Chapter Fourteen
IT WAS AS IF HE WANTED THE ELEMENTS TO KILL HIM.
The Red Deer River Valley is an isolated and unforgiving region about 130 miles east of Calgary, Canada. Gray chimneys of stone known as hoodoos soar over the rippled badlands, which rise and fall in an unsettled rhythm. Rocky mesas give way to steep canyons that plummet as if a trapdoor has been pulled. It is a land marked by absence. Valleys where fecund groves of palm trees and fir once flourished, millions of years ago, are now carved by dry river beds called coulees, which trace below a hard landscape of cliffs painted in bands of colors ranging from sand to copper to a gray so deep it appears purple. Squat bushels of muted green scrub brush layered with thorns dot the ridges and valley floor, undisturbed by any trails or paths. Aside from the shimmering water of the river, the only burst of color comes from pockets of sunflowers growing out of stone.
During their journey across the continent, Lewis and Clark attempted to explore the length of the Red Deer River, but turned back after finding that a series of violent rapids obstructed any passable routes. Subsequent wars between the Cree and Blackfoot nations stripped the area of most of its human population, and by the turn of the twentieth century only a handful of white ranchers braved a place where in the summer great swarms of mosquitoes attacked without mercy and in the winter violent blizzards blotted out all avenues of escape. Few roads existed as late as 1910, giving the region a timeless quality that made it impossible to tell what year, or century, it was.
There, in one of the most secluded spots in North America, Barnum Brown attempted to escape the weight of his pain. Racing to get as far away from New York, Frances and the memory of Marion as he could, he packed enough supplies to last for months adrift from the wider world. He set off without much of a plan in mind, almost as if he were counting on running out of luck after a lifetime of close calls. He built a flat-bottomed boat and pitched a tent on its deck, creating a mobile camp that ensured isolation. River currents took him through canyons with walls looming more than 250 feet above. The emptiness of the land was healing, his sorrow drowned out by the scale of the natural world. “No more interesting or instructive journey has ever been taken by [this] writer,” he later wrote. “Habitations are rarely discernible from the river, and for miles one travels through picturesque solitude unbroken save by the roar of the rapids.”
The area would not have been known to science had it not been for a surveying party that passed through some twenty-six years earlier led by Joseph B. Tyrrell, an arts graduate from the University of Toronto who turned toward geology after his physician advised him to work outdoors to help him fully recover from a childhood bout of scarlet fever. He took a job with the Canadian Geological Survey and was assigned the task of exploring the unmapped western wilderness. He covered more than 116,000 square miles of the province of Alberta on foot, canoe and dogsled before reaching the Red Deer River Valley in search of coal deposits. On June 9, 1884, he uncovered the first known dinosaur fossils in the region. Further investigation over the following days revealed that the area was teeming with bones, as if he had walked into an immense dinosaur graveyard.
Tyrrell did not linger on his discovery, however, and the Red Deer River Valley remained undisturbed until Thomas C. Weston, a Canadian geologist, convinced a local rancher to build a boat and float fossils down the river. The teamwork paid off and in 1889 Weston found the skull of what is now known as an Albertosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur that lived approximately 100 million years ago and may have evolved into the larger Tyrannosaurus group. The small size of Weston’s boat limited the number of bones he could collect, however, leaving the region largely untapped as paleontologists and museums scoured similar landscapes in Montana and Wyoming. Though Osborn and Brown knew of reports that abundant fossils had been located there, the Red Deer River Valley only became a point of focus in 1909, when a rancher from the area visited the American Museum of Natural History and asked to speak with a curator. He was soon sitting in an office on an upper floor, giving Brown detailed descriptions of the large fossil bones jutting out from the canyon walls on his ranch, which looked just like those in the museum halls below.
Brown possessed some of the few maps in existence that marked likely fossil sites, but during those lonesome weeks on the river chance was his guide. He had long been known for his willingness to work harder than anyone else, refusing to leave picked-over fossil beds until he spotted something that everyone else had missed; now, in a landscape where there were no second chances, he lost himself in work, letting his world shrink down to the size of the next bend in the river. The boat rode along the current until Brown spotted a potential prospecting site and guided it ashore. “In the long midsummer days, at latitude 52 degrees, there were many hours of daylight, and constant floating would have carried [the boat] many miles per day; but frequent stops were made to prospect,” he wrote, resulting in an expedition that “rarely covered more than twenty miles per day.”
The routine was soothing, a daily reminder that he had a purpose. He could not control the unseen virus that had robbed him of the woman who once served as the anchor amid the chaos of his life, nor could he face the fact that he felt unfit to serve as the only remaining parent in his young daughter’s life. With nothing left, he did the only thing he knew how to do. Over two months of searching, Brown uncovered fossils, dozens of them, all of them worthy of display. He remained in the field deep into the fall, refusing to turn back as the first week of September bombarded him with sheets of rain and sleet. “The fossils are so numerous that I doubt if we can possibly work farther down the river than Tolman’s [Ferry] this season,” he wrote to Osborn. “This is without doubt the richest Cretaceous deposit in America . . . with our numerous boxes on board containing such a variety of creatures we are living in a veritable ark.”
He relented as the full force of winter made it impossible to continue on. Over the next few months, he never stayed in one place for long. After a quick visit to the family farm in Carbondale, followed by a short trip to Oxford, New York, to see Frances, he raced south to Texas and then to Mexico, where he discovered fossilized mammoths. By March 1911 he was in Mississippi, where he uncovered the remains of primitive whales; by the start of April he was in Florida, staying just over a week before sailing on to Cuba. Once there, he explored caves and mineral springs to help determine whether land bridges once connected Cuba and other Caribbean islands to the mainland of Florida or Mexico, going so far as to build a machine to drain a hot spring so that he could better excavate its bed. He uncovered the remains of alligators, crocodiles, turtles and a nearly complete skeleton of a Megalocnus, a giant sloth that went extinct just a few thousand years ago, which he shipped back to New York. Soon it stood in the museum’s Hall of Mammals and Their Early Relatives.
Yet wherever he traveled, his thoughts kept returning to the secluded Red Deer River Valley, a place whose emptiness allowed him to let go of his pain. Two weeks after returning from Cuba, he once again headed north to Alberta, where he arrived in mid-July. There, he felt at peace, and little by little allowed himself to enjoy the small pleasures of life for the first time since Marion’s death the year before. “I picked and ate 4 different kinds of berries—strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, and saskatoons,” he noted in his field journal one night. He stayed all summer and returned the next, coming back to a land filled with distractions.
He slowly felt the joy of collecting coming back. With it came a renewed sense of daring. Soon, he was hanging off the side of a bluff, dangling by a rope as he chiseled away at rocks that he hoped contained fossils. A few weeks later, he led a field crew farther down the river on a flat-bottomed boat, their bodies completely covered by thick clothing despite the broiling heat. “Work has gone rapidly but under trying conditions,” Brown wrote. “I cannot approximate the number of mosquitoes but every person who moves about is forced to wear a net over the face, gloves, and a coat or extra heavy shirt. I have never experienced anything like it.”
When Marion was alive, Brown remained faithful to her out of both love and duty, taming his inclination to seek new adventures and new company. As he continued on his self-imposed exile from New York and the memories of her, he once again felt free to follow his instincts, regardless of the consequences. Other members of the expedition began to vent in their notes about Brown’s frequent overnight absences, often spent at the home of a local lumberman, Roy Hard, when Hard’s work had taken him out of town. For the rest of his life, tales of Brown’s womanizing would follow his expeditions into the field, with whispers among staff members at the American Museum of repeated payoffs to settle paternity suits. (Brown’s numerous love affairs were so well known that, upon news of his death, an assistant at the museum rushed into his office and destroyed folders full of his personal letters and correspondence, depriving scholars of the details of his many entanglements.)
Brown’s success in the field soon brought unwanted public attention. As details of his finds leaked beyond the small circle of the American Museum, Canadian newspapers and scientists started to ask why an American was allowed to export some of the country’s greatest treasures to New York without paying for them. The field of paleontology in Canada was at the time a shadow of that of its southern neighbor, having no version of a Bone Wars or competition among millionaire-backed museums to prod it forward. Hoping to close that gap, the Geological Survey of Canada asked Charles H. Sternberg and his three sons to collect specimens that would remain in Canadian hands.
In many ways, Sternberg was a glimpse into what Brown’s life would have looked like had he missed his chance encounter with the American Museum while in college. The son of a minister, Sternberg had spent part of his boyhood on a farm in Kansas, where he filled the long hours collecting fossils that lay scattered around him just waiting to be picked up. When he was seventeen, he sent specimens of plants fossilized in sandstone to the Smithsonian Institution, which replied with letters encouraging him to send more material. He turned a season of collecting for Cope in western Kansas while studying at Kansas State University into a career as a freelance collector, eventually selling dinosaur specimens to major museums ranging from San Diego to Sweden, as well as the American Museum in New York. Each summer, he traveled to the most remote areas of North America, surviving on hard tack, beans and wild berries while prospecting for fossils. Every winter, he cleaned and prepared his discoveries for sale and built a public following by writing articles for general interest magazines, a book of poetry and several memoirs, the first of which, titled The Life of a Fossil Hunter, was published in 1909.
A deeply religious man, Sternberg was animated in part by the thrill of uncovering previously unseen parts of what he saw as God’s master plan. He viewed his purpose as a link in the chain, connecting holy evidence of the prehistoric past with those who would live long after his own time on Earth was over. “I shall perish, but my fossils will last as long as the museums that have secured them,” he once wrote. “My own body will crumble in dust, my soul return to the God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure to generations yet unborn.”
Brown learned of Sternberg’s plan to prospect through the Red Deer River Valley through his son, George, who was working with the American Museum that summer. “Papa and the boys will soon come up in this part of the country for the Ottawa Museum,” George wrote in a letter early in the summer of 1912. The appearance of another prospecting party in a region to which Brown retreated for solace awoke a part of him that had laid dormant since Marion’s death, and he seemed reanimated by the prospect of competition. “The Ottawa party are somewhere . . . twenty miles below which does not disturb me,” Brown wrote to the head of the museum’s Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. “As long as they are there I shall concentrate the whole party in this formation where the exposures are best.”
In early September, with only a few weeks remaining in the collecting season, Brown set off in a motorboat 150 miles downstream, to reach a rock outcropping that he had noticed the year before while on a surveying mission. There he found and began excavating the nearly complete skeleton of a previously unknown duck-billed herbivore with a crescent-shaped helmet on its skull. Brown dubbed it Corythosaurus, meaning Corinthian helmet lizard, yet he was struck by something else about the specimen: its underside was covered in skin impressions, making it appear more like a mummy than a collection of bones. He had never seen anything like it. For its skin to have remained intact, the body of the animal must have fallen into water with an extremely low level of oxygen and then been quickly buried by sediment, protecting it from both predators and microbes. Brown rushed to excavate the specimen before exposure to the sun and the weather destroyed it, and shipped it back to New York just as winter made further explorations impossible.
Over three summers in the Canadian wilderness, Brown rebuilt himself, shedding his grief and replacing it with a renewed desire to explore. In the darkest moments of his life, the sense of restlessness that had sustained him as a child returned to save him, turning the process of collecting fossils into a declaration that he would not succumb to hopelessness. As he steered the boat containing more than twenty cases of fossils toward the railway station that would take him and his discoveries back to New York, he lamented in a letter that the riverbanks were so full of specimens that he had to “travel with my eyes shut so as not to see more that I want this fall.”
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IT TOOK BROWN DAYS TO recalibrate when he returned to New York. After a summer removed from nearly all the elements of modern life, the packed-in city seemed overwhelming, a crush of people unimaginable when floating down a Canadian river just a few weeks earlier. Brown often spent nearly all of his first days back in the city inside the museum, huddled with Osborn and the members of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology briefing them on what he had found and checking on the progress of the mounts of his discoveries from past seasons in the field. He would then walk the exhibition floors, noting how visitors approached the fossils he had uncovered and which drew the largest crowds. That there were finally crowds, at all, was apparent, a reflection of Osborn’s efforts to bring in more tours of schoolchildren in hopes that they would return with their parents in tow. The museum’s attendance jumped 17 percent over the previous year, edging closer to the one-million-annual-visitors mark, “although the location of the Museum is still far from the center of population,” Osborn noted in the annual report.
Brown began noticing a strange pattern: each year when he returned from the field, dinosaurs seemed to be more popular than they had been before he left. The wing holding the partial T. rex exhibit was now among the most visited in the museum, drawing attention away from the bones of Jumbo the elephant, which had delighted a generation of children before. Every year, the collective memory of P. T. Barnum’s museum of novelties receded a little further into the past, clearing mental space for dinosaurs to be seen as scientific specimens untainted by showmanship, finally perceived as ideas rather than distractions. Since his college years, Brown had spent his life trying to fill the halls of the museum; now, as he neared forty, that work had changed the world, making it seem entirely natural that extinct monsters would be displayed for any child who wished to see them.
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THE INCURSION OF DINOSAURS INTO everyday life was a phenomenon that went beyond the halls of the American Museum. In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took a break from writing the Sherlock Holmes novels that he despised, despite their popularity, and created a character who was the opposite of his most famous creation. Where Holmes was cerebral, melancholy and deliberate, Conan Doyle’s new Professor Challenger was loud, physical and impulsive, a man whom his wife calls a “perfectly impossible person.” It seemed only fitting to send him to South America, where Challenger leads an excursion to prove that he has discovered prehistoric life in the Amazon. There, the party finds a nest of pterodactyls, which Conan Doyle described as repulsive monsters. “There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick,” he wrote.
When published in 1912, The Lost World was a global success, marking one of the first times that dinosaurs played a central role in a work of popular fiction. Its resonance with readers rested not only on the thrilling depictions of prehistoric beasts battling modern-day humans, but also on what dinosaurs were starting to represent: tangible, irrefutable evidence of not only evolution, but a path of evolution which had its endpoint in Anglo-Saxon civilization. Conan Doyle’s depictions of Africans who only wish to serve their European masters, of “savages” and “half-breeds” and apemen, reflected a widespread belief that race was intrinsically linked to intelligence and ability. This line of thought ran through the American Museum in displays ranging from African artifacts to a diorama depicting the first encounters between English settlers and Native Americans in New York. As president of the museum, Osborn installed exhibits that implied an upward ascent of evolution culminating in what he called the Nordic race. The Hall of the Age of Man, for instance, began with the displays of the ancient peoples of Africa before moving to the tribes of North America and ending with Europe, suggesting a ladder in which light-skinned humans were the product of billions of years of refinement.
The twin fields of natural history and conservation were filled with men who saw no separation between their beliefs in science and in racial hierarchy. The endpoint of this line of thought was the eugenics movement, which held that applying the principles of genetic selection to the human population would cure the Earth of “undesirables,” ranging from the physically infirm to darker-skinned peoples. Madison Grant, a fellow member of the Manhattan aristocracy who helped found the Bronx Zoo and created the first organizations dedicated to protecting the California redwoods and American bison, argued that humans had now replaced natural selection, granting the powerful “complete mastery of the globe” and “the responsibility of saying what forms of life shall be preserved.” In 1916, Grant would write a polemic titled The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, in which he argued that noble Nordic instincts and talent for self-governance were being diluted by the population growth of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples. Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Grant calling the book “my bible.” In a foreword to the book, Osborn praised Grant’s theories by writing, “conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country.” Rejecting what he called the “political sophistry that all men are born with equal character to govern themselves,” Osborn urged an adherence to the motto “care for the race, even if the individual must suffer.”
The partial T. rex skeleton on display, and the other magnificent dinosaurs in the American Museum’s collection, provided Osborn with an irresistible lure. Visitors interested in the spectacle of prehistoric monsters had to walk through exhibit halls implying that a racial hierarchy not only existed but was as natural and correct as the positions of the bones mounted on each armature. It was a cycle that fed on itself, allowing Osborn’s caustic racial influence to grow as dinosaurs expanded into popular culture.
Osborn’s insistence on racial hierarchy culminated in his decision in 1921 to offer the American Museum’s Hall of Man as the venue for the Second International Eugenics Congress. Researchers from Europe and North America gathered to discuss how to maintain virtuous genetic traits in a world in which global cultures were mingling and mixing. The plight was illustrated by two models. One, built from the average dimensions of one thousand white U.S. Army veterans, was pudgy and short, the implied result of the diminishing returns obtained from mixing different strands of humanity. The other, built from the average dimensions of what was called “the fifty strongest men of Harvard,” was tall, muscular and regal, an idealized human form built from conscious breeding of the upper class. The event brought together well-known scientists from around the world, including Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and Leonard Darwin, the fourth son of Charles Darwin and a former member of Parliament.
Speakers stood at a dais in front of a diorama depicting early modern humans known as Cro-Magnon living in what is now France, a setting that Osborn felt highlighted a “greater artistic sense and ability than have been found among many other uncivilized people.” When it was his turn to speak, Darwin argued that “rational methods in human affairs”—a euphemism that meant limiting the reproductive abilities of those he considered less desirable—were the only way to avoid the suffering that “animals in the wild have to endure because of that struggle for existence to which they must submit.” Through eugenics, he said, “the end of our species may be long postponed and the race be brought to higher levels of racial health, happiness, and effectiveness.”
Osborn understood that the rising influence and popularity of the American Museum gave his theories of racial superiority greater scientific weight, even when eugenics was not the topic at hand. He often opened the museum and its collections to reporters and filmmakers, provided that the institution was treated with the proper respect. In 1912, he allowed a newspaper cartoonist named Winsor McCay to use the museum as the set of a silent movie that began with an open-topped car carrying McCay and a group of friends breaking down with a flat tire in front of the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance. McCay, who was best known for his surrealist comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, heads into the museum with his companions to see the dinosaurs. While there, McCay bets the others that he can make the Brontosaurus move on its own. A large pad appears and he begins drawing a dinosaur that he names Gertie, who comes to life as a cartoon and starts to obey all his commands. At fourteen minutes long, the film was the first to feature an animated dinosaur. It was an immediate hit when McCay took it on a vaudeville tour, where he held up signs with written dialogue and ended the show by appearing to jump on Gertie’s back and ride off into the sunset. Two years later, McCay produced a new version of the film that was shown to packed audiences in some of the country’s first theaters designed to show feature-length movies.
The merging of dinosaurs into popular culture left Brown in a sort of netherworld, stuck between the present and the deep past. In New York, he found himself fielding questions from movie studios and authors enticed by the burgeoning popularity of dinosaurs, making the museum’s early struggles for relevance and funding seem like a dim memory. Every escape from the city on an expedition felt like heading back not only in geological time, but to an earlier era of his own life, when his concerns were narrowed down to finding the next fossil. At the age of forty, he was no longer a young man, yet he had none of the constraints of adulthood. His only immediate family was a daughter he rarely saw who was cared for by her maternal grandparents; his home was as much the road as it was the small apartment he kept in Brooklyn.
He spent the summer of 1913 competing with the Sternbergs in the Red Deer River Valley, once again hiding from the modern world in pursuit of buried monsters. The spell of escape was broken once the Sternbergs began to find impressive specimens on their own. “Sternberg’s sons were up to camp in the boat today and report finding an Albertosaurus skull in fair condition,” Brown wrote in a report to the museum. “There [are] plenty of exposures here for all of us for this year but I am really provoked that the Ottawa people should follow our footsteps so closely.” His 1913 season was a disappointment by his standards, and he began the 1914 season in the Canadian outback alarmed at the continued success of the Sternbergs compared with his own relatively slow start. “Sternberg and his party are just below us [on the river] and have taken out some fossils from our territory but we have at present no serious disputes. They have no regard for [the] ethics of bone digging,” he wrote in a report to the museum that summer.
The field was often his fortress, but in the summer of 1914 he could no longer hide. In early July, a letter from Osborn informed him that “the great European war has just burst, with some uncertainty still as to whether Great Britain will be drawn in. We are fortunate to be out of its direct scope, although doubtless it will affect our affairs in various indirect ways. I can only hope it will not involve the finances of the Museum in any way.”
Throughout his life, Brown was a master at reinventing himself into new personas that changed with the times, replacing the Kansas farm boy with a cultured European before turning into a flamboyant playboy at home in New York. In the nineteen years since he discovered the American Museum’s first dinosaur specimen at Como Bluff, he had almost single-handedly made it the world’s premier collection of fossils. Now, as the war began, he searched for a new way to remain relevant. A letter from the head of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department later that summer warned Brown of the changed world he would return to.
“The war is going to be a long and exhausting struggle, and the longer it lasts the harder we shall be hit by it,” he wrote.