Chapter Four
THE LETTER BROWN HELD IN HIS HAND WAS A PORTAL TO a better life, an invitation that could not have seemed more out of place than if Fifth Avenue itself had somehow crashed onto the dirty Kansas plain. In any other context, for any other reason, the lives of a scion of Manhattan society and a man who had spent his childhood playing on mounds of coal would have remained forever distant, like opposite poles of the Earth. And yet Henry Fairfield Osborn was not used to being denied.
The eldest son of a founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, then one of the nation’s most profitable and powerful companies, Osborn grew up in the gilded cocoon of New York City’s aristocracy in the midst of the country’s greatest economic boom. When he was a year old, his uncle John Pierpont Morgan, the most important man on Wall Street, would stoop down and play with him on the family’s parlor rug. By the age of three, the boy would walk into a room and start reciting facts or sermons and expect his audience to stop whatever they were doing and pay attention. “Every day he talks up something new,” his mother noted. During the summer, he explored the family estate on a mountaintop in the Hudson Valley directly across from West Point, often swimming in the river with his younger brother’s childhood friend Theodore Roosevelt. The rest of the year he spent at the family’s four-story brownstone mansion at 32 Park Avenue in Manhattan, where boxes of pansies and tulips hung from each windowsill in the spring and landscape portraits by Frederic Edwin Church, perhaps the most famous painter then living in the United States, decorated the walls.
When his father was increasingly called away on business after the Civil War, Osborn assumed command. He began acting as the head of the family as a teenager, controlling everything from the household expenses to travel arrangements for his siblings. Whatever shyness was still lurking within him was expelled at the age of fourteen, when his father demanded that he begin publishing a newspaper that he called The Boy’s Journal, which forced him to interact with adults as equals. Later that summer, the family toured Europe, relying on Osborn to manage all the concierges and train conductors they came in contact with, his innate sense of superiority their solution to any puzzle. When it was time to choose a college, he diverted from the pipeline of boys at his prep school who ended up at Yale and went instead to Princeton. His maternal great-uncle, the Reverend Ebenezer Pemberton, had been one of its three founders before the American Revolution.
At Princeton, Osborn experienced the first conflict between the young prince he thought he was and the person others perceived him to be. He arrived at the all-male campus with slender limbs, short-cropped hair and a high collar, a look that one classmate described as “almost girlish” and which soon translated into a nickname he detested, “Polly Osborn.” Attending all of the school’s football games and joining the sculling team did little to improve his social standing. Only after he won the annual cane spree—a campus tradition in which freshmen and sophomores brutally attacked one another on a playing field with bamboo canes until only one bloodied man was left standing—did he begin to earn the respect of his classmates. Any doubts that entered his mind as to who he would become were drowned under constant letters from his mother, Virginia, that reminded him of his assured place in life. “Make up your mind to lead in college . . . not be led by the more worthless half of class,” she wrote. A deeply religious woman who often cited Bible verses in conversation, she expected her children to suffer to become closer to God, and was happy when she learned that because of a problem in the dorm building her son’s room had no heat in the winter. Over time, Osborn began to believe that he was destined for great things, having never been exposed to anything that would give him doubts. The fact that he was not an especially brilliant student and eventually graduated in the middle of his class did nothing to dent his conception of himself.
Not that his grades would matter in any real sense. His path in life had already been cleared by his father, who expected that his son would join him in the railroad business as soon as he made the social connections among his classmates that were in many ways the whole point of being there. Free to explore without worrying about his future job prospects, Osborn in his junior year took his first course in geology, which was taught by Arnold Guyot, a professor who had founded the U.S. Weather Bureau as well as Princeton’s own small natural history museum, and whose influence on his field was so great that guyots—naturally occurring flat-topped mountain peaks that rise from the ocean floor—would eventually be named after him.
It was in those classroom sessions that Osborn was first exposed to the revolution happening right under his feet. He read reports about the fossils collected by Marsh and his assistants at Yale and became fascinated by the remnants of the Earth’s history, seeing in the slow engines of geology and evolution a confirmation of his conception of God. Until the end of his career, Osborn would never break from the Presbyterian faith that his mother honed in him, arguing in one college essay that eternal salvation could only be attained through unceasing effort. Yet he also clung to an older, nearly Calvinist view of predestination that animated his sense that he was of a higher caste than nearly everyone he came into contact with. “There is no indication of a predisposition on my part to this life of research; in my school and early life I was never conscious of such a predisposition nor am I able in a review of my ancestry and of my own boyhood to account for my life vocation,” Osborn wrote in an essay soon before he retired. “My boyhood and youth were similar to those of almost any other boy, undistinguished by a display of the driving force which from the moment of its awakening in the junior year of my Princeton days, has ever impelled me with constantly increasing power. The impulse which led me to dedicate my life to research must truly have come from within.”
Marsh was one of the first to try to stand in the way of Osborn’s desires, flicking off his presumptuous request as a college student to view some of the professor’s fossils that had not yet been announced through the publication of a scientific paper. When Osborn arrived at Yale to see its collection in person, Marsh secretly followed him and a group of fellow Princeton students around the Peabody Museum in his slippers to ensure that they stayed in a small, pre-approved area. Not to be outdone, Osborn helped organize what would become known as Princeton’s first Geological Expedition, in which eighteen students and two professors embarked on an eleven-week trip through Colorado, Wyoming and Utah in the summer of 1877. They hired two private train cars—one to travel in, the other to hold their luggage—and headed for the open West, stopping first to sample the metropolitan offerings of Chicago and Kansas City.
The expedition went about as well as expected, given that it consisted of a group of young men whose idea of roughing it consisted of arguing with waiters in Europe. “Of our journey, novel to most of us though it was, there was not much to be said,” wrote William Berryman Scott, a fellow junior who was the son of a professor at Princeton’s theological seminary. “The Middle West was not then the busy, prosperous region it has since become, and the principal impression which it made upon me then was one of crudeness and shabbiness. The roads were quagmires of black mud; the towns were chiefly of wood and sadly in need of paint and, though there were a great many fine-looking farms, the journey was a depressing experience.”
The group did not find any fossils of note, but returned with their enthusiasm for the natural world undaunted. Osborn recast his life around science, ignoring his father’s pleas to consider a more lucrative line of work. He spent two years of postgraduate work in New York and Princeton, and, thanks largely to his connections, was named an assistant professor of natural history at Princeton in 1881. Like most of the things in his life to that point, Osborn’s success would not have been possible without the financial backing of his father, who first donated money to expand the college library while his son was completing his graduate work and then, when the failure of the university’s hotel threatened the funding of several professorships, agreed to pay Henry’s full salary, floating his son’s ambitions on a cloud of family money.
Despite his advantages, Osborn did little to distinguish himself as a scientist. He initially dove into embryology, determined to prove how the marsupial yolk sac conveyed nutrients to a fetus. After several years of failure in the best laboratory on campus, built with donations from his father, he turned his interest toward psychology. When that proved futile, he made plans to found and edit a scientific journal that never got off the ground. Finally, after four years on the faculty, he pivoted to vertebrate paleontology and proposed coauthoring a textbook on North American fossils with Scott, his onetime companion on the Geological Expedition, who had already built a reputation in the field while at the same time shouldering the load of teaching all the paleontology courses at the university. Osborn knew little about the subject but, thanks to his ability to control the pipeline of funding, he expanded the paleontology department and cast himself in the role of supervisor. The position allowed him to take credit for his colleague’s work, a pattern he would replicate over the remainder of his career. He settled into what he considered his rightful place and began crafting theories on how the immense fossils then turning up in the American West fit into the concept of evolution and the emergence of mammals and humankind, relying almost entirely on collectors and other field scientists to do the hard work of finding bones that he would then examine in the comfortable confines of his laboratory.
Still, he longed for bigger things. His father constantly reminded him that Princeton was neither a major social nor scientific center of the country and that every day he spent raising his four young children in New Jersey was a wasted opportunity, given their proximity to the connections that could be forged in Manhattan. Osborn, too, craved the prestige that could only be satisfied with a life centered in New York City, and often traveled with his wife and children to socialize with the city’s elite at his parents’ summer mansion, named Castle Rock, which overlooked Garrison on the Hudson. In the late 1880s, he began making his desire to move back to New York known to members of his father’s social circle, and in 1890 he was offered a position at what is now known as Columbia University by Seth Low. The heir of a prosperous trading firm known as A. A. Low and Co., Low was perhaps more famous for serving a term as the mayor of Brooklyn, where he pushed for reform in the city’s public schools. He knew that by adding Osborn to the faculty the university would stand to benefit from the wealth not only of his family but of their friends as well, and Osborn soon headed a new department of biology.
Osborn, however, had other things on his mind than trading one university position for another. While securing his professorship at Columbia, he convinced Morris Jessup, a former railroad titan and friend of his father who was now the president of the fledgling American Museum of Natural History, to bring him in to lead the museum’s new Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. Though it was a small department at an institution that barely registered in the minds of New Yorkers at the time, Osborn saw in the position a way to bolster his own reputation by transforming the American Museum into a player in the rapidly expanding world of paleontology—perhaps the one branch of science in which Americans were held in higher esteem than their counterparts in Europe. For that, he had to thank the man who had stood in his way. “There is nothing in any way comparable . . . for their scientific importance, to the series of fossils which Professor Marsh has brought together,” noted the British evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley after touring Yale’s Peabody Museum in person.
By positioning himself as the heir to Marsh and Cope without the weight of scandal, Osborn envisioned a path toward becoming the most prominent scientist in the country, able to exert his intellectual influence in the same way that his father’s millions remade his material world. The board of trustees soon voted to provide Osborn what he needed to make the paleontology division further “the cause of science, education, and popular interest” at the museum. To do so, Osborn would need to build up a division from scratch. The museum was a mass of empty rooms, and it was his job to fill them. For the first time in his life, Osborn would have an independent measure of his success or failure that could not be swayed by his father. In order to succeed, he needed to revolutionize a museum in which the public had shown little interest. And for that, he needed a person that he could trust to bring him the fossils and subsequent fame which he considered his due.
✢✢✢✢
DESPITE THE IMPORTANCE OF DINOSAUR fossils to the growing understanding of the history of life on Earth, very few people had actually seen one. The conception of what a dinosaur looked like when its bones were set back into their rightful places was at best provided by drawings done by naturalists that were rooted in science but filled in with fantasy, and at worst a fancy of the mind no different than daydreams of a dragon. How the muscles and bones of a living dinosaur shaped its body required a leap of imagination, like conjuring the finished form of a ship after discovering its scattered wreckage at the bottom of the sea.
Nevertheless, in the early 1850s, Prince Albert, in a nod to Britain’s outsized role in their discovery, decided it was time to build the world’s first life-size models of dinosaurs. He turned to Sir Richard Owen, who had come up with the classification of dinosaurs less than a decade before, and work soon began on an exhibit depicting the prehistoric world that would serve as the centerpiece for the Crystal Palace, an amusement park, zoo and ornamental gardens planned for Sydenham, a suburban section of southeast London. Owen envisaged a collection consisting of models of the three known dinosaurs at the time situated around a lake, as well as models of flying reptiles known as pterosaurs and giant mammals such as a sloth and a deer, whose antlers would consist of actual fossils. To make the idea a reality, Owen hired a sculptor named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a former assistant superintendent of the London World’s Fair best known for making models of living animals for the Earl of Derby.
With nothing other than Owen’s drawings and theories to go on, Hawkins cleared his workshop and began constructing the first life-size forms of dinosaurs to appear on Earth in millions of years. He began by crafting small models out of clay, basing the way that each animal’s limbs and muscles hung from its body on Owen’s conception that dinosaurs were large, lumbering, dimwitted beasts that mainly lived in or near water in order to provide relief from the strain of moving their enormous bodies. Once each model—the most ambitious and accurate depiction of dinosaurs ever attempted at that point—met Owen’s approval, Hawkins turned to brick, iron and cement to forge full sculptures that when finished weighed up to thirty tons, a process he called “not less than building a house upon four columns.” Sea lizards, Iguanodons, Megalosaurus and pterodactyls began to take shape in his South London workshop, slowly bridging the abyss of time between the Paleozoic Era and the Victorian Age. Each scaly creation was painted a shade of light green, making it appear to be the unintended result of mating a garden lizard with a particularly tall and fat hippopotamus.
To build up the public’s interest in the new park, Hawkins invited twenty-one of London’s leading scientists and newspaper editors to dine on an eight-course feast served inside the Iguanodon mold on New Year’s Eve of 1853. Owen sat at the literal head of the table, greeting each person as he climbed up a small ladder to reach the belly of the beast. The party went long into the night, with speeches heralding Owen’s achievements, and continued as the distinguished group of men made their way to the railway station. Their drunken chorus was “so fierce and enthusiastic as almost to lead to the belief that the herd of Iguanodons were bellowing,” Hawkins wrote.
The coverage of Hawkins’s publicity stunt was the first widespread intrusion of dinosaurs into the public consciousness, sparking one of the first social manias based in science. Hawkins was besieged with requests to tour his workshop before the official opening of the Crystal Palace, and started a lucrative business selling miniature casts of his models. Charles Dickens wrote letters to Owen begging him to write for his journal Household Words. When Queen Victoria opened the Crystal Palace on June 10, 1854, forty thousand people lined up outside. Sir Richard Owen stood with the French emperor and the king of Portugal as the Queen, clad in a light blue dress and white shawl, gave a speech in which she said she hoped “that this wonderful structure, and the treasures of art and knowledge which it contains, may long continue to elevate and instruct, as well as to delight and amuse, the minds of all classes of my people.” Hundreds of thousands of visitors toured the grounds of the Crystal Palace over the next decade. Those that did not make the trip themselves could hardly miss the posters and models of Hawkins’s creations that were widely sold throughout the country, spurring the imaginations of writers including Jules Verne and Louis Figuier, whose work soon featured dinosaurs sparring with one another.
The models made the existence of dinosaurs real in a way that drawings of fossils could not, upending the conception of the world that was then being handed down by education and religion. It was as if several pages had suddenly been added in the middle of a familiar story, forcing readers to reconcile everything they now knew with what they had always believed. Though science had by this time disproved the biblical story of a great flood, belief in it remained so widespread that a London weekly magazine ran an essay devoted to Hawkins’s models which postulated in all sincerity that these “savages and beasts” had become extinct “because they were too large to go into the Ark, and so they were all drowned,” without asking why Noah was not instructed to build something bigger from the get-go.
The worldwide popularity of Hawkins’s models in Crystal Park led the commissioners of the new Central Park then under construction in New York City to want an expanded version of their own. As it emerged from the Civil War, New York found itself becoming the world’s busiest port and one of its wealthiest cities. Yet it continued to feel inferior to its rivals, London and Paris, and an exhibit featuring dinosaurs discovered in the American West—larger, heavier and presumably fiercer than anything found in Europe—would be a fitting way to underscore the superiority of the New World. While he was on a speaking tour of the United States, Hawkins received a commission to create models for a planned Paleozoic Museum that would stand within the park, attracting millions and enhancing New York’s reputation with its own wonders to display. “For thousands of years men have dwelt upon the earth without even suspecting that it was a mighty tomb of animated races that once flourished upon it as the living tribes do now,” the park’s commissioners wrote in an annual report announcing their plan to build a dinosaur-focused museum. “Only in very recent times, which men still remember, was the discovery made that earth has had a vast antiquity; that it has teemed with life for countless ages, and that generations of the most gigantic and extraordinary creatures lived through long geological periods, and were succeeded by other kinds of creatures equally colossal and equally strange.”
In the ten years since Hawkins built the Crystal Palace sculptures, scientists—many of them animated by the opportunity to correct a man who was widely despised—had realized that there were fundamental flaws in Owen’s conception of how dinosaurs moved. Instead of the heavy, squat beasts that Owen suggested, further discoveries of fossils revealed that they were more likely lithe and active, with some as likely to move on two feet as on all fours. Intent on depicting New York’s dinosaur models “clothed in the forms which science now ventures to define,” Hawkins traveled to Philadelphia to seek help from Joseph Leidy, then the country’s leading expert on prehistoric life. Leidy let Hawkins view the bipedal Hadrosaurus foulkii in the possession of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, which when it was discovered in 1858 in suburban New Jersey was the most complete dinosaur skeleton then known. (Owen and Mantell had theorized that what we now know as dinosaurs were prehistoric reptiles from the shape of their teeth; the discovery of a full skeleton seemed to confirm that theory by the presence of a cloaca, so named after the Latin term for sewer, which is the single opening shared by the reproductive, intestinal and urinary tracts in modern-day animals including some reptiles, amphibians and birds.) Hawkins made plaster casts of the thirty-foot-long herbivore’s bones and, with Leidy’s input, built a metal armature that acted as a form of sinew in steel, allowing him to connect the disparate parts of the animal in their natural positions, creating a hybrid of sculpture and anatomy. The only thing missing was a skull, which he improvised by crafting the head of an Iguanodon.
After two months of work, the result was the world’s first standing dinosaur skeleton that appeared in a lifelike pose. The specimen was put on display at the Academy in November 1868. Though the museum was only open two days a week, more than 100,000 people—a number more than twice the annual attendance in any year of the institution’s history—passed through its doors to gawk at the bones. Their numbers were so great that the Academy’s secretary complained that “The crowds lead to many accidents, the sum total of which amounts to a considerable destruction of property, in the way of broken glass, light wood work, &c. Further, the excessive clouds of dust produced by the moving crowds, rest upon the horizontal cases, obscuring from view their contents, while it penetrates others much to the detriment of parts of the collection.” Due to the novel problem of what they deemed an “excessive number of visitors,” the Academy’s trustees decided it was time to charge an admission fee for the first time in the history of the institution, a subtle way to discourage the poor from coming into contact with science.
Hawkins returned to New York to complete the models for the Paleozoic Museum, but soon ran into a problem he had never before encountered while resurrecting the prehistoric world: modern-day politics. The city was run by a corrupt web of politicians headed by William “Boss” Tweed, who suspended funding for the proposed Central Park museum in order to shuffle money to pet projects. When Hawkins complained publicly, a gang of vandals hired by Tweed broke into his studio in the Arsenal building in Central Park on the night of May 3, 1871, and smashed every mold and sculpture Hawkins had built over the prior three years. “Don’t you bother so much about dead animals,” one of the men reportedly told Hawkins. “There are lots of live animals—you can make models of them.” The rubble was dumped in a pit in the northern stretches of Central Park, and the idea of a Paleozoic Museum was buried with it.
The fate of dinosaurs in Manhattan would instead fall to a struggling museum founded by a relatively unknown comparative anatomist named Albert Bickmore. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Bickmore worked in the basement of the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology under Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist who had founded it in 1860 after his popular books and professorship made him one of the country’s best-known scientists. A staunch creationist who publicly opposed Darwin and believed that a museum could offer a testament to the variety of God’s works, Agassiz nevertheless became famous for his insights into how life changed over time. He was among the first to recognize that the slow movement of glaciers changed the composition of life and rock across Europe, and readily accepted the concept of extinction as the result of catastrophic ice ages—a theory he paired with the argument that God could recreate species as per his heavenly whims.
But it was his views on the systems and categories of life that made Agassiz famous in his own time. He argued that all forms of life—branch, order, species—fell within their own hierarchies, with humans at the top. (This did not apply to all humans, however, as Agassiz claimed to be physically revolted by the first Black person he encountered when he moved to the United States, and argued that non-white humans were of a lesser, distinct species. While he opposed slavery, he did so only because he objected to the “unnatural” intermingling of races.) “I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done,” he wrote. “I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg—that is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.”
As a professor, Agassiz was known to be a rampant self-promoter and grating mentor, who confiscated his assistants’ laboratory keys if they asked to be paid. Those who could stand his bluster would have to pass a test he called “trials by fish,” in which he left students in a room with decomposing specimens and told them to make close observations of the minute stages of decay. “In six weeks you will either become utterly weary of the task, or . . . be so completely fascinated . . . as to wish to devote your whole life to the pursuit of our science,” he wrote.
Bickmore passed the test and watched as Agassiz convinced a group of Harvard alumni and the Massachusetts legislature to donate money that allowed the Museum of Comparative Zoology to expand. He soon realized that he would never match his mentor in fame or academic stature. Instead, he asked why he couldn’t build a similar museum devoted to exploring the natural world, but at a grander scale. “[W]hen I journeyed for three years in Eastern Asia and over Siberia, I carried with me everywhere two things, a Bible and a sketch plan for a museum in New York,” Bickmore later wrote. His reasoning for building a museum dedicated to science in New York City was as practical as his vision was not. “Science does not appear to create wealth directly,” he reasoned, so it “must depend on the interest which rich and generous men take in it. . . . New York is our city of the greatest wealth [and therefore] the best location for the future museum of natural history for our whole land.”
Bickmore traveled throughout Europe, meeting with members of the scientific elite in London and Berlin and touring the Continent’s museums. He returned to New York with a letter of introduction from the head of the British Museum and made his way through the city’s aristocracy, pitching the idea of a museum as a way to further the glory of their hometown while preventing rival cities like Boston or Chicago from one day eclipsing it. He eventually convinced nearly twenty of the city’s wealthiest men—a group including J. P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt (the father of the future president) and A. T. Stewart, who founded the first department store in New York City and amassed a fortune that ranks among the ten largest in U.S. history—to pledge their financial support for a new museum of natural history, and to ask the Board of Commissioners of Central Park to place it on public grounds.
Its name was a reflection of Bickmore’s ambition: the American Museum of Natural History. From its birth in 1869, it was meant to be an institution that would have no rival in the country, existing on a higher plane like one of Agassiz’s advanced species. Yet Bickmore was not the first person to call something the American Museum. Still alive in memory was a stranger, more cacophonous space that, until a freak fire at the end of the Civil War just four years earlier, was the most popular museum in America—and nearly the exact opposite of the prestigious place of science that Bickmore hoped to build.