Chapter Six
HE HAD TO READ IT TWICE TO BE SURE. BARNUM BROWN held the letter from the American Museum of Natural History in his hand, unable to get past the fact that it had come from New York City—a place that may as well have been on the moon, given the fact that he had never been east of the Appalachians, much less seen a skyscraper or walked along a busy city street. Inside, a letter from Wortman offered Brown a spot on the museum’s field expedition that summer. If he accepted, he would need to meet up with the party somewhere in the western states by a certain date. Everything beyond that—his destination or the expedition’s ultimate aim—was a mystery.
Whereas most people would have a list of questions before committing themselves to a months-long undertaking in conditions that could quickly turn deadly, Brown saw only answered prayers. He immediately withdrew from his classes at the University of Kansas and began cleaning out his room at Professor Williston’s home. “Mr. Brown has gone home tonight and Sunday expects to start for Colorado where he will meet Dr. [Wortman] & party of the New York museum and go collecting ‘doggie bone fossils’ for them,” Williston’s wife wrote in a letter to her daughter. “It seems pretty cold to start off camping but he thinks they are going to Arizona or New Mexico.”
Once he met up with the expedition, Brown learned that he was to start the summer of 1896 in the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico, a parched high desert landscape of blanched rocks and ravines that was once a white sand beach along the shore of a sea covering what is now eastern Utah. As the water receded and tectonic plates shifted, the area became a floodplain where animal carcasses were often covered in sediment before they had the chance to be destroyed by scavengers, beginning the slow process of fossilization. Osborn sent the expedition to the unforgiving terrain in search of the remains of early mammals. Once found, he planned to feature the specimens in an exhibit demonstrating the course of evolution immediately following the disappearance of dinosaurs, putting the museum at the center of the question of why subsequent animal lifeforms never rivaled their immense size.
Dinosaur fossils themselves had proven elusive over the museum’s previous expeditions, and Osborn was left with no other plan than hoping that the public would find the bones of prehistoric mammals just as captivating given that they, too, were large. He particularly hoped to find a skull of a Coryphodon, a hoofed mammal roughly the size of a cow that was one of the first large mammals to appear after an asteroid hit the Yucatán Peninsula in what is now Mexico about 65 million years ago, killing an estimated 80 percent of all animal life on Earth and wiping away dinosaur species that did not evolve to become what we know now as birds.
Like all expeditions, the crew balanced the competing demands of money and time. Each day in the field that did not result in a museum-quality fossil was a day wasted, and Wortman and his crew lived with the constant fear that Osborn would revoke their funding and spend it elsewhere. Already, his demanding nature and reputation for coldness were well known throughout the small world of paleontology, making the option to work for him the least attractive of most possibilities. Yet the appeal of being associated with a museum based in New York and the unstated promise that Osborn could secure more funding if needed, given his connections with wealthy trustees, were hard to pass up. If Osborn wanted a particular fossil, whoever was working for him was to deliver it or find themselves replaced by someone who would. Though the museum had few specimens of its own, Osborn refused to put anything on the exhibition floor that did not meet his exacting standards. “While it is true that that the collections of the Museum were unusually rich in the remains of [Coryphodon] . . . They are more or less fragmentary and too imperfect to be used in mounting a complete skeleton,” Osborn wrote in a report following the prospecting season.
The wagon train set off from Colorado in mid-April in weather that Brown would later remember as “extremely cold and unfavorable for rapid travel,” and remained in the badlands as the season turned and the sun scalded them in June. They prospected through the early summer, trying to imagine the contours of the rivers and streams of the former world as they searched without success. Each day fell into the same cycle of blasting, digging and disappointment, repeated under blazing skies and ruminated over each night under a freezing moon. “After a month’s hard work, under the most trying circumstances, we found ourselves with practically no results, and what was still more discouraging, with but a few scattered fragments of the animal whose remains we were so anxious to secure,” Wortman wrote.
The youngest member of the team, Brown proved that he not only had the physical endurance to withstand the grueling extremes of weather, but the social skills to make it all seem like a grand adventure. He began trading supplies with a Native American family who lived near the dig site, offering corn meal for fresh goat milk—though he stopped drinking it after watching how it was obtained by a local woman. “Sometimes there were goat droppings in the milk which she skimmed out with her fingers before sending the milk to us. Having seen the process, we lost our appetite . . . but continued to give the Indians meal in exchange for the milk,” he later wrote. On other nights, he shared the latest edition of his hometown’s newspaper, the Astonisher and the Paralyzer, which his parents sent him each week. Wortman, in particular, found the tales of small-town Kansas life enchanting, so far removed from the pressures of working for a high-profile institution in New York. (Wortman would eventually grow embittered with paleontology and quit the field to open a drugstore in Brownsville, Texas, where he spent the rest of his life.)
By late June, the weather was too hot to continue in New Mexico. The expedition had found several mammalian fossils, but no Coryphodon. Unwilling to waste an entire prospecting season, Osborn directed Wortman to purchase a wagon and head north. Over the next few weeks, the expedition party trudged seven hundred miles to a quarry in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, a region so remote that it might as well have been another planet. Everything necessary for survival—food, guns, bullets and barrels of water—had to be planned and accounted for, given that there were no lifelines to help if the party became stranded. It was as if they were walking off the corner of the map and into the great unknown, all while carrying the expectation that they would bring back evidence of unreal creatures that lived in a world unrecognizable as our own.
The party reached their destination on July 18, and spent the next six weeks collecting in a dry, desolate region nearly devoid of plant life. What it had going for it, however, was a topography that jumped and ebbed, like notes on a sheet of music. A high point more than 11,000 feet above sea level would quickly give way to a valley floor nearly 8,000 feet lower, exposing layers of rock that in some places were more than 2.5 billion years old. Wortman had been the first known paleontologist to explore the region nineteen years earlier, when he traveled north on his own accord while collecting for Cope after learning of the badlands from traders at the remote Fort Washakie.
He later recalled it as “a wild, uninhabited region, save for the occasional visits of roving bands of hostile Indians.” In letters to contemporaries who requested his advice before embarking on their own expeditions to the area, he downplayed the threat of violence and revealed that his real fear were the elements. “The exploration of this region is most arduous and difficult,” he wrote. “The great scarcity of water in these badland wastes makes it very inconvenient. . . . The broken and mountainous character of the country forbids the use of wagons to such an extent that pack animals are indispensable.”
Through hard effort, he learned that what he called blue beds—limestone nodules tinted dark blue by oxidation—were the most likely to bear fossils, and discovered three previously unknown extinct mammalian species in his first season exploring the region. Now, with a complete team from the American Museum supporting him, he once again turned his attention to the blue beds. Over the following weeks, the crew found the remains of extinct horses, monkeys and a wolverine-like carnivorous mammal known as a creodont, but a Coryphodon remained elusive—that is, until Brown unearthed a nearly-complete skeleton with a perfect skull, lacking only the hind limbs. Wortman instantly recognized that it would be the crown jewel of the exhibition, delivering exactly what Osborn, still back in his comfortable office in New York, demanded. Having found what they needed, Wortman and the rest of the expedition began their journey back to New York before the weather turned deadly. Brown, however, remained in Laramie through October, spending his time hunting deer and exploring the rich sandstone terrain on the chance that he would find previously unknown fossil beds that would convince the American Museum or one of its competitors to bring him on as a full-time collector.
His ambition was justified: not far away lay the quarry where Arthur Lakes and William Reed, who was then collecting for Marsh, had found the first known Stegosaurus in the remote outcrops at Como Bluff. Though Marsh offered only a paltry fifty dollars for the whole quarry, Reed grew to be fanatically loyal to him, going so far as to dynamite fossils that he found but did not plan on taking with him so that they would not fall into Cope’s hands. He soon learned, however, that Marsh would not requite his devotion. Fed up with the low pay and Marsh’s domineering nature, Reed quit prospecting and became a shepherd. “I regret leaving the Bone business . . . [but] I think it is my duty to look at my own interests first,” he wrote.
So began Reed’s on-again-off-again relationship to paleontology, leaving him standing somewhere between the respected field collector of an established museum and a man desperate enough to search stones in hopes of finding something of value. A hard winter killed most of his flock, forcing him to look for direction once more. He contacted Marsh, hoping to work for him as a salaried employee the coming summer, but refused Marsh’s offer to pay only for the crates of fossils he found interesting. Reed then spent more than a decade bouncing among jobs, ranging from railroad construction to harvesting hay. When, in the early 1890s, the University of Wyoming decided to establish its own collection of vertebrate fossils discovered in the state rather than see professional collectors “take the best things [they know] of and ship them to eastern colleges,” Reed was hired at a salary of $1,000 per year. The university soon announced that its “bone room” was as large as the collection at Yale.
While in Wyoming, Brown befriended Reed and learned of potentially rich deposits that had not yet been tapped. He shared this information with Wortman at the American Museum, hoping to prove himself useful enough to be called back for another season of work. “There is a far greater field to be worked up in Jurassic mammals than I had any idea of,” Brown wrote. He returned to Lawrence in mid-November, where he jumped back into his coursework as though he had never left. If it was hard to transition from the frontier to the classroom, Brown never showed it, perhaps because he was not a brilliant student to begin with. Still, it was hard not to find him daydreaming of pulling a fossil out of a canyon or gully, far from the flat plains around him. He had tasted the broader world beyond Kansas and found that he measured up, and now he wanted nothing more than to go out and have another chance to prove it.
That spring, Brown received his first letter directly from Osborn, a man he knew only as a mystery. “Dear Mr. Brown, I have had considerable conversation with Dr. Wortman regarding your work during the coming summer and winter,” Osborn wrote, in a letter that would forever cleave Brown’s life away from the family farm in Carbondale. Though careful not to offer any outright promises, Osborn dangled the lure of New York City before a young man who wanted nothing more than to break free of the boundaries of his childhood. In exchange, he made clear, he wanted to know more about the promising fossil sites that Brown had encountered in Wyoming. “It is possible by prompt application and strong recommendation from Professor Williston that you can secure a [Columbia] University scholarship, which means free tuition, but I do not consider it very probable, there are such enormous demands for these places. . . . I would like a report from you regarding the Jurassic mammal beds, and although I would like you to talk over your plans with Professor Williston, for several reasons I prefer that you should not speak to anyone else about them.”
Brown completed the report within a week and sent it to New York, too young and earnest to attempt to conceal his joy. Though Osborn had not formally offered him a job that summer, Brown prepared himself to head back out into the field and hoped that this time he would lead an expedition himself. In a private letter to Osborn, Williston expressed reservations about expecting too much from his student “until [he] has learned where and how to look for the bones,” he wrote. Still, Brown charged ahead, his excitement at the possibility of heading back to Wyoming burning so hot that it could have been felt in New York itself. “I can leave here by April 15 or whenever necessary as I have my work nearly completed,” he wrote to Osborn. “I am deeply grateful for your kind offer. The University and Museum work is exactly what I desire.”
His enthusiasm evident, Brown then detailed his proposal to prospect for the specimens that Osborn craved: dinosaurs. “As to the reptiles,” Brown wrote, “I think we can obtain any amount of material. . . . I worked with Mr. Reed a few days in a quarry west of Laramie where the bones were literally packed one on top of the other, nearly all in a good state of preservation.”
It was exactly what Osborn wanted to hear.
✢✢✢✢
THE DISCOVERY OF DINOSAUR BONES in the American West that were more gigantic than anything previously imagined took paleontology out of the realm of science and turned it into something closer to a trophy case, reflecting the achievements of those whose money made the discovery possible. Art had long filled this need, allowing a wealthy person to watch their reputation carried upward on a gust of prestige. At the turn of the twentieth century, the forces of industrialization and the rise of corporations handed a handful of men wealth on a scale never before seen. For them, art would no longer do. Something far more rare and difficult would be necessary to reflect the towering position of this new group of gilded tycoons, able to sway millions of lives around the world with their decisions. Nothing less than acquiring and displaying fossils of dinosaurs—the largest and most powerful beasts to ever walk the Earth—could mirror their status in life.
At a time when the churning economy expanded the gulf between the well-off and the rest of the country like never before, the super-rich convinced themselves that funding natural history museums as a form of public education was one way to make inequality into something of a blessing. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie, department store magnate Marshall Field, Wall Street fixture J. P. Morgan: all leaned on grand displays of philanthropy through founding or offering significant support to natural history museums to preempt criticism of their immense wealth. If there was a flaw in the plan, it was that delivering on the potential of the museum often proved harder in practice than in theory. What good would donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to a museum do if no one showed up? “Trustees like to be sure they are getting value for their money,” Bickmore, who originated the idea of the American Museum of Natural History, recognized as early as 1873.
Osborn knew that large dinosaur fossils would accomplish that goal, but he had yet to make acquiring a specimen a reality. For the first time in his life, his money and his connections had let him down and opened the door to failure. In Brown, however, he had unexpectedly found a connection to the lucrative bone quarries that had once built Marsh’s reputation. Brown was unproven; the fossil beds, however, were not. That calculation allowed Osborn to take a chance he would not normally have committed to and fund a college student still a year away from graduation, knowing that if he succeeded it would change the course of the American Museum. He wrote to Brown offering to back a small prospecting trip that summer, paying him far less than experienced collectors because, as Osborn knew, no matter what price he offered Brown would be a fool to turn it down. Brown jumped at the opportunity, and set off into the wilderness with his future—and that of the museum—resting on his young shoulders.
He returned to Laramie in early May, intending to retrace the steps of Reed and reopen a quarry which had once proved fruitful. Within days he was in over his head. The roads were a mess; supplies were virtually unobtainable; hiring others to help seemed impossible. Worse yet, the information he had gathered from Reed had proven hopelessly out of date, making him feel as if he had been caught in a lie that would destroy his career before it had even begun. Not knowing what else to do, he wrote a long letter to Osborn, putting his thoughts down on paper while trying to keep at bay the fear that he had somehow screwed it all up.
“I feel pretty badly mixed up in the situation, that I have misinformed you somewhat,” he wrote in a rambling letter, describing the sorry state of the quarry he had hoped to reopen. “Marsh had another man continue work there a year after [Reed] left and he went back into the bluff several years until they had a twenty-foot bank to face, now all this has caved in . . . and of course the amount of [dirt] you have to move rapidly increases as you go back,” he continued, trailing off in sentences that seemed to have no destination in mind.
He listed the going rate for hiring a man and a team of horses but was too timid to make a decision one way or another. His fear of disappointing Osborn immobilized him, with each pang of doubt reaffirming his insecurity that he was a college kid out of his depth. In time, Brown would become legendary for his cool wit and gregarious nature. Yet at that moment he was still on the border between boyhood and manhood and wanted nothing more than for someone to show him the way. “You see I am completely handicapped,” he wrote, displaying a vulnerability toward Osborn that would become a theme of his life. “I don’t know how much expense I dare take on myself or what other things might present themselves to your mind. Wire me immediately what to do. I want to do everything to the best advantage of the Museum. If I shall get an outfit will need more money. Meantime I shall gain all information possible and lay over on my expense if necessary.”
Whether it was the remote terrain, the farmer’s instinct to make a decision that ran through his blood, or the fact that he feared nothing more than being stuck in one place, Brown regained his confidence and wrote another letter to Osborn two days later, spelling out his plan. “You advised me to use my best judgment this summer in regard to all things and I hope I have done right in delaying here until you know exactly how things are,” he wrote, his thoughts of self-doubt washed away by forty-eight hours of reflection. “Now I feel confident that it is policy to buy an outfit here. . . . There are certainly other mammal beds there and plenty of reptile material. Shall I not collect everything?” In what surely appealed to Osborn’s social and religious codes, Brown’s solution was simply to work harder, trusting that his seemingly innate ability to discover fossils would clear any obstacle.
Brown left Laramie in early May for Aurora, a small village fifty miles away whose chief attraction was that it contained a small station on the Union Pacific Railroad, before continuing on to Como Bluffs. Once there, Brown headed to an outcropping dating back approximately 150 million years, when the sagebrush prairie he saw around him was once a humid subtropical plain lush with palmlike cycads and pines that attracted herbivores and the carnivores that preyed upon them. It was during this period, known as the late Jurassic, that dinosaurs began expanding to larger and larger sizes, though paleontologists still do not quite know the catalyst that spurred such a sustained swelling in mass. One theory is that dinosaur bones grew more hollow, like those of birds, making them weigh significantly less than a solid-boned mammal of similar proportions. With this physiological limitation effectively removed, dinosaurs were free to balloon over tens of millions of years before reaching their peak size during the Cretaceous period, a nearly 80-million-year span that began with all of Earth’s land mass clustered on just two continents—Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south—and ended with the semblance of the continents we recognize today, though India remained adrift in the Indian Ocean and Australia was still conjoined with Antarctica.
Sixty-five million years later, Brown trekked out through the remnants of a once fertile landscape, hoping to uncover the largest bones he could find. With no one to answer to but his own instinct, he spent the first weeks of the summer opening one of Marsh’s former mammal quarries. Like the mines they were fashioned on, a bone quarry often consisted of several shafts dug deep into the rock, from which prospectors could search for a seam of fossils. At the end of each season, the shafts would be boarded up and covered as much as possible, a measure intended to protect them from both the elements and the curiosity of others. Brown worked in Marsh’s former quarry alone, sifting through the rock and dirt for something that would make Osborn’s short yardage of trust in him seem warranted. While working, he could not help but notice an adjacent quarry that had once been tapped by collectors working for Cope. When the Marsh quarry proved fruitless, Brown shifted over and opened up the Cope one. Nearly as soon as he began digging he found dinosaur fossils, so many that he knew there was no way he could excavate them all by himself. The quarry was a “veritable gold mine and I have bones up to my eyes,” Brown wrote in a letter to Osborn. Unable to resist seeing it for himself, Osborn left on a rare trip into the field as soon as Brown’s message reached him in New York, determined to be on hand when the American Museum secured its first dinosaur.
There, in the badlands of Wyoming, Brown and Osborn met face-to-face for the first time. They had no way of knowing that they would become deeply intertwined in each other’s lives, their fates so closely stitched that the success of one would not be possible without the other. Everything about them—their upbringing, their education, their conception of the world and their place within it—were so far apart that it seemed a wonder that the other existed. Yet they were united by their hunger. Osborn, born into privilege and ensured of his natural superiority, would never have come to rely on the youngest son of a poor farmer’s family had it not been for the fossils he desperately craved; Brown, a child of the frontier who longed for greater things, would never have tolerated Osborn’s outsized ego if not for the chance he offered to leave the farm behind forever. The bond between them would grow over time, yet it would forever be rooted in the fear of failure that each man recognized in the other.
In a photo taken that summer, Osborn and Brown are posed high on a bluff with barren hills behind them. Brown is kneeling, his face tanned by the summer sun, wearing a black turtleneck and a wide-brimmed hat and holding a small pickaxe in his hand. Handsome, strong and composed, he looks as if he belongs, a man equally at ease in a hard landscape or on a city street. At his side, Osborn sits wearing a dark pea coat and gloves, looking as if he has just been plucked from a walk in Central Park. Perhaps to hide his discomfort, he is staring at the camera with an intense glare, like a king reminding his subjects of their place. Between them, sticking out of the rock like a rat’s tail, lies the only reason why two life stories so unalike would eventually be bound together: a three-foot-long bone of a Diplodocus, which would soon become the first dinosaur specimen in the museum’s collection.
Everything about the specimen was big. Its teeth were the size of pencils, each foot larger than a grown man. An adult Diplodocus longus stretched up to 92 feet long, making it not only one of the longest sauropods—a group of dinosaurs so named for their graceful, extended necks—but one of the longest animals in the history of Earth. (The longest known dinosaur was likely a North American sauropod known as Supersaurus, which may have extended up to 137 feet from head to tail; a modern blue whale, by comparison, tops out at about 105 feet.) Its proportions suggested that nature was attempting an experiment to see just how long an animal’s body could sweep: its two-foot-long head was connected to a neck that could stretch more than 21 feet, while its tail spanned another 45 feet behind it. A third of the tail tapered to a thin tip, known as its whiplash, which paleontologists believe the animal cracked to intimidate predators and possibly communicate with other members of its herd. Though immense, Diplodocus was strangely light for its size. At 15 tons, it weighed about half that of comparable sauropods and less than a tenth of a blue whale.
With one exposed bone and hopes for a full skeleton beneath it, Brown and Osborn stood at what would be the start of a very complicated puzzle. A full dinosaur specimen was invaluable, its unmistakable form a guarantee that crowds would come to any institution where it was displayed. A random leg or arm bone or a scattering of teeth, meanwhile, would be of intense interest to paleontologists but make no ripples on a museum floor, uninteresting and unremarked upon by anyone who happened to walk by. Though he hoped to supervise the process of excavation to ensure that no harm would come to the museum’s new prize, Osborn realized within a few days that the process would take weeks, far more time on the frontier than he could stand. Before he left, he sent messages to Wortman, who was then prospecting in Colorado, and a field crew working in Nebraska to abandon their projects and rush to Wyoming. Not long after he arrived, Wortman discovered another giant fossil while attempting to excavate the Diplodocus. The new specimen was an Apatosaurus, which when alive had stretched 75 feet long and stood on four massive, pillarlike legs.
The work continued through the heat of August. Wortman and the crew of reinforcements worked on the Apatosaurus, which Brown described in a letter to Osborn as “beautiful bones, as perfect as any I have ever seen from the Jurassic.” Brown took on the Diplodocus alone, covering the top of each portion of the skeleton he uncovered in a jacket of plaster of Paris before digging a small trench underneath it and wrapping it again, enclosing it in a white cocoon that looked like a misshapen beehive. For the bones too heavy or impacted in rock to excavate from above, he grabbed pieces of timber and built makeshift mines to attack them from below. Dozens of crates filled with wrapped bones were loaded onto trains heading east as the prospecting season wound down in September, the freight cost of shipping tons of fossils paid for by a connection of Osborn’s father.
With their first dinosaur specimens in hand, Osborn and Brown accelerated the trajectories of their lives. Osborn, never one to play down his successes, published a report in which he inserted the fact that he had been the co-discoverer of the two specimens uncovered that summer. “So far as the skeletons themselves are concerned . . . They are, perhaps, by far, the most complete and perfect of their kind that have ever been collected and will make magnificent material for purposes of exhibition,” he wrote. He sketched out plans for two freestanding displays that would mount the creatures in lifelike poses, a feat that had never before been attempted with fossils so large, given the amount of weight that any support would need to hold. He had long harbored big dreams for the American Museum; now he owned the bones that could make them possible. The dinosaurs would be not only a validation of his career, but a monument to his genius.
For Brown, meanwhile, the adventure was only beginning. Toward the end of the summer, Osborn informed him in a terse letter that he had been selected for the full scholarship to Columbia University. He had braved the wilderness. Now his prize was waiting for him: New York City.