Chapter Thirteen
NEW YORK IN 1906 WAS A CITY BURSTING WITH DIVERsions. At the Polo Grounds, the New York Giants drew nearly half a million people to watch a season spent in the distant wake of the first-place Chicago Cubs, who ended the year twenty games ahead in the standings. In Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, the Superbas (soon to be renamed the Dodgers) attracted nearly 300,000 spectators that season despite the fact that they were not very good, ending the year seventh out of the eight teams in the National League. Putting that many fans in the seats was itself something of a miracle, given that the stadium was right next to the pungent Gowanus Canal, a grimy waterway so polluted by industrial waste that a state commission called it “a disgrace to Brooklyn.” For those looking for indoor forms of entertainment, the Metropolitan Museum of Art that year brought in just under 800,000 visitors, many of them lured by a decision by Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, the museum’s director, to move the collection of modern sculptures away from the walls. The decision “has overcome the effect of emptiness hitherto presented by this part of the Museum,” the New York Times wrote in appreciation. “This not only improves the appearance of the hall, but enables visitors to study the statues from all sides.”
Getting tourists to actually come through the doors of any museum was itself becoming a problem. After starting the city’s first roving tour guides with a team of six horses and an open carriage a few years earlier, an entrepreneur from Colorado named Henry J. Mayham improved his operation with the purchase of a multilevel, open-topped motorized bus. A driver sat at an oversized steering wheel while to his right a guide with a megaphone shouted out factoids of history. The tour rumbled along a twelve-mile route, giving visitors a way to experience the city while hardly setting foot in it.
Not that you needed to go out into the streets for excitement. Millions of New Yorkers grabbed their newspapers each day to read the latest in a murder trial gripping the country. Harry Thaw, a Pittsburgh millionaire and husband of Evelyn Nesbit—the most famous model in the country—had shot Stanford White, whose architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White had transformed New York over a generation through the design of buildings ranging from Madison Square Garden to the Washington Square Arch, three times in the head on the evening of June 25, 1906, as he sat in the Garden watching a musical number entitled “I Could Love A Million Girls.” After Thaw was apprehended that night, he said he did it because White had raped his wife when she was sixteen and he would kill him again if given the chance. The upcoming legal case would soon be called “the trial of the century” and mark the first time that a crush of media coverage prompted a judge to sequester a jury in American history.
World-famous art, professional sports, high-society murders: in such a cityscape, it was hard for anything—even a 40-foot-long Brontosaurus—to stand out. As the year wound to a close, Osborn counted the daily visitor tallies at the American Museum of Natural History, which painfully confirmed a truth that his own eyes had told him for months. Attendance was down nearly 15 percent from the year before. In that time, he had been promoted to president of the museum, putting the full weight of the institution’s future on his shoulders. Though it was a scientific marvel, the Brontosaurus exhibit was not enough of a draw on its own to make the museum a destination among the multitudes of options in New York. Osborn’s expectation that mounted dinosaur displays would continue to draw crowds looked increasingly foolish, as if he were simply dressing up the hokum and novelties of P. T. Barnum with the pretensions of the upper class.
He had no other choice but to push more chips onto the table, hoping that the problem was that his bet wasn’t large enough to begin with. In a final effort to put a good face on a bad year, he unveiled an exhibit featuring the feet, legs and lower pelvis of the Tyrannosaurus rex on December 29, 1906. It was the first time any portion of the creature had been put on public display, and broke with Osborn’s reluctance to display any dinosaur, much less one as important as the T. rex, before the full mount was ready. Yet he felt boxed into a corner. He desperately needed some good press for the museum, if only to convince donors that their money was not wasted.
A few days before the exhibit opened, the New York Times described the T. rex as “The Prize Fighter of Antiquity Discovered and Restored” in an article that incorrectly bolstered Osborn’s role in finding the specimen. “Of the tyrannosaurus, the greatest of flesh-eating animals, the only known specimen is the one discovered in Montana by Prof. Henry F. Osborn, and now mounted and placed on exhibition for the first time in the Natural History Museum,” the paper reported. A photo that ran alongside the piece showed a museum worker whose height reached slightly below the creature’s knees, dusting its pelvis with a broom. To a modern eye, nothing about the scene is recognizable as the T. rex. Instead, it looks like a spindly pair of stone legs, waiting for a body to appear.
In the frenzy to share the species with the world, Osborn neglected a fact that had been obvious since the first dinosaur fossils were put on public display: visitors might be awed by the size of an animal’s limbs, but what they really want to see is its head. That fact was what compelled him to send Barnum Brown into the field searching for the skull of a Triceratops over several summers until he found one worthy of display, and it was the skull of the museum’s mounted Brontosaurus—rather than its dramatic tail or long neck—that visitors were drawn to, as if looking for a personal connection between themselves and the deep past. In time, the skull of the T. rex—with its oversized nostrils, imposing size and sinister jaws and teeth—would become one of the most recognizable silhouettes in all of science, an emblem of everything from children’s pajamas to amusement park rides. But at that moment Osborn had nothing to show. Brown, the only person yet to find a T. rex, continued to search for a skull worthy of exhibition after the previous season’s find proved incomplete. No one knew if he would ever unearth one, leaving Osborn in the awkward position of promising that more was coming, like a painter describing the plan of a mural while he waits for his brushes to arrive. The legs alone of the T. rex did nothing to excite the public imagination and offered no hints to the fantastical predatory machine the creature once was. Instead, the exhibit seemed as if it was nothing more than bones unconnected to a larger idea, a lone piece of a puzzle far separated from the box it came in.
Osborn’s usual solution to any problem was to send Brown into the wilderness and expect him to come back with something important, once again living up to his nickname “Mr. Bones.” Yet for the first time in nearly a decade, that option was unavailable. Brown remained in Brooklyn with Marion throughout her pregnancy and was at her side when their daughter, Frances, was born on January 2, 1908. He began the adventure of fatherhood in an apartment very different from the rural farmhouse in which he grew up.
The break from digging gave Brown his first sustained opportunity to focus on the academic side of paleontology, finally freeing him to turn to theory after having proven his worth in the field. He spent months working out the details of how to mount the museum’s collection of Anatosaurus specimens—a large duckbilled dinosaur that lived in North America roughly 65 million years ago, which was distinguished by rows of hundreds of blunt teeth along its elongated jaw. He also wrote some of the few professional papers he published in his lifetime, detailing not only the sediment layers of the Hell Creek Formation but the abundance of fossil mammals he uncovered in a 1903 expedition to northern Arkansas known as the Conrad Fissure Collection, including black bears, wolves and more than fifteen different species of what are now known as saber-toothed cats.
Though he tried, Brown was not built to stay in one place for long. The world was too big, there were too many things to pursue and too many places to explore. Becoming a father did little to make it easier to ignore the voice that forever told him to seek out new places, in rebellion against the confines of his childhood. After Frances was born, he could no longer resist it. With Marion’s blessing, he began planning an expedition to the hard landscape of the Big Dry region of Montana, about thirty miles east of the Hell Creek beds where he discovered the first T. rex. The sediment formations were similar, increasing the chances that another important specimen could be found. If anything, they were more remote than those near Jordan. It was a part of the same pattern of discovery that marked his career; each major find would draw the attention of other paleontologists and museums, forcing Brown to go farther and farther into the blank spots of the map in search of something new.
With Marion and Frances nesting in the family apartment in Brooklyn, Brown left New York in early June with a renewed appreciation of the freedom and possibilities of the open West. Within three weeks he was drinking and singing late into the night at raucous dinners with local ranch families and making plans for an even bigger celebration on the Fourth of July. After months of city life and the responsibilities of parenthood, he grabbed at any opportunity for fun, convincing a local woman to drive around the county collecting phonographs in order to throw a party. “I danced till twelve finding some very good partners and one bad one,” he wrote in his field journal. “Some of the people danced all night till seven o’clock Sunday morning then had breakfast and drove to their homes.”
Science seemed almost an afterthought in those wild weeks. Yet it was his counterintuitive ability to find fun that made Brown such a successful collector. In terms of technique, he was unmatched: he seemed to have an innate feel for the land, reading the rocks and pushing past the physical constraints of others in ways that he could not teach. But getting to that point—knowing where to dig a new quarry, or how to have the luck to find a dinosaur fossil jutting out of the ground—was often a reflection of his mastery of the softer science of friendship. With his deadpan wit and willingness to try anything at least once, Brown innately knew how to get people to like him. More often than not in the lonesome communities that bordered the badlands, those conversations would lead to invitations to come out and inspect a strange bone that happened to be sitting on a rancher’s land. What to an outsider seemed like a charmed life of continuous discovery was the result of Brown’s tending to both poles of his personality: the intellect and drive which made him chafe at what he saw as the dead end of Carbondale, and the joy he took in the presence of other people that often put him at the center of any party. The results of this two-pronged life in the field often made it seem like Brown had a touch of magic and was fated to find fossils where others were cursed to come home empty-handed. “Found Tyrannosaurus lower jaw and back of skull near one of the buttes. Will take it,” Brown wrote in his journal in early July.
Not long after, he found fifteen connected tail vertebrae from an animal he could not immediately identify. The layers of sediment were relatively soft compared to the conditions in nearby Hell Creek, making it possible for him to dig an additional six feet into the rock without needing to turn to dynamite. The line of bones continued, suggesting the presence of a complete skeleton. He borrowed a plow from a local rancher in order to remove layers of topsoil and rock, and, over the following two weeks, he and an assistant chiseled the bones free. Finally, on July 15, he wrote to Osborn with news of another discovery. “Our new animal turns out to be a Tyrannosaurus,” he wrote. “The bones are in a good state of preservation.”
That was not all. The new specimen was more complete than any that Brown had yet found, and included the most elusive prize: a perfectly preserved skull. For the first time, human eyes took in the complete four-foot-long head of a T. rex, confirming in one glance the violence that it was once capable of. Osborn immediately made plans to travel west, to see the dig that he knew would change paleontology—and his career—forever. “Your letter of July 15, makes me feel like a prophet and the son of a prophet, as I felt that you would surely find a Tyrannosaurus this season,” he wrote. “I congratulate you with all my heart on this splendid discovery. . . . I am keeping very quiet about this discovery because I do not want to see a rush into the country where you are working.”
The discovery of a fully intact Tyrannosaurus presented Brown with problems beyond the necessity of keeping it a secret. First among them was getting the bones out of the ground without disturbing them. Brown fired the expedition’s cook—no small gesture in a place so remote that finding a replacement was not guaranteed—after he caught him driving a team of horses into camp falling-down drunk. “Was sorry to lose him for he was a good cook and a good worker but I won’t have a man in camp that I cannot trust to [drive to] town with the bones. Hope we may have someone who can cook without burning the water when you come out,” he wrote in a letter to Osborn in early August. The caution was warranted. As Brown removed more of the rock surrounding the specimen, he began to realize just what he had. “I am sure you will be more pleased with our new Tyrannosaurus when you see what a magnificent specimen it is. The skull alone is worth the summer’s work for it is perfect,” he wrote to Osborn in mid-August, noting that the lower jaws of the creature weighed about 1,000 pounds.
Osborn arrived on August 26 and attention immediately turned to the question of how to get the bones back to New York safely. Brown, who still felt the sting of Osborn’s rebuke when a shipment of unrelated fossils had arrived at the Museum destroyed, insisted on loading the full specimen onto one train rather than parceling it out into several shipments to save on costs. Osborn relented, leaving Brown in a race against the coming winter. Snow started falling in late September, well before he was finished building the crates to hold the collection of bones now encased in plaster. Still he worked, dragging and digging and dynamiting until he pulled each section of fossil from the rock. The loads were so heavy that wagons kept breaking down under their weight. Twice Brown had to abandon the entire specimen in the Montana badlands when the wagons pulling it got stuck in a rut, while he rode ahead to a local ranch to borrow more horses. In the end, it took sixteen horses to pull five loads of fossils forty-five miles to the nearest rail depot, finally bringing the full splendor of the T. rex out of the dusty pockets of the badlands and into the modern world.
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THE T. REX WAS A revolutionary find; to do it justice, Osborn felt an obligation to reimagine how a dinosaur appeared in a museum setting. With the partial mount’s failure to attract attention the year before still haunting him, the question of how to present a full specimen to the public consumed Osborn. For all of the clues they offered about Earth’s past, dinosaurs had not yet proven any power to hold the public’s attention for a sustained amount of time, and seemed to be exhibits grounded more in a sense of spectacle than in science. The same problem had hung over paleontology since the field’s inception: a suspicion that it was a pursuit of the shocking and grotesque rather than a legitimate field of study that offered some connection or insights into modern-day life. In the public’s mind, dinosaurs were little more than one of Carnegie’s replicas of the Diplodocus or a Brontosaurus—huge animals whose main value was their sheer size, without any deeper meaning.
The T. rex exhibit had to do more. Osborn wanted to convey a sense of movement and danger, making visitors feel that they were stepping onto a planet that looked very different from today’s—a proposition that subtly implied that the world might also look very different tomorrow. He asked an artist working in the paleontology department to sculpt a scale model of the animal’s full skeleton, and then asked several designers to submit their best ideas. Eventually, he chose a display suggested by Raymond Ditmars, who had helped found the Bronx Zoo’s popular reptile house with more than a dozen species from his own collection and would go on to produce groundbreaking natural history films. Instead of a staid pose like Carnegie’s Diplodocus, Ditmars proposed a scene in which a T. rex is in the middle of devouring a duck-billed herbivore when another T. rex attempts to steal its meal. “The crouching figure reluctantly stops eating and accepts the challenge, partly rising to spring on its adversary,” Brown wrote in a paper describing the planned exhibition design. “The psychological moment of tense inertia before the combat was chosen to best show positions of the limbs and bodies, as well as to picture an incident in the life history of these giant reptiles.” The size of the exhibition hall would ultimately prove too small to contain Ditmar’s proposed mount, however, leaving Osborn to scale back his ambitions.
Over the course of his career, Brown discovered dozens of species and rarely concerned himself with how their final displays would appear. Yet the T. rex was different. In its monumental size, Brown saw a validation of his own ambitions. He had worked his way out from his family farm and discovered a creature that would stand forever in a prominent spot in what was becoming, thanks to his efforts, one of the most important museums in the world. It was a culmination of all the lonely nights spent in the middle of nowhere, wondering if his luck would continue and lead to another fossil or finally run away from him, the last gasp of borrowed time. He had seen the world, married a woman he loved and become a father, fulfilling all the dreams that he dared to ask of himself. And with a perfect T. rex skull still undergoing its slow restoration process in the museum’s laboratories, he knew that there were greater accolades to come.
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OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS, Brown returned to Hell Creek and ventured farther north into Canada, always on the lookout for new relics of the prehistoric past. He uncovered a Triceratops skull, fossilized crustaceans and a crocodile-like Champsosaurus, continuing to fill back rooms in the museum while preparators were busy readying his previous discoveries for exhibition. But he always returned to Brooklyn, his life falling into a dependable pattern: summers in the field and the rest of the year in the city, making a daily circuit between the museum and the family apartment. After his childhood on the frontier, he had successfully built a bridge into a new era, making himself relevant in a changing world in ways that his own father could not.
With its skyscrapers, subways and palaces of culture, the New York of 1910 looked in many ways like the city of today. Yet it was a city still rooted in the past, beset by the illnesses of urban life that had plagued cities since the Middle Ages. Measles, rheumatic fever, diphtheria and whooping cough killed thousands of New Yorkers that year. The pain was felt heaviest by children. Nearly sixteen thousand newborns in 1909 did not live long enough to celebrate their first birthdays, a death toll nearly triple that of any other city in the country. Nor were their mothers spared. What was then known as the puerperal state and is now commonly called postpartum was responsible for 45 percent of all deaths among adults between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine, making the act of giving birth nearly three times as deadly as getting into an accident and twice as likely to be the cause of death as suicide.
While the cities that it compared itself to seemed to be getting healthier, New York fell in the other direction, with the death rate among children under five at the start of 1910 higher than that of London or Paris in the 1880s. To be a parent in 1910 was to face each day with fear that a wayward cough or sneeze in a crowded streetcar might unleash an invisible killer that would attack the most vulnerable. Each year that a child lived seemed like another battle won. The war would continue until their fifth birthday, the age at which the diseases of urban life seemed to lose much of their lethality and allow parents to finally trust that their offspring would not be taken from them too soon. Scarlet fever was among the city’s most notorious killers. Named for the bright red rash that covers the body, it was caused by the same bacteria that causes strep throat. Children who caught the disease would suffer with a high fever and would find it painful to swallow, their tongues often swollen, with a white coating, and a pale ring appearing around their mouths.
Barnum and Marion Brown celebrated when Frances turned one, thankful not only for the joy she had brought into their lives but for the fact that she had not been taken from them. At the age of two, she remained strong and healthy, showing some of the same grit that allowed her father to outlast his competitors in the field. That strength was tempered by her mother’s calm and measured disposition. Barnum “told his daughter more than once that it was her mother, Marion, who had the brilliant mind, not her father. He agreed that his was an average mind but that Marion’s was far better,” Frances later wrote.
On a sunny day in April 1910, Marion placed Frances in a stroller and took her on a walk through nearby Prospect Park. Though Marion would later not recall seeing anyone who was sick, Frances soon spiked a fever and broke out in a bright red rash. Within a day, Marion developed the same symptoms. Their fevers rose and rose again, unbroken by any remedy. As they spiraled into sickness, Barnum did not know where to direct his fears. Each time Frances seemed stable, Marion would get worse; when Marion felt calm, Frances would appear closer to death. Antibiotics to treat scarlet fever would not be developed until 1928, nearly a full generation in the future. Instead, Barnum was left to frantically search for anyone who could help save his wife and their only child.
Frances’s fever soon broke, but Marion continued to get worse. The family’s doctors were at a loss, unable to extinguish the fire that raged inside her body. Brown finally asked Osborn for help, hoping that his wealth and connections could do what medicine so far had not. Osborn immediately began making calls, promising Brown that he would bring in specialists from anywhere in the world at the museum’s expense. But it was too late. Five days after entering Prospect Park as the healthy mother of a smiling young girl, Marion died on April 9, 1910.
In Marion, Brown had found the only person who had tamed his innate sense of chaos. With her passing, his tether to a normal life was slashed. The question of how to live seemed overwhelming; the duty of fatherhood simply too much. “Marion’s shocked and grief-stricken parents, both then in their middle sixties, told Barnum that they would take the baby and raise her, that they could not have anyone else have all that was left to them of Marion. Barnum, torn with grief and anger at cruel Fate, agreed that that would be the best solution for the daughter,” Frances later wrote in a memoir of her father’s life. “Long afterwards, as a mature woman, Frances could understand how her father reasoned in that desperate time: a daughter was expendable; a wife was not.”
A light went out in Barnum Brown’s life. In shock, he clung to routine and formality as best as he could. “I want to thank you for the efforts to help keep my beloved wife alive, your kind letters of sympathy, and financial aid—all expressions of truest friendship for which I cannot find words to express my appreciation,” he wrote in a letter to Osborn. “I shall always be deeply grateful. The baby continues to improve but still shows kidney complications. . . . The funeral service will be Tuesday, May 17th, at 4 o’clock and I shall return to my duties Wednesday.”
Throughout his life, Brown chased the horizon to solve his problems. Less than a month after losing Marion and giving Frances to her grandparents to raise, he set off for a hastily-planned expedition into the isolated Canadian wilderness. It was there, Frances later wrote, that he was “free to seek numbness from pain by throwing himself into the hardest work he could find.”