“She can’t sell those crates!”
“I don’t see why not. She says they’re hers.”
“They’re mine!”
“It’s no good getting all hot like this,” the sheriff said. “I checked with some folks come down from Deadwood. Seems you showed up there with a dead Indian and a dead white man. I’ll lay you a hundred to one that white man was William Johnson.”
Johnson started to explain, but the sheriff held up his hand. “I’m sure you got a story to explain it,” he said. “Your type always does.”
The sheriff went out of the jail. Johnson heard the deputy say, “Who is that fella?”
“Some desperado, putting on airs,” the sheriff said, and he went out for a drink.
The deputy was a boy of sixteen. Johnson traded him his boots to send a second telegram to Philadelphia.
“Sheriff’ll be mighty angry if he finds out,” the deputy said. “He wants you to go to Yankton to be tried for murder.”
“Just send it,” Johnson said, writing quickly.
Dear Father:
Sorry I wrecked yacht. Remember pet squirrel summer 71. Mother’s fever after Edward born. Headmaster Ellis warning at Exeter. I am truly alive and you are causing great trouble. Send money and inform sheriff.
Your loving son Pinky.
The deputy read the telegram slowly, mouthing the words. He looked up. “Pinky?”
“Just send it,” Johnson said.
“Pinky?”
“That was my name as a baby.”
The deputy shook his head. But he sent the telegram.
“Now look here, Mr. Johnson,” the sheriff said, unlocking the cell a few hours later. “It was an honest mistake. I was only doing my duty.”
“You got the telegram?” Johnson said.
“I got three telegrams,” the sheriff said. “One from your father, one from Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania, and one from Mr. Hayden at the Geological Survey in Washington. For all I know there are more coming. I’m telling you it was an honest mistake.”
“That’s fine,” Johnson said.
“No hard feelings?”
But Johnson had other things on his mind. “Where’s my gun?”
He found Emily in the lobby of the Inter-Ocean Hotel. She was drinking wine.
“Where are my crates?”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“What have you done with my crates, Emily?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “They are just old bones. Nobody wants ’em.”
Relieved, Johnson collapsed in a chair beside her.
“I can’t see why they are so important to you,” she said.
“They are, that’s all.”
“Well, I hope you got some money because the hotel is asking for the bill and my smiling at the desk man is wearing thin.”
“I have money. My father sent—”
She wasn’t listening, however, but staring across the room past him. Her eyes lit up: “Collis!”
Johnson turned to look. Behind him, a heavyset, dour man in a dark suit was checking into the hotel at the front desk. The man looked over. He had the mournful expression of a basset hound. “Miranda? Miranda Lapham?”
Johnson frowned. “Miranda?”
Emily was standing, beaming. “Collis Huntington, whatever are you doing in Cheyenne?”
“Bless me, it’s Miranda Lapham!”
“Miranda? Lapham?” Johnson said, not only confused by Emily’s new name but by the sudden idea that he might not have known her real identity at all. And why had she lied to him?
The heavyset man embraced Emily with warm and lingering familiarity. “Why, Miranda, you look wonderful, simply wonderful.”
“It’s delightful to see you, Collis.”
“Let me look at you,” he said, stepping back, beaming. “You haven’t changed a bit, Miranda. I don’t mind telling you I’ve missed you, Miranda.”
“And I you, Collis.”
The heavy man turned to Johnson. “This beautiful young lady is the best lobbyist the railroads ever had in Washington.”
Johnson said nothing. He was still trying to put it together. Collis Huntington, Washington, railroads . . . My God—Collis Huntington! One of the Big Four of the Central Pacific in California. Collis Huntington, the blatant corruptionist who traveled each year to Washington with a suitcase full of money for the congressmen, the man once described as “scrupulously dishonest.”
“Everyone misses you, Miranda,” Huntington went on. “They all ask for you still. Bob Arthur—”
“Dear Senator Arthur—”
“And Jack Kearns—”
“Commissioner Kearns, what a dear man—”
“And even the general—”
“The general? He still asks for me?”
“He does,” Huntington said sadly, shaking his head. “Why don’t you come back, Miranda? Washington was always your first love.”
“All right,” she said suddenly. “You’ve convinced me.”
Huntington turned to Johnson. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your companion?”
“He’s nobody,” Miranda Lapham said, shaking her head so her curls moved prettily. She took Huntington’s arm. “Come, Collis, we’ll have a delicious lunch and you can tell me the news of Washington. And there is so much to do, you will have to find me a house, of course, and I will need some setting up . . .”
They moved away, arm in arm, to the dining room.
Johnson sat there, stunned.
At eight the next morning, feeling he had lived a decade in a few months, he took the Union Pacific train east, all ten crates stored in the rattling luggage car. The monotony of the voyage was most enjoyable, and he marked the greening of the landscape. The arrival of autumn could be seen in the top leaves of the oaks and maples and apple trees. At each stop, he would get off and buy the local newspapers, noticing an Eastern point of view creeping into the editorials about the Indian Wars—and various other topics.
On the morning of the fourth day, in Pittsburgh, he telegraphed Cope to say he had survived and would like to come speak with him; he said nothing about the crates of bones. Then he telegraphed his parents and asked that they have an extra place set for dinner that night.
He arrived in Philadelphia on October 8.
Four Meetings
At the train station, Johnson hired a man with an empty greengrocer’s wagon to take him to Cope’s house on Pine Street in Philadelphia. It wasn’t a long trip, and he arrived to find that Cope owned two matching three-story stone row houses, one a residence and the other a private museum and offices. Most surprising was that Cope lived perhaps only seven or eight blocks from Rittenhouse Square, where Johnson’s mother was even now preparing for his arrival.
“Which house is the residence?” he asked the wagon owner.
“I do not know, but I think that fellow will tell you,” the man said, pointing.
It was Cope himself, bouncing down the steps. “Johnson!”
“Professor!”
He gave Johnson a firm handshake and a decisively strong hug.
“You’re alive and—” He spied the tarp over the back of the wagon. “Is it possible?”
Johnson nodded. “It wasn’t impossible, is perhaps my best answer.”
The crates were taken directly into the museum half of Cope’s property. Mrs. Cope came in with lemonade and wafers, and they sat down; they oohed over his stories, fussed over his appearance, exclaimed over his crates of bones.
“I will want to have a secretary transcribe an entire account of your adventure,” said Cope. “We need to be able to prove that the bones we excavated in Montana are the bones that sit now in Philadelphia.”
“A few may have broken from the way the wagon and stages bounced around,” Johnson said. “Plus there may be a few bullet holes or bone chips, but mostly they’re all here.”
“The Brontosaurus teeth?” Cope asked, his hands twitching in excitement. “Do you stil
l have the teeth? It may not reflect well on me, but I have been worrying about this since the day we thought you had been killed.”
“It’s this crate here, Professor,” Johnson said, finding the box with the X.
Cope unpacked it on the spot, lifted the teeth one by one, and stared at them for a very long time, transfixed. He set them down in a row, much as he had done on the shale cliff many weeks earlier, nearly two thousand miles to the west. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “Quite extraordinary. Marsh will be hard put to match it for many years.”
“Edward,” said Mrs. Cope, “hadn’t we better send Mr. Johnson home to his family?”
“Yes, of course,” Cope said. “They must be eager to see you.”
His father embraced him warmly. “I thank God for your return, son.”
His mother stood at the top of the stairs and said weepily, “The beard makes you look frightfully common, William. Get rid of it at once.”
“What’s happened to your lip?” his father said. “Are you wounded?”
“Indians,” Johnson said.
“Looks like teeth marks to me,” Edward, his brother, said.
“That’s so,” Johnson said. “This Indian climbed aboard the wagon and bit me. Wanted to see what I would taste like.”
“Bit you on the lip? What, was he trying to kiss you?”
“They are savages,” Johnson said. “And unpredictable.”
“Kissed by an Indian!” Edward said, clapping his hands. “Kissed by an Indian!”
Johnson rolled up his trousers and showed everyone the scar where the arrow had pierced his leg. He produced the stump of the arrow. He chose not to tell them many details, and said nothing of Emily Williams or Miranda Lapham or whatever her true name was. He did tell them about burying Toad and Little Wind.
Edward burst into tears and ran upstairs to his room.
“We’re just glad to have you back, son,” his father said, looking suddenly much older.
The fall term was already under way, but the dean of Yale College permitted him to enroll anyway. Johnson was not above the dramatic effect of putting on his Western clothes and his gun and striding into the dining room.
The entire room fell silent. Then someone said, “It’s Johnson! Willy Johnson!”
Johnson strode over to Marlin’s table. Marlin was eating with friends.
“I believe you owe me money,” Johnson said, in his best tough voice.
“How colorful you look,” Marlin said, laughing. “You must introduce me to your tailor, William.”
Johnson said nothing.
“Should I presume you had many dime Western adventures and killed men in actual gunfights?” Marlin said, hamming it up for their listeners.
“Yes,” Johnson said. “That would be correct.”
Marlin’s antic smile dropped, unsure of Johnson’s meaning.
“I believe you owe me money,” Johnson said again.
“My dear fellow, I owe you nothing at all! If you remember, the terms of our bet were that you would accompany Professor Marsh, and the entire school knows you did not get far with him before he cast you aside as a rogue and scoundrel.”
In a single swift movement, Johnson grabbed Marlin by the collar, effortlessly hoisted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall. “You snotty little bastard, you give me that thousand dollars or I’ll break your head open.”
Marlin was gasping, and noticed Johnson’s scar. “I don’t know you.”
“No, but you owe me. Now tell everybody what you are going to do.”
“I’m going to pay you a thousand dollars.”
“Louder.”
Marlin repeated it loudly. The room laughed. Johnson dropped him in a crumpled heap to the floor and walked out of the dining room.
Othniel Marsh lived alone in a mansion he had built on a hill outside New Haven. As he walked up the hill, Johnson had a sense of the loneliness and isolation of Marsh’s life, his need for approval, for status and acceptance. He was shown to the drawing room; Marsh was working there alone, and looked up from a manuscript he was preparing.
“You sent for me, Professor Marsh?”
Marsh glared at him. “Where are they?”
“You mean the bones?”
“Of course I mean the bones! Where are they?”
Johnson held Marsh’s gaze. He realized he was no longer afraid of the man, in any way. “Professor Cope has the bones, in Philadelphia. All of them.”
“Is it true you have found the remains of a hitherto unknown dinosaur of great size?”
“I am not at liberty to say, Professor.”
“You are a fatuous fool,” Marsh said. “You have squandered your own opportunity for greatness. Cope will never publish, and if he does, his report will be so hasty, so filled with inaccuracies, that it will never attain the recognition of the scientific community. You should have brought them to Yale, where they could be properly studied. You are a fool and a traitor to your college, Johnson.”
“Is that all, Professor?”
“Yes, that’s all.” Johnson turned to leave. “One more thing,” Marsh said.
“Yes, Professor?”
“I don’t suppose you can get the bones back?”
“No, Professor.”
“Then it’s gone,” Marsh said wistfully. “All gone.” He returned to his manuscript. His pen scratched on the paper.
Johnson left the room. On his way out, he passed a small skeleton of the miniature Cretaceous horse Eohippus. It was beautifully formed, beautifully assembled, this pale skeleton from the distant past. Somehow it made Johnson sad. He turned away, and hurried down the hill toward the College.
Postscript
Cope
Edward Drinker Cope died penniless in 1897 in Philadelphia, having exhausted his family fortune and his energy battling Marsh. He was relatively young still, only fifty-six years old. But he had seen the first Brontosaurus skeleton assembled at the Yale Peabody Museum and more than fourteen hundred papers published. He is credited with the discovery and naming of more than one thousand vertebrate species and more than fifty kinds of dinosaurs. One, Anisonchus cophater, he said he named “in honor of the number of Cope haters who surround me!” He donated his body to science and instructed that after death his brain size be compared with Marsh’s, it being commonly believed at the time that brain size determined intelligence. Marsh declined to accept the challenge.
Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh died two years after Cope, alone and embittered in the house he had built for himself. He was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. He and his fossil hunters discovered five-hundred-odd different fossilized animals, including some eighty dinosaurs; he named them all himself.
Earp
Wyatt Earp died on January 13, 1929, in a rented bungalow near the intersection of Venice and Crenshaw Boulevards in Los Angeles, after acting in silent movies and then selling the rights to his life story to Columbia Pictures. In later years he was strongly influenced by the wishes of his wife, Josie. He told his life story as he remembered it, or chose to remember it, to Stuart N. Lake, a Pasadena writer, two years before his death. When published as Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, it made a terrific impression, and established his fame enduringly.
Sternberg
Charles Hazelius Sternberg became a celebrated American fossil collector and amateur paleontologist who wrote about his time with Cope. He was in fact working for Cope when Cope died, and learned of his death three days later, wired directly by his wife. Sternberg wrote two books: The Life of a Fossil Hunter (1909) and Hunting Dinosaurs in the Badlands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada (1917). He was responsible for finding the Monoclonius, or, as it is commonly known, the horned dinosaur. He quoted Cope as saying, “No man can say he loves us, when he wantonly destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys his creatures.” Fossils collected by Sternberg are displayed in museums around the world.
Author’s Note
“Biography,” observed Oscar Wilde, “lends to death a new terror.” Even in a work of fiction about individuals long dead, there is reason to consider his sentiment.
Readers unfamiliar with this period of American history may be interested to know that Professors Marsh and Cope were real people, their rivalry and antagonism depicted here without exaggeration—in fact, it has been toned down, since the nineteenth century promoted a degree of ad hominem excess that is hard to believe now.
Cope did go to the Montana badlands in 1876, and discovered the teeth of Brontosaurus, essentially as recounted here.*
The antagonism between Cope and Marsh that played out over ten years is compressed here into a single summer, with some changes. Thus, it was Marsh who made the false skull for Cope to find, and so on. However, it is true that on many occasions the workers of Cope and Marsh fired on one another—with much more serious intent than suggested here.
The character of William Johnson is entirely fictitious. I would not read this novel as history. For history, read Charles Sternberg’s detailed account of Cope’s trip to the Montana badlands in The Life of a Fossil Hunter.
I am indebted to E. H. Colbert, the eminent paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, for first bringing the story of Marsh and Cope to my attention; in his kind correspondence he suggested a novel about them; he also provided me with my first leads in his books.
Finally, readers who inspect photographic books, as I have done, should be extremely careful about the captions. There has emerged a new breed of photo book in which authentic pictures of the West are accompanied by bleak, elegiac prose. The captions may seem to fit the pictures, but they do not fit the facts—this sad, melancholy attitude is a complete anachronism. Towns such as Deadwood may look depressing to us now, but they were exciting places then, and the people who inhabited them were excited to be there. Too often, the people who write captions to photographs indulge their own uninformed fantasies about the pictures and what they mean.