in 1863. David Rains Wallace, author of the key text on the feud, The Bonehunters’ Revenge, suggests that even then they probably ‘felt a nascent rivalry ... Their disparate backgrounds predisposed them to look down, subtly, on each other. The patrician Edward may have considered Marsh not quite a gentleman. The academic Othniel probably regarded Cope as not quite a professional.’ Cope’s freewheeling, individualist style contrasted with what Wallace calls the ‘calm, methodical careerism’ of Marsh, who quickly scaled the greasy pole of the scientific establishment.
‘Professor Marsh’s Primeval Troupe’ A cartoon from Punch, 1890, showing Othniel Charles Marsh’s ‘perfect mastery over the ceratopsidae’. Surveying his finds, prolific American fossil hunter Marsh stands astride the skull of a triceratops, considering two reconstructions he would have supervised – or at least claimed credit for.
‘See the bones roll out’
Both men had conceived a passion for fossils, and were to become the greatest fossil hunters of their – and arguably any other – age. Awareness of fossils had gathered pace since the early 19th century and the end of the American Civil War, and the opening up of the American West, particularly the rampant growth of the railways, had set the stage for a blizzard of discoveries (see box, page 54). Cope and Marsh would be at the forefront of these developments. Scientific renown, even glory, was at stake for those who could find, reconstruct, describe and name new species, but what truly drove them was something dark and atavistic: an insatiable hunger to possess. Each man would eventually amass vast collections; in Marsh’s case, at least, far more than he could adequately process.
At first there seems to have been a degree of cordiality, even cooperation, between the two men, but avarice soon overcame concord. Cope himself traced the beginning of their feud to 1868, claiming that he had taken Marsh on a tour of the New Jersey fossil beds, but that ‘soon after, in endeavouring to obtain fossils from these localities, I found everything closed to me and pledged to Marsh for money considerations.’ Marsh’s financial clout (he was backed by his uncle’s massive fortune, via the Peabody Museum at Yale) and political nous would increasingly enable him to ‘reserve’ fertile fossil sites as his private preserves.
Other reports date the start of the feud to an earlier incident in 1866, when Marsh published a report correcting an incorrect reconstruction of an elasmosaurus by Cope. The geologist Walter Wheeler, however, points to the summer of 1872, when both men were collecting in Bridger Basin, Wyoming; it appears it was at this time that their competitiveness boiled over into antagonism. The following year Marsh wrote to Cope to complain about his behaviour in Wyoming: ‘The information I received ... made me very angry, and ... I was so mad ... I should have “gone for you”, not with pistols or fists, but in print ... I was never so angry in my life.’ Cope’s response? ‘All the specimens you obtained during August 1872 you owe to me.’
Their row grew to encompass arguments over access to fossils, accusations of deliberate destruction, attempts to hijack collections and bitter and complicated feuding over priority when it came to publishing descriptions of specimens. Marsh quickly retired from front-line collecting, hiring proxies to do the work (but claiming all the credit); Cope, without the funds or the institutional backing of his rival, was still in the field when the conflict reached its apogee at Como Bluff in Wyoming, one of the richest fossil sites in the world.
In 1877, each man was alerted to the site by different sources. Marsh’s proxies resorted to code words and deception to throw Cope off the scent. His assistant Samuel Williston wrote to Marsh that the bones ‘extend for seven miles and are by the ton.’ Another assistant, William Harlow Reed, wrote to a colleague, capturing the excitement of the pursuit: ‘I wish you were here to see the bones roll out and they are beauties ... it would astonish you to see the holes we have dug.’
TIMELINE
Leg and foot bones of a diplodocus, in situ, where they were discovered at Como Bluff. Remains of the diplodocus were first discovered here in 1878, and the genus was named by Marsh.
Cope was not to be denied, and soon rival camps were eyeing each other suspiciously across the site. There should have been plenty to go round, but stories abound of the depths to which the two men sank. Supposedly, Marsh ordered some dinosaur pits to be dynamited to prevent Cope from acquiring specimens, and later resorted to ‘salting’ Cope’s excavations with random fossils that did not belong there, to obstruct his reconstructions. Cope allegedly responded by having a trainload of Marsh’s findings diverted to Philadelphia. Tensions mounted and on at least one occasion guns were pulled. Wallace describes Como as ‘more like one of the more squalid gold strikes than an instance of exalted scientific discovery.’ He likens the antics of the two protagonists to industrial robber barons: ‘In competing for a natural treasure – the abundant, unknown fossils of the western badlands – they might have been timber barons or mining tycoons.’ Scientific ideals were now secondary; each man became as preoccupied with denying finds to his rival as in making them himself.
Dirty linen
While Cope was ploughing his own furrow out West, Marsh was back East becoming an establishment figure. The US Geological Survey (USGS) was a key player in the opening up of the West, and it could help or hinder access to fossil fields. Cope was associated with the Survey early on, but Marsh became a close ally of John Wesley Powell, its director, and soon Cope was ousted and Marsh installed as the official vertebrate palaeontologist. Marsh was winning the bone war, and as Cope’s options and funds dwindled he became increasingly bitter. According to Wallace: ‘He became Professor Moriarty to Othniel’s academic Sherlock Holmes.’
Forced to sell most of his fossil collection in 1885, an increasingly desperate Cope was easily sucked into the orbit of one of the dark forces of the Gilded Age, newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett, Jr. Wallace described Bennett as both ‘a man as monstrous in his way as the palaeontologists’ plesiosaurs and mosasaurs,’ and at the same time, ‘[perhaps] the most underestimated American figure of the late nineteenth century.’ In the pages of Bennett’s mouthpiece, the New York Herald, the largest and most influential newspaper of the age, Cope opted to wash his dirty linen in the most public fashion imaginable. ‘It is a business I do not like, but it is absolutely necessary,’ he insisted.
Cope detailed a slew of charges of professional and personal misconduct against Marsh, and ensured that many of the Yale man’s former associates were dragged into the feud (many were nursing grudges because of Marsh’s high-handed, penny-pinching ways, and his insistence on sole authorship of papers deriving from fossil discoveries). Cope accused Marsh of restricting access to the fossil fields, abusing his role in the USGS through his relationship with Powell and deliberately blocking publication of Cope’s findings. Marsh was guilty of plagiarism and taking credit for other men’s work, and was not the true author of most of the papers attributed to his name. Bennett splashed the details of this unedifying row across the front page of the Herald on the morning of 12 January 1890. The scientific community reeled.
BONE RUSH
Fossils were the object of some confusion for much of history, and were commonly misinterpreted as the remains of mythical or magical beasts. Toadstones, for instance, were believed to be semi-precious stones sprung
