“I believe we have seen the last of Othy Marsh,” Cope said. Smiling, he rolled over to sleep.
Moving Camp
In early August, they were visited by a party of soldiers passing through the badlands on their way to the Missouri River. Steamboats came as far upriver as Cow Island, where the army maintained a small camp. The soldiers were on their way to reinforce the garrison there.
They were young Irish and German boys, no older than the students, and they seemed amazed to find white men alive in the region. “I surely would pull out of here,” one said.
They brought news of the war, and it was not good: Custer’s defeat was still unavenged; General Crook had fought an inconclusive battle at the Powder River in Wyoming but had seen no Indians since; General Terry had not engaged any large parties of Sioux at all. The war, which the Eastern newspapers had confidently predicted would be over in a matter of weeks, appeared now to be dragging on indefinitely. Some generals were predicting that it would not be resolved for at least a year, and perhaps not even by the end of the decade.
“Trouble with Indians,” one soldier explained, “is when they want to find you they find you—and when they don’t want you to find them, you’d never know they were there.” He paused. “It is their country, after all, but I didn’t say it.”
Another soldier looked at their stacked crates. “You mining here?”
“No,” Johnson said. “These’re bones. We’re digging fossil bones.”
“Sure you are,” the soldier said, grinning broadly. He offered Johnson a drink from his canteen, which was filled with bourbon. Johnson gasped; the soldier laughed. “Makes the miles shorter, I can tell you,” he explained.
The soldiers grazed their horses for an hour with Cope’s party and then went on.
“I surely wouldn’t dawdle here much longer,” their Captain Lawson said. “Best we know, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and his Sioux’ll make for Canada before winter, which means they’ll be here any day now. They find you here, they’ll kill you for sure.”
And with that final advice, he rode off.
(Much later, Johnson heard that when Sitting Bull went north, he killed all the white men he came across, among them the troops stationed at Cow Island, including Captain Lawson.)
“I think we ought to be going,” Isaac said, scratching his chin.
“Not yet,” Cope said.
“We’ve found plenty of bones.”
“That’s so,” Cookie said. “Plenty so far. More’n enough.”
“Not yet,” Cope said, in an icy tone that ended all discussion. As Sternberg noted in his account of the expedition, “We had long since learned there was no purpose served in arguing with him when his mind was made up. Cope’s indomitable will could not be conquered.”
But Cope did decide to break camp and move to another location. For the last three weeks, they had been located at the foot of thousand-foot-high shale cliffs. He had been scouting the area, and he felt there was a more promising fossil location three miles distant.
“Where?” Sternberg said.
Cope pointed. “Up on the plains.”
“You mean on the flat tablelands?”
“That’s right.”
Isaac protested: “But, Professor, it’ll take three days to move out of the badlands, find a new route, and come back in up there.”
“No, it won’t.”
“We can’t scale these cliffs.”
“Yes, we can.”
“A man can’t walk up, a horse can’t ride up, and certainly this wagon can’t be pulled up those cliffs, Professor.”
“Yes, it can. I will show you.”
Cope insisted they pack up at once, and moved two miles to the east, where he proudly pointed to a sloping bank of shale.
It was much gentler than the surrounding cliffs, but still far too steep to negotiate. While there were some level ridges, the shale was loose and crumbling, affording treacherous footing.
Cookie, the teamster, looked at the proposed route and spat tobacco. “Can’t be done, can’t be done.”
“It can,” Cope said, “and it will.”
It took them fourteen hours to climb a thousand feet—backbreaking work, and continuously dangerous. Using shovels and picks, they dug a trail up the side. Then they unloaded the wagon and put everything they could on the horses and got the horses up; now only the wagon remained.
Cookie drove it halfway up the incline from the floor below, but when he arrived at a level ridge so narrow that one wheel was hanging over empty space, he refused to go any farther.
This enraged Cope, who said he would drive the wagon himself: “Not only are you a revolting cook, but you are a wretched teamster!” The others quickly interceded, and Isaac climbed on to drive the wagon.
They had to unhitch the lead horses, and pull the wagon with the remaining two ponies.
Sternberg later described it in The Life of a Fossil Hunter:
Isaac had driven about thirty feet when the inevitable happened. I saw the wagon slowly begin to tip, pulling the ponies over sideways, and then the whole outfit, wagon and horses, began to roll down the slope. Whenever the wheels stuck up in the air, the ponies drew in their feet to their bellies, and at the next turn, stretched out their legs for another roll.
My heart was in my mouth for fear that Isaac would be killed in one of the turns, or that the wagon would roll over [the] precipice below, but after three complete turns, they landed, the horses on their feet, the wagon on its wheels, on a level ledge of sandstone, and stood there as if nothing had happened.
Eventually they unhitched all the horses and pulled the wagon up on ropes, but they succeeded, and late in the day they made camp, on the prairie.
Cope snapped at Cookie, “This dinner better be your best.”
“Just wait and see,” Cookie said. And he served them the usual fare of hardtack, bacon, and beans.
Despite the grumbling, their new camp was a decided improvement. The breeze made it cooler, for they were on the open plains, wrote Johnson, with “a magnificent view of mountains in every direction—to the west the towering craggy Rockies, with white snow gleaming on their peaks; to the south, east, and north, the Judith River, Medicine Bow, Bearpaw, and Sweet Grass Mountains, completely encircling us. Especially in the early morning, when the air was clear and we would see herds of deer and elk and antelope and the mountains beyond, it was a sight of such glory as surely cannot be matched elsewhere in all creation.”
But the herds of deer and antelope were migrating northward, and the snow was creeping down the slopes of the Rockies as the days passed. One morning they awoke to find a thin carpet of snow had fallen during the night, and although it burned off by midday, they could not ignore the inevitable fact. The seasons were changing, fall was coming, and with the fall, the Sioux.
“It’s time to leave, Professor.”
“Not yet,” Cope said. “Not just yet.”
The Teeth
One afternoon, Johnson came across some knobby protuberances of rock, each roughly the size of a fist. He was working in a promising deposit midway up the side of a shale slope, and these knobs got in his way; he pulled several out of the exposed surface, and they tumbled down the hillside, narrowly missing Cope, who was at the base of the cliffs, sketching a newly discovered Allosaurus leg bone. Cope heard them coming and took a practiced step to the side.
“Hey there!” he shouted up the slope.
“Sorry, Professor,” Johnson called sheepishly. One or two rocks continued to fall; Cope moved aside again the other way and dusted himself off.
“Be careful!”
“Yes, sir. Sorry!” Johnson repeated. Gingerly, he returned to his work, digging with his pick around still other rocks, trying to pry them free and—
“Stop!”
Johnson looked down. Cope was scrambling up the hillside toward him like a madman, one of the fallen rocks in each hand.
“Stop! Stop, I say!”
“I
’m being careful,” Johnson protested. “Really I—”
“Wait!” Cope slid several yards down the slope. “Do nothing! Touch nothing!” Still shouting, he slid backwards, disappearing in a dust cloud.
Johnson waited. After a moment, he saw Professor Cope scrambling out of the dust, coming up the hill with frenzied energy.
Johnson thought he must be very angry. It was foolish and nearly impossible to climb straight up the hill; they had all learned that long ago. The surface was too sheer and too friable; a climber had to zigzag his way up, and even that was so difficult they usually preferred a detour of as much as a mile to find an easy route to the top, and from there to descend to where they wanted to go.
Yet here was Cope scrambling straight up as if his life depended upon doing so. “Wait!”
“I’m waiting, Professor.”
“Don’t do anything!”
“I’m not doing anything, Professor.”
At length Cope arrived beside him, covered in dirt, gasping for breath. But he did not hesitate. He wiped his face with his sleeve and peered at the excavation.
“Where is your camera?” he demanded. “Why don’t you have your camera? I want a picture in situ.”
“Of these rocks?” Johnson asked, astonished.
“Rocks? You think these are rocks? They are nothing of the sort.”
“Then what are they?”
“They are teeth!” Cope exclaimed.
Cope touched one, and traced with his finger the gentle hills and indentations of the cusp pattern. He placed the two he held next to each other, then found a third at Johnson’s feet and set it in a row with the other two; it was clear from their similarity in size and form that they went together.
“Teeth,” he repeated. “Dinosaur teeth.”
“But they are enormous! This dinosaur must be of fantastic size.”
For a moment the two men silently contemplated just how large such a dinosaur must have been—the jaw needed to hold rows of such large teeth, the thick skull needed to match such a massive jaw, the enormous neck the width of a stout oak to lift and move such a skull and jaw, the gigantic backbone commensurate to the neck, with each vertebra as big around as a wagon wheel, with four staggeringly huge and thick legs to support such a beast. Each tooth implied an enormity of every bone and every joint. An animal that large might even need a long tail to counterweight its neck, in fact.
Cope stared across the rocky expanse and beyond, into his own imagination and knowledge. For a moment his usual ferocious confidence gave way to quiet wonder. “The full creature must be at least twice the dimensions of any previously known,” he said, almost to himself.
They had already made several discoveries of large dinosaurs, including three examples of the genus Monoclonius, a horned dinosaur that resembled a gigantic rhinoceros. Monoclonius sphenocerus, one of the specimens, was estimated by Cope to stand seven feet tall at the hip joint, and to be twenty-five feet long, including the tail.
Yet this new dinosaur was far larger than that. Cope measured the teeth with his steel calipers, scratched some calculations on his sketch pad, and shook his head. “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said, and measured again. And then he stood looking across the expanses of rock, as if expecting to see the giant dinosaur appear before him, shaking the ground with each step. “If we are making discoveries such as this one,” he said to Johnson, “it means that we have barely scratched what is possible to learn. You and I are the first men in recorded history to glimpse these teeth. They will change everything we think we know about these animals, and much as I hesitate to say such a thing, man becomes smaller when we realize what remarkable beasts went before us.”
Johnson saw then that all that was done in Cope’s mission—all that even he, Johnson, did now—would have meaning to scientists in the future.
“Now, your camera,” Cope reminded him. “We must record this moment and place.”
Johnson went off to collect his equipment, from the flat plains above. When he returned, careful not to fall, Cope was still shaking his head. “Of course you can’t be sure from teeth alone,” he said. “Allometric factors may be misleading.”
“How big do you make it?” Johnson asked. He glanced at the sketch pad, now covered with calculations, some scratched out and done again.
“Seventy-five, possibly one hundred feet long, with a head perhaps thirty feet above the ground.”
And right there he gave it the name, Brontosaurus, “thundering lizard,” because it must have thundered when it walked. “But perhaps,” he said, “I should call it Apatosaurus, or ‘unreal lizard.’ Because it is hard to believe such a thing ever existed . . .”
Johnson took several plates, up close and from farther away, with Cope in all of them. They hurried back to camp, told the others of their discovery, and then in the fading twilight paced out the dimensions of Brontosaurus—a creature as long as three horse-drawn wagons, and as tall as a four-story building. It made the imagination run wild. It was altogether astonishing, and Cope announced that “this discovery alone justifies our entire time in the West,” and that they had made “a momentous discovery, in these teeth. These are,” Cope said, “the teeth of dragons.”
The trouble the teeth would soon cause them, they could not have imagined.
Around the Campfire
Any discovery led Cope to wax philosophical around the campfire at night. Each man had examined the teeth, felt their ridges and knobs, weighed their heft in one hand. The discovery of the gigantic Brontosaurus provoked an unusual degree of speculation.
“There are so many things in nature we would never imagine,” Cope said. “At the time of this Brontosaurus, the glacial ice had receded and our entire planet was tropical. There were fig trees in Greenland, palm trees in Alaska. The vast plains of America were then vast lakes, and where we are sitting now was at the bottom of a lake. The animals we find were preserved because they died and sank to the bottom of the lake, where muddy sediment silted over them, and that sediment in turn compressed into rock. But who would have conceived such things until the evidence for them was found?”
No one spoke. They stared at the crackling fire.
“I am thirty-six years old, but at the time I was born,” Cope said, “dinosaurs were unknown. All the generations of mankind had been born and died, lived and inhabited the earth, and none ever suspected that long, long before them, life on our planet was dominated by a race of gigantic reptilian creatures who held sway for millions upon millions of years.”
George Morton coughed. “If this is so, then what about man?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Most discussions of evolution sidestepped the question of man. Darwin himself had not dealt with man for more than a decade after his book was published.
“You know of the German finds in the Neander Valley?” Cope asked. “No? Well, back in ’56 they discovered a complete skull in Germany—heavy-boned, with brutish brow ridges. The strata is disputed, but it seems to be very old. I myself saw the find in Europe in ’63.”
“I heard the Neander skull was an ape, or a degenerate,” Sternberg said.
“That is unlikely,” Cope said. “Professor Venn in Düsseldorf has devised a new method of measuring the brain size of skulls. It’s quite simple: he fills the brain case with mustard seeds, then pours the seeds out into a measuring vessel. His researches show that the Neander skull held a larger brain than we possess today.”
“You are saying this Neander skull is human?” Morton said.
“I don’t know,” Cope said. “But I do not see how one can believe that dinosaurs evolved, and reptiles evolved, and mammals such as the horse evolved, but that man sprang fully developed without antecedents.”
“Aren’t you a Quaker, Professor Cope?”
Cope’s ideas were still unacceptable to most faiths, including the Religious Society of Friends, which was the Quakers’ formal name.
“I may not be,” Cope said. “Religion explains
what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all . . . No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.”
Leaving the Badlands
The morning of August 26 was distinctly chilly as they set out on the one-day journey to Cow Island, located at one of the few natural fords along a two-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri River, where the Missouri Breaks formed a barrier on each side. The island also served as a steamboat landing, and it was here Cope planned to meet the steamboat that came up from St. Louis. They were all eager to leave, and frankly worried about Indians, but they had too many fossils to take with them in the wagon. Nothing would do but to make two trips. Cope marked the most precious box, the one with the Brontosaurus teeth, with a subtle X on one side.
“I’m going to leave this one here,” Cope said, “for the second trip.”
Johnson said he didn’t understand. Why not take it on the first trip?
“The chances we get raided on our first leg are probably better than the chances the second load will get discovered here,” he said. “Plus we should be able to pick up some extra hands at Cow Island to protect us on the second trip.”
Their initial journey was uneventful; they reached Cow Island in the early evening and dined with the army troops stationed there. Marsh and his men had gone down the Missouri on the previous steamer, after warning the troops of “Cope’s cutthroats and vagabonds,” who might appear later.
Captain Lawson laughed. “I think Mr. Marsh bears no love for your party,” he said.
Cope affirmed that was the case.
The steamboat was due in two days, but the schedule was uncertain, especially so late in the year. It was imperative that they make their final trip to the plains camp the following day. Cope would remain in Cow Island, repacking the fossils for the steamboat journey, while Little Wind and Cookie drove the wagon back in the morning under Sternberg’s supervision.