere between present-day Sioux City, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska, Lewis and Clark came across “a petrified Jawbone of a fish or some other animal,” a discovery which grew more perplexing as it became clear that they were not near an ocean. Indeed, the more desolate the region, the more likely it was to contain the bones of what looked to be aquatic life. In present-day South Dakota, they discovered the ribs, teeth and backbone of a creature that stretched 45 feet long. Not knowing what else it could be, they deemed it a large fish; scientists now believe that the specimen was likely the remains of a plesiosaur, a marine reptile that lived alongside dinosaurs in the Mesozoic Era.
The Corps of Discovery were likely the first white explorers to find dinosaur fossils in the western half of the United States, though they did not know it. On their way back from the Pacific, they stopped at a 150-foot-tall block of rock they named Pompey’s Tower, in honor of the eighteen-month-old son of Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman born in present-day Idaho who acted as a guide and interpreter for the Corps as it traveled across the continent. On the same day that he carved his name into the rock—now known as Pompey’s Pillar—Clark noted in a journal entry full of creative spellings that he “employed himself in getting pieces of the rib of a fish which was Semented within the face of the rock this rib is about 3 inchs in Secumpherance about the middle. . . . I have Several peces of this rib the bone is neither decayed nor petrified but very rotten. The part which I could not get out may be Seen, it is about 6 or 7 Miles below Pompey’s Tower . . . about 20 feet above the water.” Perhaps with the memory of a whale carcass he had viewed on the Pacific Coast fresh in his mind, Clark reasoned that the bones were those of a similar sea creature worn away over the centuries. Modern-day paleontologists believe that he was describing a Hadrosaurus, a duckbilled dinosaur that is among the more common specimens in the area.
By the time Brown reached the Hell Creek region nine decades later, dinosaur fossils were becoming a well-known and increasingly profitable part of the landscape, though it had yet to see the same sort of frenzied activity as the fossil beds of Wyoming. “Yesterday I heard of another specimen having been found within five miles of Forsyth,” he wrote in a letter to Osborn in June 1902, shortly after he reached Miles City. “I rode out [to find] . . . the skeleton having been destroyed by souvenir hunters. It was a Claosaurus”—the same species of duckbilled herbivore that Brown had found the previous season without much excitement. Its skull and vertebrae were “sold to the Smithsonian Institute [sic] about four years ago. It seems a Baptist Sunday School teacher had stolen the skull and sold it,” he added.
Brown continued his search and within a matter of weeks managed to find the ranch where Hornaday had snapped pictures of what appeared to be a Triceratops skull. Upon close inspection of the bones, however, he realized that it was not a Triceratops at all, but the broken remains of a mosasaur, a giant predatory marine reptile that, like modern snakes, had two rows of teeth in its upper jaw to prevent prey from escaping. Fearing that another summer would end with him returning empty-handed, Brown resolved to stay in Hell Creek until he found something that would ensure his future with the museum. He bought three horses, a wagon full of equipment and enough food to feed a small expedition party. He was soon joined by Richard Swann Lull, a doctoral student of Osborn’s at Columbia University, and a young volunteer named Phillip Brooks.
Tall, athletic and pompous, Lull was six years older than Brown and outranked him in terms of academic achievement, yet Brown had more field experience and knew how to survive in the harshest conditions. Still, Brown did not wear his higher status well. It was his first time heading a group expedition for the museum, and the unfamiliar managerial tasks weighed on him after the freedom of solitude he had enjoyed in Patagonia and Colorado. Even little things tripped him up. He wrote constant updates to Osborn but often neglected to send them, confessing in one dispatch that he had “discovered the letter still in my pocket yesterday so I will try a new one.” There was so much to do, and so many things that could go wrong—not only for him, but for the museum, which desperately needed some good news from the field.
In early July, Brown’s party arrived in the hamlet of Jordan, a hundred miles northwest of Miles City, a roughly five-day wagon ride that felt far greater. Founded three years earlier by a hunter named Arthur Jordan, it had the grim distinction of being located farther from a railroad station than any other settlement in the country. Its lone civic building was a post office built out of logs; its most frequented was a saloon that kept its beer in the cellar, providing the only cold drink within a hundred miles. In such a lawless, isolated and dangerous place, the arrival of men from New York City was a diversion that could not go unrecognized. “Every shady character that could not stand the spotlight of civilization drifted in and around the new town, always ready to have fun or start trouble, and a few of them desired to pick on the scientists and their men,” Arthur Jordan wrote in his autobiography. “Only once did they annoy Professor Lull when he came in town to get his mail. . . . They ran for their rifles and began to throw lead all about him. The fellow made his team do their best in going over the hill and away from those drunken, demented morons.”
Brown kept the expedition team moving before the citizens of Jordan had a chance to improve their aim or regain their sobriety, and in the following days they made camp on the banks of Hell Creek. He took a horse and went on solitary scouting trips through the ravines and foothills, trying to get a sense of how the land was shaped and where promising layers of stone might lie. Brown had a talent for surviving in nearly any conditions, but was still taken aback by the difficulty of the terrain. “The country greatly resembles Lance Creek in Wyoming along the breaks but the main canyons are certainly bad lands, almost impossible lands I might say,” he wrote in a letter.
Even so, he could not let up. In one of the most hostile places on Earth, the demands of New York found a way to reach him. A letter from Osborn arrived on July 25, admonishing him for the wasted freight charges and labor after a shipment of fossils he had collected earlier that summer arrived at the American Museum in a broken heap due to the rough transport. “You will be very much disappointed to learn that the Dinosaur which you collected with so much care and labor has proved almost valueless. . . . It will perhaps yield two or three bones of value,” Osborn wrote. “The skull proves to be entirely crushed and unrecognizable. This seems to warn us that we should certainly examine material a little more carefully in the field. . . . I know you sent the specimen to us after the best possible methods; but it should have received a more careful examination.”
As the last days of July ticked away, Brown found himself torn. The party uncovered a Triceratops skull that was in decent condition, though its horns were missing. With enough work, it could be “a fine exhibition specimen,” he wrote to Osborn, knowing that would begin to make up for the crushed fossil now sitting in the museum in New York. If anything, the skull would buy him at least one more year of employment. But he wanted more. Never one to be satisfied with what he had in hand, Brown felt compelled to brave another ravine, search another hillside, climb over the side of another cliff if doing so meant that he would come closer to a specimen that would put the trajectory of his life back on its upward tracks. As the temperature soared above 100 degrees, Brown worked without stopping, the contours of his face slowly disappearing behind accumulated layers of grime and dust. Since childhood he had acted as if he had an unspoken trust that the universe would bend in his favor when he needed it. Each morning he stepped out of his tent seemed to be another plea that his luck would return.
As July faded into August, Brown attacked a sandstone hill he called Sheba Mountain with a plow and scraper, determined to satisfy his curiosity about what lay beneath. Its particular composition of stone and its location near what was once an inland sea fit the profile of a promising fossil bed. Once Brown began to dig, however, the rock proved incredibly hard, seemingly impervious to any blade. Unable to let it alone, he sent an assistant to Miles City to come back with enough dynamite to blow off all the hillside above what he hoped would be the bone layer. Brown was not in the habit of blasting away at every spot that gave him trouble, but this time—whether due to frustration, intrigue or a combination of the two—he had to know what secret the Earth was protecting with such ferocity. He laid the explosives, set the timer and waited. The blast echoed among the ravines of the badlands, reverberating like distant thunder. A dark cloud of dust and dirt hung in the air, so thick that he could taste sand on his tongue. Once the smoke cleared, he edged closer to the lip of the quarry, staring into the deep hole he had created. It was nothing less than a time machine, bridging the 60-million-year gap between the age of the dinosaurs and our own. As he looked down into the pit, Brown took in a shape that no human being had ever laid eyes on. “Quarry No. 1 contains the femur, pubes, [partial] humerus, three vertebrae, and two undetermined bones of a large Carnivorous Dinosaur not described by Marsh,” Brown wrote in a letter that evening to Osborn. “I have never seen anything like it.”
It was as if a child’s conception of a monster had become real and was laid down in stone. Though most of its skull and tail were missing, everything about the beast seemed designed to overwhelm the human mind: its hips, nearly 13 feet above the ground, would later be found to power legs that ran at speeds greater than 10 miles per hour; its immense jaws measured over four feet in length and could exert as much pressure as the weight of three modern cars, instantly exploding the bones of its prey; its serrated teeth, the longest of any known dinosaur, could dig through the thick skin of a Triceratops and rip out five hundred pounds of flesh in one bite. In time, the creature would become perhaps the most recognizable animal the world has ever seen, its deadly silhouette and Latin name familiar even to those with no interest in dinosaurs or science. Yet in that moment in the hot August sun, the animal that would soon take the name of Tyrannosaurus rex was entirely new—an unmistakable set of clues that the history of life was more varied and surreal than anyone had imagined.
Brown knew that he was suddenly in a race against time. He had found the only specimen of a creature previously unknown to science, and there was no telling if he or anyone else would ever find another. With less than two months before the broiling landscape would become too cold to allow work to continue, Brown scrambled to uncover as much of the fossil as possible. A September snowstorm was not out of the question, which could mean that the dinosaur might have to be abandoned over the long winter and spring—enough time that someone from Jordan could pick up on rumors of its discovery and try to sell it themselves, or, even worse, destroy it through carelessness.
Brown rode his men hard, his natural cool reserve vanishing under the demands of an unrelenting taskmaster. The small general store in Jordan soon ran out of lumber and plaster, the two supplies most essential in extracting a gigantic fossil out of the ground without damaging it. With no other choice, Brown turned to dynamite, taking the risk that the surrounding rock layer was dense enough that he would not accidentally blow up the fossil before he could share it with the world. “The bones are separated by two or three feet of soft sand usually and each bone is surrounded by the hardest blue sandstone I ever tried to work in the form of concretions,” he wrote to Osborn in September, after nearly a month of nonstop digging and prying. Each day, more of the animal was revealed, like the wrapping paper of a gift being removed inch by inch.
Finally, in October, Brown pulled the last section of the skeleton free. The small team of horses strained under the load, pulling the haul to Miles City in shifts, eventually moving more than fifteen thousand pounds of bones to a boxcar that Osborn had arranged for them. As the first snow of winter fell, Brown watched as nineteen crates of fossils were loaded into the boxcar, a collection that included not only the new carnivorous dinosaur, but also the skeletons of a crocodile-like Champsosaurus and a Triceratops—both of which still stand on the floor of the American Museum.
Though he knew that its contents were priceless, he did not accompany the train east. A prospector at heart, he could not leave Montana without poking his head around for at least a few days more. He soon walked into the lobby of the Billings State Bank on a small errand and, while waiting in line, noticed a display case containing the oversized limb bone of a dinosaur. A brief talk with the bank’s manager revealed where the fossil had come from, and Brown spent the final days of the year camped on the banks of Beavers Creek searching for the remainder of the specimen.
When the train carrying the crates from Jordan reached New York, Osborn did not realize what he had. It would be two years before museum technicians fully cleaned and prepared the skeleton of the T. rex, removing each piece from the matrix of stone and arranging them all in a fully articulated skeleton. Until then, what in time would become the most famous dinosaur in the world looked no different from every other fossil Brown had found, encased in a cocoon of white plaster with the letters AMNH painted in black on its side.
With nothing to quell the sense that he was losing the fossil race, Osborn remained preoccupied with the Carnegie Museum and its Diplodocus, unable to see the magnitude of what Brown had discovered. “I think we have the finest carnivorous Dinosaur material in the world; but I envy the Carnegie Museum their complete skeletons. Mr. Hatcher writes me that they have found a magnificent Diplodocus which seems to be almost perfect,” he wrote in a letter at the end of the prospecting season. “We are certainly not holding our own . . . both Carnegie and Chicago have done better than we have.”