Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  During the first heady years of its life, the Museum had purchased a number of expensive collections. In 1874, for example, it paid $65,000 for the fossil invertebrate collection of Professor James Hall. This was undoubtedly an important purchase, and it kept this significant collection from being sold to a hungry German museum. (Louis Agassiz had once said that "whoever gets this collection gets the geological museum of America.") During a lifetime of meticulous collecting, Hall had amassed tens of thousands of fossils representing over 7,000 species; indeed, the collection was so important that the nomenclature of the geological structure of North America had been based on Hall's fossils. But it was also a very expensive acquisition—one that the thinly stretched Museum budget could ill afford.

  The Museum hoped to pay for the Hall collection with a public subscription. Unfortunately, the public proved to be quite uninterested in an aggregation of gray invertebrate fossils. Very little money came forth. The trustees found themselves in the uncomfortable position of making up the shortfall—not an inconsiderable amount for the time. The Hall collection and other enthusiastic purchases of a similar nature put the Museum seriously in debt.

  The location of the new Museum aggravated the cash-flow problem. The exhibition halls were virtually empty; more people visited the "rump" collection of natural history junk left behind in the Arsenal Building than came to the new Museum. The first two Presidents of the Museum, John David Wolfe and Robert L. Stuart, lacked the energy and time to put the Museum on a sound footing. Most of the other trustees were losing interest; fewer and fewer were coming to trustee meetings because the trip uptown was so inconvenient. In an effort to attract public attention, Bickmore would again and again persuade the trustees to advance funds for a new purchase, and again and again he would stage a grand unveiling. But each time, the flurry of visitors would soon drop off, leaving the Museum once again deserted.

  Some of the trustees began seriously to question the value of the Museum itself. One wrote that "no matter how fine the exhibits are, if no one saw them what good are they?" By 1880, the Museum was on the brink of extinction. The trustees had by and large clamped down on purchases, public interest was at a critically low level, and Museum President Robert L. Stuart had said that when he retired, he would recommend closing the Museum if no one could be found to take his place.

  The trustees decided that a report on the future needs and direction of the Museum was necessary. They gave the task to Morris K. Jesup, a Museum founder and wealthy railroad magnate and banker. They directed Jesup to devise a plan that would scale down the Museum's aims and goals, reduce expenses, and—most important—curtail the extravagant purchases of Bickmore and several other sympathetic trustees.

  Jesup was not particularly interested in or sympathetic to the science of natural history, and his sixth-grade education certainly didn't prepare him for understanding the complexities of the institution. But after spending time with Bickmore, wandering about the halls gazing at the fossils and stuffed animals, and chatting with the two curators taking care of the collections, he underwent a conversion. Rather than winding the place down, he told the trustees that the Museum should be vigorously expanded and provided with an endowment. He shrewdly noted that the exhibitions should cease to focus on boring fossil invertebrates, but instead look to "lions" and other big mammals to arouse the public interest. He argued passionately that the Museum could be "a power of great good" for the people of New York City. The trustees were impressed by his report, and when Robert L. Stuart resigned, they made Jesup the third President of the Museum.

  Jesup's presidency lasted more than a quarter-century, and during that time he completely transformed the Museum. In 1881, when he arrived, there were some 54,000 square feet of exhibits; twenty-five years later, there were close to 600,000. In 1881, the Museum employed twelve people; by 1906 the number had grown to 185. In 1881, the endowment was zero; in 1906, it stood at well over a million dollars. Much of this was due to Jesup.

  Jesup was one of the nineteenth century's quintessential self-made men. He was a man of great self-control, with an uncompromisingly moralistic view of the world. He was born in 1830 into a strictly religious and quite wealthy family. Theatergoing, cardplaying, and dancing were forbidden as the Devil's amusements. Morris was the fifth of eight brothers and sisters. He was devoted to his mother, to Christian duty and the Presbyterian Church, to charity and honor. His many charities included the New York City Mission and Tract Society (which published Christian tracts and distributed them with zeal to the poorer classes), the Five Points House of Industry (a rehabilitation center for wayward boys), the American Sunday School Union, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan and Destitute Children, among others.

  His life was uneventful until 1837, when the serious financial panic of that year completely wiped out the family fortune. Almost immediately afterward, the seven-year-old Jesup's father died, leaving Mrs. Jesup a destitute widow with eight children to support Gesup would later see all his siblings but one die of tuberculosis). His family's financial condition continued to grow worse until, at the age of twelve, Jesup was forced to drop out of school to help support his mother. He landed a job as a messenger boy at the Wall Street firm of Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor, run by one of his father's old friends and Jesup's namesake, Morris Ketchum. Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor manufactured locomotives and cotton mill machinery, and Jesup began learning the business.

  From this pathetic, Horatio Alger–like beginning, Jesup amassed and then gave away one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century. In 1852, at age twenty-two, Jesup left the firm, and with a bookkeeper named Charles Clark set up Clark & Jesup. This firm did a commission business, buying railroad supplies from manufacturers and reselling them to the railroads. It was a financial success, and several years later Jesup formed a new concern, M.K. Jesup & Company, which in time branched out into the investment banking business, eventually buying entire railroads. Jesup's specialty was to buy a controlling interest in a failing railroad, reorganize it, and sell it at a spectacular profit. When he became one of the original Museum incorporators in 1869, he had only been in business seventeen years and had already built a vast fortune.

  Jesup was fifty-one when he was elected to the presidency of the Museum, and at fifty-four he retired from business to devote himself to it full-time. His sixth-grade education never hindered his understanding of science, and may in fact have been an asset. One scientist wrote, "He began his duties untrammelled by tradition. He was the advocate of no established school or method.... His oft-repeated remark, 'I am a plain, unscientific man; I want the exhibits to be labelled so I can understand them, and then I shall feel sure that others can understand,' summed up his prime desire."

  Perhaps most importantly for the Museum, Jesup recognized that the foundation for good exhibitions was good research and active collecting. He launched the Museum into a golden age of exploration—the fifty-year period from 1880 to 1930, when the Museum sent over a thousand expeditions into the field, many to the remotest corners of the earth. By 1930 the Museum had been involved with expeditions that discovered the North Pole; that penetrated unmapped areas of Siberia; that traversed Outer Mongolia and the great Gobi Desert; that penetrated the deepest jungles of the Congo—expeditions that, in fact, were to bring Museum representatives to every continent on the globe.

  THREE

  The First Grand Expedition

  It was a golden age for natural science. The world stood poised on the edge of the twentieth century, but an explorer could still come face to face with Stone Age peoples who were entirely unaware of the existence of an outside world. Exploration and collection were still a dangerous business, in which the loss of life was not uncommon. On the other hand, science had matured to the point where people realized that the earth's resources were not infinite. The new science of anthropology, for example, suddenly made people aware that cultures were dying out all over the world,
and that an effort had to be made to save what was left. Technology had recently provided the tools to do so—including the camera and the wax-cylinder phonograph.

  On the other hand, zoologists and biologists saw an entire globe virtually unexplored scientifically, and accessible in a way that it never had been before. New discoveries in many branches of natural science were following thick and fast: dinosaurs were discovered in the American West, remarkable new species of animals were found in the African jungles, new lands discovered in the Arctic. More than anything, natural scientists of the late nineteenth century believed deeply in the value of collections. To them, collections were facts. They held secrets about the world; secrets that could be extracted through careful study. Collections would reveal the relationships among all life on the planet, including human beings. They would be a resource for scientists centuries into the future, long after such things no longer existed in the wild. And on a more human level, spectacular collections and brilliant discoveries brought glory and fame to collectors, their institutions, and the benefactors who provided them with funds.

  In 1895, President Jesup hired a young man, Franz Boas, to be the assistant curator m the Department of Ethnology. An austere man with a forceful personality, Boas was a meticulous, careful researcher who had unconventional—even radical—ideas about cultural anthropology. Before Boas, anthropologists had ranked human societies on a kind of evolutionary ladder; some races, they believed, were obviously better than others. The best and most advanced of all, of course, was the white Protestant culture of Western Europe and America.

  Boas disagreed. He believed that all cultures were intrinsically equal—a view called cultural relativism. If this was so, Boas figured, one could learn as much about humanity by studying a small tribe in British Columbia as by studying a great civilization. But Boas saw many of the small cultures he wanted to study dying out, and he believed that with their death, priceless information would be lost forever. Time was running out, and he felt the urgent need to collect and save everything possible from these cultures for the benefit of future generations. In particular, Boas saw the fragile aboriginal cultures of the North Pacific rim of North America poised at the edge of extinction, and he realized that his might well be the last opportunity anyone would have to study these cultures. In earlier trips to the Northwest Coast, he had already begun to see the beginnings of a decline, stemming from the desire of the Indians to possess Western technology, and from the growing suppression of Northwest Coast culture by the provincial government of British Columbia. In Asia he saw disease and starvation decimating the native populations whenever they came in contact with the West. What was happening in Siberia was a mirror image of what was going on in the Western United States—and Boas knew perfectly well what the final result would be. His overriding desire was to save every possible thing related to these societies for future study and ultimately for the common heritage of humanity.

  When he first came to the Museum, Boas may have seen that there was a chance President Jesup would not support a kind of shotgun approach to collecting in the area Boas was studying, the Indians of the Northwest Coast. Jesup was a man who liked definite goals and tangible results. Therefore, Boas presented Jesup with a definite theory that required testing—that the Indians of North America had entered the New World from northeastern Siberia across the Bering Strait.

  The origin of Native Americans was in fact one of the great unsettled questions in anthropology at that time. Some scientists identified them with one or another of the tribes of Asia or the South Pacific, while others insisted they were culturally—and perhaps racially—independent of the old World. Boas argued that the way to prove his theory was to send a major expedition to explore and study the cultures living along the entire North Pacific rim, from the Indians along the Northwest Coast of North America to the aborigines of eastern Siberia.

  Jesup seized upon the problem with great interest. He was growing old (in 1895 he was already sixty-five), and he wanted a major scientific discovery to come out of his presidency. His shrewd financial management of the Museum had left it flush with funds, and whatever money the Museum didn't have for an expedition, Jesup would find within his own pockets. Boas would now be able to accomplish his secret agenda while at the same time pursuing this important anthropological question.

  By 1897, Boas had organized the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. In the entire field of anthropology, nothing of comparable size or scope had ever been attempted before. Boas hired over a dozen anthropologists and assistants who fanned out among the tiny aboriginal cultures living along the circum-Pacific: the Ainu of northern Japan, the Tungus and Yakut of southern Siberia, the Yukaghir and Chukchee of northern Siberia and the Koryak of the eastern coast; the Asiatic and Alaskan Eskimo; and the Kwakiutl, Salish, Bella Coola, and Thompson Indians living along the Northwest Coast of Canada.

  Boas directed the fieldwork in North America himself, reserving the Kwakiutl and Bella Coola Indians as his own. On earlier expeditions to the area, Boas had made the acquaintance of George Hunt, a part-Kwakiutl man living at Fort Rupert in British Columbia. Boas asked Hunt to join the expedition, and the two men worked together, collecting objects; transcribing myths, and gathering ethnographic material. Whenever Boas went into the field, Hunt accompanied him and acted as advance man, interpreter, and guide. When Boas was not in the field, George Hunt collected and transcribed myths, which he sent to Boas through the mail and for which he received payment of fifty cents per page. He was deeply knowledgeable about Kwakiutl customs and myths, and contributed valuable material for Boas' resulting analyses. Allen Wardwell, in his book Objects of Bright Pride, turned up an illuminating piece of correspondence between Boas and Hunt. Just before Boas left New York for British Columbia in 1897, he sent Hunt a letter, which read in part:

  It occurred to me that in laying out our work, it would be a very good plan to have the Indians clearly understand what we are about. For this purpose, I enclose a letter which I have written to the Kwakiutl tribe.... I hope you will read this letter to them, translated, of course, into Indian, and in doing so, you better invite them to a feast, for which I will pay when I see you.

  In the files of the Museum, Wardwell found part of the following letter, which Boas had enclosed in his letter to Hunt (the last pages of it are lost):

  Friends, I am Mr. Boas who is speaking to you. I am he whom you called Heiltsaqoalis. It is two winters since I have been with you, but I have thought of you often. You were very kind to me when I was with you.... It is difficult for you to show the white men in Victoria that your feasts and potlatches are good, and I have tried to show them they are good.... I am trying to show them that your ways are not bad ways ... I am sorry to see how many of your children do not obey the old laws, how they walk the ways of the white man. The ways of the Indian were made differently from the ways of the white man at the beginning of the world, and it is good that we remember the old ways ... your young people do not know the history of your people . . . it is not good that these stories are forgotten. . . .

  Boas was particularly anxious to preserve the myths of the Northwest Coast Indians. Most artifacts can survive the extinction of a culture; pots, house foundations, knives, stonework, and burials will last for thousands of years. But myths, Boas realized, are the most delicate artifact of a culture, and the first to disappear in the face of cultural change. Boas believed that myths were the key to understanding a culture. Like the majority of artifacts, myths reveal influences, contacts, and ideas from other cultures. They also reveal, Boas believed, the way a culture organizes and makes sense of a complex world. Myths integrate—in one structure—the many traits of a culture.

  Despite his grasp of their importance, however, Boas found myth-gathering a tedious business. An entry in one of his journals attests: "I had a miserable day today. The natives held a big potlatch again. I was unable to get hold of anyone and had to snatch at whatever I could get. Late at night I did get something, [
a tale] for which I have been searching—'The Birth of the Raven.'" He went on to complain about how much nonsense he was forced to listen to before getting one valuable myth.

  The expeditions along the Northwest Coast yielded the largest and most important collection from that area in the world. Besides virtually the entire creation and myth cycle of the Kwakiutl and other Indians, Boas and Hunt brought back magical transformation masks, shamans' dance shirts, huge carved bowls and painted chests, shamans' rattles, exquisite carvings in bone, cedar, and slate, feast dishes, and giant totem poles (for which they paid one dollar per foot).

  These items were saved just in time. By 1910 the Northwest Coast Indian culture had been suppressed and the potlatch (the periodic feasts where important chiefs would try to outdo each other in giving away their wealth) outlawed; the Indians had stopped creating their extraordinary art. What Boas feared most had come to pass.

  EXPEDITIONS IN ASIA

  Meanwhile, Boas had sent three men to conduct parallel work in Asia. The first two were Russian anthropologists, Waldemar Borgoras and Waldemar Jochelson, both of whom had been exiled to Siberia by the Czar for belonging to revolutionary societies. Once in Siberia, the two were more or less free to travel and research as they pleased, only mildly inconvenienced by the shadow of the Czar's secret police. The third man, Berthold Laufer, a German, was put in charge of research among the tribes living along the Amur River, which runs along the present-day border of China and the Soviet Union.