87.
One painting that Lucy did not sell was a large work by her husband called The Eagle and the Lamb. The painting must have had special significance: She hung it, out of all her husband’s works, in her bedroom. The painting, as she knew, was also a favorite of her student George Bird Grinnell. Before her journey to Louisville, the last journey of her life, Lucy wrote a short note in a shaking hand to Grinnell. “Dear young friend,” it began. She worried in the note about the possibility of an “accident” on the trip, perhaps her way of expressing concern about the hardship of travel on the very old. If anything were to happen, she directed Grinnell to “take possession of the Eagle & Lamb, with all the love & esteem for yourself & parents that is possible for our hearts to feel.” Lucy survived the trip to Louisville, though she died shortly thereafter. Her will would also specify that the painting should go to Grinnell. It hung in his home for all his life.8
Grinnell would sum up the life of Lucy Audubon in an essay he would later write about her husband: “The great lesson of his life lies in our recognition … that he triumphed in the strength of another, who molded his character, shaped his aims, gave substance to his dreams, and finally, by the exercise of that self-denial which he was incapable of as a long-sustained effort, won for him the public recognition and reward of his splendid talents.”9
The greatest lesson that Grinnell would learn from Lucy Audubon—the greatest lesson of his life—was her creed of self-denial. Self-denial, preached Grandma Audubon, was the “key to success in life.”10 For Lucy, sacrifice made possible the success of her husband and the stable upbringing of her children. Their successes became hers, and appropriately so.
Grinnell, only fourteen at the time that Lucy left Audubon Park, could not yet know the importance of the boyhood lesson that he would one day apply to the broad world around him. His teacher had sown a seed, but the conditions for cultivation were not yet present. For many years, in fact, it appeared that young George Bird Grinnell might instead follow the path of those to whom too much is given. In the West with the Marsh expedition, though, came the first signs of Grinnell’s great awakening.
THE BASE OF OPERATIONS FOR THE THIRD AND MOST SIGNIFICANT stage of the 1870 Marsh expedition was the southwest Wyoming outpost of Fort Bridger. Jim Bridger, “King of the Mountain Men,” had established the fort in 1843, and it became an important way station for westbound travelers. Now two months into their voyage, Grinnell was proud that he and his Yale companions had come to look like the frontiersmen they idolized: “Bearded, bronzed by exposure to all weather, and clothed in buckskin, you might take them at first glance for a party of trappers.”11
For the Marsh expedition, Fort Bridger was the gateway to the greatest scientific discoveries of the journey. In the basin to the south of the fort, the expedition uncovered Eohippus, the earliest known member of the horse family, and also the “extraordinary six-horned beasts later described by Marsh as Dinocerata.”12
Grinnell certainly shared in the pride and excitement of these discoveries. In his memoirs he noted briefly that the “three trips that the expedition had already made resulted in great collections of fossils, which were of extraordinary interest.”13 Grinnell had earned the respect of Professor Marsh, known as a difficult taskmaster. Indeed the 1870 expedition would represent the beginning of a long professional relationship between the two men. Still, Grinnell’s writings leave little doubt about the aspect of their journey that excited him the most, and it was not paleontology.
Grinnell would be a prolific writer throughout his life, including two dozen books, hundreds of magazine and journal articles, thousands of letters, and a short, unpublished memoir. While his writing could be forceful and passionate, particularly when advocating for a cause in which he believed, it rarely offered much insight into Grinnell as a person. (This is particularly notable in contrast to today’s “reality” tidal wave of shallow introspection ad nauseum.) Yet in his writings about the land surrounding Fort Bridger, Grinnell offered several revealing glimpses of the degree to which he was moved by what he saw around him. “North, south, east and west the eye rests upon mountains piled on mountains,” he wrote of the Uinta Range. “Truly it is a grand scene, and a lover of nature may well be exercised if, for a time, he forgets all else in contemplating it.”14 Of the Green River, Grinnell wrote that “[e]ach mile of the river’s length presents fresh charms, and the thoughtful mind is awed and purified by the contemplation of these, some of the grandest works of Nature.”15
Grinnell, who had come to the West in search of the “wild and wooly,” had found something more profound. At times, Grinnell’s descriptions took on the explicit overtones of religion:
Parks there are, where the tall pines and the cottonwoods, with their silvery foliage, stand as if arrayed at the command of the most skillful of gardener; where green meadows, dotted with clumps of trees, or with little copses, stretch away toward the rocky heights beyond and seem almost to reveal the hand of man in the artistic beauty of their design. But no gardener planted these towering trees, nor was human skill evoked to lay out these delightful parks; the hand of a greater being than man is visible in all these beauties—the hand of God.16
On September 20, 1870, George Bird Grinnell celebrated his twenty-first birthday in a ruggedly beautiful campsite along the Henry’s Fork River. After a cheerfully aimless youth, Grinnell was entering adulthood with bigger thoughts on his mind.
In addition to a view of nature in full pristine splendor, the Fort Bridger stage of the Marsh expedition also exposed Grinnell to “a glimpse of the old-time trapper’s life in the Rocky Mountains of thirty years before.” Grinnell needed a new horse and was told that three trappers encamped on the Henry’s Fork might be willing to trade. He rode out to find Ike Edwards, Phil Mass, and John Baker. Each trapper had an Indian wife and “a large flock of children of various sizes.” The oldest of the trappers had been in the West for decades and experienced the height of the beaver-trade era. Grinnell was fascinated by the fact that “they still supported themselves, in part at least, by trapping beaver.” They invited Grinnell to stay over. He eagerly accepted and “spent some days full of joy and interest in this old-time camp.”17
They slept in teepees and lived off the land. “The river bottom and the hills were full of game; the stream full of trout.” In the early mornings, Grinnell accompanied the old mountain men on forays to run traplines, usually returning with “one, two or more beaver.” It was a lifestyle that Grinnell embraced to his core. “Their mode of life appealed strongly to a young man fond of the open,” he remembered, “and while I was with them I could not imagine, nor can I imagine now, a more attractive—a happier—life than theirs.” Nor was there any hint of exaggeration when Grinnell wrote that “I desired enormously to spend the rest of my life with these people.”18
By October, though, the Fort Bridger stage of the Marsh expedition was complete. The party left behind the high adventure of the Rockies “and then spent several weeks in seeing what all tourists see.” In Salt Lake City, Professor Marsh discussed his fossil findings with Brigham Young, who believed that the ancient horses provided evidence for the existence of the lost tribe of Mormon and Moroni described in the Book of Mormon. Marsh’s young field assistants, meanwhile, “flirted with twenty-two daughters of Brigham Young in a box at the theatre.” Then it was on to California, where the expedition visited Yosemite Valley and the “Big Trees.” By Thanksgiving, Grinnell found himself back at Audubon Park, contemplating his future in the company of his parents.19
TO A DEGREE THAT GRINNELL HIMSELF MIGHT NOT YET HAVE APPRECIATED, his adventures with the Marsh expedition represented the most important formative events of his life.
The expedition itself was a scientific triumph. Marsh carted thirty-five boxes of fossils back to Yale, where the contents became the foundation for the great Peabody
