Dinosaurs in the Attic (11 page)

We were both going over the glare ice and P. kept whipping up his dogs. I told him I could not keep up and he advised me to follow his trail. This was impossible. I then snatched the rifle from the load and warned him to keep behind me. A few minutes later I turned and saw him whipping up the dogs away from me.

I shot once in the air. He did not stop. I then killed him with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.

I had trouble finding the igloo at the Cape.

Saturday, May 2,
1914. The storm abated considerably and I went over to Peary's cairn. I photographed it after removing record. I left a copy of Peary's record and the following of my own. [Green's record, which he copied in his journal, merely repeats why he shot the Eskimo.]

Green later published an account of the killing in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. "A moment before I had faced the end of everything," Green wrote. "He that had loomed hostile and a deceit between me and safety lay now crumpled and inert in the unheeding snow.

"For once fate was balked ... I had baffled misfortune. The feeling sent red gladness to my anaemic humor ... the present was perfect, ecstatic. To prolong the moment was my impulse. I laughed, not fiendishly, but because I was glad."

He lashed the body to the sledge and carried it through the storm to an abandoned igloo closer to his rendezvous point with MacMillan. He dragged the dead body into the igloo, and fell into an exhausted sleep, which was suddenly interrupted by a nightmare. When he awoke in a cold sweat, he found himself looking at the dead Eskimo. "A horrible sight met my eyes," he wrote. "his eyes were open, glaring and malignant, fixed upon me."

Green leaped up and dragged the body outside behind an ice hummock. "Perhaps the wolves and foxes did not find it for several days," he wrote. "Made little difference I do not write to boast morbid delight in a truly sorrowful experience Let the right combination of circumstances, edged by the pitiless elements, cut a man to the quick and he will turn savage by the very logic he once boasted was his certificate of culture." It took Green two more days of horror battling the storm to return to the dugout camp where MacMillan was waiting for him.

MacMillan has revealed little of his feelings about his assistant's killing the Eskimo. He repeatedly stated that since Green felt it was necessary to take the life of his Eskimo companion, it was not up to MacMillan to pass judgment. In
Four Years in the White North,
MacMillan touches on the killing and does present a veiled critism of his companion. He wrote:

Green, inexperienced in the handling of Eskimos, and failing to understand their motives and temperament, had felt it necessary to shoot his companion. Pee-a-wah-to was a faithful assistant of Peary for more than two years, his last trip as one of the famous starvation party to the world's record of 87°6'. He had been my traveling companion from the first, and one of the best.

In 1921 the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen learned the truth about the killing of Pee-a-wah-to. He wrote a long letter that made its way to a Danish Minister and from there to the U.S. Secretary of State. In turn, the Secretary of State sent it to Osborn, asking for an explanation. Rasmussen, himself part Eskimo, was a close friend of Pee-a-wah-to's. When Rasmussen had arrived in Etah in 1916, he heard about his friend's death and asked MacMillan for an account of it. MacMillan merely told him their prepared story about an avalanche. But the story seemed suspicious to Rasmussen, and when he ran into Green in South Greenland he posed him the same question. According to Rasmussen, "Green's face suddenly changed color, and in evident confusion he replied that this was a matter which Mr. McMillan [sic] had told the members of the expedition not to speak about." Rasmussen added, "I only regarded [this explanation] as evidence of Mr. Green's mental condition, for I knew that during the winters in the northernmost Greenland his nerves had become absolutely ruined."

But then, several years later, Rasmussen picked up MacMillan's newly published
Four Years in the White North
and read the passage quoted above. He was enraged. He was especially incensed at the callous way MacMillan had described the shooting, ''just as if there was only a question of a dog." In his letter he demanded that MacMillan provide a full account of the Eskimo's death, and that the Museum take care of Pee-a-wah-to's widow and children. He added that there was no need to prosecute Green for his crime: "Green was most certainly a nervous wreck," he wrote, "who cannot be regarded as responsible for his act." The nature of exploration in those times brought explorers into extreme circumstances, and it was clear to everyone that Green really felt he was defending his life when he shot the Eskimo.

The Museum replied that Green had helped Pee-a-wah-to's family while he was in Etah, that Pee-a-wah-to's widow had remarried, and that all of his children were either married or independent, except for one. An acrimonious exchange of letters took place. The Danes put the matter before a committee, which concluded in a report sent to the U.S. Secretary of State that Green had misunderstood Pee-a-wah-to's motives. The Eskimo, it reported, merely meant to exhort Green to keep going, thinking the white man meant to give up, and that he was only trying to escape from the deranged Green after Green fired the warning shot. It said, "Green, in a condition of despair and excitement, killed a well-meaning traveling companion." But the report noted that Pee-a-wah-to's widow had died and the children grown up, so that the claim for compensation was being dropped. The matter, having been brought up and dealt with by the proper authorities, was concluded.

The Crocker Land Expedition was the last to explore the Arctic using dogs and sledges; indeed, it was one of the last expeditions to explore the unknown without motorized travel and modern equipment. A decade later the airplane would prove conclusively that Crocker Land, the "Arctic Atlantis," was just a vast, frozen sea, broken and heaved into masses of ice, covering the pole and stretching from western North America to Siberia and beyond.

SIX

The Great Dinosaur "Gold Rush"

During the first ten years of Jesup's tenure at the Museum, a dinosaur "gold rush" was in full swing in the American West. This gold rush was fueled primarily by two wealthy men—Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope—who were engaged in a pitched scientific battle to see who could discover and name the most dinosaurs. The two men hated each other bitterly, vilified each other in public and private, and poured their personal fortunes into searching for and digging up dinosaurs—Marsh for the Peabody Museum at Yale and the U.S. Geologic Survey, and Cope for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and his own private collection.

The extraordinary rivalry between these two eminent paleontologists began sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s. While the exact moment of the break is in question {the two men had originally been friends}, it probably came in a dispute over the fossil beds of Haddonfield, New Jersey, where the first American dinosaur had been discovered in 1858. At the time, Cope was living in Haddonfield and collecting specimens in the area. In the spring of 1868, Cope showed Marsh around the various quarries. Not long afterwards, Cope later alleged, Marsh paid off the quarry owners, and Cope suddenly found the quarries closed to him and open to Marsh. The rivalry intensified, although still on a professional level, when Cope reconstructed an
Elasmosaurus
skeleton and erroneously placed the skull on the end of the tail.
^*13
Marsh lost no time rushing a correction into print, in which he jokingly said that Cope should have named the animal
Streptosaurus,
meaning "twisted reptile." The article must surely have embarrassed and galled Cope.

In 1871, however, Cope turned the tables, and began digging in one of Marsh's fossil localities in Kansas {after hiring away one of his assistants}. Similar incidents followed, with both Marsh and Cope luring each other's collectors away with more money; often, these collectors came with proprietary secrets about the location and extent of fossil beds. {Marsh and Cope did little of the actual collecting themselves. Instead, they hired and directed collecting parties.} In 1872 and 1873, in a nasty exchange of letters, Cope and Marsh accused each other of stealing specimens. Marsh also accused Cope of fudging the dates of publication of certain scientific articles, thus stealing credit for new discoveries away from Marsh. This question of dates was no trivial matter. The actual excavation of a new species meant little; it was the publication date of the
report
on the find that established to the scientific community who would get credit for the discovery. Often Cope and Marsh were making the same new discoveries, and thus the object of the race was to get into print first. Indeed, Cope even spent a large portion of his fortune buying a controlling interest in the journal
American Naturalist,
in order to rush his discoveries into print faster. Their scientific papers increasingly contained
ad hominem
attacks on each other, thinly disguised as "scientific criticism." "It is plain," Cope wrote in one paper, "that most of Prof. Marsh's criticisms are misrepresentations, his systematic innovations are untenable, and his statements as to the dates of my papers are either criminally ambiguous or untrue."

Before 1877, only scattered dinosaur remains had been found in England, western Europe, and America. But within a six-month period in 1877, three large dinosaur finds—culminating with the spectacular discovery of the vast fossil fields of Como Bluff, Wyoming—intensified the rivalry between Cope and Marsh, and greatly increased the scientific stakes. The find also served to popularize dinosaurs, and indirectly led the American Museum of Natural History into the arena of dinosaur collecting.

Marsh learned of this first major dinosaur find when he received a letter from a Colorado schoolmaster and geologist, Arthur Lakes, who wrote him of "some enormous bones ... of some gigantic saurian." Lakes enclosed a sketch.

At first, oddly enough, Marsh showed little interest in this letter and other letters that followed, some of which he didn't even bother to answer. But when Marsh learned that Lakes had then written to Cope, he immediately instructed his chief collector, Samuel Williston, to investigate the locality.

Coincidental1y, at about that same time, Cope had received a letter from another Colorado resident, informing him of a find of large bones in a different spot. When Marsh learned of
this,
he again sent Williston out to investigate. Williston soon reported that Cope's men were indeed excavating and shipping large dinosaurs back to Philadelphia.

The third and most significant discovery came in a letter to Marsh from two men calling themselves Harlow and Edwards. Harlow and Edwards, whose real names were Carlin and Reed (and which they kept secret in an effort to protect their discovery), worked for the Union Pacific Railroad, and they told Marsh they had discovered dinosaur fossils in Como Bluff, Wyoming Territory. In another letter, they warned Marsh that there were others in the area "looking for such things" (i.e., dinosaurs), and that they were operating in strict secrecy.

Marsh again dispatched Williston to reconnoiter. After a delay due to ill health, Williston arrived at Como Bluff on November 14, 1877. Williston had been there only hours when he fired off a letter to Marsh, which read in part, "I have seen a lot of bones that they have ready to ship and they tell me the bones extend for
seven
miles and are by the ton...." Several days later, Marsh received another letter from Williston, confirming the extent of the deposit and warning him that "there will be great danger from competition next summer." Marsh knew, of course, exactly what kind of competition Williston was referring to.

Marsh's men worked feverishly at Como Bluff though the winter and spring, but despite their efforts at secrecy, word of the finds leaked out to the local newspaper. Shortly thereafter, Williston reported some disturbing news to Marsh: "One of Cope's men was here. He first purported to be selling groceries!! Gave his name as
'Haines,'
thick heavy set sullen portly man of about forty, shaven except mustache and whiskers." Later that day, Williston elaborated in a second letter. "I have been talking further with Carlin about this man 'Haines.' There is no doubt he is direct from Cope.... He gained
no definite
information from Carlin or my brother. He went up into the hill and returning said that he had found no fossils,—
of course
he lied."

Soon Cope's collectors had opened a quarry not more than three hundred yards from one of Marsh's, and once again their rivalry heated up. At Como Bluff, the two collectors resorted to such schemes as destroying minor or incomplete fossils in their own quarries to prevent the rival party from collecting them, and filling up abandoned quarries with stones and dirt. On at least one occasion, rival parties nearly came to blows over sites, and one of Marsh's collectors felt it necessary to have several "strong men" with him whenever he was in the field.