Chapter One
THE BOY NEEDED A NAME.
It was a duty that William and Clara Brown had already answered three times before, following the births of their two daughters and a son. Now, with another infant staring up at them in the farmhouse where they lived on the outskirts of Carbondale, Kansas, it seemed an overwhelming task. A name was supposed to guide the child on a safe and righteous path, instilling trust in others and resolve in oneself. William, especially, was highly attuned to any sign that someone was deviating from a Christian way of life, often refusing to sell coal to buyers in distant cities after deciding that their penmanship reflected poorly on their character. And besides, all of their good ideas had been taken. Their two daughters had been named after family, closing off that avenue of inspiration. At the age of six, their first son, Frank, was as forthright as his name suggested, developing into such a miniature version of his father that the pair were clad in matching three-piece suits and poorly-tied bow ties in family portraits. Yet here before them lay another boy, his fate so uncertain that several days after his birth he still didn’t have anything to shape his identity.
Leaving so weighty a decision to the last minute was entirely out of the Brown character. Like all farmers, William prized certainty where he could find it, seeking any comfort from the annual cycle of planting crops in the spring without knowing whether there would be enough summer rain to nurture them. Born in Virginia in 1833, he migrated to the open plains of the West as a twenty-one-year-old in search of a better chance. “There were those among the pioneers who were merely drifters, fiddle-footed and restless, that wandered westward either to escape an unpleasant situation in the east, or in the hope of getting something for nothing in the west. . . . Father’s pioneering was purposeful: he was hard-working, with a good head for business; he sought and found promising opportunities worthy of the heavy investment of thought, time, and labor that he poured into them,” his youngest son later wrote. In Wisconsin, he met Clara Silver, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a prosperous dairy farmer, and the two were married by the end of the year. After four years of accumulating livestock, the pair—accompanied by a young daughter and with another on the way—headed toward the Kansas Territory in 1859. They eventually stopped in Osage County, in the eastern part of the state near the Missouri border about twenty miles south of the state capital, where William purchased land on a spot named Carbon Hill, due to the long bands of coal which blackened the soil.
The young family lived out of their wagon while William built them a home. The small wooden house soon turned into a refuge, as the Kansas prairie devolved into a remote battlefield in the Civil War. Pro-Union guerrilla fighters, known as jayhawkers, battled Confederate sympathizers known as bushwhackers, each side ambushing the other in bloody raids that terrorized the countryside. “Mother used to say that during the War it was not uncommon for Federals to stop for food in the morning, Rebels at noon, and Bushwhackers at night. She never dared to say where their sympathy lay for fear of retaliation by shooting the family, burning down their house, or destroying their property,” her youngest son later wrote. Clara was able to maintain a neutrality in part because William was away for long periods of time, having secured a lucrative contract to lead wagon-trains full of supplies for the U.S. Army across the open frontier. Once the war was over, he watched as ribbons of railroad tracks appeared on the plains, stitching together the Transcontinental Railroad and boxing in what had seemed to be the limitless horizon.
The rails made him feel like a relic in his own time. Determined not to be left further behind, he hitched up his team of oxen and began clearing off the topsoil of his land, revealing long bands of coal that could be extracted from the earth and sold to buyers across the state. Now in the mining business, William built a modern two-story house with a gabled roof that was soon recognized as “the best residence in this section of the country” by a local committee. Though never rich by the standards of a city, the Browns grew prosperous enough that they employed thirty-one men to help run the farm and dig up coal, feeding everyone three times a day in the family’s living room. With any money that was left over, they traveled up to the capital city of Topeka and its diversions.
It was there that six-year-old Frank saw an advertisement for P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling World’s Fair plastered on barns, trees, and the sides of seemingly every office building, the bright and bold colors of the circus beaconing through the low winter light. Soon he could think of nothing else. The birth of his younger brother a month later on February 12, 1873, did little to cool the heat of his focus. As William and Clarissa sat at the kitchen table discussing possible names, Frank burst in and yelled, “Let’s call him Barnum!” Though it had nothing to offer in the way of family lineage and carried with it a suggestion of showmanship that seemed out of place in Kansas, the name somehow stuck. After several more days in which his parents tried and failed to find a better alternative, a newly-christened Barnum Brown was finally ready to face the future.
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THE FIRST YEARS OF HIS life offered few chances to live up to his name. His earliest memory was of lying in a bassinet under an oak tree on a sunny day, spending an unhurried afternoon with his mother listening to the wind rustle the leaves. As soon as he could walk, he was cast in the daily choreography of life on a farm that made the place function. He hauled water, milked cows and helped his mother raise lettuce and onions in the garden outside the kitchen window—nothing, in short, that would suggest the extraordinary life that was to come. His mother began to rely on him so much for help around the house that Barnum would later write that she said that “I was the best ‘girl’ she ever had, for Melissa was romancing and Alice, who resented being a girl and loved men’s work, was raising cattle on her own, helped by brother Frank . . . so little brother got a lot of housework.” When he turned ten, he graduated to chores outside of the home. “In the late summer, I sometimes milked 20 cows, morning and night, sitting on a one-legged stool, so if a cow kicked I would fall over without resistance,” he later wrote. For company he had a Newfoundland dog, Old Bruno, who weighed twice as much as he did and would often disappear for hours chasing jackrabbits.
When Barnum grew old enough to accompany his father, his favorite pastime was following along behind the team of oxen as they stripped layers of soil off the land in William’s never-ending search for new seams of coal. Sometimes as much as eighteen feet of dirt and rock needed to be removed before he found one, leaving makeshift mountain ranges of discarded rubble for Barnum to play on. When the boy wasn’t climbing, he was digging, and soon began to notice that some of the objects that at first glance appeared like any other rock seemed instead like they belonged on a beach. One looked like a piece of honeycomb coated in beeswax; another was three inches long and shaped like a perfect cornucopia.
He began holding on to as many of them as he could find, with the help of his father who “though untrained in geology, encouraged me in making these collections, for he thought that by doing so we could find out why sea shells could be entombed in a Kansas hilltop 650 miles from the nearest seacoast today, the Gulf of Mexico,” Barnum later wrote. Soon, he was storing so many specimens inside his room that his clothes could no longer fit in his drawers, leading his mother to banish his shells to a nearby shed, where Barnum set up his own showroom—the first but not the last time that he would inadvertently follow in the footsteps of his namesake. “This became my first museum, where I had my first experience as a showman regaling visitors with these treasures, together with the Indian arrow points and scrapers I picked up while plowing our cornfields,” he later wrote.
The boy had somehow stumbled onto the most pressing question in science. A hundred years before his birth, the history of the planet barely registered as a serious avenue of intellectual inquiry. In the late 1600s, James Usher, the archbishop of Armagh, had seemed to settle the question by adding together the lifespans of every named descendant of Adam in the Bible and cross-referencing them with the seasonality of the Hebrew calendar, allowing him to conclude that God created the Earth on the night of October 23, exactly 4,004 years before the birth of Christ. This was considered a landmark feat of scholarship, prompting some printers to add dates in red ink on the margins of pages of the Old Testament to give readers an exact chronological grounding. Others sought to emulate Usher’s achievement by turning their attention to questions such as how exactly Noah organized all of the animals in the Ark.
Yet the realization that certain kinds of rocks and minerals had outsized economic purpose that could feed the new machines of industry coming out of workshops across Europe sent miners deeper and deeper into the Earth, and they kept coming back with things that shouldn’t have been there if God had created the world in an orderly seven days some six thousand years ago, as the Bible suggested. Why were the bones of what appeared to be ancient fish uncovered far below the ground of open plains? Why were strange skeletons that didn’t seem to match any living things found poking out of cliffs and marshes? And, if seashells found at the top of high mountains were evidence of the Great Flood, as some scholars argued, then why weren’t the surrounding rocks smoothed by the erosion of such an immense amount of water? Rather than the neat process of Creation described in the Bible, Earth seemed to be covered with the scars of chaos.
Miners were among the first to realize that the planet was much older than a literal interpretation of the Bible would suggest. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a young German by the name of Abraham Werner grew up accompanying his father on his inspections of the Duke of Solm’s ironworks, and eventually enrolled at the prestigious Freiburg School of Mining. While most of his fellow students were immersed in questions of where to find silver and how to square the mineral formations they found with what they learned in the Bible, Werner noticed that Earth’s crust seemed to be made up of four categories of rock that always appeared in the same order.
The oldest and deepest layer he called primary rocks, which contained formations such as granite that contained no trace of life. Above those he identified transition rocks, which included slate and graywacke and the first appearance of fossils. In Werner’s time, fossils were widely recognized as something more than strange stones, though what exactly they were remained unclear. Aristotle was among the first to put forth the theory that some material that appeared to be rock was once animated with life. This conception was not universally accepted, however, and centuries later some European theologists proposed that perhaps stones that took the form of bizarre animals or plants was God’s way of ornamenting the interior of the Earth, much like flowers decorate its surface, or perhaps they were red herrings placed there by God as tests of faith. In any case, the fossilized relics of life—bones, shells, teeth or leaves—are not in the strictest sense the biological remains of what was once a plant or animal; instead, they are inorganic minerals like calcium that linger after tissues and blood cells have decayed, essentially becoming rocks that are in the exact shape of the original living material.
Werner, however, was concerned not with the history of life on Earth, but with the composition of the planet that sustained it. He noticed that on top of the transition rocks lay what he called the secondary layer, which was made up of sandstone and gypsum and other rock formations that were bursting with evidence of long-dead plants and animals. Finally came the tertiary layer, which consisted of sand and clay and an abundance of subterranean lifeforms that could be found by digging in the ground with your bare hands. After studying those repeated, stratified layers of material beneath our feet, Werner concluded that the entire planet had once been a vast ocean from which Earth’s crust slowly emerged over more than a million years.
In Scotland, a farmer and naturalist by the name of James Hutton agreed with Werner that Earth had a history longer than anyone thought. So much longer, in fact, that he would later write “that we find no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.” Hutton, who had studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh before running two small family farms, presented a paper in 1788 in which he theorized that the planet’s surface was part of a continuous cycle in which sediments on land are carried to the ocean, where they are compacted into bedrock on the sea floor over time until they are ejected once more back above the surface by volcanoes and other eruptions from deep within the earth, starting the process fresh again. As evidence, he pointed to a promontory at Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland where horizontal layers of red sandstone intermingle with a string of vertical layers of gray shale, an arrangement that, far from Werner’s idea that all types of stone are found in a uniform sequence, could only be explained by the violent churn of the planet weaving bands of rock formed on land with those formed undersea over a time period of millions of years.
He described a process in which what appear as unmoving mountains to our eyes were once rocks buried on the bottom of the ocean, a cycle ticking along at a scale of destruction slower and more momentous than we can imagine. “We have the satisfaction to find, that in nature there is wisdom, system and consistency,” Hutton wrote. “For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that, there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth.”
Geology, it seemed, was anything but the neat and tidy study of rocks. Instead, it was a window into an abyss of time so deep that it was nearly incomprehensible. Was Earth a million years old? A billion? More? And if the planet was so old and the record of human life in the Bible dated back only six thousand years, what if anything took place during those missing millennia, a gap of the unknown stretching so wide that it may as well have been infinite? Recognizing a threat to their explanation of the world, religious scholars downplayed both the significance and relevance of the dangerous new science. When a newly established professor of mineralogy at Oxford briefly left the university to undertake field studies in Europe, one dean happily announced, “Thank God we will hear no more of this Geology!”
For all of the existential questions it raised about life on Earth and humankind’s place within it, geology as a discipline was too valuable to ignore. Hidden inside the Earth were minerals, precious metals and soon-to-be-important oil fields that were worth a lot of money, and treasure hunters cared little about what it all meant in a cosmic sense as long as this new branch of science could be of some use in their goal of getting rich. A year before the United Kingdom undertook a similar project, the United States Congress directed the Topographical Bureau of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct the first geological map of the young and growing country, in 1834. “Few subjects connected with the duties of this bureau open so many and so important national advantages, or are adapted to redound more to international commercial prosperity [as the] development of these great resources of wealth and commercial interests, which now lie inert and buried in the bowels of the earth,” Colonel J. J. Albert, the head of the bureau, said when requesting funding for the project. In 1859, for the first time, the value of industrial products manufactured or built in the country exceeded the value of everything grown or produced on its farms, hastening the search for the raw materials that the new economy relied on.
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AS BARNUM BROWN GREW OLDER, a world built on the products of mining erased the slower-paced existence that his parents had known. Iron machines began to replace oxen in the fields; telegraphs stood in the place of handwritten requests for another shipment of coal. The pace of change seemed to sweep him up along with it, instilling in him a sense of restlessness that could never be fulfilled on a farm. It was a feeling that was infectious, a rush of excitement that seemed to emanate off him and enchant everyone he met. In time, his spell would prompt a New York socialite to give up her charmed existence and go with him on a search by foot through rural India for victims of an outbreak of bubonic plague. As a teenager, he was tall, lean, curious and fully aware that his twinkling blue eyes made him handsome—a potent combination incompatible with a town whose main drag consisted of a bank, two churches and a grocery store where they gave away unsold meat for dog food. To be in his company meant unshackling whatever tied you to the present and finding yourself compelled to explore beyond not only the distant horizon but whatever came after that, pushing past everything known until you reached a blank spot on the map. Carbondale, where the greatest excitement came in the form of updated grain prices or the inevitable side effects of a hive of eighteen saloons catering to the town’s two thousand people, could simply not keep up with him. There wasn’t even a high school to keep his mind distracted from wondering what life was like at the far ends of the train tracks that passed through town.
Barnum’s parents knew that any energy spent trying to tether him to the farm was wasted. Once he finished the last year of schooling available to him in Carbondale, in 1889, they made plans for him to move to the university town of Lawrence thirty-five miles away, where he could attend high school before enrolling in the University of Kansas. Before the sixteen-year-old left home, however, his father wanted him to accompany him on one last adventure, a journey whose ostensible purpose was to find land suitable for a cattle ranch but was really an excuse to get out and see the world together while they could. “Father wanted me to see what was left of the Old West before it faded away, to show me some of the places he had been in his pioneer days, and to broaden the outlook of an adolescent farm boy who had never been more than twenty miles from home,” Barnum later wrote.
Together, they prepared a covered wagon and packed it with enough sugar, bacon, flour, beans, raisins and coffee to last them four months on the plains. They headed north, waking up each morning before sunrise so that Barnum could prepare them breakfast while his father fed the team of horses, and stopping in the afternoon when they found good grazing land. They would repeat the same process at night, with his father taking the extra step of padlocking the animals to the wagon when he was worried that the smell of Barnum’s cooking would bring unwanted attention as they passed through the quilt of lands belonging to the Comanche, Kiowa, Sioux and other tribes who still roamed the Plains in diminished numbers. As they rode, William told his son tales of a world that no longer existed. Bison were once so plentiful that his father had witnessed “great herds . . . streaming across the Missouri River in such numbers as to stop the river boats,” Barnum later wrote. The introduction of barbed wire, railroads and bloodthirsty settlers carrying powerful rifles had exterminated millions of bison in the brief span of Barnum’s life, leaving the boy to relent that “we saw only their heads, preserved by the long shaggy hair and tough hide, strewn across the prairies like small barrels.”
In southeastern Montana, the Browns neared the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where thousands of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors had decimated George Armstrong Custer’s force of 250 calvary some thirteen years earlier. As they approached the battlefield on the Fourth of July, a Crow guide spotted them and directed them to a prime viewing spot on the ford of the Bighorn River, where they watched a Native American reenactment of the battle while a nearby garrison of soldiers looked on with their guns ready. They then continued westward across the wide-open land, through what would eventually become Yellowstone National Park. There, Barnum discovered that the lakes were teeming with trout, so many that he could snare two fish with one cast and soon filled up a keg with them. He traded his catch to the men of the U.S. Cavalry, who were not allowed to go hunting or fishing in the hostile country, and came back with a big jar of pickles that he ate in one sitting.
Only after they spotted the snowcapped peaks of the Rockies did William decide that it was time to head back, leaving behind the open country of his youth and the company of his youngest son to return to a present where he felt he had no future. “There were more new sights and every day was a fascinating adventure,” Barnum later wrote. “And then we were home again with our loved ones. We had trailed about three thousand miles at an average rate of twenty-five miles a day when we were on the march. It took us a little more than four months from start to finish. What an experience! This was Father’s finest gift to me; it was of himself.”
In the days after his return, Barnum readied himself for the move to Lawrence and its university, a place that seemed unbelievably cosmopolitan after the long, empty hours on the farm without the company of anyone his own age. As he boxed up his childhood, he packed shells from his personal museum to take with him, intent on finding a professor who could explain why the world suggested by the relics he found underground did not match what he saw in the present day. He did a last round of chores on the farm, hoping that he would never return to an existence circumscribed by duty and the seasons. He was young, ambitious and, thanks to the journey into the wilderness with his father, had the self-confidence to survive in any situation. At the age of sixteen, he set out in search of a life that could contain him.