The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Marsh made the Kansas site his first stop the next spring. As soon as the crew’s tents were pitched, he raced off and found the cross he’d carved into the chalk. After a few minutes of hunting, he found the bone’s other half, as well as several other wing bones embedded in the rock. The dragon was every bit as big as he’d hoped. It was a career-making find, enough to turn every other paleontologist in the world green with envy.

  None was more verdant than Cope. While his rival was making splashy discoveries out West with his uncle’s fortune, Cope had been stuck in New Jersey, barely scraping by. It was especially galling because Cope’s father had plenty of money. He just wouldn’t let Cope spend it hunting bones; he still wanted to make his son a gentleman farmer. Finally, after years of arguing, Cope forced his father to sell a tract of farmland that was supposed to be part of his inheritance. Not a moment too soon, either: shortly after the sale, Marsh published a string of papers about his new fossils, sending Cope into spasms of jealousy.

  Beyond the discoveries themselves, Cope also objected to what he saw as Marsh’s pernicious influence on the study of dinosaurs. Not to get too psychoanalytical, but Cope viewed dinosaurs as uncannily like himself—quick and nimble and darting. Marsh, in contrast, viewed dinosaurs as more like him—sluggish and methodical beasts, mostly just lumbering along. Each man of course dismissed his rival’s ideas as absurd, but Marsh’s sudden renown gave him more leverage to stamp his view onto paleontology. So with the proceeds from the farm sale, Cope outfit his own, rival collecting trip out West in September 1871. Achilles would now join Ajax on the field of battle.

  Inevitably, word of Cope’s expedition reached Marsh. Considering how Marsh had horned in on the quarries in New Jersey, it would have been the height of hypocrisy for him to protest Cope’s coming west—especially given how much vaster the West was. Naturally, then, Marsh threw a fit. He spread the word among his army contacts not to trust this interloper, and when Cope arrived on the frontier, many soldiers and scouts in the forts cold-shouldered him. One fort forced him to sleep in a hay yard. Cope ignored the snubs and set off anyway.

  Cope’s expedition had a different feel than Marsh’s. While Marsh had always loved hunting, and shot animals left and right on the trail, Cope the pacifist refused to even carry a gun, and consented to a five-soldier escort only reluctantly. While Marsh reveled in field life, thrilled to be one of the boys, Cope prudishly read out loud from the Bible each night around the campfire, ignoring the smirks, eye rolls, and disruptive belches of his crew. While both Marsh and Cope lectured from the saddle on geological formations, Cope pointed out wildflowers, too. Cope also wrote touching letters to his daughter Julia (sprinkled with Quaker “thees” and “thous”), and snagged the occasional rattlesnake to pickle in alcohol and bring back home for her.

  Over the next few years, on various collecting trips, Cope’s crews endured hardships galore: tornadoes; quicksand; pools of water so alkaline (or foul) that their bowels were instantly evacuated; dust storms so thick that their skin oozed grit for days afterward; swarms of insects so aggressive that they had to cake their skin with bacon grease or risk being eaten alive. As with Marsh, however, no amount of hardship could blunt Cope’s excitement. He once discovered ten new fossil species in just two days, and discovered dozens of extinct species overall—weasels and mastodons, fish and gigantic tortoises. Best of all, he unearthed a pterodactyl even larger than Marsh’s dragon, giving him bragging rights. To be sure, the work did take a toll on him. After thinking about ancient beasts all day, Cope would also see them in phantasmagoric dreams after sundown, an awful experience. “Every animal of which we had found traces during the day played with him at night,” one companion remembered, “tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling upon him. When I would awake him, he would thank me cordially and lie down for another attack.” Yet Cope never hesitated to head out and start digging again the next morning. Such is obsession.

  Overall Cope shipped literal tons of fossils back to Philadelphia. And thanks to his hare-like personality, he soon pulled ahead of his rival in terms of official discoveries. Marsh had shipped his own tons back to Yale, but even with Marsh’s head start out West, the speedy Cope often beat him to the punch—pumping out journal articles and claiming priority for species that Marsh had also collected but hadn’t gotten around to describing yet. Cope was also much more willing to conjure up whole new species from a jaw fragment or spare vertebra. In 1872 alone, he churned out fifty-six papers, more than one per week.

  Increasingly, however, Marsh suspected that Cope wasn’t relying on speed alone for an edge. Up to this point in their feud, Marsh had been the main instigator; in the classic playground defense, he started it. But the closer he looked, the more Marsh saw signs that Cope had started fighting dirty, too.

  For example, there were a few cases where Marsh and Cope had unearthed the same species almost simultaneously. In poring over Cope’s papers on them, however, Marsh noticed some inconsistencies with the supposed dates of discovery. Jumping to the harshest possible conclusion, he accused Cope of backdating the papers in order to secure priority for himself. (Lamely, Cope admitted the errors but blamed them on his secretary and publishers.) Around the same time, Marsh received a package from Cope with some fossils inside. In an accompanying letter Cope explained that the bones had been accidentally “abstracted” from a box of Marsh’s awaiting shipment at a railroad station in Kansas. In the darndest coincidence, the missing bones had then been rerouted to Cope instead. Marsh took the letter as a taunt, and it enraged him—especially because Cope never returned the most valuable specimens in the shipment.

  In response to all this, Marsh called on the powerful American Philosophical Society to censure Cope for his behavior, as well as retract old papers of his in its house journals. The society wouldn’t go that far, but did agree to bar some of his future papers. Given that the society was based in Philadelphia, Cope’s base of power, this boycott might have seriously damaged his career. He felt he had no choice but to neutralize the threat. When Cope’s father died in 1875, he left his son $250,000 ($6 million today), and among other things, Cope purchased a scientific journal called The American Naturalist. This allowed him to publish his own papers as fast as he liked, even when blocked elsewhere. As editor, Cope could also take swipes at Marsh whenever he fancied. One piece written by an ex-assistant of Marsh’s called him a “scheming demagogue” and decried his “unusual elasticity of conscience.” In an obituary of another assistant, Cope accused Marsh of stealing his underlings’ ideas without acknowledgment. (A charge, as we’ll see, with some merit.)

  It didn’t take long for things to escalate. Partly to cover more territory, in the mid-1870s Cope and especially Marsh began delegating more and more of the actual digging out West to platoons of professional fossil-hunters. Not surprisingly, these crews of “bone sharps” inherited their bosses’ prejudices, as well as their sharp practices. Cope’s men sometimes went undercover and tried to infiltrate Marsh’s camps on the pretext of selling groceries. Marsh’s men began spying on Cope’s in turn, and they reported back to Marsh in code: Cope was “B. Jones,” good luck in finding fossils was “health,” and requests for money were pleas for “ammunition.” Security about the location of dig sites got so tight that one of Cope’s boys refused to tell even his parents where he’d be spending the summer.

  Before long a few diggers defected from one camp to the other, happily selling their secrets for better pay. Others remained loyal, and would climb atop bluffs and hurl stones down at those collecting below. If anyone found a carving (like Marsh’s cross) to mark a trail to revisit later, the bone sharps would efface it—then return later to grab the fossils themselves. They’d also fill old dig sites with rubble, or allegedly even dynamite them, to prevent their rivals from digging there in the future. Most egregiously, when one of Marsh’s men shut down a dig site once, he crushed scores of fossil bones under his boot—pulverized them into dust—rather than ris
k the chance of Cope’s men finding them later. The pressure got so intense that even crews on the same side got into brawls. One of Marsh’s top lieutenants pulled a gun on another crew leader and challenged him to a duel.

  Eventually, the war got too hot for some diggers. One resigned to herd sheep; another returned to teaching. Scientific colleagues were disgusted, too. Joseph Leidy, the discoverer of the first dinosaur in North America, actually quit dinosaur paleontology altogether, convinced that it wasn’t a field for gentlemen anymore.

  Still, the occasional crushed fossil notwithstanding, the field of paleontology benefitted mightily from the rivalry. Knowing they had competition, the crews pushed harder and ranged wider than they ever would have on their own, and several iconic dinosaurs were first unearthed during this period: Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus,2 and others. Marsh and Cope also poured their personal fortunes into outfitting expeditions and preparing specimens. Marsh alone spent $30,000 ($720,000 today) to mount an especially fine Brontosaurus, the likes of which the world had never seen. Thanks to these two rivals, in fact, paleontology became the one field where American scientists clearly outpaced the rest of the world. Unlike in chemistry or physics or biology, the best research wasn’t taking place in London or Paris or Berlin, but right here at home. Sinful science can have its upsides.

  Other fields besides paleontology benefitted, too. Charles Darwin knew that his theory of evolution would live or die by the fossil record, and Cope and especially Marsh provided vital support. One of Marsh’s specialties, ancient birds with teeth, helped prove a then-controversial theory that dinosaurs had evolved into modern birds. Equally important, Marsh could trace the evolution of the horse through twenty-eight species over 60 million years, showing its transformation from a four-toed, fox-sized animal into the majestic hoofed steeds of today. When Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, visited Marsh to inquire about horse evolution, he was blown away. No one had ever traced the descent of a living animal from an ancient form before. Equally impressive, every time Huxley challenged some point, or asked for proof in the form of an intermediate species, Marsh simply dispatched an assistant to fetch the very thing Huxley sought. “I believe you are a magician,” Huxley finally stammered. “Whatever I want, you just conjure it up.” Darwin thought Marsh no less magical, and wrote a letter praising his work on the toothed birds as “magnificent.”

  But if this early phase of the Cope-Marsh feud benefitted both themselves and their field, the same cannot be said of the final, Pyrrhic stages of their war.

  Despite their treatment of each other, Cope and Marsh both had strong moral compasses. Cope was a pacifist who read the Bible every night. Marsh, in turn, risked his very reputation to fight the awful abuse of American Indians out West.

  Marsh’s crusade for Indian rights began in 1874, after a fossil-hunting trip to the Badlands of what’s now South Dakota. Local tribes had refused to let Marsh enter the region at first, convinced that his “expedition” was really a cover story to steal gold from the nearby Black Hills. Tribal elders granted him passage grudgingly, and only after Marsh promised to relay their complaints about shabby treatment back to Washington. Marsh headed out in November, into land so frigid he sometimes had to chip icicles off his beard to eat dinner. To the Indians’ astonishment, Marsh kept his word about not hunting for gold, returning with nothing more than wagons full of old bones.

  Afterward, Chief Red Cloud took Marsh aside and showed him the basis for their complaints. In exchange for ceding land to the United States, the tribes had signed various treaties promising them foodstuffs and supplies. Red Cloud presented Marsh with that year’s allotment—rancid pork, moldy flour, moth-eaten clothes, threadbare blankets. Like everyone else with a pulse, Marsh knew that the agents who distributed goods to Indians were crooked. He had no idea how crooked, though, until that moment. He was appalled, and promised to take the matter up with officials in Washington—nay, with the president himself. Red Cloud nodded and thanked Marsh, but didn’t hold out much hope. He’d seen too many broken promises before. Hell, Marsh was probably in on the scam.

  Defying expectations once again, Marsh traveled to Washington in 1875 for a scientific meeting and used the trip to launch a crusade against Indian agents out West. In particular, he targeted the so-called Indian Ring, a group of officials so greedy and corrupt that even the most notorious Indian-killer in the U.S. Army, George Armstrong Custer, was disgusted by them. Marsh met personally with members of the ring, and when they stonewalled his demands for reform, he called in some favors and finagled a meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant, among others. Marsh also convinced a few crusading journalists to pen exposés. Feeling cornered, the Indian Ring began spreading rumors that Marsh was a drunkard and had committed “indiscretions” out West, perhaps with the Yale boys. For once in his life, Marsh bit his tongue and didn’t return fire, fearing that any mudslinging would hurt the Indian cause.

  After months of work, Marsh finally blew the Indian Ring scandal open in late 1875 and forced the resignation of several prominent officials. This certainly didn’t end the corruption among agents, much less the encroachment on Indian land. But Red Cloud was deeply touched by Marsh’s efforts. “I thought he would do like all white men, and forget me when he went away,” Red Cloud later said. “But he did not. He told the Great Father [President Grant] everything just as he promised he would, and I think he is the best white man I ever saw.”

  The crusade made Marsh a minor celebrity and won him the respect of many in Washington. So what did he do with his newfound prestige and moral high ground? Attack Edward Cope, naturally.

  Throughout the 1870s, different agencies within the U.S. government had sponsored a series of geological surveys to produce detailed maps of the interior of the country. Both Marsh and Cope had worked on different surveys and had benefitted from the funding they provided. (Cope in fact got reprimanded repeatedly for wandering off course to hunt for fossils instead of sticking to his assigned duties.) Penny-pinchers in Congress, however, didn’t like the idea of four surveys running simultaneously—it seemed redundant. In 1878 they proposed consolidating everything into one survey.

  In that decision, Marsh sensed an opportunity. He’d already parlayed his celebrity in Washington into the vice-presidency of the National Academy of Sciences there; when the president of NAS died soon after, Marsh assumed control. By lucky coincidence, Congress asked NAS for advice on consolidating the geological surveys, and Marsh used every ounce of political clout he had—even meeting with President Rutherford B. Hayes—to shut down the survey that supported Cope. Marsh then got himself named chief paleontologist of the new, combined survey. In his official remarks on the consolidation, he crowed, “This is a great thing for American science.” Perhaps. It was most certainly a great thing for Othniel Marsh.

  Cope, meanwhile, was devastated. He’d already burned through much of his inheritance, and now his main source of outside funding had been yanked. Rashly, he took most of his remaining money and sunk it into some mining companies out West, figuring that his advanced knowledge of geology would give him an edge in selecting good investments. It didn’t. Mining back then was basically legalized gambling, with the additional handicap that the casino could lie to you about the odds. Fraud and puffery abounded, and by the mid-1880s Cope was wiped out. If not for a teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania, he would have gone bankrupt.

  Then came the final blow. In 1889, Cope received a letter ordering him to turn over all his fossils to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Cope had actually spent $75,000 of his own money collecting many of the specimens, but because he’d worked on the geological survey at the same time, the government felt it had claims to all of them. The letter came from the secretary of the interior, but Cope was convinced that Marsh was behind the whole thing.

  Facing ruin, Cope decided to go nuclear. It was no secret in paleontology circles that Marsh’s assistants usually ended up despising him after a fe
w years. Marsh was stingy with pay, stole ideas, and never granted assistants any independence. Cope had already tried to take advantage of this discontent by sneaking up to New Haven for the Princeton-Yale football game one year and meeting with Marsh’s men on the sly to foment rebellion. The plot failed (the assistants didn’t like Cope, either), but Cope nevertheless began collecting bits of gossip in letters, which he kept in his lower-right-hand desk drawer. He called the bundle his “Marshiana,” and after the threat to seize his fossils arrived, he decided to expose his rival to the world.

  To do so he reached out to William Hosea Ballou, a former assistant at American Naturalist who now reported for the sensationalist New York Herald. Cope had once named a fossil after Ballou, and Ballou in turn idolized Cope: he’d once declared Cope far more brilliant than even Charles Darwin. After hearing Cope’s pitch, Ballou readily agreed to write a story about how the consolidation of the geological surveys had been corrupt—and, not incidentally, to smear Marsh along the way.

  Violating even the low journalistic standards of the day, Ballou interviewed several of Marsh’s former assistants without telling them he was a reporter. He posed as a fellow scientist instead, who merely wanted to chitchat about a colleague. The ploy worked, and the quotes he gathered were priceless. One former assistant called Marsh’s work “the most remarkable collection of errors and ignorance… ever displayed.” Another claimed the geological survey was every bit as corrupt as Tammany Hall. Still another declared, “I never knew [Marsh] to do two consecutive honest day’s work in science,” then added that Marsh “has never been known to tell the truth when a falsehood would serve the purpose as well.”