Dragon Teeth

Author’s Note

“Biography,” observed Oscar Wilde, “lends to death a new terror.” Even in a work of fiction about individuals long dead, there is reason to consider his sentiment.

Readers unfamiliar with this period of American history may be interested to know that Professors Marsh and Cope were real people, their rivalry and antagonism depicted here without exaggeration—in fact, it has been toned down, since the nineteenth century promoted a degree of ad hominem excess that is hard to believe now.

Cope did go to the Montana badlands in 1876, and discovered the teeth of Brontosaurus, essentially as recounted here.[1]

The antagonism between Cope and Marsh that played out over ten years is compressed here into a single summer, with some changes. Thus, it was Marsh who made the false skull for Cope to find, and so on. However, it is true that on many occasions the workers of Cope and Marsh fired on one another—with much more serious intent than suggested here.

The character of William Johnson is entirely fictitious. I would not read this novel as history. For history, read Charles Sternberg’s detailed account of Cope’s trip to the Montana badlands in The Life of a Fossil Hunter.

I am indebted to E. H. Colbert, the eminent paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, for first bringing the story of Marsh and Cope to my attention; in his kind correspondence he suggested a novel about them; he also provided me with my first leads in his books.

Finally, readers who inspect photographic books, as I have done, should be extremely careful about the captions. There has emerged a new breed of photo book in which authentic pictures of the West are accompanied by bleak, elegiac prose. The captions may seem to fit the pictures, but they do not fit the facts—this sad, melancholy attitude is a complete anachronism. Towns such as Deadwood may look depressing to us now, but they were exciting places then, and the people who inhabited them were excited to be there. Too often, the people who write captions to photographs indulge their own uninformed fantasies about the pictures and what they mean.

All the events of 1876 occurred as reported here, except that Marsh did not lead a party of students west that year (he had gone every year for the previous six, but remained in New Haven in 1876 to meet the English biologist T. H. Huxley); that all of Cope’s bones traveled safely on the Missouri steamer, and no one continued on to Deadwood; and that Robert Louis Stevenson did not go west until 1879. The descriptions of the Indian Wars are accurate, sadly so, and from a vantage of some hundred-plus years later, it seems safe to say that the American West described in these pages, like the world of the dinosaurs long before, was soon to be forever lost.