Bones of Contention Among America’s Early Paleontologists
Entertaining if occasionally exasperating, “The Bonehunters’ Revenge” retells the lively tale of two fine 19th century American naturalists who made the big discoveries of ancient mammal and dinosaur bones in the West and fought bitterly over them for most of their adult lives. The battling duo were Edward Drinker Cope, an upper-class Philadelphia Quaker who eventually became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Othniel C. Marsh, born on a farm in Lockport, N.Y., who at 35 was handed a professorship at Yale by a rich patron.
They schemed against each other and feuded on the ground where their major discoveries were made (chiefly Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico); in scientific publications; in scientific associations (for years, Marsh was head of the National Academy of Sciences, and in his later years, Cope became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science); and in Congress, where each tried to besmirch the other’s name.
Why they fought so long and so fiercely is not entirely clear. Wallace ascribes it chiefly to ambition, though at one point he speculates--this being the gossipy 1990s--that perhaps, just perhaps, Marsh, who never married and surrounded himself with young men, was reacting against a same-sex crush he couldn’t help having for the married Cope. Without any evidence, such speculation seems beside the point.
Certainly both men were ambitious to find the most bones, the biggest bones, the bones that best told the developing history of the past of the Earth and its creatures. Charles Darwin thought that the bones, Marsh’s in particular, indicated that his theory of evolution was correct. (Marsh was a convinced Darwinian; Cope, more a follower of the theories of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who thought that species now extinct had merely been transformed by the environment they encountered into newer species.)
Certainly the two rivals’ fervent quests for knowledge and fame were of a piece with America’s vibrant geographic, economic and intellectual expansionism in the years following the Civil War. The opening of the West was a major part of that expansion, and here the feud had an unfortunate consequence. John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Colorado River, was appointed director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1872, and he named Marsh as the survey’s vertebrate paleontologist.
Throughout the 1880s, Marsh’s fame grew as Cope’s declined. Cope tried mining but failed at that, too. Then, in 1890, Cope struck back at Marsh, by means of a freelance hack writer named William Hosea Ballou, and James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald.
Taking Cope’s side in the long-running controversy, Ballou peddled to the Herald a series of articles that accused Marsh and Powell of ignorance, plagiarism and incompetence. The Geological Survey, the articles said, was a pawn of the National Academy of Sciences, which Marsh headed. “Will Congress Investigate?” the newspaper asked. Congress did, to considerable uproar. Powell lost his job, and with it his dream of preventing development in the arid West until a way could be found to allocate water fairly and efficiently. The West would look different today if Powell had had his way.
After the furor, Cope died in 1897, Marsh two years later. Wallace mars this tale with inappropriately slangy overwriting--the cowed staff of the Herald are without fail called “Bennett’s zombies,” for instance. Wallace also is too free with speculation. Phrases like “would have,” “must have,” “surely did” abound. Still, “The Bonehunters’ Revenge” is both an engaging human yarn and an important bit of American history.
