Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  TWO

  Professor Bickmore's Museum

  Stored in an obscure drawer in the Museum's vast photographic archives is an unusual trio of photographs. The first shows a Victorian gentleman with a magnificent white beard, wearing a black frock coat, a starched shirt, a tie tack, and a gold watch chain. The second shows the same stiff man in profile. The third, just as formal as the others, is the rear view of the elderly gentleman; all one can see is the back of his balding pate.

  This triptych of photographs is the official portrait of Professor Albert S. Bickmore, founder of the American Museum of Natural History, taken around the turn of the century. He directed that his portrait be taken in this unusual fashion because it was the way nineteenth-century anthropologists traditionally photographed their aboriginal subjects: from the front, side, and back, like a series of mug shots. The Museum's photographic archives contain tens of thousands of such photographic trios—snapshots of Eskimos, Aleuts, Mongolians, Ainus, and many others.

  That Bickmore requested such a portrait gives us an insight into his character. At the least, it was an eccentric idea that anticipated by a quarter of a century our modern concepts of cultural relativism. Conventional notions of propriety and personal dignity—usually of such importance to the Victorians—didn't concern Bickmore. His colleagues described him as an extremely optimistic and enthusiastic person, able to excite even the most phlegmatic audience. He had an entrepreneur's personality. Bickmore's goal—to found the country's greatest museum of natural history, and to do it in New York City—was ambitious in the extreme. He had no social connections and no money; his academic credentials were fair but not impeccable; and he was young and inexperienced. But he was the kind of man the rich railroad and banking magnates of New York City would understand. And this talent was to play a crucial role in the founding of the Museum.

  Bickmore was born in 1839 in St. George, a small town on the Maine coast opposite Monhegan Island. He was the son of an old New England family of sea captains and shipbuilders. In an unpublished autobiography now housed in the Museum's Rare Book Room, Bickmore tells of spending much of his time roaming the woods and shores of Maine, gathering shells, rocks, and other things of which natural history is made.

  Bickmore went to Dartmouth College, at that time considered the poor man's Harvard, and there studied chemistry and geology. Upon graduation, he persuaded one of his professors to give him a letter of introduction to study under the eminent Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz, who had recently established the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. In 1860, letter in hand, Bickmore traveled to the museum in Cambridge. There he was told that Agassiz could be found in the museum's basement, working in his vast collection. Bickmore descended to the basement and discovered a pompous little man (who turned out to be Agassiz) working "amid a great array of bottles of alcoholic specimens."

  Agassiz gave Bickmore his standard "entrance examination." He would give his prospects a specimen—in Bickmore's case, a sea urchin—and require them to study it, in excruciating detail, for weeks on end. "In six weeks," Agassiz told Bickmore, "you will either become utterly weary of the task, or else you will be so completely fascinated with it as to devote your whole life to the pursuit of our science." Bickmore passed the test and, as one of Agassiz' assistants, was charged with caring for the radiates and mollusks in the Museum's collection.

  Bickmore had other things in mind than invertebrates. He was nursing a secret ambition, and an opportunity to put his idea to the test soon arose. In 1861 the Prince of Wales visited the United States with his tutor, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, founder of the Oxford University Museum (England's counterpart to the Museum of Comparative Zoology). When the royal entourage visited Harvard, Bickmore, who was only twenty-two, buttonholed Dr. Acland in private. "Does it seem strange to you, sir," Bickmore asked him, "that Agassiz, our great teacher, should have located his museum of natural history for future America out here in Cambridge, while in Europe the institutions of this character are placed in the political and monetary capitals of the several empires?"

  "Yes, it does seem strange," Acland replied, "but what has suggested such a question to your mind?"

  "Now New York," Bickmore continued, "is our city of the greatest wealth and therefore probably the best location for the future museum of natural history for the whole land."

  "He simply turned toward me," Bickmore recalled, "and, looking me straight in the eye, said, 'My young friend, that is a grand thought.'

  "I at once determined that I would work for nothing else by day and dream of nothing else by night."

  The young man's plans were hastened, however unintentionally, by Agassiz himself. A European of the old school, Agassiz ran his operation in a dictatorial fashion. He forbade his srudents to publish their research until he decided they were ready—which was far too long for Bickmore. When Bickmore and other students tried to find jobs elsewhere without informing Agassiz, the scientist was enraged. The final blow came when Agassiz discovered that Bickmore had been secretly raising money for an expedition to the Far East. In 1863, Agassiz declined to recommend Bickmore to a permanent position as his assistant, which amounted to little more than a de facto firing.

  Having raised enough money for his expedition, Bickmore set out for the East Indian Archipelago, carrying his two most treasured possessions: his Bible and a sketch plan of his own devising for the new museum.*3 The primary purpose of the trip was to collect birds and shells from the Spice Islands, Borneo, Java, and the other Malaysian and East Indian islands. During the three-year expedition, Bickmore survived several earthquakes, a fall into a volcanic crater, a landslide, and the shock of seeing part of his rare bird collection appear on his dinner plate.

  Bickmore enlisted native help in his collecting efforts, and displayed a shrewdness in bargaining that would later be evident in his negotiations with Boss Tweed about the founding of the Museum. "My mode of trading with these people," he wrote,

  was extremely simple and avoided any unpleasant discussion. A small table was placed on the verandah along the front of the raja's house and I took a seat behind it. The natives then came up separately and placed their shells or lot of shells in a row on the table, and I placed opposite each of them whatever price I was willing to pay and then, pointing first to the money and then to the shells simply said, "Ini atau itu," "This or that," leaving them to make their choice.

  Upon his return to the United States in 1867, Bickmore wasted no time in making contact with wealthy New Yorkers who could help further his plans. He had already met with many of these men before departing on his expedition, and they were impressed with the results he brought back. These men introduced the professor to some of their friends, among them J. Pierpont Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Morris K. Jesup. Bickmore, who was a mere twenty-eight years old, talked many of these men into making the Museum their chief philanthropic pursuit.

  He succeeded largely because of his inexhaustible powers of persuasion. One colleague wrote that if anyone showed the slightest interest in his plan, Bickmore would plunge headlong "into that incessant preoccupation of his mind, the new museum building, its future, its uses, how it should develop, how it would feed school, college, and university ... how it would expand commensurately with the new continent's metropolis until it outrivaled ... the collective shows of all the world."

  This cadre of rich industrialists—who spent half their lives avoiding salesmen, people seeking favors and patronage, and business associates—simply could not escape the persistence of the poor young man from Maine.

  Bickmore assembled his group, and together they drafted a letter to the commissioners of Central Park. This letter simply informed the commissioners that the group had long desired to establish a great natural history museum in Central Park, and that they now had the opportunity to acquire a rare collection of mounted animals and skeletons from the widow of Edouard Verreaux of Paris. Would the commissioners be willing to provide for its recep
tion and development? In the second week of 1869—at a time when Hawkins was hard at work on the plans for his own Paleozoic Museum—the Controller of the Park, Andrew Green, replied that they were ready to cooperate. On January 19, the group met again, passed a set of resolutions governing the new museum, and selected a board of trustees.

  Bickmore's next task was a good deal more difficult and unpleasant: he was charged with pushing the museum's charter through the state legislature, which at this time was still firmly controlled by Boss Tweed. Indeed, with Tweed anything was possible, but without him they hadn't a chance. There was little reason to believe he would be any more sympathetic to the new museum than he had been to previous plans. It was suggested that Bickmore visit the corrupt state senator in Albany with an arsenal of letters of introduction; it was particularly suggested that he obtain a letter from Samuel J. Tilden.

  At last, the day came when Bickmore arrived at Tweed's hotel. Bickmore wrote of Tweed:

  I found him to be a man of portly dimensions and comfortably seated in a large arm chair. I introduced myself and my business by saying: "Senator, I am honored by your friend Samuel]. Tilden, with this letter, and I also have these other letters from leading citizens in New York City."

  "Well, well, what can I do for Mr. Tilden?"

  "These gentlemen, Senator, whose names are on this paper, have asked me to state to you that they desire to found a Museum of Natural History in New York, and if possible on Central Park, similar to Professor Agassiz' great museum in Cambridge—you know of that institution, Senator?"

  "Certainly! Certainly!" was his reply (and now I must confess that for an instant a cruel doubt flashed over my mind, as to whether he had ever really heard its name mentioned before in all his life).... "All right, my young friend, I will see your bill safely through," was his reply as he thrust our carefully prepared document into his capacious outside pocket.

  Whatever Tilden's letter said, or promised—or threatened—it worked admirably. The bill breezed through the committee and was passed unanimously in the State Senate. Ironically—considering the treatment Hawkins had been subjected to—Tweed saw to it that not a single word was changed.

  From an office at the prestigious Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers, Bickmore embarked upon a fund-raising venture to expand the collections (some of which were being temporarily stored in a vault at the same firm). Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., charged Bickmore with the raising of enough money to expand the Museum's collections, and he gave him a list of prospective philanthropists. A week or so later, Bickmore was back in Roosevelt's office with the list of pledges. "As [Roosevelt] unrolled the document," Bickmore wrote, "there came over his face first an expression of surprise and then of radiant delight." Bickmore's indefatigable solicitations had already raised over $40,000 for the new institution. Roosevelt declared, "Professor, New York wants a natural history museum and it shall have one."

  Bickmore next persuaded the Central Park commissioners to let the new Museum occupy part of the Arsenal Building within Central Park. He immediately began supervising the acquisition of various collections. The first annual report listed the earliest collections, which included the bones of the extinct dodo, a book on the fossils of North Carolina, 4,000 shells, and Bickmore's own collections including "alcoholic mollusca [and] four skeletons of the sea otter." Bickmore also purchased 3,000 bird skins from Daniel Giraud Elliot, the entire "cabinet" of Prince Maximilian of Neuwied. Baron R. Osten-Sacken, the Russian consul-general in New York City and an avid insect collector, donated 4,000 beetles he had collected in America. Later donations streamed in. Among them were a mastodon's tooth, presented by a Mr. Root; sixteen specimens of algae and one mummified crocodile from a Mr. Young; and a mounted badger from Syria, donated by a Reverend Dodge. Other strange and exotic donations began filling up the storerooms of the Arsenal Building, until it was fairly bursting with bones, stuffed animals, and various exotica. It was all too evident that a new and larger building would have to be found—and soon.

  THE ONCE AND FUTURE MUSEUM

  In 1871 the Museum and its sister institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, jointly petitioned the state legislature for land and buildings to house and display their collections permanently. The petition, signed by 40,000 New Yorkers, persuaded city politicians to offer the American Museum a sixteen-acre parcel of land known as Manhattan Square, adjacent to Central Park on 79th Street. (Manhattan Square had been planned as a park well before the creation of Central Park, but as of 1871 remained undeveloped.) When the Museum took possession, it was a dismal and positively wild site indeed. As Louis Garatacap, a curator in the young Museum, wrote: "It included a rugged, disconsolate tract of ground, thrown into hillocks where the gneiss ledges protruded their weathered shapes, or depressed in hollows filled with stagnant pools, and bearing throughout an uncompromising, scarcely serviceable appearance."

  In that period of the late nineteenth century, it was also a very isolated site. The elevated railway that would soon run along what is now Columbus avenue had not been extended farther than 59th Street, and the bridge connecting Manhattan Square with Central Park (now called the Naturalists' Gate) had not yet been built. The area around the Museum, now the fashionable Upper West Side, was then undergoing the painful process of development. It was a ramshackle patchwork of rundown farms, tenements, rocky outcrops, foul swamps, and undeveloped tracts clustered with vegetable gardens and the hovels of squatters.

  Before building could begin on Manhattan Square, a dozen or more squatters had to be unceremoniously removed from the site, along with their herds of goats and pigs. Then the trustees of the new Museum hired Calvert Vaux, one of the designers of Central Park, to be the architect of the fledgling Museum. Vaux contemplated a Museum of lofty and stupendous dimensions. The edifice was to be a hollow square seven hundred feet along each side, containing two long buildings that crossed in the center, forming four interior courtyards. The center of the structure would be an enormous tower called—appropriately enough—the Hall of the Heavens. Oacob Wrey Mould, J. C. Cady, and other architects would later add details to and alter the plan.)

  On June 2, 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant laid the cornerstone for the new building. He was attended by a flock of important officials, including three cabinet members, the governor, and the mayor (as well as a group of curious squatters who had remained throughout the construction.) The ceremony opened with a rousing prayer by a Reverend Tyng, followed by an address by the president of the commissioners of Central Park, who alluded rather apologetically to the forbidding landscape:

  To the stranger who comes here to-day these rugged foundation walls and these rough surroundings are not well calculated to make a pleasant impression; but to us who have watched the rapid growth northward of this city, and who were familiar with the barren and rocky ground upon which Central Park has been created, it requires but little strain of the imagination to conceive of the speedy occupation of all these vacant lots by substantial dwellings, and to picture to ourselves the spot upon which we now stand, known as Manhattan Square, as covered by the proposed Museum of Natural History, costing, ere its final completion, not less than $6,000,000, and embracing a collection of objects of scientific interest second to none other in the world.

  All was silent as Grant troweled the cornerstone and time capsule into place. The trowel, a little silver affair supplied by Tiffany's, was stolen moments later.*4

  The first building was opened to the public on December 22, 1877, with President Rutherford B. Hayes presiding. It was an austere Victorian structure that looked out upon a landscape of rubble, undrained ponds, and piles of rock. An early photograph of the Museum, taken from the roof of the Dakota Building,†5 shows the Museum standing in this wasteland, with a number of shanties, gardens, and various animals still inhabiting the fringes of Manhattan Square.

  Grand hopes were sounded in a series of opening speeches, and Bickmore looked forward to the coming weeks, when the Museum would be thronged
with crowds of excited visitors. But the following day, Bickmore opened the doors of the Museum to a paltry crowd, and in the following months Bickmore found himself wandering unhappily through virtually deserted exhibition halls. Unexpectedly, so soon after its jubilant opening, the Museum was plunged into a period of crisis that threatened to shut its doors permanently.

  MISERY ON MANHATTAN SQUARE

  Between the opening of the first building and 1880, the Museum got into serious trouble.