Dragon Teeth

Night on the Plains

The first night they camped in a place called Clagett, on the banks of the Judith River. There was a trading post here, surrounded by a stockade, but it had been recently abandoned.

Hill cooked his first dinner, which they found heavy but otherwise acceptable. Hill used buffalo chips for fuel, thus explaining two of his nicknames: Chippie and Stinky. After dinner, Hill hung their food in a tree.

“What’re you doing that for?” Johnson asked.

“That’s to keep the food away from marauding grizzlies,” Hill said. “Now go get ready to sleep.”

Hill himself stamped the ground with his boots before laying out his bedding.

“What’re you doing that for?” Johnson asked.

“That’s to stop up the snake holes,” Hill said, “so the rattlers don’t climb under the blankets with you at night.”

“You’re jobbing me,” Johnson said.

“I ain’t,” Hill warned. “You ask anyone. Gets cold at night and they like the warm, so they crawl right in with you, coil up against your groin.”

Johnson went to Sternberg, who was also laying out his bedding. “Aren’t you going to stamp the ground?”

“No,” Sternberg said. “This spot isn’t lumpy, looks real comfortable.”

“What about rattlesnakes crawling into the blankets?”

“That hardly ever happens,” Sternberg said.

“It hardly ever happens?” Johnson’s voice rose in alarm.

“I wouldn’t worry over it,” Sternberg said. “In the morning, just wake up slow, and see if you got any visitors. Snakes just run away, come morning.”

Johnson shuddered.

They had seen no sign of human life all day long, but Isaac was convinced they were at risk from Indians. “With Mr. Indian,” he grumbled, “the time you feel safest is the time you aren’t.” Isaac insisted they post guards throughout the night; the others grudgingly went along. Isaac himself would take the last watch, before dawn.

This was Johnson’s first night out under the great domed sky of the prairie, and sleep was impossible. The very thought of a rattlesnake or a grizzly bear would have prevented any sleep, but there were too many other sounds besides—the whisper of the wind in the grass, the hooting of owls in the darkness, the distant howls of coyotes. He stared up at the thousands of stars in the cloudless sky, and listened.

He was awake for each changing of the guard, and saw Isaac take over from Sternberg at four o’clock in the morning. But eventually fatigue overcame him, and he was soundly asleep when a series of explosions jolted him awake. Isaac was shouting, “Halt! Halt, I say, halt!” as he fired his revolver.

They all jumped up. Isaac pointed east across the prairie. “There’s something out there! Can you see it, there’s something out there!”

They looked and saw nothing.

“I tell you, there’s a man, a lone man!”

“Where?”

“There! Out there!”

They stared at the distant horizon of the plains, and saw nothing at all.

Cookie unleashed a stream of epithets. “He’s Injun shy and he’s crazy, too—he’s going to see a red man behind every bush long as we’re out here. We won’t get a lick of sleep.”

Cope quietly said that he would take over the watch, and sent the others back to bed.

It would be many weeks before they realized that Isaac had been right.

If Stinky’s food and Isaac’s guarding left something to be desired, so did Little Wind’s scouting. The Shoshoni brave got them lost for much of the following day.

Two hours after they set out, they came across fresh horse manure on the plains.

“Indians,” Isaac gasped.

Hill snorted in disgust. “Know what that is?” he said. “That’s manure from our horses, that’s what it is.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You think so? See the wagon tracks over there?” He pointed to faint tracks, where the prairie grass had been pressed down. “You want to bet I put the wheels of this wagon in those tracks and they line up exactly? We’re lost, I tell you.”

Cope rode alongside Little Wind. “Are we lost?”

“No,” Little Wind said.

“Well, what do you expect him to say?” Hill grumbled. “You ever heard an Indian admit he was lost?”

“I’ve never heard of an Indian being lost,” Sternberg said.

“Well, we got one here, purchased at great expense,” Hill said. “You mark my words, he’s never been in this part of the country before, no matter what he says. And he’s lost, no matter what he says.”

For Johnson, the conversation filled him with strange dread. All day they had been riding under the great bowl of the sky, across uniformly flat country, a great vista without landmarks except for the occasional isolated tree or line of cottonwoods that marked a creek. It was truly a “sea of grass,” and like the sea it was trackless and vast. He began to understand why everyone in the West talked so familiarly of certain landmarks—Pompey’s Pillar, Twin Peaks, Yellow Cliffs. These few recognizable features were islands in the wide ocean of the prairie, and knowledge of their locations was essential for survival.

Johnson rode alongside Toad. “Can we really be lost?”

Toad shook his head. “Indians are born here. They can read the land in ways we can’t begin to imagine. We’re not lost.”

“Well, we’re going south,” Hill grumbled, staring at the sun. “Why’re we going south, when every man here knows that the Judith lands are east? Can someone tell me that?”

The next two hours were tense, until finally they came upon an old wagon track running east. Little Wind pointed. “This road for wagons to Judith lands.”

“That’s what the problem was,” Toad said. “He’s not used to traveling with a wagon, and he had to find the track for our wagon to use.”

“The problem,” Hill said, “is that he doesn’t know the country.”

“He knows this country,” Sternberg said. “This is the Indian hunting lands we’re in now.”

They rode on in sober silence.

Incidents on the Plains

In the middle of the still hot afternoon, Johnson was riding alongside Cope, talking quite peaceably to him, when his hat suddenly flew away in the air, although there was no wind.

A moment later they heard the snapping report of a long rifle. Then another, and another.

Someone was shooting at them.

“Down!” Cope shouted. “Down!”

They dismounted and ducked for cover, crawling beneath the wagon. In the distance they could see a brown swirling dust cloud.

“Oh God,” Isaac whispered. “Indians.”

The distant cloud grew in size, resolving into many silhouetted horsemen. More bullets whizzed through the air; the fabric of the wagon ripped; bullets spanged off pots and pans. Bessie brayed in alarm.

“We’re done for,” Morton moaned.

“Any minute now we’ll hear those arrows whistling,” Isaac said, “and then, when they get closer, out come the tomahawks—”

“Shut up!” Cope said. He had never taken his eyes off the cloud. “They’re not Indians.”

“Damn if you’re not a bigger fool than I thought you were! Who else’d be—”

Isaac fell silent. The cloud was now close enough that they could resolve the riders into individual figures. Blue-coated figures.

“Might still be red men,” Isaac said. “Wearing Custer’s jackets. For a surprise attack.”

“Not much surprise if they are.”

Little Wind squinted at the horizon. “Not Indians,” he pronounced finally. “Saddle ponies.”

“Damn!” Cookie shouted. “The army! My boys in blue!” He leapt up shouting, waving his hands. A fusillade of lead sent him diving back beneath the wagon.

The army horsemen rode around the wagon, whooping Indian-style, firing their pistols into the air. Finally, they stopped, and a young captain pulled up, his horse snorting. He aimed his revolver at the figures huddled beneath the wagon.

“Out, you slime. Out! By God, I’ve a mind to finish you right here, every last man of you.”

Cope emerged, purple with fury. His fists were clenched at his sides. “I demand to know the meaning of this outrage.”

“You’ll know it in hell, you blackguard,” the army captain said, and he shot twice at Cope, but his rearing horse threw off his aim.

“Wait, Cap’n,” one of the soldiers said. By now Cope’s party had all crawled from beneath the wagon and stood lined up along the wheels. “They don’t look like gunrunners.”

“Damn me if they’re not,” the captain said. They could see now that he was drunk; his words were slurred; his body rocked precariously in the saddle. “Nobody but gunrunners’d be out in this territory now. Supplying Mr. Indian with arms, when just last week six hundred of our own dear lads have fallen to the savages. It’s slime like you make it—”

Cope drew himself up. “This is a scientific expedition,” he said, “undertaken with the full knowledge and authorization of Captain Ransom at Fort Benton.”

“Balls,” said the captain, and discharged his gun into the air for punctuation.

“I am Professor Cope of Philadelphia, and I am a United States paleontologist and—”

“Kiss my calico-covered arse,” the captain said.

Cope lost his temper and leapt forward, and Sternberg and Isaac hurried to intervene. “Now, Professor, control yourself, Professor!” Sternberg yelled as Cope struggled, shouting, “I want him, I want him!”

In the ensuing confusion, the army captain fired three more times, and wheeled on his horse. “Light ’em up, boys! Light ’em up!”

“But Captain—”

“I said light ’em up”—more gunshots—“and I mean light ’em up!”

There were still more gunshots, and Toad fell, shrieking, “I am hit, I am hit!” They rushed to help him; blood poured freely from his hand. One of the soldiers rode up with a torch. The dry canvas of the wagon burst into flames.

They turned to put out the fire, which roared fiercely. The cavalry wheeled around them, the captain shouting, “Teach ’em a lesson, boys! Teach ’em in hell!”

And then, still firing, they turned and rode off.

Cope’s journal laconically notes:

That night it rained. Torrential cracking thunderstorms continued all the next day and all that night. Cold and shivering, they huddled beneath the wagon, trying to sleep with the intermittent glaring flash of lightning showing them each other’s haggard faces.

The next day it rained again, and the trail was turned to mud, bogging down the wagons. They made only two miles of painful, soggy progress. But in the late afternoon, the sun burst through the clouds and the air became warmer. They felt better, especially when, climbing to the top of a gentle rise, they saw one of the great sights of the West.

A herd of buffalo, stretching as far as the eye could see, dark shaggy shapes clumping on the yellow-green grass of the plains. The animals seemed peaceful, except for occasional snorting and bellowing.

Cope estimated there were two million buffalo in the herd, perhaps more. “You are lucky to see it,” he said. “In another year or two, herds like these will be only a memory.”

Isaac was nervous. “Where there are buffalo, there are Indians,” he said, and he insisted they camp that night on high ground.

Johnson was fascinated by the indifference of the animals to the arrival of men. Even when Sternberg went out and shot an antelope for dinner, the herd hardly responded. But Johnson later remembered that Cookie had said to Cope, “Shall I unhitch the wagon tonight?” and Cope looked at the sky and said thoughtfully, “Better not tonight.”

Meanwhile the antelope was butchered, and the flesh was found to be crawling with maggoty parasites. Cookie announced he had eaten worse, but they decided on a meal of biscuits and beans instead. Johnson recorded that “I am already thoroughly sick of beans, with six more weeks of them still before me.”

But it was not all bad. They ate, sitting on a rocky outcrop beside the camp and watched the buffalo tinge with red as the sun set behind them. And then, in the light of the moon, the shaggy shapes, and the occasional distant snorting of the creatures, made “a vision of great majesty stretching away peacefully before us. Such were my thoughts as I turned in for a much-needed sleep.”

Lightning cracked the sky at midnight, and the rain began again.

Grumbling and swearing, the students dragged their sleeping outfits under the wagon. Almost immediately, the rain stopped.

They rolled on the hard ground, trying to get back to sleep. “Hell,” Morton said, sniffing. “What is that smell?”

“You’re lyin’ in horseshit,” Toad said.

“Oh God, it’s true.”

They were laughing at Morton’s predicament, with the steady rumble of thunder still in their ears. Then suddenly Cope ran around the wagon, rudely kicking them. “Up! Up! Are you mad? Get up!”

Johnson glanced up, and saw Sternberg and Isaac hastily loading the camp equipment, flinging it into the wagon; the wagon began to move over their heads as they scrambled out beneath. Cookie and Little Wind were shouting to each other.

Johnson ran to Cope. His hair was matted down by the rain; his eyes were wild. Overhead the moon raced among storm clouds.

“What is it?” Johnson shouted over the rumbling thunder. “Why are we moving?”

Cope shoved him roughly away. “The lee of the rocks! Get in the lee of the rocks!” Isaac had already gotten the wagon near the rocky outcrop, and Cookie was struggling with the horses, which snorted and reared, agitated. The students stared at each other, not understanding.

And then Johnson realized the rumble they were hearing was not thunder. It was the buffalo.

Terrorized by the lightning, the buffalo stampeded past the men in a wet, dense river of flesh that flowed around the rocks on both sides. They were all spattered by copious quantities of mud; for Johnson, it was a peculiar sensation, in that “the mud covered our clothing, our hair, our faces, and we grew heavier as we became transformed into mud-men, until finally we were all bowed over by the immense weight of it.”

They eventually could see nothing, and could only listen to the thundering hooves, the snorting and grunting, as the dark shapes hurtled past them, ceaselessly. It seemed as if it went on forever.

In fact, the herd had stampeded past them, without interruption, for two hours.

Johnson awoke, his body stiff and aching. He was unable to open his eyes. He touched his face, felt the hard caked mud, and peeled it away.

“I was greeted by a sight of utter desolation,” he later recalled, “as if a hurricane or a whirlwind had struck us. There was only choppy mud as far as the eye could see, and our pitiful human party picking their way through it. Whatever of our camp outfit had been protected by the rocks was safe; everything else was gone. Two tents trampled into the mud so deeply we could not locate them in the morning; heavy pots and cook pans dented and twisted by the passage of thousands of hooves; tattered fragments of a yellow shirt; a carbine shattered and bent.”

They were greatly discouraged, particularly George Morton, who seemed to be in profound shock. Cookie argued to turn back, but as usual Cope was indomitable. “I am not here to excavate trifling possessions from mud,” he said. “I am here to excavate prehistoric bones.”

“Yes,” Cookie said. “If you ever get there.”

“We will.” He ordered them to break camp and pull out.

Little Wind was particularly grim. He said something to Cope, and then galloped off to the north.

“Where’s he going?” George Morton asked in alarm.

“He doesn’t believe the buffalo stampeded because of lightning,” Cope said. “He says they don’t do that.”

“I’ve known ’em to do it,” Isaac said, “in Wyoming. Stupid and unpredictable, buffalo are.”

“But what else could it be?” Morton said, still alarmed. “What does he think?”

“He thinks he heard gunshots just before the stampede began. He is going to look.”

“He’s going to contact his fellow red men,” Isaac muttered, “and tell them where to find some nice white scalps.”

“I think it’s all ridiculous,” Morton said petulantly. “I think we should give it up and stop these wild chases.”

The shock of the stampede must have unnerved him, Johnson thought. He watched Morton poke through the mud, looking for his sketch pad.

Little Wind was gone an hour, and he came back riding hard.

“One camp,” he said, pointing north. “Two men, two or three ponies. One fire. No tent. Many rifle shells.” He opened his hand, and a cascade of copper jackets tumbled down in the sunlight.

“Well, I’ll be!” Sternberg said.

“It’s Marsh’s men,” Cope said grimly.

“Did you see them?” Morton asked.

Little Wind shook his head. “Left many hours.”

“Which way did they go?”

Little Wind pointed east. The same direction they were going.

“Then we’ll come across them again,” Cope said. He clenched his fists. “I’d enjoy that.”

Badlands

The Judith River, a tributary of the Missouri, flowed from the Little Belt Mountains and connected with large creeks in a confusing meander of waterways.

“There’s damn good trout in those waters,” said Cookie. “Not that I expect we will be fishing.”

The Judith River basin itself consisted of badlands, rocky outcrops that formed, for the eye, into mysterious shapes, demons and dragons. A place of gargoyles, said Toad.

Toad’s arm was now swollen and red; he complained of pain. Sternberg said privately he thought Toad would have to be sent back to Fort Benton, where the army surgeon could amputate his arm with the benefit of whiskey and a bone saw. But nobody mentioned it to Toad.

The scale of the rock formations in the Judith badlands was enormous; great cliffs—Cope called them “exposures”—reaching hundreds of feet into the air, in places towering more than a thousand feet above them. With pastel bands of pink and black rock, the land had a stark and desolate beauty. But it was a harsh land: there was little water nearby, and it was mostly brackish, alkaline, poisonous. “Hard to believe this was a great inland lake, surrounded by swamps,” Cope said, staring at the soft sculpted rock. Cope always seemed to see more than the others did. Cope and also Sternberg: the tough fossil hunter had the practiced eye of a plains explorer; he always seemed to know where to find game and water.

“We’ll have water enough here,” he predicted. “It won’t be the water that troubles us. It’ll be the dust.”

There was indeed an alkaline bite in the air, but the others did not mind it so much. Their immediate problem was to find a campsite near a suitable place for excavation, and this was no mean task. Moving the wagons over the terrain—there were no wagon trails here—was difficult and sometimes dangerous work.

They were also nervous about Indians, because they saw plenty of signs around them: pony tracks, abandoned cook fires, the occasional antelope carcass. Some of the cook fires looked recent, but Sternberg professed complete indifference. Even the Sioux weren’t crazy enough to stay in the badlands for long. “Only a crazy white man’d spend all summer here,” he laughed. “And only a crazy, rich white man would spend his vacation here!” He slapped Johnson on the back.

For two days they pushed the wagons up hills and braced them down hills, until finally Cope announced that they were in a suitable bone region, and they could make camp at the next good site they found. Sternberg suggested the top of the nearby rise, and they pushed the wagons up a final time, coughing in the dust of the wheels. Toad, unable to help because of his swollen arm, said, “Do you smell fire?” but no one did.

As they came to the top of the rise, they had a view over the plains and a meandering stream, with cottonwoods growing alongside it. And stretching as far as they could see were white teepees, each with a thin column of smoke issuing from them.

“My God,” Sternberg said. He quickly estimated the number.

“What do you make it?” Isaac said.

“I make it more’n a thousand teepees. My God,” Sternberg said again.

“I am persuaded,” said Isaac, “that we are dead men.”

“I reckon,” said Cookie Hill. He spat on the ground.

Sternberg didn’t think so. The question was what tribe of Indians they were. If they were Sioux, then Isaac was right; they were as good as dead. But the Sioux were supposed to still be farther south.

“Who cares where they’re supposed to be?” Cookie said. “They’re here, and so are we. It’s that Little Weasel, he led us here—”

“That’s enough. Let’s go about our business,” Cope said. “Make our camp, and act naturally.”

“After you, Professor,” Cookie said.

It was difficult to act naturally with a thousand teepees spread on the plains below, and the associated horses, fires, people. They had of course already been spotted; some of the Indians were pointing and gesturing.

By the time they had unloaded the cook wagon and started the fire for the night, a group of mounted horsemen splashed across the stream and rode up toward their camp.

“Here they come, boys,” Cookie muttered.

Johnson counted twelve riders. His heart pounded as he heard their horses approach. They were superb horsemen, riding fast and easily, trailing a cloud of dust. They whooped and shouted savagely as they came closer.

“These were my first Indians,” he later remembered, “and I was consumed in equal parts with curiosity and terror. I confess that to see the swirling dust cloud, and hear their savage shrieks, increased the latter, and for the thousandth time on this journey I regretted the rashness of my wager.”

The Indians were now close and rode in circles around the wagon, whooping enthusiastically. They knew the white men were frightened, and enjoyed it. Finally, they drew up, and their leader repeated several times, “Howah, howah.” He said it in a grunting sort of way.

Johnson whispered to Sternberg, “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘How.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, ‘I agree, everything is fine, I feel friendly.’”

Johnson could now see the Indians clearly. Like many other first-time observers of Plains Indians, he was astonished at how handsome they were—“tall and muscularly endowed, their faces possessing pleasing regular features, their bearing naturally dignified and proud, their persons and buckskin garments surprisingly clean.”

The Indians were not smiling, but they seemed friendly enough. They all said “Howah” in turn, and looked around at the camp. There was an awkward silence. Isaac, who knew some Indian language, ventured a few words of greeting.

Instantly their faces darkened. They wheeled on their horses and rode away, disappearing in an alkaline dust cloud.

Sternberg said, “You goddamn fool, what did you say?”

“I said, ‘I bid you welcome and wish you success and happiness in the journey of your life.’”

“What’d you say it in?”

“Mandan.”

“You goddamn fool, Mandan’s Sioux talk. Those’re Crows!”

Even Johnson had been long enough in the plains to know of the traditional enmity between the Sioux and the Crow tribes. The hatred between them was deep and implacable, especially since in recent years the Crows had allied themselves with the white soldiers in the fight against the Sioux.

“Well, Mandan’s all I know,” Isaac protested, “so I said it.”

“You goddamn fool,” Sternberg repeated. “If we didn’t before, now we have a problem.”

“I thought Crows never killed white people,” Morton said, licking his lips.

“That’s what the Crows say,” Sternberg said, “but they tend to exaggerate. Oh yes, lads, we have a problem.”

“Well, we’ll go down there and straighten it out,” Cope said, in his usual forthright manner.

“After our last supper?” Cookie said.

“No,” Cope said. “Now.”

The Indian Village

Aboriginal peoples had hunted on the Western plains of America for more than ten thousand years. They had seen the glaciers recede and the land become warm; they had witnessed (and perhaps accelerated) the disappearance of the great mastodons, the hippo, and the feared saber-toothed tiger. They had hunted when the land was heavily forested, and they hunted now that it was a sea of grass. Through all the thousands of years, through all the changes of game and climate, Indians had continued to live as nomadic hunters on the vast spaces of the land.

The Plains Indians of the nineteenth century were colorful, dramatic, mystical, warlike people. They captured the imagination of all who saw them, and in many ways they stood, in the popular mind, for all American Indians. The antiquity of their rituals, the intricate organization of their way of life, was much admired by liberal thinkers.

But the truth was that the Plains Indian society that Westerners saw was hardly older than the white American nation that now threatened its existence. The Plains Indians were a nomadic hunting society organized around the horse, as were the Mongols of Asia. Yet there had been no horses in America until the Spaniards introduced them three hundred years earlier, changing Plains Indian society beyond recognition.

And even the traditional tribal structures, and tribal rivalries, were less ancient than often imagined. Most authorities believed the Crow Indians were once part of the Sioux nation, living in what is now Iowa; they had migrated west toward Montana, evolved a separate identity, and become the implacable antagonists of their former kin. As one expert wrote, “The Sioux and the Crow are virtually the same in dress, manner, habits, language, customs, values, bearing. This similarity might be thought to form the basis of friendship, yet it only heightens their antagonism.”

It was these Crow Indians that they now rode down to visit.

First impressions of an Indian village were often contradictory. Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer and journalist who in 1871 famously found Dr. David Livingstone in Africa, entered Black Kettle’s village with Custer and found it filthy: “so foul, indeed, as to defy description.” Robes on the teepee floors were crawling with vermin; excremental odors assailed him.

Other first-time observers were unnerved to see Indians roasting a dog over a fire, or chewing bloody buffalo steaks. But Johnson’s first impressions, riding that evening into the Crow village, seem more revealing about him than about the Crow:

“Anyone who imagines,” he wrote,

They tethered their horses at the edge of the village and walked in, slowly. Curious stares greeted them from every side; laughing children fell silent, paused to watch the strangers pass; odors of cooking venison and the peculiar pungency of drying hides assaulted their nostrils. At length a young brave came up and made some elaborate movements with his hands.

“What’s he doing?” whispered Johnson.

“Sign language,” Toad said, cradling his swollen arm with the other.

“You understand it?”

“No,” Toad said.

But Little Wind did, and he spoke to the brave in the Crow language. The Indian led them deeper into the village, to a large teepee where five older warriors sat around a fire in a semicircle.

“The chiefs,” Toad whispered. At a gesture from one, the white men all sat in a semicircle facing them.

“Then began,” wrote Johnson,

If the powwow seemed interminable, it must have in part been because of the tension the whites felt. Sternberg noted that “they didn’t care overly for our answers.” It soon emerged that they knew about Cope, had been told that he was unfriendly to Indians, and had killed his own father. The Crow had been advised to kill him in turn.

Cope was furious, but kept his temper. Smiling pleasantly, he said to the others, “Do you see the villainy, the black scoundrel’s techniques, finally exposed to all eyes? Do I harass Marsh? Do I attempt at every juncture to impede his progress? Am I jealous of him? I ask you. I ask you.”

The chiefs could tell that Cope was upset, and Little Wind hastened to assure them of an error.

The Indians insisted there was no error: Cope had been described well and true.

Who has said these things about him? Little Wind asked.

Red Cloud Agency.

Red Cloud Agency is a Sioux agency.

This is so.

The Sioux are your enemy.

This is so.

How can you believe the words of an enemy?

The discussion dragged on, hour after hour. At length, to control his temper or perhaps his nerves, Cope began to sketch. He drew the chief, and the likeness aroused great interest. The chief wanted the sketch, and Cope gave it to him. The chief wanted Cope’s pen. Cope refused.

“Professor,” Sternberg said, “I think you’d better give him your pen.”

“I will do nothing of the sort.”

“Professor…”

“Very well.” Cope handed over the pen.

Shortly before dawn, the discussion turned from Cope to Toad. Some kind of new chief was called for, a very pale, very thin man with a wild look in his eyes. His name was White Deer. White Deer looked at Toad, and muttered something, and left.

The Indians then announced they wanted Toad to remain in the camp, and for the others to leave.

Cope refused.

“It’s all right,” Toad said. “I will serve as a kind of hostage.”

“They may kill you.”

“But if they kill me,” Toad pointed out, “they’ll almost certainly kill all of you soon after.”

In the end, Toad remained, and the others left.

From their camp, they looked down on the Indian encampment as dawn broke. The braves had begun whooping and riding in circles; a large fire was being built.

“Poor Toad,” Isaac said. “They’ll torture him for sure.”

Cope watched through his glass, but the smoke obscured everything. Now a chanting began; it kept up until nine in the morning, when it abruptly stopped.

A party of braves rode up to the camp, bringing Toad with them on a spare horse. They came upon Cope washing his false teeth in a tin bowl. The Indians were entranced and, before Toad dismounted, insisted that Cope pop his lifelike teeth in and then take them out again.

Cope did this several times, contrasting a dazzling smile with a gaping, toothless hole, and the Indians departed much entertained.

Dazed, Toad watched them go.

“That one chief, White Deer, did magic on my hand,” he said, “to cure it.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No, they just waved feathers over it and chanted. But I had to eat some awful stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“I don’t know, but it was awful. I’m very tired now.” He curled up beneath the wagon, and slept for the next twelve hours.

Toad’s arm was improved the following morning. In three days he was cured. Each morning, the Indians would ride up to see Cope. And they would watch Funny Tooth wash his teeth. The Indians would often hang around the camp, but they never took anything. And they were very interested in what the whites were doing: finding bones.

Bone Country

With these preliminary problems resolved, Cope was impatient to begin the work. The students found him standing in the dawn chill, glancing up at the cliffs near the camp, which were being struck with light for the first time that day. Abruptly, he leapt up and said, “Come along, come along. Quickly now, this is the best time to look.”

“Look for what?” the students asked, surprised.

“You’ll know soon enough.” He led them to the cliff face exposure nearest the camp and pointed. “See anything?”

They looked. They saw bare, eroded rock, predominantly gray in color with pink and dark gray striations highlighted in the weak morning sunlight. That was all they saw.

“No bones?” Cope asked.

Encouraged by this hint, they looked hard, squinting in the light. Toad pointed. “How about up there?”

Cope shook his head. “Just embedded boulders.”

Morton pointed. “Near the rise there?”

Cope shook his head. “Too high, don’t look up there.”

Johnson tried his luck. “Over there?”

Cope smiled. “Dead sagebrush. Well, it seems you can see everything but the bones. Now: look in the middle of the cliff, for a cliff this high will have its Cretaceous zone near the middle—a lower cliff, it might be nearer the top—but this one, it will be in the middle—just below that pink striation band there. Now run your eye along the band until you see a kind of roughness, see there? That oval patch there? Those are bones.”

They looked, and then they saw: the bones caught the sunlight ever so differently from the rock, rounded edges more muted than jagged stone, their color a shade different. Once pointed out, it became easy: they saw another patch there—and more there—and there again—and still more. “We realized,” wrote Johnson,

They were discovering dinosaurs.

In 1876, scientific acceptance of dinosaurs was still fairly recent; at the turn of the century, men did not suspect the existence of these great reptiles at all, although the evidence was there to see.

Back in July 1806, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, explored the south bank of the Yellowstone River, in what would later become Montana Territory, and found a fossil “semented [sic] within the face of the rock.” He described it as a bone three inches in circumference and three feet in length, and considered it the rib of a fish, although it was probably a dinosaur bone.

More dinosaur bones were found in Connecticut in 1818; they were believed to be the remains of human beings; dinosaur footprints, discovered in the same region, were described as the tracks of “Noah’s raven.”

The true meaning of these fossils was first recognized in England. In 1824, an eccentric English clergyman named Buckland described “the Megalosaurus or Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield.” Buckland imagined the fossil creature to be more than forty feet long, “and with a bulk equal to that of an elephant seven feet high.” But this remarkable lizard was considered an isolated specimen.

The following year, Gideon Mantell, an English physician, described “Iguanodon, a newly-discovered Fossil Reptile.” Mantell’s description was based largely on some teeth found in an English quarry. Originally the teeth were sent to Baron Cuvier, the greatest anatomist of his day; he pronounced them the incisors of a rhinoceros. Dissatisfied, Mantell remained convinced that “I had discovered the teeth of an unknown herbivorous reptile,” and eventually demonstrated that the teeth most resembled those of an iguana, an American lizard.

Baron Cuvier admitted his error, and wondered: “Do we not have here a new animal, an herbivorous reptile… of another time?” Other fossil reptiles were unearthed in rapid succession: Hylaeosaurus in 1832; Macrodontophion in 1834; Thecodontosaurus and Paleosaurus in 1836; Plateosaurus in 1837. With each new discovery came the growing suspicion that the bones represented a whole group of reptiles that had since vanished from the earth.

Finally, in 1841, another physician and anatomist, Richard Owen, proposed the entire group be called Dinosauria, or “terrible lizards.” The notion became so widely accepted that in 1854, full-size reconstructions of dinosaurs were built in the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, and attained wide popularity with the public. (Owen, knighted by Queen Victoria for his accomplishments, later became a bitter opponent of Darwin and the doctrine of evolution.)

By 1870, the focus of dinosaur hunting shifted from Europe to North America. It had been recognized since the 1850s that there were large numbers of fossils in the American West, but recovery of these giant bones was impractical until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

The following year, Cope and Marsh began their furious competition to acquire fossils from this new region. They undertook their labors with all the ruthlessness of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. In part this aggressiveness—new to scientific endeavors—reflected the prevailing values of their age. And in part it was a recognition of the fact that dinosaurs were no longer mysterious. Cope and Marsh knew exactly what they were about: they were discovering the full range of a great order of vanished reptiles. They were making scientific history.

And they knew that fame and honor would accrue to the man who discovered and described the largest number.

The two men were consumed by the search. “Hunting for bones,” wrote Johnson, “has a peculiar fascination, not unlike hunting for gold. One never knows what one will find, and the possibilities, the potential discoveries lying in wait, fuels the quest.”

And they did indeed make discoveries. While they dug the hillside, Cope was kept busy on the ground below, sketching, making notes, and classifying. He insisted that the students be meticulous in recording which bones were found in proximity to which others. Shovel and pickax were used to loosen the stone, but they gave way to the smaller tools, which appeared simple enough: hammer, chisel, pick, and brush. Despite the students’ earnestness, there was first a great deal of technique to be learned; they had to learn to choose among the three weights of wide-head hammer, four widths of rock chisel (imported from Germany, explained Cope, for the quality of the cold steel), two sizes of steel points to pick at the stone, and a variety of stiff brushes for whisking away dirt and dust and gravel.

“We’ve come too far not to do this the correct way,” Cope said. “The fossils don’t always give themselves up easily, too.”

One did not just bang a fossilized bone out of the rock, he explained to them. One studied the position of the fossil, tapped the stone with a chisel when necessary, hammered vigorously only rarely. To find the subtle demarcation between bone and stone, it was necessary to see color difference.

“Sometimes it helps just to spit on it,” Cope said. “The moisture heightens the contrast.”

“I’m going to die of thirst pretty quickly,” muttered George Morton.

“And don’t just look at what you are doing,” Cope instructed. “Listen, too. Listen to the sound of the chisel hitting the stone. The higher the note, the harder the stone.”

He also demonstrated the right position to extract the fossils, depending upon the slope of the rock. They worked on their bellies, on their knees, squatting, and sometimes while standing. When the rock face was especially sharp, they hammered in a spike and secured themselves with ropes. They were to understand how the angle of the sun revealed not just the face of the stone but also its fissures and unexpected depths.

Johnson found himself recalling how challenging it had been for him to learn to take photographs; extracting fossils from the grasp of stone without damaging them was far more difficult.

Cope showed them how to position their tools next to the hand that would use those tools and to work as efficiently as possible, for in a day each student would switch from hammer and chisel to pick to brush and back again in all combinations hundreds of times. Left-handers kept their chisels to their right, brushes to their left.

“The work is more tiring than you expect,” he told them.

And, indeed, it was.

“My fingers hurt, my wrists hurt, my shoulders hurt, and also my knees and feet,” said George Morton after the first few days.

“Better you than me,” Cookie said.

As the bones came down to the camp, Cope laid them on a dark wool blanket for contrast, staring at them until he saw how they related to each other. In late July, he announced a new duck-billed Hadrosaurus; a week later, a flying reptile. And then in August they found a Titanosaurus, and finally the teeth of a Champsosaurus. “We are finding wonderful dinosaurs!” exulted Cope. “Wonderful, marvelous dinosaurs!”

The work was exhausting, backbreaking, sometimes dangerous. For one thing, the scale of the landscape was, as in the rest of the West, deceptive. What appeared to be a small cliff exposure turned out, on climbing, to be five or six hundred feet high. Scrambling up these sheer crumbling faces, working halfway up the hill, maintaining balance on the incline, was fatiguing in the extreme. It was a strange world: often, working on these huge rocky faces, they were so far apart they could hardly see each other, but because the land was so quiet and the curving cliffs acted like giant funnels, they could hold clear conversations no louder than a whisper, even within the constant sound of the reverberating pings and soft clicks of hammers striking chisel and chisel striking stone.

At other times, the broader silence and desolation became oppressive. Especially after the Crow moved on, they were uncomfortably aware of the silence.

And Sternberg had been right: in the end, the worst thing about the badlands was the dust. Harshly alkaline, it billowed up with every stab of pick and shovel; it burned the eyes, stung the nose, caked the mouth, caused coughing spasms; it burned in open cuts; it covered clothes and chafed at elbows and armpits and backs of knees; it gritted in sleeping bags; it dusted food, sour and bitter, and flavored coffee; stirred by the wind, it became a constant force, a signature of this harsh and forbidding place.

Their hands, which they needed in order to do everything, especially dig fossils, were soon scraped and calloused, the dust burning in any cracks. Cope insisted they thoroughly wash their hands at the end of the day and dispensed a small dollop of yellowish emollient to rub into their palms and fingers.

“Smells bad,” Johnson said. “What is it?”

“Clarified bear fat.”

But the dust was everywhere. Nothing they tried worked. Bandanas and facecloths did not help, since they could not protect the eyes. Cookie built a tent to try to keep the dust off the food he was preparing, but it burned down on the second day. They complained to each other for a while, and then after the second week, they no longer mentioned it. It was like a conspiracy of silence. They would no longer talk about the dust.

Once dug out, the fragile bones had to be lowered down with ropes in a difficult, painstaking process. One slip, and the fossils would break free of the ropes and tumble down the hillside, crashing to the ground, smashed beyond value.

At such times, Cope turned waspish, reminding them that the fossils had “lain for millions of years in perfect peace and remarkable preservation, waiting for you to drop them like idiots! Idiots!”

These hot speeches led them to anxiously await some slip by Cope himself, but it never happened. Sternberg finally said that “except for his temper, the professor is perfect, and it seems best to recognize it.”

But the rock was fragile, and breaks in the fossils did occur, even with the most careful handling. Most frustrating of all was a break days or weeks after the fossil was lowered to the ground.

It was Sternberg who first proposed a solution.

When they set out from Fort Benton, they had brought with them several hundred pounds of rice. As the days went on, it became clear that they would never eat all the rice (“at least not the way Stinky cooks it,” Isaac grumbled). Rather than leave it behind, Sternberg boiled the rice to a gelatinous paste, which he poured over the fossils. This novel preservative technique left the fossils looking like snowy blocks—or, as he put it, “gigantic cookies.”

But whatever they called it, the paste provided a protective covering. They had no further breaks.

Around the Fire

Each evening, when the sunlight was fading and the light was soft, making the sculptured terrain look less stark, Cope reviewed with them the finds of the day, and spoke of the lost world in which these giant animals roamed.

“Cope could speak like an orator when he chose to,” noted Sternberg, “and of an evening, the dead gray rocks became dense green jungle, the trickling streams vast vegetation-choked lakes, the clear sky turned close with hot rainclouds, and indeed the entire barren landscape before our eyes was transformed into an ancient swamp. It was mysterious, when he spoke that way. We felt goose-bumps and a chill on the spine.”

In part, that chill came from the lingering tinge of heresy. Unlike Marsh, Cope was not an open Darwinian, but he appeared to believe in evolution, and certainly in great antiquity. Morton was going to be a preacher, like his father. He asked Cope, “as a man of science,” how old the world was.

Cope said he had no idea, in the mild way he had when he was concealing something. It was the opposite side of his snapping temper, this almost lazy indifference, this tranquil, calm voice. This mildness overcame Cope whenever the discussion moved into areas that might be considered religious. A devout Quaker (despite his pugilistic temperament), he found it difficult to tread on the religious feelings of others.

Was the world, Morton asked, six thousand years old, as Bishop Ussher had said?

A great many serious and informed people still believed this date, despite Darwin and the fuss that the new scientists who called themselves “geologists” were making. After all, the trouble with what the scientists said was that they were always saying something different. This year one idea, next year something else. Scientific opinion was ever changing, like the fashions of women’s dress, while the firm and fixed date 4004 BC invited the attention of those seeking greater verity.

No, Cope said, he did not think the world was so recent.

How old, then? asked Morton. Six thousand years? Ten thousand years?

No, Cope said, still tranquil.

Then how much older?

A thousand thousand times as old, said Cope, his voice still dreamy.

“Surely you’re joking!” Morton exclaimed. “Four billion years? That is patently absurd.”

“I know of no one who was there at the time,” Cope said mildly.

“But what about the age of the sun?” Morton said, with a smug look.

In 1871, Lord Kelvin, the most eminent physicist of his day, posed a serious objection to Darwin’s theory. It had not been answered by Darwin, or anyone else, in subsequent years.

Whatever else one might think of evolutionary theory, it obviously implied a substantial period of time—at least several hundred thousand years—to carry out its effects on earth. At the time of Darwin’s publication, the oldest estimates of the age of the earth were around ten thousand years. Darwin himself believed the earth would have to be at least three hundred thousand years old to allow enough time for evolution. The earthly evidence, from the new study of geology, was confusing and contradictory, but it seemed at least conceivable that the earth might be several hundred thousand years old.

Lord Kelvin took a different approach to the question. He asked how long the sun had been burning. At this time, the mass of the sun was well established; it was obviously burning with the same processes of combustion as were found on earth; therefore one could estimate the time it would take to consume the mass of the sun in a great fire. Kelvin’s answer was that the sun would burn up entirely within twenty thousand years.

The fact that Lord Kelvin was a devoutly religious man and therefore opposed to evolution could not be thought to have biased his thinking. He had investigated the problem from the impersonal vantage point of mathematics and physics. And he had concluded, irrefutably, that there was simply not enough time for evolutionary processes to take place.

Corroborating evidence derived from the warmth of the earth. From mine shafts and other drilling, it was known that the earth’s temperature increased one degree for every thousand feet of depth. This implied that the core of the earth was still quite hot. But if the earth had really formed hundreds of thousands of years ago, it would have long since become cool. That was a clear implication of the second law of thermodynamics, and there was no disputing it.

There was only one escape from these physical dilemmas, and Cope echoed Darwin in suggesting it. “Perhaps,” he said, “we do not know everything about the energy sources of the sun and the earth.”

“You mean there may be a new form of energy, as yet unknown to science?” Morton asked. “The physicists say that it is impossible, that the rules governing the universe are fully understood by them.”

“Perhaps the physicists are wrong,” Cope said.

“Certainly someone is wrong.”

“That is true,” Cope said evenly.

If he was open-minded when listening to Morton’s beliefs, he was equally so with Little Wind, the Snake scout.

Early in the bone digging, Little Wind became agitated and objected to their excavations. He said they would all be killed.

“Who will kill us?” Sternberg inquired.

“The Great Spirit, with lightning.”

“Why?” Sternberg asked.

“Because we disturb the burial ground.”

Little Wind explained that these were the bones of giant snakes that had inhabited the earth in ages past, before the Great Spirit had hunted them down and killed them all with bolts of lightning so that man could live on the plains.

The Great Spirit would not want the serpent bones disturbed, and would not look kindly on their adventures.

Sternberg, who did not like Little Wind anyway, duly reported it to Cope.

“He may be right,” Cope said.

“It’s nothing but savage superstition,” Sternberg snorted.

“Superstition? Which part do you mean?”

“All of it,” Sternberg said. “The very idea.”

Cope said, “The Indians think these fossils are the bones of serpents, which is to say reptiles. We think they were reptiles, too. They think these creatures were gigantic. So do we. They think these gigantic reptiles lived in the distant past. So do we. They think the Great Spirit killed them. We say we don’t know why they disappeared—but since we offer no explanation of our own, how can we be sure theirs is superstition?”

Sternberg walked away, shaking his head.

Bad Water

Cope chose his campsites for convenience to fossils, and no other reason. One difficulty with their first site was lack of water. Nearby Bear Creek was so badly polluted they did not draw water from there after the first night, when they all experienced dysentery and cramps. And the water elsewhere in the badlands was, in Sternberg’s words, “like a dense solution of Epsom salts.”

So they drew all their water from springs. Little Wind knew several, the nearest a two-mile ride from camp. Since Johnson was fussiest about the water, which he used for his photographic processes, it became his job to ride to and from the spring each day, and fetch the water.

Someone always accompanied him on these excursions. They had seen no trouble with the Crows, and the Sioux were still presumed to be far south, but these were Indian hunting grounds, and they never knew when they might meet small parties of hostile Indians. Solitary riders were always at risk.

Nevertheless, for Johnson it was the most exhilarating part of the day. To ride out under the great dome of blue sky, with the plains stretching in all directions around him, was an experience that approached the mystical.

Usually, Little Wind rode with him. Little Wind liked to get out of camp, too, but for different reasons. As the days passed and more bones were unearthed, he became increasingly fearful of the retribution of the Great Spirit, or, as he sometimes called it, the Everywhere Spirit—the spirit that existed in all things in the world, and was found everywhere.

They would usually arrive at the spring, located in flat prairie, around three in the afternoon, as the sun was cooling and the light turning yellow. They filled their water bags and slung them onto the horses, and paused to drink directly from the stream, and then rode back.

One day as they reached the spring, Little Wind gestured for Johnson to stay some distance away while he dismounted and inspected the ground around the spring closely.

“What is it?” Johnson said.

Little Wind was moving quickly all around the spring, his nose inches from the ground. Occasionally he picked up a clod of prairie sod, smelled it, and dropped it again.

This behavior always filled Johnson with a mixture of amazement and irritation—amazement that an Indian could read the land as he read a book, and irritation because he could not learn to do it himself, and he suspected that Little Wind, knowing this, added a theatrical touch to his procedures.

“What is it?” Johnson asked again, annoyed.

“Horses,” Little Wind said. “Two horses, two men. This morning.”

“Indians?” The word came out more nervously than he had intended.

Little Wind shook his head. “Horses have shoes. Men have boots.”

They had seen no white men for nearly a month, except their own party. There was little reason for white men to be here.

Johnson frowned. “Trappers?”

“What trappers?” Little Wind gestured to the flat expanse of the plains in all directions. “Nothing to trap.”

“Buffalo hunters?” There was still a trade in buffalo hides, which were fashioned into robes for sale in the cities.

Little Wind shook his head. “Buffalo men don’t hunt on Sioux land.”

That was true, Johnson thought. To invade the Sioux lands looking for gold was one thing, but buffalo hunters would never take the risk.

“Then who are they?”

“Same men.”

“What same men?”

“Same men at Dog Creek.”

Johnson dismounted. “The same men whose camp you found, back at Dog Creek? How do you know that?”

Little Wind pointed in the mud. “This one boot crack heel. Same heel. Same man.”

“I’ll be damned,” Johnson said. “We’re being followed.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “let’s get the water and tell Cope. Maybe he’ll want to do something.”

“No use water here.” Little Wind pointed to the horses, which were standing quietly by the spring.

“I don’t get it,” Johnson said.

“Horses no drink,” Little Wind said.

The horses always drank as soon as they reached the spring. That was the first thing they did, let the horses drink before they filled their water bags.

But Little Wind was right: today the horses were not drinking.

“I’ll be,” Johnson said.

“Water not so good,” Little Wind said. He bent close to the water and sniffed. Suddenly he plunged his arm up to his shoulder into the spring, and pulled out great clumps of a pale green grass. He reached in again, pulled out more. With each clump he removed, the spring flowed more freely.

He named the weed for Johnson, and explained that it would cause sickness if men drank it. Little Wind was speaking quickly, and Johnson did not understand it all, except that apparently it caused fevers and vomiting and men acted crazy, if they didn’t die.

“Bad thing,” he said. “Tomorrow water is good.”

He stared off across the plains.

“We go find those white men?” Johnson said.

“I go,” Little Wind said.

“Me, too,” Johnson said.

They rode at a gallop for nearly an hour in the yellowing afternoon light, and soon they were far from camp. It would be difficult, Johnson realized, to make it back by nightfall.

Periodically, Little Wind would pause, dismount, check the ground, and mount up again.

“How much farther?”

“Soon.”

They rode on.

The sun dropped behind the peaks of the Rockies, and still they rode. Johnson began to worry. He had never been out on the plains at night before, and Cope had repeatedly warned him always to return to camp before dark.

“How much farther?”

“Soon.”

They rode for perhaps fifteen minutes more and stopped again. Little Wind seemed to be stopping more often. Johnson thought it was because it was too dark to see the ground clearly.

“How much farther?”

“You want go back?”

“Me? No, I was just asking how much farther.”

Little Wind smiled. “Get dark, you afraid.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I was just asking. Is it much farther, do you think?”

“No,” Little Wind said. He pointed. “There.”

Beyond a far ridge, they saw a thin line of gray smoke climbing straight into the sky. A campfire.

“Leave horses,” Little Wind said, dismounting. He pulled up a bunch of grass, let the blades fall in the wind. They drifted south. Little Wind nodded, and explained that they must approach the camp downwind or the other men’s horses would smell them.

They crept forward, over the next ridge, lay on their stomachs, and looked down into the valley below.

In the deepening twilight, two men, a tent, a glowing fire. Six horses picketed behind the tent. One of the men was stocky, the other tall. They were cooking an antelope they had killed. Johnson could not see their faces well.

But he found the sight of this solitary camp, surrounded in all directions by miles of open plains, oddly disturbing. Why were they here?

“These men want bones,” Little Wind said, echoing his own thoughts.

And then the tall man leaned close to the fire as he adjusted the leg on the spit, and Johnson saw a face he knew. It was the tough man he had spoken to in the Omaha train station. The man Marsh had spoken to near the cornfields. Navy Joe Benedict.

And then they heard a murmuring voice. The tent flap opened, and a balding, heavyset man emerged. He was rubbing something in his hands—spectacles he was cleaning. The man spoke again, and even from a distance Johnson recognized the slight halt, the formality of the speech.

It was Marsh.

Cope clapped his hands in delight. “So! The learned professor of Copeology has followed us here! What better proof of what I have been saying? The man is not a scientist—he is a dog in the manger. He does not pursue his own discoveries—he seeks to spy on mine. I have neither time nor inclination to spy on him. But Daddy Marsh can come all the way from Yale College to the Territory of Montana just to keep track of me!” He shook his head. “The asylum will yet receive him.”

“You seem amused, Professor,” Johnson said.

“Of course I am amused! Not only is my theory of the man’s dementia amply confirmed—but so long as he is tracking me, he cannot be finding any new bones of his own!”

“I doubt that follows,” Sternberg said soberly. “Marsh has nothing if not money, and his students are not with him. He is probably paying his bone hunters to dig for him simultaneously in three or four territories, even as we speak.”

Sternberg had done some work for Marsh several years before, in Kansas. He was undoubtedly right, and Cope stopped smiling.

“Speaking of finds,” Cookie said, “how did he find us?”

“Little Wind said that these are the same men that were following us back at Dog Creek.”

Isaac leapt up. “See? I told you we were being followed!”

“Sit down, J.C.,” Cope said. He was frowning now, his good humor vanished.

“What are they doing here, anyway?” Cookie said. “They’re not on the square. They’re gonna kill us and take the bones.”

“They’re not going to kill us,” Cope said.

“Well then, take the bones, for sure.”

“They wouldn’t dare. Even Marsh wouldn’t dare.”

But in the darkness of the plains, he sounded unconvinced. There was a silence. They listened to the moan of the night wind.

“They poisoned the water,” Johnson said.

“Yes,” Cope said. “They did.”

“I wouldn’t call that neighborly,” Cookie said.

“True…”

“You’ve made some important discoveries, Professor. Discoveries any scientist’d give his left arm to claim as his own.”

“True.”

There was another long silence.

“We surely are a long way from home, out here,” Isaac said. “If something happened to us, who’d be the wiser? They’d just blame the Indians if we never showed back in Fort Benton.”

“They blame Indians.” Little Wind nodded.

“Quite true.”

“Better do something about them,” Isaac said.

“You’re right,” Cope said finally. He stared at the campfire. “We will do something. We will invite them to dinner tomorrow night.”

Dinner with Cope and Marsh

The search for fossils was abandoned the next day in feverish preparation for Marsh. The camp was cleaned, clothes and bodies washed. Sternberg shot a deer for dinner and Cookie roasted it.

Cope was busy with preparations of his own. He picked through the piles of fossils they had found, selecting a piece here, a piece there, setting them aside.

Johnson asked if he could help, but Cope shook his head. “This is a job for an expert.”

“You are selecting finds to show Marsh?”

“In a way. I am making a new creature: Dinosaurus marshiensis vulgaris.”

By the end of the day he had assembled from fragments a passable skull, with two horned projections that stuck out laterally from the jaw like curving tusks.

Isaac said it looked like a wild boar, or a warthog.

“Exactly,” Cope said, excited. “A prehistoric porcine giant. A piglike dinosaur! A pig for a pig!”

“It’s nice,” Sternberg allowed, “but it won’t stand close scrutiny from Marsh.”

“It won’t have to.”

Cope ordered them to lift the skull, which was held together with paste, and under his instructions they moved it first farther from the fire, then closer, then farther again. Next to one side, and to another. Cope stood by the fire, squinted, and then ordered it moved again.

“He’s like a woman decorating his house, and we’re movin’ the furniture,” Cookie said, panting.

It was late afternoon when Cope pronounced himself satisfied with the skull’s position. They all went off to clean up, and Little Wind was dispatched to invite the other camp to join them for dinner. He returned a few minutes later to say that three riders were approaching the camp.

Cope smiled grimly. “I should have known he’d invite himself.”

“There was a theatrical aspect to both men,” observed Sternberg, who had worked for both, “although it manifested differently. Professor Marsh was heavy and solemn, a man of judicious pauses. He spoke slowly and had a way of making the listener hang on his next words. Professor Cope was the opposite—his words came in a tumbling rush, his movements were quick and nervous, and he captivated attention as a hummingbird does, so brilliantly quick you did not want to miss anything. At this meeting—the only face-to-face encounter I ever witnessed—it was clear no love was lost between them, though they were at pains to hide this fact in frosty Eastern formality.”

“To what do we owe this honor, Professor Marsh?” Cope asked when the three men had ridden into camp and dismounted.

“A social visit, Professor Cope,” Marsh said. “We happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“Quite extraordinary, Professor Marsh, considering how large a neighborhood it is.”

“Similar interests, Professor Cope, lead down similar paths.”

“I am astonished you even knew we were here.”

“We didn’t know,” Marsh said. “But we saw your cook fire and came to investigate.”

“Your attention honors us,” Cope said. “You must stay to dinner, of course.”

“We have no wish to intrude,” Marsh said, his eyes darting around the camp.

“And likewise, I am sure we have no wish to detain you on your journey—”

“Since you insist, we will be delighted to stay to dinner, Professor Cope. We accept with gratitude.”

Cookie produced some decent bourbon; as they drank, Marsh continued to look around the camp. His gaze fell on several fossils, and at length, the unusual tusked skull set off to one side. His eyes widened.

“I see you are looking around—” Cope began.

“No, no—”

“Ours must strike you as a very small expedition, compared to the grand scale of your own endeavors.”

“Your outfit appears efficient and compact.”

“We have been fortunate to make one or two significant finds.”

“I’m certain you have,” Marsh said. He spilled his bourbon nervously, and wiped his chin with the heel of his hand.

“As one colleague to another, perhaps you’d enjoy a tour of our little camp, Professor Marsh.”

Marsh’s excitement was palpable, but all he said was, “Oh, I don’t want to pry.”

“I can’t tempt you?”

“I wouldn’t want to be accused of anything improper,” Marsh said, smiling.

“On second thought,” Cope said, “you are correct as always. Let’s forgo a tour, and simply have dinner.”

In that instant, Marsh shot him a look of such murderous hatred that it chilled Johnson to see it.

“More whiskey?” Cope asked.

“Yes, I will have more,” Marsh said, and he extended his glass.

Dinner was a comedy of diplomacy. Marsh reminded Cope of the details of their past friendship, which had begun, of course, in Berlin, of all places, when both men were much younger and the Civil War raged. Cope hastened to add his own warm, confirming anecdotes; they fell all over each other in eagerness to declare their fervent admiration for one another.

“Professor Cope has probably told you how I got him his first job,” Marsh said.

They demurred politely: they had not heard.

“Well, not quite his first job,” Marsh said. “Professor Cope had quit his position as zoology professor at Haverford—quit rather suddenly, as I recall—and in 1868 he was looking to go west. True, Professor Cope?”

“True, Professor Marsh.”

“So I took him down to Washington to meet Ferdinand Hayden, who was planning the Geological Survey expedition. He and Hayden liked each other, and Professor Cope signed on as expedition paleontologist.”

“Very true.”

“Though you never actually accompanied the expedition, I believe,” Marsh said.

“No,” Cope said. “My baby daughter was ill, and my own health not excellent, so I worked from Philadelphia, cataloging the bones the expedition sent back.”

“You have the most extraordinary ability to draw deductions from bones without benefit of having seen them in the actual site or having dug them out yourself.”

Marsh managed to turn this compliment into an insult.

“You are no less talented in just that way, Professor Marsh,” Cope said quickly. “I often wish I had, like you, the ample funds from multiple patrons needed to pay for the large network of bone hunters and fossil scouts you employ. It must be difficult for you to keep up with the quantities of bones sent you in New Haven, and to write all the papers yourself.”

“A problem you face as well,” Marsh said. “I am amazed you are no more than a year behind in your own reporting. You must often be obliged to work with great haste.”

“With great speed, certainly,” Cope said.

“You always had a facile ability,” Marsh said, and he then reminisced about some weeks they had spent as young men in Haddonfield, New Jersey, searching for fossils together. “Those were great times,” he said, beaming.

“Of course we were younger then, and didn’t know what we know now.”

“But even then,” Marsh said, “I remember that if we found a fossil, I was obliged to ponder it for days to deduce its meaning, whereas Professor Cope would simply glance at it, snap his fingers, and give it a name. An impressive display of erudition—despite the occasional error.”

“I recall no errors,” Cope said, “though in the years since then, you have been kind enough to hunt down all my errors and point them out to me.”

“Science is an exacting mistress, demanding truth above all.”

“For myself, I’ve always felt that truth is a by-product of a man’s character. An honest man will reveal the truth with every breath he takes, while a dishonest man will distort in the same way. More whiskey?”

“I believe I’ll have water,” Marsh said. Navy Joe Benedict, sitting by his side, nudged him. “On second thought, whiskey sounds good.”

“You don’t want water?”

“The water in the badlands doesn’t always agree with me.”

“That’s why we draw ours from a spring. Anyway, you were saying, Professor Marsh, about honesty?”

“No, I believe honesty was your subject, Professor Cope.”

Johnson later recorded:

“Sleep with Your Guns Tonight, Boys”

No sooner were they gone over the nearest ridge than Cope was wide awake, alert and energized.

“Break out your guns!” he said. “Sleep with your guns tonight, boys.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“We’ll have visitors tonight, mark my words.” Cope bunched his fists in his pugilistic way. “That vertebrate vulgarity will be back, crawling in on his belly like a snake for a closer look at my pig skull.”

“You don’t mean to shoot at them?” Isaac said, horrified.

“I do,” Cope said. “They have opposed us and impeded us, they have got the army after us, they have poisoned our water and insulted our persons, and now they are going to steal our finds. Yes, I mean to shoot at them.”

This seemed to them extreme, but Cope was angry and would not be talked out of it.

An hour passed. Most of the camp fell asleep. Johnson was lying next to Cope, and his twisting and turning kept him awake.

Thus he was awake when the first dark figure crept over the ridge.

Cope gave a soft sigh.

A second figure, then a third. The third was heavyset, lumbering.

Cope sighed again, and swung his rifle around.

The figures crept toward the camp, and made for the fossil head.

Cope raised his rifle to shoot. He was a crack shot, and for a horrified moment Johnson thought he really intended to kill his rival.

“Now, Professor—”

“Johnson,” he said quietly, “I have him in my sights. It is within my power to kill a trespassing sneak and thief. Remember this night.”

And Cope raised his rifle higher into the air, and fired twice at the sky, and shouted, “Indians! Indians!”

The cry brought the camp to its feet. Soon rifles were discharged from all sides; the night air was clouded with gun smoke, and acrid with the smell of powder.

Across the camp, they heard the intruders scrambling up the ridge. There was an occasional shout of “Damn you! Damn your eyes!”

Finally, a deep, distinctive voice cried, “Just your way, Cope! It’s a damnable fake! Just your way! A fake!”

And the three men were gone.

The firing stopped.

“I believe we have seen the last of Othy Marsh,” Cope said. Smiling, he rolled over to sleep.

Moving Camp

In early August, they were visited by a party of soldiers passing through the badlands on their way to the Missouri River. Steamboats came as far upriver as Cow Island, where the army maintained a small camp. The soldiers were on their way to reinforce the garrison there.

They were young Irish and German boys, no older than the students, and they seemed amazed to find white men alive in the region. “I surely would pull out of here,” one said.

They brought news of the war, and it was not good: Custer’s defeat was still unavenged; General Crook had fought an inconclusive battle at the Powder River in Wyoming but had seen no Indians since; General Terry had not engaged any large parties of Sioux at all. The war, which the Eastern newspapers had confidently predicted would be over in a matter of weeks, appeared now to be dragging on indefinitely. Some generals were predicting that it would not be resolved for at least a year, and perhaps not even by the end of the decade.

“Trouble with Indians,” one soldier explained, “is when they want to find you they find you—and when they don’t want you to find them, you’d never know they were there.” He paused. “It is their country, after all, but I didn’t say it.”

Another soldier looked at their stacked crates. “You mining here?”

“No,” Johnson said. “These’re bones. We’re digging fossil bones.”

“Sure you are,” the soldier said, grinning broadly. He offered Johnson a drink from his canteen, which was filled with bourbon. Johnson gasped; the soldier laughed. “Makes the miles shorter, I can tell you,” he explained.

The soldiers grazed their horses for an hour with Cope’s party and then went on.

“I surely wouldn’t dawdle here much longer,” their Captain Lawson said. “Best we know, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and his Sioux’ll make for Canada before winter, which means they’ll be here any day now. They find you here, they’ll kill you for sure.”

And with that final advice, he rode off.

(Much later, Johnson heard that when Sitting Bull went north, he killed all the white men he came across, among them the troops stationed at Cow Island, including Captain Lawson.)

“I think we ought to be going,” Isaac said, scratching his chin.

“Not yet,” Cope said.

“We’ve found plenty of bones.”

“That’s so,” Cookie said. “Plenty so far. More’n enough.”

“Not yet,” Cope said, in an icy tone that ended all discussion. As Sternberg noted in his account of the expedition, “We had long since learned there was no purpose served in arguing with him when his mind was made up. Cope’s indomitable will could not be conquered.”

But Cope did decide to break camp and move to another location. For the last three weeks, they had been located at the foot of thousand-foot-high shale cliffs. He had been scouting the area, and he felt there was a more promising fossil location three miles distant.

“Where?” Sternberg said.

Cope pointed. “Up on the plains.”

“You mean on the flat tablelands?”

“That’s right.”

Isaac protested: “But, Professor, it’ll take three days to move out of the badlands, find a new route, and come back in up there.”

“No, it won’t.”

“We can’t scale these cliffs.”

“Yes, we can.”

“A man can’t walk up, a horse can’t ride up, and certainly this wagon can’t be pulled up those cliffs, Professor.”

“Yes, it can. I will show you.”

Cope insisted they pack up at once, and moved two miles to the east, where he proudly pointed to a sloping bank of shale.

It was much gentler than the surrounding cliffs, but still far too steep to negotiate. While there were some level ridges, the shale was loose and crumbling, affording treacherous footing.

Cookie, the teamster, looked at the proposed route and spat tobacco. “Can’t be done, can’t be done.”

“It can,” Cope said, “and it will.”

It took them fourteen hours to climb a thousand feet—backbreaking work, and continuously dangerous. Using shovels and picks, they dug a trail up the side. Then they unloaded the wagon and put everything they could on the horses and got the horses up; now only the wagon remained.

Cookie drove it halfway up the incline from the floor below, but when he arrived at a level ridge so narrow that one wheel was hanging over empty space, he refused to go any farther.

This enraged Cope, who said he would drive the wagon himself: “Not only are you a revolting cook, but you are a wretched teamster!” The others quickly interceded, and Isaac climbed on to drive the wagon.

They had to unhitch the lead horses, and pull the wagon with the remaining two ponies.

Sternberg later described it in The Life of a Fossil Hunter:

Eventually they unhitched all the horses and pulled the wagon up on ropes, but they succeeded, and late in the day they made camp, on the prairie.

Cope snapped at Cookie, “This dinner better be your best.”

“Just wait and see,” Cookie said. And he served them the usual fare of hardtack, bacon, and beans.

Despite the grumbling, their new camp was a decided improvement. The breeze made it cooler, for they were on the open plains, wrote Johnson, with “a magnificent view of mountains in every direction—to the west the towering craggy Rockies, with white snow gleaming on their peaks; to the south, east, and north, the Judith River, Medicine Bow, Bearpaw, and Sweet Grass Mountains, completely encircling us. Especially in the early morning, when the air was clear and we would see herds of deer and elk and antelope and the mountains beyond, it was a sight of such glory as surely cannot be matched elsewhere in all creation.”

But the herds of deer and antelope were migrating northward, and the snow was creeping down the slopes of the Rockies as the days passed. One morning they awoke to find a thin carpet of snow had fallen during the night, and although it burned off by midday, they could not ignore the inevitable fact. The seasons were changing, fall was coming, and with the fall, the Sioux.

“It’s time to leave, Professor.”

“Not yet,” Cope said. “Not just yet.”

The Teeth

One afternoon, Johnson came across some knobby protuberances of rock, each roughly the size of a fist. He was working in a promising deposit midway up the side of a shale slope, and these knobs got in his way; he pulled several out of the exposed surface, and they tumbled down the hillside, narrowly missing Cope, who was at the base of the cliffs, sketching a newly discovered Allosaurus leg bone. Cope heard them coming and took a practiced step to the side.

“Hey there!” he shouted up the slope.

“Sorry, Professor,” Johnson called sheepishly. One or two rocks continued to fall; Cope moved aside again the other way and dusted himself off.

“Be careful!”

“Yes, sir. Sorry!” Johnson repeated. Gingerly, he returned to his work, digging with his pick around still other rocks, trying to pry them free and—

“Stop!”

Johnson looked down. Cope was scrambling up the hillside toward him like a madman, one of the fallen rocks in each hand.

“Stop! Stop, I say!”

“I’m being careful,” Johnson protested. “Really I—”

“Wait!” Cope slid several yards down the slope. “Do nothing! Touch nothing!” Still shouting, he slid backwards, disappearing in a dust cloud.

Johnson waited. After a moment, he saw Professor Cope scrambling out of the dust, coming up the hill with frenzied energy.

Johnson thought he must be very angry. It was foolish and nearly impossible to climb straight up the hill; they had all learned that long ago. The surface was too sheer and too friable; a climber had to zigzag his way up, and even that was so difficult they usually preferred a detour of as much as a mile to find an easy route to the top, and from there to descend to where they wanted to go.

Yet here was Cope scrambling straight up as if his life depended upon doing so. “Wait!”

“I’m waiting, Professor.”

“Don’t do anything!”

“I’m not doing anything, Professor.”

At length Cope arrived beside him, covered in dirt, gasping for breath. But he did not hesitate. He wiped his face with his sleeve and peered at the excavation.

“Where is your camera?” he demanded. “Why don’t you have your camera? I want a picture in situ.”

“Of these rocks?” Johnson asked, astonished.

“Rocks? You think these are rocks? They are nothing of the sort.”

“Then what are they?”

“They are teeth!” Cope exclaimed.

Cope touched one, and traced with his finger the gentle hills and indentations of the cusp pattern. He placed the two he held next to each other, then found a third at Johnson’s feet and set it in a row with the other two; it was clear from their similarity in size and form that they went together.

“Teeth,” he repeated. “Dinosaur teeth.”

“But they are enormous! This dinosaur must be of fantastic size.”

For a moment the two men silently contemplated just how large such a dinosaur must have been—the jaw needed to hold rows of such large teeth, the thick skull needed to match such a massive jaw, the enormous neck the width of a stout oak to lift and move such a skull and jaw, the gigantic backbone commensurate to the neck, with each vertebra as big around as a wagon wheel, with four staggeringly huge and thick legs to support such a beast. Each tooth implied an enormity of every bone and every joint. An animal that large might even need a long tail to counterweight its neck, in fact.

Cope stared across the rocky expanse and beyond, into his own imagination and knowledge. For a moment his usual ferocious confidence gave way to quiet wonder. “The full creature must be at least twice the dimensions of any previously known,” he said, almost to himself.

They had already made several discoveries of large dinosaurs, including three examples of the genus Monoclonius, a horned dinosaur that resembled a gigantic rhinoceros. Monoclonius sphenocerus, one of the specimens, was estimated by Cope to stand seven feet tall at the hip joint, and to be twenty-five feet long, including the tail.

Yet this new dinosaur was far larger than that. Cope measured the teeth with his steel calipers, scratched some calculations on his sketch pad, and shook his head. “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said, and measured again. And then he stood looking across the expanses of rock, as if expecting to see the giant dinosaur appear before him, shaking the ground with each step. “If we are making discoveries such as this one,” he said to Johnson, “it means that we have barely scratched what is possible to learn. You and I are the first men in recorded history to glimpse these teeth. They will change everything we think we know about these animals, and much as I hesitate to say such a thing, man becomes smaller when we realize what remarkable beasts went before us.”

Johnson saw then that all that was done in Cope’s mission—all that even he, Johnson, did now—would have meaning to scientists in the future.

“Now, your camera,” Cope reminded him. “We must record this moment and place.”

Johnson went off to collect his equipment, from the flat plains above. When he returned, careful not to fall, Cope was still shaking his head. “Of course you can’t be sure from teeth alone,” he said. “Allometric factors may be misleading.”

“How big do you make it?” Johnson asked. He glanced at the sketch pad, now covered with calculations, some scratched out and done again.

“Seventy-five, possibly one hundred feet long, with a head perhaps thirty feet above the ground.”

And right there he gave it the name, Brontosaurus, “thundering lizard,” because it must have thundered when it walked. “But perhaps,” he said, “I should call it Apatosaurus, or ‘unreal lizard.’ Because it is hard to believe such a thing ever existed…”

Johnson took several plates, up close and from farther away, with Cope in all of them. They hurried back to camp, told the others of their discovery, and then in the fading twilight paced out the dimensions of Brontosaurus—a creature as long as three horse-drawn wagons, and as tall as a four-story building. It made the imagination run wild. It was altogether astonishing, and Cope announced that “this discovery alone justifies our entire time in the West,” and that they had made “a momentous discovery, in these teeth. These are,” Cope said, “the teeth of dragons.”

The trouble the teeth would soon cause them, they could not have imagined.

Around the Campfire

Any discovery led Cope to wax philosophical around the campfire at night. Each man had examined the teeth, felt their ridges and knobs, weighed their heft in one hand. The discovery of the gigantic Brontosaurus provoked an unusual degree of speculation.

“There are so many things in nature we would never imagine,” Cope said. “At the time of this Brontosaurus, the glacial ice had receded and our entire planet was tropical. There were fig trees in Greenland, palm trees in Alaska. The vast plains of America were then vast lakes, and where we are sitting now was at the bottom of a lake. The animals we find were preserved because they died and sank to the bottom of the lake, where muddy sediment silted over them, and that sediment in turn compressed into rock. But who would have conceived such things until the evidence for them was found?”

No one spoke. They stared at the crackling fire.

“I am thirty-six years old, but at the time I was born,” Cope said, “dinosaurs were unknown. All the generations of mankind had been born and died, lived and inhabited the earth, and none ever suspected that long, long before them, life on our planet was dominated by a race of gigantic reptilian creatures who held sway for millions upon millions of years.”

George Morton coughed. “If this is so, then what about man?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Most discussions of evolution sidestepped the question of man. Darwin himself had not dealt with man for more than a decade after his book was published.

“You know of the German finds in the Neander Valley?” Cope asked. “No? Well, back in ’56 they discovered a complete skull in Germany—heavy-boned, with brutish brow ridges. The strata is disputed, but it seems to be very old. I myself saw the find in Europe in ’63.”

“I heard the Neander skull was an ape, or a degenerate,” Sternberg said.

“That is unlikely,” Cope said. “Professor Venn in Düsseldorf has devised a new method of measuring the brain size of skulls. It’s quite simple: he fills the brain case with mustard seeds, then pours the seeds out into a measuring vessel. His researches show that the Neander skull held a larger brain than we possess today.”

“You are saying this Neander skull is human?” Morton said.

“I don’t know,” Cope said. “But I do not see how one can believe that dinosaurs evolved, and reptiles evolved, and mammals such as the horse evolved, but that man sprang fully developed without antecedents.”

“Aren’t you a Quaker, Professor Cope?”

Cope’s ideas were still unacceptable to most faiths, including the Religious Society of Friends, which was the Quakers’ formal name.

“I may not be,” Cope said. “Religion explains what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all… No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.”

Leaving the Badlands

The morning of August 26 was distinctly chilly as they set out on the one-day journey to Cow Island, located at one of the few natural fords along a two-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri River, where the Missouri Breaks formed a barrier on each side. The island also served as a steamboat landing, and it was here Cope planned to meet the steamboat that came up from St. Louis. They were all eager to leave, and frankly worried about Indians, but they had too many fossils to take with them in the wagon. Nothing would do but to make two trips. Cope marked the most precious box, the one with the Brontosaurus teeth, with a subtle X on one side.

“I’m going to leave this one here,” Cope said, “for the second trip.”

Johnson said he didn’t understand. Why not take it on the first trip?

“The chances we get raided on our first leg are probably better than the chances the second load will get discovered here,” he said. “Plus we should be able to pick up some extra hands at Cow Island to protect us on the second trip.”

Their initial journey was uneventful; they reached Cow Island in the early evening and dined with the army troops stationed there. Marsh and his men had gone down the Missouri on the previous steamer, after warning the troops of “Cope’s cutthroats and vagabonds,” who might appear later.

Captain Lawson laughed. “I think Mr. Marsh bears no love for your party,” he said.

Cope affirmed that was the case.

The steamboat was due in two days, but the schedule was uncertain, especially so late in the year. It was imperative that they make their final trip to the plains camp the following day. Cope would remain in Cow Island, repacking the fossils for the steamboat journey, while Little Wind and Cookie drove the wagon back in the morning under Sternberg’s supervision.

But early the next morning, Sternberg awoke with severe chills and fever, a recurrence of his malaria. Isaac was too jumpy about Indians to go back, Cookie and Little Wind too unreliable to go unsupervised. There was the question as to who would lead the expedition.

Johnson said, “I’ll lead it.”

It was the moment he had been waiting for. Summer on the plains had toughened him, but he had always been under the supervision of older and more experienced men. He longed for a chance to prove himself on his own, and this short trip seemed the perfect opportunity for independence, and a fitting conclusion to the summer’s adventures.

Toad felt the same way. He immediately said, “I’ll go, too.”

“You two shouldn’t make the trip alone,” Cope said. “I haven’t been able to find any extra hands. The soldiers are unavailable to us.”

“We won’t be alone. We’ll have Cookie and Little Wind.”

Cope frowned. He drummed his fingers nervously on his sketchbook.

“Please, Professor. It’s important that you repack the fossils. We will be fine. And the day is passing as we stand here discussing it.”

“All right,” Cope said finally. “This is against my better judgment, but all right.”

Delighted, Johnson and Toad left at seven that morning, with Cookie and Little Wind driving the wagon.

Cope organized the wooden boxes of fossils, repacking those not sufficiently safe to suffer the depredations of the steamboat’s stevedores. Isaac looked after Sternberg, who was delirious most of the time; he boiled him a tea made of the bark of willow branches, which he said helped with fevers. Morton assisted Cope.

Six or seven other passengers waited at Cow Island for the steamboat. Among them was a Mormon farmer named Travis and his young son. They had come to Montana to bring the gospel to the settlers, but had had little success, and were disgruntled.

“What you got in those crates there?” Travis asked.

Cope looked up. “Fossil bones.”

“What for?”

“I study them,” Cope said.

Travis laughed. “Why study bones when you can study living animals?”

“These are the bones of extinct animals.”

“That can’t be.”

“Why not?” Cope asked.

“Are you a God-fearing man?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Do you believe God is perfect?”

“Yes, I do.”

Travis laughed again. “Well then, you must agree there can be no extinct animals, because the good Lord in His perfection would never allow a line of His creatures to become extinct.”

“Why not?” Cope asked.

“I just told you.” Travis looked annoyed.

“You just told me your belief about how God goes about His business. But what if God attains His perfection by degrees, casting aside His past creations in order to create new ones?”

“Men may do that, because men are imperfect. God does not, because He is perfect. There was only one Creation. Do you think God made mistakes in His Creation?”

“He made man. Didn’t you just say man is imperfect?”

Travis glowered. “You’re one of those professors,” he said. “One of those educated fools who has departed from righteousness to blasphemy.”

Cope was in no mood for theological dispute. “Better an educated fool than an uneducated fool,” he snapped.

“You are doing the work of the Devil,” Travis said, and he kicked one of the fossil crates.

“Do that again,” Cope said, “and I’ll beat your brains out.”

Travis kicked another crate.

In a letter to his wife, Cope wrote:

Morton described what happened directly:

This was certainly still so in 1876. Much earlier in the century, Thomas Jefferson had carefully concealed his own view that fossils represented extinct creatures. In Jefferson’s day, public espousal of belief in extinction was considered heresy. Attitudes had since changed in many places, but not everywhere. It was still controversial to espouse evolution in certain parts of the United States.

Soon after the fight ended, the steamboat, the Lizzie B., rounded the bend and whistled her imminent arrival. All eyes were on the boat, except for those of one soldier who glanced back across the plains and shouted, “Look there! Horses!”

And from across the plains, two riderless horses approached.

“My heart sank,” Cope wrote in his journal, “to imagine what this might mean.”

They quickly mounted up and rode out to meet them. As they came closer they saw Cookie, bent over, clutching the saddle, near death. A half dozen Indian arrows pierced his body; blood streamed freely from his wounds. The other horse belonged to Johnson: there was blood on the saddle, and arrows were stuck in the leather.

The army soldiers got Cookie off the horse and laid him on the ground. His lips were swollen and crusted dry; they gave him sips from the canteen until he could speak.

“What happened?” Cope said.

“Indians,” Cookie said. “Damn Indians. Nothing we could—”

And he coughed blood, fitfully, writhing with the effort, and died.

“We must return at once and search for survivors,” Cope said. “And our bones.”

Captain Lawson shook his head. He yanked one arrow from the saddle. “These’re Sioux arrows,” he said.

“So?”

The captain nodded toward the plains. “There won’t be anything to go back for, Professor. I’m sorry, but if you find your friends at all—which I doubt—they’ll be scalped and mutilated and left to rot on the plains.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“Bury this ’un and say a prayer for the others is about all,” Captain Lawson said.

The next morning, they mournfully loaded their fossils onto the steamboat and headed back down the Missouri. The nearest telegraph station was in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, which was nearly five hundred miles to the east, on the Missouri. When the Lizzie B. stopped there, Cope sent the following cable to Johnson’s family in Philadelphia: