Contents
Cover
Endpaper
Title Page
Introduction
Part I : The Field Trip West Young Johnson Joins the Field Trip West
Marsh
Learning Photography
Philadelphia
“Ready to Dig for Yale?”
Chicago
Going West
The West
A Night in Cheyenne
Morning in Cheyenne
Cope’s Expedition
West with Cope
Fort Benton
Part II: The Lost World Night on the Plains
Incidents on the Plains
Badlands
The Indian Village
Bone Country
Around the Fire
Bad Water
Dinner with Cope and Marsh
“Sleep with Your Guns Tonight, Boys”
Moving Camp
The Teeth
Around the Campfire
Leaving the Badlands
Part III: Dragon Teeth On the Plains
Badlands
Deadwood
Life in Deadwood
The Black Hills Art Gallery
The Army Arrives
Last Day in Deadwood
The Next Day in Deadwood
Emily
Emily’s News
Moving the Bones
A Shootout
The Cheyenne Road
The Second Attack
Red Canyon
Fort Laramie
The Laramie Bone Deal
Cheyenne
Four Meetings
Postscript
Author’s Note
Afterword
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Michael Crichton
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
As he appears in an early photograph, William Johnson is a handsome young man with a crooked smile and a naive grin. A study in slouching indifference, he lounges against a Gothic building. He is a tall fellow, but his height appears irrelevant to his presentation of himself. The photograph is dated “New Haven, 1875,” and was apparently taken after he had left home to begin studies as an undergraduate at Yale College.
A later photograph, marked “Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1876,” shows Johnson quite differently. His mouth is framed by a full mustache; his body is harder and enlarged by use; his jaw is set; he stands confidently with shoulders squared and feet wide—and ankle-deep in mud. Clearly visible is a peculiar scar on his upper lip, which in later years he claimed was the result of an Indian attack.
The following story tells what happened between the two pictures.
For the journals and notebooks of William Johnson, I am indebted to the estate of W. J. T. Johnson, and particularly to Johnson’s great-niece, Emily Silliman, who permitted me to quote extensively from the unpublished material. (Much of the factual contents of Johnson’s accounts found their way into print in 1890, during the fierce battles for priority between Cope and Marsh, which finally involved the U.S. government. But the text itself, or even excerpts, was never published, until now.)
Part I
The Field Trip West
Young Johnson Joins the Field Trip West
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, the elder son of Philadelphia shipbuilder Silas Johnson, entered Yale College in the fall of 1875. According to his headmaster at Exeter, Johnson was “gifted, attractive, athletic and able.” But the headmaster added that Johnson was “headstrong, indolent and badly spoilt, with a notable indifference to any motive save his own pleasures. Unless he finds a purpose to his life, he risks unseemly decline into indolence and vice.”
Those words could have served as the description of a thousand young men in late nineteenth-century America, young men with intimidating, dynamic fathers, large quantities of money, and no particular way to pass the time.
William Johnson fulfilled his headmaster’s prediction during his first year at Yale. He was placed on probation in November for gambling, and again in February after an incident involving heavy drinking and the smashing of a New Haven merchant’s window. Silas Johnson paid the bill. Despite such reckless behavior, Johnson remained courtly and even shy with women of his own age, for he had yet to have any luck with them. For their part, they found reason to seek his attention, their formal upbringings notwithstanding. In all other respects, however, he remained unrepentant. Early that spring, on a sunny afternoon, Johnson wrecked his roommate’s yacht, running it aground on Long Island Sound. The boat sank within minutes; Johnson was rescued by a passing trawler; asked what happened, he admitted to the incredulous fishermen that he did not know how to sail because it would be “so utterly tedious to learn. And anyway, it looks simple enough.” Confronted by his roommate, Johnson admitted he had not asked permission to use the yacht because “it was such bother to find you.”
Faced with the bill for the lost yacht, Johnson’s father complained to his friends that “the cost of educating a young gentleman at Yale these days is ruinously expensive.” His father was the serious son of a Scottish immigrant, and took some pains to conceal the excesses of his offspring; in his letters, he repeatedly urged William to find a purpose in life. But William seemed content with his spoiled frivolity, and when he announced his intention to spend the coming summer in Europe, “the prospect,” said his father, “fills me with direst fiscal dread.”
Thus his family was surprised when William Johnson abruptly decided to go west during the summer of 1876. Johnson never publically explained why he had changed his mind. But those close to him at Yale knew the reason. He had decided to go west because of a bet.
In his own words, from the journal he scrupulously kept:
Every young man probably has an arch-rival at some point in his life, and in my first year at Yale, I had mine. Harold Hannibal Marlin was my own age, eighteen. He was handsome, athletic, well-spoken, soaking rich, and he was from New York, which he considered superior to Philadelphia in every respect. I found him insufferable. The sentiment was returned in kind.
Marlin and I competed in every arena—in the classroom, on the playing-field, in the undergraduate pranks of the night. Nothing would exist but that we would compete over it. We argued incessantly, always taking the opposing view from the other.
One night at dinner he said that the future of America lay in the developing West. I said it didn’t, that the future of our great nation could hardly rest on a vast desert populated by savage aboriginal tribes.
He replied I didn’t know what I was talking about, because I hadn’t been there. This was a sore point—Marlin had actually been to the West, at least as far as Kansas City, where his brother lived, and he never failed to express his superiority in this matter of travel.
I had never succeeded in neutralizing it.
“Going west is no shakes. Any fool can go,” I said.
“But all fools haven’t gone—at least you haven’t.”
“I’ve never had the least desire to go,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Hannibal Marlin replied, checking to see that the others were listening. “I think you’re afraid.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Oh yes. A nice trip to Europe’s more your way of things.”
“Europe? Europe is for old people and dusty scholars.”
“Mark my word, you’ll tour Europe this summer, perhaps with a parasol.”
“And if I do go, that doesn’t mean—”
“Ah hah! You see?” Marlin turned to address the assembled table. “Afraid. Afraid.” He smiled in a knowing, patronizing way that made me hate him and left me no choice.
“As a matter of f
act,” I said coolly, “I am already determined on a trip in the West this summer.”
That caught him by surprise; the smug smile froze on his face. “Oh?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am going with Professor Marsh. He takes a group of students with him each summer.” There had been an advertisement in the paper the previous week; I vaguely remembered it.
“What? Fat old Marsh? The bone professor?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re going with Marsh? Accommodations for his group are Spartan, and they say he works the boys unmercifully. It doesn’t seem your line of things at all.” His eyes narrowed. “When do you leave?”
“He hasn’t told us the date yet.”
Marlin smiled. “You’ve never laid eyes on Professor Marsh, and you’ll never go with him.”
“I will.”
“You won’t.”
“I tell you, it’s already decided.”
Marlin sighed in his patronizing way. “I have a thousand dollars that says you will not go.”
Marlin had been losing the attention of the table, but he got it back with that one. A thousand dollars was a great deal of money in 1876, even from one rich boy to another.
“A thousand dollars says you won’t go west with Marsh this summer,” Marlin repeated.
“You, sir, have made a wager,” I replied. And in that moment I realized that, through no fault of my own, I would now spend the entire summer in some ghastly hot desert in the company of a known lunatic, digging up old bones.
Marsh
Professor Marsh kept offices in the Peabody Museum on the Yale campus. A heavy green door with large white lettering read Prof. O. C. Marsh. Visitors by written appointment only.
Johnson knocked. There was no reply, so he knocked again.
“Go away.”
Johnson knocked a third time.
A small panel opened in the center of the door, and an eye squinted out. “What is it?”
“I want to see Professor Marsh.”
“But does he want to see you?” demanded the eye. “I doubt it.”
“I am replying to his notice.” Johnson held up the newspaper advertisement from the week before.
“Sorry. Too late. Positions all filled.” The door panel snapped shut.
Johnson was not accustomed to being denied anything, particularly a silly trip he did not want in the first place. Angrily, he kicked the door. He stared at the buggy traffic on Whitney Avenue. But with his pride, and a thousand dollars, hanging in the balance, he got control of himself, and knocked politely once more. “I’m sorry, Professor Marsh, but I really must go west with you.”
“Young man, the only place you must go is away. Go away.”
“Please, Professor Marsh. Please let me join your expedition.” The thought of his humiliation before Marlin was awful to Johnson. His voice choked; his eyes watered. “Please hear me out, sir. I’ll do whatever you say, I’ll even provide my own equipment.”
The panel snapped open again. “Young man, everyone provides their own equipment, and everyone does whatever I say, except you. You are presenting an unmanly spectacle.” The eye peered out. “Now go away.”
“Please, sir, you have to take me.”
“If you wanted to come you should have answered the advertisement last week. Everyone else did. We had thirty candidates to choose from last week. Now we have selected everyone except— You’re not, by any chance, a photographer?”
Johnson saw his chance and leapt at it. “A photographer? Yes, sir, I am! I am indeed.”
“Well! You should have said so at once. Come in.” The door swung open wide, and Johnson had his first full look at the heavy, powerful, solemn figure of Othniel C. Marsh, Yale’s first professor of paleontology. Of medium height, he appeared to enjoy a fleshy, robust health.
Marsh led him back into the interior of the museum. The air was chalky and shafts of sunlight pierced it like a cathedral. In a vast cavernous space, Johnson saw men in white lab coats bent over great slabs of rock, chipping bones free with small chisels. They worked carefully, he saw, and used small brushes to clean their work. In the far corner, a gigantic skeleton was being assembled, the framework of bones rising to the ceiling.
“Giganthopus marshiensis, my crowning achievement,” Marsh said, nodding toward the looming beast of bones. “To date, that is. Discovered her in ’74, in the Wyoming Territory. I always think of her as her. What is your name?”
“William Johnson, sir.”
“What does your father do?”
“My father is in shipping, sir.” Chalky dust hung in the air; Johnson coughed.
Marsh looked suspicious. “Are you unwell, Johnson?”
“No, sir, perfectly well.”
“I cannot abide sickness around me.”
“My health is excellent, sir.”
Marsh appeared unconvinced. “How old are you, Johnson?”
“Eighteen, sir.”
“And how long have you been a photographer?”
“A photographer? Oh, uh—from my youth, sir. My, uh—my father took pictures and I learned from him, sir.”
“You have your own equipment?”
“Yes—uh, no, sir—but I can obtain it. From my father, sir.”
“You are nervous, Johnson. Why is that?”
“I’m just eager to go with you, sir.”
“Are you.” Marsh stared at him, as if Johnson were a curious anatomical specimen himself.
Uneasy under that stare, Johnson attempted a compliment. “I’ve heard so many exciting things about you, sir.”
“Indeed? What have you heard?”
Johnson hesitated. In truth, he had heard only that Marsh was an obsessive, driven man who owed his college position to his monomaniacal interest in fossil bones, and to his uncle, the famous philanthropist George Peabody, who had provided the funding for the Peabody Museum, for Marsh’s professorship, and for Marsh’s annual field trips to the West.
“Only that students have found it a privilege and an adventure to accompany you, sir.”
Marsh was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “I dislike compliments and idle flattery. I don’t like to be called ‘sir.’ You may refer to me as ‘Professor.’ As for privilege and adventure, I offer damned hard work and plenty of it. But I’ll say this: all my students have come back alive and well. Now then—why do you want to go so much?”
“Personal reasons, si— Professor.”
“All reasons are personal reasons, Johnson. I’m asking yours.”
“Well, Professor, I am interested in the study of fossils.”
“You are interested? You say you are interested? Young man, these fossils”—his hand swept wide, gesturing to the room—“these fossils do not invite interest. They invite passionate commitment, they invite religious fervor and scientific speculation, they invite heated discourse and argument, but they do not thrive on mere interest. No, no. I am sorry. No, no, indeed.”
Johnson feared he had lost his opportunity with his chance remark, but in another swift change, Marsh smiled and said, “Never mind, I need a photographer and you are welcome to come.” He extended his hand, and Johnson shook it. “Where are you from, Johnson?”
“Philadelphia.”
The name had an extraordinary effect on Marsh. He dropped Johnson’s hand, and took a step back. “Philadelphia! You—you—you are from Philadelphia?”
“Yes, sir, is there something wrong with Philadelphia?”
“Don’t call me ‘sir’! And your father is in shipping?”
“Yes, he is.”
Marsh’s face turned purple; his body shook with rage. “And I suppose you are a Quaker, too? Hmmm? A Quaker from Philadelphia?”
“No, Methodist, actually.”
“Isn’t that very close to Quaker?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you live in the same city that he does.”
“That who does?”
Marsh fell silent, frowning, starin
g at the floor, and then he made another of his abrupt turns, shifting his bulk. For a large man he was surprisingly agile and athletic.
“Never mind,” he said, smiling once again. “I’ve no quarrel with any resident of the City of Brotherly Love, whatever they may say. And yet I imagine you are wondering where my expedition is going this summer, to look for fossils?”
The question had never crossed Johnson’s mind, but to show proper interest, he replied, “I am a bit curious, yes.”
“I imagine you are. Yes. I imagine you are. Well, it is a secret,” Marsh said, leaning close to Johnson’s face and hissing the words. “Do you understand me? A secret. And it will remain a secret, known only to me, until we are on the train headed west. Is that completely understood?”
Johnson backed away under the vehemence of the words. “Yes, Professor.”
“Good. If your family desires to know your destination, tell them Colorado. It isn’t true, for we won’t go to Colorado this year, but that doesn’t matter because you’ll be out of touch anyway, and Colorado is a delightful place not to be. Understood?”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Good. Now then, we depart June 14, from Grand Central Depot in New York. Returning no later than September 1 to the same station. See the museum secretary tomorrow and he will give you a list of provisions you are to provide—in addition, in your case, to your photographic equipment. You will allow supplies sufficient for a hundred photographs. Any questions?”
“No, sir. No, Professor.”
“Then I will see you at the platform on June 14, Mr. Johnson.” They shook hands briefly. Marsh’s hand was damp and cold.
“Thank you, Professor.” Johnson turned and headed toward the door.
“Ah, ah, ah. Where do you think you are going?”
“To leave.”
“By yourself?”
“I can find my way—”
“No one, Johnson, is permitted unescorted movement through this office. I am not a fool, I know there are spies eager to look at the latest drafts of my papers, or the latest bones to emerge from the rock. My assistant Mr. Gall will see you out.” At the mention of his name, a thin, pinched man in a lab coat put down his chisel and walked with Johnson to the door.