Chapter Five
THE MERMAID BURNED FIRST.
A wooden club said to have been used to kill the explorer Captain James Cook in Hawaii fell next in the path of the flames, followed by a case containing live boa constrictors that had dined on fresh rabbits before an audience of schoolchildren earlier that morning. As the fire spread to the upper floors, someone—perhaps a firefighter, perhaps a visitor who panicked and didn’t know what else to do—smashed one of the glass sides of an immense water tank with an axe, sending thousands of gallons of seawater cascading down the stairwells and leaving two whales beached on the second floor of a building in Lower Manhattan. Wax figures of Napoleon and Cleopatra, letters signed by George Washington, screeching monkeys of all sizes—seemingly everything that could be conjured by the human imagination soon came tumbling out of the windows and landing in a crowd that had begun to gather on Ann Street.
A firefighter named William McNamara who had visited the building often enough to know its layout ran up the smoky stairwell, past the wax figures of Christ and the disciples and the stage where a “learned seal” named Ned performed twice a day. When he reached the third floor, he kicked open doors until he found Ann Swan, the eight-foot-tall “giantess” the New York Times called an “exceedingly tall and graceful specimen of longitude,” and Zuruby, the wooly-haired Circassian beauty, huddling in a corner. He led both women down through the flames to safety, though he refused to go back and grab the $120 in gold coins that Swan said she had hidden in her room. Rumors that a lion had escaped and was prowling around the neighborhood prompted the two women to spend the remainder of the afternoon in the bustling newsroom of the nearby New York Sun, where they sipped tea and experienced the novel pleasure of being ignored.
The fire continued to grow, consuming a place that was considered such an essential stop on any New York sightseeing trip that the Prince of Wales had insisted on visiting it when he arrived in the country in 1860. “Birds of rarest plumage, fish of most exquisite tint, animals peculiar to every section, minerals characteristic of every region, and peculiarities of all portions of the earth, costly, beautiful curious and strange, were crowded on the dusty shelves of room after room, where they attracted the earnest attention and studious regard of the scholar and the connoisseur,” the New York Times lamented on July 14, 1865, as the American Museum lay smoldering on the ground. “Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the dirty, ill-shaped structure, filled with specimens so full of suggestion and of merit, passed from our gaze, and its like cannot soon be seen again . . . for many years the Museum has been a landmark of the city; has afforded us in childhood fullest vision of the wonderful and miraculous; has opened to us the secrets of the earth, and revealed to us the mysteries of the past.”
It was a place as famous for its lies as for its truths, a collection of humbugs and spectacles that mirrored the mind of its founder, a man whose genius lay in letting his customers in on the fact that they could not trust him. Phineas Taylor Barnum—P. T. for short—was born thirty-four years after his country’s founding, and seemed to embody the uniquely American belief that a good story was more important than fact. This mindset was a gift of his grandfather, who would tell the young P. T. every week that he would one day inherit prime farmland known as Ivy Island, which was destined to make him the wealthiest boy in their hometown of Bethel, Connecticut. When Barnum turned twelve, his grandfather finally took him to tour the property he had been promised. Where he expected to find a place worthy of his dreams, he instead found a hornet-infested swamp. “I saw nothing but a few stunted ivies and straggling trees. The truth flashed upon me. I had been the laughing-stock of the family and neighborhood for years,” Barnum later wrote in his autobiography. “My grandfather would go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven. In this one particular, as well as in many others, I am almost sorry to say I am his counterpart,” he wrote.
He carried out his first known swindle while working as a clerk at a general store near Bethel, selling thousands of tickets at fifty cents each for what he claimed was a “magnificent lottery.” Its winners soon discovered that their prizes were empty bottles and other pieces of junk that Barnum had pulled from the store’s unsold inventory. In search of new gimmicks, he tried opening his own store, ran a few more lotteries and briefly served time in jail after founding a newspaper whose specialty seemed to be losing libel suits. He found the success he was looking for in the creation of the American Museum, which opened in Lower Manhattan in the early 1840s.
He was not the first person to open a museum and fill it with the strangest things he could find; he just did it better than anyone else. The first popular museum in the United States was founded by a Philadelphia painter named Charles Willson Peale, who, needing to supplement his income, collected and displayed items ranging from a mastodon bone to Benjamin Franklin’s taxidermied angora cat. (That was not quite enough for Peale, who, in a fit of ambition, once asked Franklin if he could display his body, too, once he was done with it.) Known as “cabinets of curiosities,” these early museums were often little more than a collection of novel and strange things collected during a wealthy person’s lifetime, without any attempt to forge them into a coherent whole or reflection of an idea, and seemed to revel in a lack of order and repel any whiff of seriousness.
Peale initially aimed higher, inscribing the motto “Whoso would learn Wisdom, let him enter here!” above the museum’s door, and sprinkled exhibits of taxidermied animals in front of painted backgrounds of their natural surroundings among the less scientific aspects of the collection. “By showing the nest, hollow, or cave, a particular view of the country from which they came, some instances of the habitats may be given,” he wrote. Yet poor attendance led his son, Rubens, to persuade his father to lighten the mood by bringing in live entertainers. After Charles retired, Rubens expanded these diversions to include magicians, funhouse mirrors and biological “freaks of nature.” Within a year, he doubled the museum’s revenue, and he began casting an eye out for ways to expand. He opened Peale’s New York Museum in 1825 and established a policy of offering discounts to schools and students. On its four floors, exhibits ranged from colorful gemstones to a calf with two heads to a dog named Romeo who barked answers to questions from the audience. Despite his efforts, the museum could not turn a profit, and Rubens lost it to his creditors in 1830, eventually retiring to his father-in-law’s country estate, where he spent the remainder of his life experimenting with mesmerism. (All was not lost for Rubens, however, as a portrait his brother painted of him in 1801 with what was said to be the first geranium ever grown in the New World now hangs in the National Gallery of Art.)
The building and all it contained were eventually purchased by Barnum, who went on to add other exhibits from competing museums and rechristened them all the American Museum. Outwardly, he promised that the enterprise would be educational, advertising that his collection would serve as an “encyclopedia synopsis of everything worth seeing in this curious world.” Privately, he began the search for the sort of spectacle which would bring in the crowds that Rubens had struggled to attract.
The competition was fierce. A German immigrant by the name of Albert Carl Koch toured Manhattan with the mounted bones of what appeared to be an enormous sea serpent nearly one hundred and twenty feet long. He initially dubbed it the Hydrarchos sillimani after a friend named Benjamin Silliman. When Silliman objected, Koch went with Hydrarchos harlandi instead, after the anatomist Richard Harland, who was not in a position to argue given that he was dead. Only after the specimen was exhibited in Boston and newspapers suggested that it was the remains of a beast that had escaped from Noah’s Ark did several Harvard scholars examine it and conclude that it was simply a jumbled arrangement of fossilized whale bones purporting to be a much larger animal. (Koch, by this time, had already taken the exhibit to Europe, where he ended up selling it to a dazzled King Frederick William IV of Prussia.)
Not to be outdone, Barnum purchased the black, shriveled body of what was said to be a FeeJee mermaid that had been caught off the coast of Japan toward the end of the nineteenth century. Three feet long, with sharp teeth, bulbous breasts and scaly skin, the specimen had in fact been masterfully stitched together using parts from a baboon, an orangutan and a shark, among other creatures. Barnum knew that the “all-important question” for audiences was that they be allowed to “see and examine the specimen” themselves to judge its veracity. He exhibited it at the American Museum, where he paid a man claiming to be a scholar to give lectures in the top-floor lecture hall about the natural history of mermaids. When a visitor who had actually been to Fiji stood up and said that there were no such things near that or any island, Barnum’s scholar responded that there was no accounting for the ignorance of some men and continued talking. The museum brought in the then-unheard-of sum of $1,000 in revenue the first week the mermaid was on exhibit—three times its normal amount—which cemented its place as the most popular choice of entertainment in a city filled with immigrants who had few of their traditional amusements to fall back on. The American Museum sold more than 30 million tickets over the next decade, including one to president-elect Abraham Lincoln, who walked past a crowd of 250,000 gawking New Yorkers to view the collection on February 19, 1861, while on a tour of the country before his inauguration. After it burned down five years after Lincoln’s visit, Barnum lost interest in the business of museums and turned his attention to a traveling circus that one day would reach Topeka, Kansas, and prompt a young Frank Brown to come up with a name for his new baby brother.
Vaudeville theaters and some of the nation’s first amusement parks soon filled the space the American Museum had occupied in the country’s imagination. Though the name of the institution he envisioned was nearly identical to Barnum’s house of fun, Bickmore aimed past the public when it came to the question of how to fund the American Museum of Natural History and focused on a rising class of millionaires looking to cement their place in society through prominent donations. A museum devoted to fusty subjects like rocks and bones should have been a hard sell, especially with the near-simultaneous founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which would eventually sit on the other side of Central Park and promised an eternal association with the beauty and refinement of European masters. Wealthy Americans at the time felt a keen need to purchase art and other cultural treasures as an outward sign of their sophistication, even—and especially—if they were in the relatively rough businesses of railroads or oil. Upon attending a dinner at railroad baron Leland Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, one guest remarked that it “looked as if the old palaces of Europe had been ransacked.” Using the spoils of capitalism to bring culture to the masses was seen as a noble calling, allowing one to act both in ruthless self-interest and for the public good at the same time. “Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and rice into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculpted marble,” prominent attorney Joseph Choate said at a speech at an opening for the Met.
Yet as industrialization remade the U.S. economy and gave the wealthiest 1 percent of households nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, science seemed better equipped to emphasize moral values of discipline, rationality and the pursuit of knowledge than art, no matter its prestige. It only helped that the discovery of these priceless scientific gemstones was often the byproduct of mining the Earth of its material wealth, producing specimens that would never be known if not for the thirst of capitalism. In its first years in a temporary building in Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History consisted mainly of rare objects of natural origin that served as centerpieces for exclusive parties. Patrons “promenaded up and down inspecting the numerous cases, and filling their minds with science, while their ears were filled with the soft strains of Lanner and Strauss,” the New York Times noted after an early gathering of the city’s elite.
Few outside the New York aristocracy were interested in or felt comfortable in such a setting, preferring instead the color and adventure promised by P. T. Barnum’s dime museum. Still, the American Museum of Natural History doubled down on seriousness, building a massive complex of buildings in Manhattan Square, a park bounded by Seventy-Seventh Street, Eighty-First Street, Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, close to the homes of its benefactors and far from the city’s commercial heart. In 1888, an architect named Josiah Cleveland Cady designed a massive Romanesque addition in pink granite, featuring so many castlelike towers, turrets and tourelles that it seemed as if the only thing missing was a moat. Furthering its aim to remain as elite as its benefactors, the museum began funding explorations across the globe, making it something closer to a research institution and, as one trustee put it, “not permit it to be diverted from its original purpose and become a mere show-room of natural curiosities.”
Still, it had to do something to bring visitors in the door. When the first section of the imposing addition opened in 1892, the museum struggled to find a way to “sprinkle our wholesome bread with a little sugar,” as one trustee put it, and attract a broad audience into a place that by the looks of it was more intent on keeping people out than welcoming them in. Bickmore, fearing that his museum was doomed to become “a stuffed circus, with the chief task of the curators keeping it dusted,” began offering free lectures to the city’s schoolteachers in hopes that their enthusiasm would spread to their charges.
At the same time, the museum made a more overt appeal to those who felt more at home in P. T. Barnum’s dime museum by purchasing a diorama depicting an Arab courier on a camel trying to fend off a Barbary lion that was tearing its claws into the camel’s side. Created by Edouard and Jules Verraux, heirs to one of the most famous taxidermy supply houses in France, the work’s lifelike poses of both human and animal had made it one of the signature exhibits of the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, with visitors left shaken by the violence of the moment frozen in time. (Only in 2017 did CT scans and an X-ray reveal that the reason the courier looked so realistic was that its head was a human skull covered in plaster, most likely stolen by the Verraux brothers from a graveyard.) Once installed in a prominent place in the American Museum, the diorama shared space with some of the largest fossils in the museum’s collection—including a seven-foot-tall Irish elk, a twelve-foot-tall specimen of the flightless giant moa and a mastodon with impressive tusks—all dutifully labeled with their full Latin names, as if to preempt an accusation that anything other than science could account for their position near the front door.
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FOR ALL ITS GOOD INTENTIONS, the new American Museum of Natural History barely broke into the stream of life in Manhattan, more of a stately mausoleum tucked away along a wealthy span of the city than anything connected to the here and now. As attendance continued to disappoint, one curator made plain what should be done: the “magnificent museum . . . will need some representation of the giant vertebrate fauna which Marsh and Cope and Leidy have made known to the world.” Dinosaurs, in effect, would be the perfect match between the titillating attractions that the public wanted to see and the responsible exhibits that the museum had to offer. The idea was that a visitor, drawn in by the bones of giant beasts, would stick around and see what else could be found in a sprawling palace of science. Marsh, who was not generally interested in what the public wanted, recognized in a speech at the museum that the special appeal of dinosaurs lay not only in the fact that they were so large and strange, but that they spoke to the “great problem” of “the origin of life itself.”
The question was how to fill the museum’s empty shelves. When he took the job, Osborn pledged that he would turn the museum into a “center for exhibition, publication, and research” in a field “in which America leads the world.” He was given $5,000 a year—a sum worth more than $150,000 in today’s dollars—to hire assistants and cover operating expenses, a not insignificant outlay at a time when the museum’s trustees were beginning to question whether their efforts to build and maintain a little-loved institution had been worth it. The future of the American Museum was effectively in Osborn’s hands. Short on staff, money and time, he faced the first true challenge of his life and the first real consequences of failure.
His offers to purchase specimens from both Marsh and Cope were rebuffed, leaving him in the unfamiliar position of competing in a fair fight with other museums harboring similar ambitions in cities such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. As he had in Princeton, Osborn sought to smooth out the wrinkles of his own shortcomings with the experience of others. He hired Jacob L. Wortman, a moody and virulently anti-Semitic former medical doctor who had collected for Cope, as his primary assistant. In the newly recognized role of preparator, he hired Adam Hermann, who had previously worked for Marsh, and gave him the responsibility of ensuring that fossils would not crumble once excavated from stone—a job that ensured that the museum would have something to show for its work in the field. In an essay published near the end of his career, Hermann noted that in the early days of paleontology “fossils were dug out of the ground where they were discovered in the same rough manner that potatoes are dug in the field. They were picked up in pieces, done up as far as possible in parcels in the order in which they had been taken up, and then left to the preparator in the laboratory to fit the fragments together again. Joining the pieces together, however, was in a great many cases an utter impossibility, especially if the pieces were quite small and the fractures not characteristic enough to determine their position.”
Over time, Hermann developed techniques, such as the use of hot glue and plaster, to preserve fossils that are still used to this day, though a lifetime of frustration with the field paleontologists who dumped a mess of bones into his laboratory could be sensed in his gripe that “I have found in my experience that some collectors do not pay attention enough to the packing and the labeling of the different parcels. This is one of the most important parts of collecting and should never be neglected.” To capture the public imagination until fossil mounts were ready, Osborn brought in artist Charles R. Knight to paint murals depicting the prehistoric world, betting that immersive displays—a nod toward an element of showmanship intertwined with paleontology that Marsh despised—would resurrect public interest in the American Museum.
Within two years of taking the job, Osborn had collectors in the American West searching for dinosaur fossils, though they met with little success. Nevertheless, in 1895, he presented a plan to the museum’s trustees to open a new Hall of Fossil Reptiles, which he promised would “break down Marsh’s work as far as possible” and make the museum “the world’s leading center for fossil reptiles.”
The only flaw in the plan was that even if the trustees agreed to build a new hall, Osborn still had nothing to display in it. As he prepared for the upcoming prospecting season, Osborn remained desperate to find the bones that would salvage his reputation. He had not only his professional life to consider, but more importantly the opinion of his father. Professorships the elder Osborn could stomach, but not wayward promises of dinosaur bones that if unfulfilled would leave a dark mark on the Osborn name. For all of his willingness to fund his son’s life, William Henry Osborn was unrelenting in one aspect: that his son’s scientific career “maintain the family prestige.”