Chapter Three
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, BARNUM BROWN COULD BE FELT as much as he was seen. Immensely strong and buoyed by deep reservoirs of energy supporting his lean frame, there seemed to be no task that could discourage him, as if he were forever a boy stuck in the body of a man. That was not the only thing that was childlike about him. He seemed to pay no attention to hierarchy or rank, looking past the trappings of social status without ever feeling the need to question whether he belonged. If he was interested in something, he would go for it, not stopping to think of all the reasons why he shouldn’t. When he heard that Williston was planning an expedition to the White River Badlands in South Dakota in the summer of 1894, he talked his way onto the nine-person crew despite never having taken a paleontology class. He was twenty years old and wanted nothing more than to continue what felt would be a life of ever-increasing fun, free to pursue where his interests pulled him.
The party left Lawrence on June 13, 1894, reaching the badlands nine days later after taking a boat up the Missouri River. In an echo of his trip through the disappearing West with his father, Brown was called on to do far more than anyone else. He cooked the expedition’s food, washed their clothes and did all the other small jobs that were required to keep a pack of ten men alive as they searched for fossils under blistering skies that at any moment could be shattered by torrential thunderstorms and hail. In return, he learned how to turn his raw energy into skill.
Paleontology as a professional endeavor was barely fifty years old, and still to a startling degree relied on luck. The fossils that inspired Owen to invent the term “dinosaur” had been found by accident, unintentional byproducts of mining operations and road construction, and were given scientific value only when they fell into the hands of someone who recognized what they were. Anning, meanwhile, concentrated nearly all of her prospecting within the small region where she happened to grow up, never having the money nor the opportunity to venture to new locales in hopes they would prove as bountiful as home. Marsh and Cope may have known how to identify bones when they were brought out of the ground, but had very little skill at discovering new fossil beds themselves. The betrayal of paying off the other’s sources of bones was what truly fueled the rancor of their twenty year-long battle, a reflection that both men remained hopelessly dependent on tips from those who dug into the earth for some other purpose and came up with the unexpected, like reeling in a shoe when they were trying to catch trout. Aside from miners and farmers, most of the fossils found during the Bone Wars were discovered by hikers, who came upon gigantic bones sticking out of the ground by happenstance, and cowboys, who noticed what looked like strange bison skulls sticking out of the ground while driving cattle through canyons. (One early prospector sold several items to Marsh after he realized that ants on the prairies pick up and carry small, hard objects to form mounds around their nests, leaving anthills ringed by the jaws and teeth of dinosaurs.)
Venturing into the field with the expectation of finding fossils that no one knew were there was in many ways still a novelty. Fieldwork, when it was done, consisted of taking the knowledge gained from hard labor and applying it to science. Paleontology required drawing from both physical strength and intellectual skill, and those who could bridge the divide inherent in the profession would soar to its greatest heights. On those dusty, hot days in the badlands, Brown received his first lessons in how to dig with purpose, learning to manipulate tools that were the dominion of miners and others skilled in breaking apart the earth without destroying the treasures hidden within. It was a welcome respite from the classroom for a student just then realizing his academic limitations. Here, knowledge came through exertion, the product of hours stooped over in the sun muscling closer to a potential specimen only to find that there was still more work to do, like opening a series of Russian nesting dolls.
Pickaxes and shovels were suitable for taking apart big rocks; rock hammers were the most useful when working in the neighborhood of a bone; digging knives and trowels were required when you were close enough to extract it. Anything more delicate than that required a pocket knife. Paintbrushes kept an area clean, and plaster would stop a newly excavated bone from crumbling once exposed to air. Dynamite was handy to clear an area, but use it too liberally and you’d blow up what had sat untouched for millions of years before you came along. If blasting was impossible, then a scraper plow attached to a team of horses could take off a layer of twenty feet of rock and dirt. And there was nothing wrong with keeping the fossil encased in rock once you found it; that’s what the hammers and chisels back in the campus laboratory were for.
Once Brown learned the fundamentals of how to dig, he needed to learn the art of where to direct his newfound ability. Honing the talent to tell fossil from stone is something close to acquiring a new sense; in these often harsh environments, the blanching of the sun can make it impossible to rely on color or weight alone. A conical shape may hint that the object in question is a tooth, while a curve or an unusually straight line may be the first sign of a bone. If it is still a mystery whether you are holding a rock or a fossil in your hand, there is one last resort: licking it. The tip of the tongue briefly sticks to fossils, yet will not stick to stone. (Licking is also a go-to for geologists in the field hoping to make an easy identification of what minerals they are working with: quartz, calcite and gypsum often look remarkably like halite, the mineral commonly known as rock salt, but do not have the same distinctive flavor; chrysocolla and kaolinite, meanwhile, are known to be remarkably sticky and also tasteless.)
The confirmation that an object is indeed a fossil simply leads to more questions. Depending on which part was exposed, it can often be a matter of guessing which way the skeleton continues on beneath the shell of rock and dirt, the combination of which is known in the field as its matrix. Sometimes, what seems like the logical path of a bone ends in nothing, requiring you to retrace your path to discover the point where it jutted off, if it did at all. Other times the bones seem to plummet deeper into the earth, forcing a calculated guess as to whether launching a further assault is worth it. That is not all. What looks like the promising start of a femur or mandible will sometimes turn out to be nothing but the indistinguishable nib of a toe—a disappointment compounded by the fact that it took four days of punishing labor to confirm the fact that you are no better off than when you started. As a whole, the work of finding fossils amounts to moments of joy surrounded by days of toil, an unbalanced equation that often pushes away those who are unwilling to shoulder the near-certainty of repeated failure.
As soon as he got into the field, Brown seemed to have an innate sense of how an animal’s body was positioned at the time it was buried and fossilized, a feel for the juxtaposition of rocks and the relics of life that no amount of anatomy courses could teach. With a glance he was often able to tell whether what appeared to be a knob of rock was a glimmer of a larger knee bone, or whether a seam would curve and reveal itself to be a spine. He had already distinguished himself through his physical brawn; now, it was his ability to take on what another team member had started and quickly determine whether it was worth the effort that made him invaluable. It was if he had a magical ability to unearth a specimen, like someone who can sit down and complete a jigsaw puzzle without first needing to find the edges. Sometimes he would disappear into picked-over quarries and come out with fossils everyone else had missed, a feat that happened with enough frequency that it seemed like he could see layers beneath the surface.
The harder question was where to start digging in the first place. Finding a fossil requires the ability to see, outside the bounds of time, two different scenes at once: the immediate features of the landscape before you, and what it likely looked like millions of years ago. Geological maps which identified the type and age of rock were relatively rare in Brown’s era, meaning that many expeditions were simply a search for the Mesozoic-Era sedimentary rocks that had the potential to hold dinosaur fossils. Actually finding a specimen on some of these scouting missions was considered an unexpected stroke of fortune.
Searching for fossils took expedition parties into some of the most difficult terrain on Earth, picking their way over rock formations that are the leftovers of once-verdant landscapes. The snaking red-striped sandstone ravines of the badlands, their ridges jutting out like the Earth’s bones, were once lapped by ancient streams and lakes. Animals that died either in or near the water could become covered by mud and silt, starting the process of fossilization. Over millions of years, the weight and pressure of additional layers of sediment turned the remains of once-living creatures into stone, and in some cases lifted rock formations that were once at the bottom of vast inland seas or rivers into canyons and gullies. A paleontologist on the hunt for a fossil first looks for a subtle variation of colors, which can be a sign that different types of sediment came together in an event such as a flood that could have buried the remains of an animal within it. After color, the next sign of a fossil is often texture. Some bones are marked by countless little holes, as if they were aerated, while others are smoother and shinier than rock alone. Adjusting to the barren landscape of the fossil beds, with its narrow band of colors, required becoming comfortable in a land that seemed so forbidding as to never have harbored life.
Not everything about being in the field was work. The badlands into which Williston led his crew that summer were filled with crews from other colleges, making the experience something closer to a raucous spring break than the ruthless competition between Cope and Marsh. “Princeton girls did not come today which was a great disappointment after greasing our shoes and washing up,” Brown complained in his diary one night, most likely referring to a crew from Evelyn College, the university’s short-lived women’s college. (Princeton itself did not admit women until 1969.) “Saw a beautiful sunset. In the evening drowned out [a] Nebraska [crew] with ‘Carmine’ and other familiar college songs.” Later that summer, Brown’s team “ushered in the glorious fourth of July with twenty or thirty shots which made Neb think the Sioux were upon them.”
Brown’s first find was the skull of an Oreodont, a piglike mammal that lived in abundant numbers on the Great Plains five million years ago. “The Dr. is well pleased with my skull. It is the greatest find so far,” he boasted in his field journal. Williston soon began to rely on Brown not only for his strength—few others in the team could manage the job of moving delicate, heavy objects up and down the ravines without dropping them—but for his patience. Fully unearthing a fossil required digging around the specimen and covering it all with hardened flour paste, which formed a protective jacket until all of the remaining rock could be carefully chiseled away in a laboratory. Williston did not trust himself to wait. “He would start to work on a specimen and then turn it over to me and say, ‘Brown, you take it out. I am so anxious to see the specimen when it is out that I am afraid I will injure it in excavation,’ ” Brown wrote. Over the course of a month and a half, the team found the remnants of a saber-toothed tiger and other prehistoric mammals, but failed to find the bones of a dinosaur.
The following summer, Williston again tapped Brown to work as a field hand on a trip to Wyoming in search of the skull of a Triceratops. The first known specimen of the species—whose three horns and parrotlike beak gave it one of the largest heads of any known land animal—had been found in the region six years earlier when a cowboy named Edmund Wilson saw what he thought was the head of a steer hiding behind some rocks on the bank of a gulch during a roundup and threw a lasso over it. Ranch hands who rode alongside him described it as having “horns as long as a hoe handle and eye holes as big as your hat.” Upon closer inspection, Wilson realized it was the skull of a creature that looked like an alien. When he pulled the rope to try to drag the skull with him back to the ranch, it rolled to the bottom of the gulch, leaving just one of its horns intact. Word of the find soon reached Marsh in New Haven, and he sent an assistant curator by the name of John Bell Hatcher out to Wyoming with instructions to bring back the skull as soon as possible. When it reached Yale, Marsh determined that the creature’s head weighed half a ton. He quickly wrote the first formal description of the animal, which appeared in the American Journal of Science in April 1889. Marsh did not know what to make of the creature, calling it a “strange reptile” and noting that “other remains received more recently indicate forms much larger and more grotesque in appearance,” before bestowing upon it the name Ceratops horridus.
Other Triceratops specimens—which were also originally known by the competing name Ceratops—popped up over the next several years in the same region, leaving one prospector to call it the “Ceratops beds of Converse County.” (The fossil beds, which spread through eastern Wyoming and North Dakota, are now known as the Lance Formation. With some sections nearly two thousand feet thick, they have accounted for some of the most spectacular finds in the history of paleontology.) As the specimens were relatively plentiful, the problem was not finding them; rather, it was getting one out of the field without destroying equipment in the process. The skull alone of one specimen discovered in North Dakota weighed more than three tons, requiring a team of horses to haul it out of a ravine and several broken-down carts to pull it across the prairie.
No one had ever put a Triceratops on display, however, and Williston hoped that by finding one he could bolster the small museum at the university while also giving himself the added pleasure of annoying Marsh, who had lost the federal funding that he relied on to fund his expeditions in 1890 due in large part to the fallout of the Bone Wars scandal. “I shall await the results with interest,” Williston wrote to a colleague after learning that Marsh was working on a book based on the fossils Williston had helped collect. “Perhaps, if I get the material from a brand new locality that I am after, [I can] undo some of his work.”
Brown helped lead a team of horses north from Kansas, arriving near Lusk in the first week of July 1895, just in time for a raucous Fourth of July. “From all directions the cowboys are coming to begin the celebration,” a worried university trustee who accompanied the prospecting team wrote in his journal. “Very soon a large bonfire is started in the middle of main street and the sound of all kinds of fireworks begins. The fellows running their horses through town, full tilt, fire their revolvers into the fire just to see it fly. They keep up this orgy nearly all night and we get but little sleep.”
Brown was raised in a town where saloons were the only source of entertainment, and was the rare person who felt comfortable in both the rough world of the frontier and among scientists who only ventured into the badlands to excavate fossils they hoped to place in a museum. The longer he stayed in the field, the more he realized that this—the open lands, the adventure and the mixture of science and the frontier—was his natural element, a place where he felt fully free.
He soon proved himself worthy. Within two weeks of arriving in Wyoming, he helped find two Triceratops skulls—each one six feet long, four feet across, and three feet thick—embedded in a high sandstone bluff deep in the badlands. Each specimen was among the finest ever recorded, their refinement a testament to Brown’s ability to dig but not destroy. By the time the expedition returned to Kansas, they had collected an additional five tons of fossils, and Brown had built a strong enough relationship with Williston that the professor invited him to live in his house during the fall semester. “[Brown] took a great deal of the care & looked after things in camp. Things others wouldn’t think of,” Williston’s wife later remarked in a letter, singling him out from a cadre of students and professionals who shared the same dreams.
With the expedition a success, Williston began preparing for the following summer’s prospecting season. He received a letter from a colleague at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, asking if a student whom he had taken with him to South Dakota might be available to work the following summer as an assistant. Williston, however, suggested a different person for the job.
“Brown has been with me on two expeditions, and is the best man in the field that I ever had. He is energetic, has great powers of endurance, walking thirty miles a day without fatigue, is very methodical in all his habits, and thoroughly honest,” he wrote, before continuing, “The man whom you remember in Dakota was probably Dickinson. He was a very good student in the University and a good fellow, but a complete failure in the field.”
Not long after, a letter bearing a Manhattan postmark arrived for Brown. Inside it sat an invitation that changed the course of his life.