Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
learned from Lucy Audubon—including the one that would later emerge as the central creed of his life—would not register for years. Indeed from the time Grinnell left the school of Grandma Audubon to the time he graduated from college, his life had the feeling of casual indifference and missed opportunity.
His wealthy parents sent him to the best secondary schools. In 1861, when George was 12, he began a two-year stint at Manhattan’s French Institute. At age 14 he enrolled in the prestigious Churchill Military School at Sing Sing. Churchill enforced a mild form of military discipline, but the accommodations were hardly spartan. The supplies that new students were instructed to bring to school included “napkin ring, bathrobe and slippers, mackintosh and umbrella, sponge and nail file.” For three years, Grinnell went obediently through the well-defined motions of the school. He eventually rose up the ranks to command a company of his fellow students, but his academic performance was middling at best. Grinnell’s self-appraisal was both insightful and blunt: “I knew very well that I had wasted my time at school.”15
Nor did Grinnell have any sense of direction, a passive actor in setting the course of his life. “It had been determined that, when I left school, I should go to Yale, where my grandfather had graduated in 1804, and others of my ancestors had associations.” Even with family connections, Grinnell’s academic credentials made admission to Yale a dubious proposition. Grinnell’s instructors at Churchill warned him that he was not prepared to pass Yale’s rigorous entrance exams. But “my parents had made up their minds, and I was not in the habit of questioning my father’s decisions.” Grinnell spent the summer of 1866 in tedious remedial review. In September he traveled to New Haven and just managed to gain entrance, though “I had conditions in Greek and in Euclid.”16
Having successfully put his nose to the grindstone to win admittance, Grinnell found that his lackadaisical attitude toward his education quickly resurfaced once on campus. “Little of interest happened” was his summary of his freshman year. Grinnell’s sophomore year was more interesting because, as he explained, “I was perpetually in trouble.” He did find application for his outdoor skills, climbing up the lightning rod of a campus clock tower in order to inscribe his class number at the top. Grinnell was also an enthusiastic participant in “all the hazing and hat-stealing which was usual by Sophomores.” Partway through the fall semester, Grinnell was “detected in hazing a Freshman, and was suspended for one year.”
Grinnell, along with a few fellow transgressors, was exiled to Farmington, Connecticut. Their supervisor in Farmington, one Reverend L.R. Payne (Yale ’59), was responsible for tutoring the boys and, presumably, guiding them back to a more responsible path. Contrition, however, was in short supply among Grinnell and his comrades. “At Farmington we had a very good time, doing very little studying, and spending most of our time out of doors.” It was almost like being back at Audubon Park. “We took long walks, paddled on the Farmington River, and on moonlight nights in winter used to spend pretty much all night tramping over the fields.” At the end of the school year, Yale gave Grinnell the opportunity to take the exams with his class, but “[m]y idleness at Farmington resulted in a failure to pass.”
The following autumn, no doubt at the intervention of his parents, Grinnell was set up with a new tutor, a physician named Dr. Hurlburt, this time in Stamford. Dr. Hurlburt, according to Grinnell, was “not only a good tutor, but a good handler of boys.” His prescription for the wayward Grinnell: a “course of sprouts.” Hurlburt roused Grinnell at an early hour, taking him along on his rounds. As they drove along in his buggy, Grinnell recited his lessons, then studied on his own while the doctor made house calls. At the end of two semesters, Grinnell returned again to Yale, this time passing his exams “with flying colors.”17
Though back on track, Grinnell evinced no particular interest in where that track might lead. Inertia seemed to be the main force to compel him, and inertia seemed to be leading him toward a rather unremarkable life as a member of an upper-class, East Coast family. The summer before his senior year, his mother took him and two brothers on a three-month tour of Europe. The Continent appeared to make no particular impression; in his memoirs he recounted no detail of the trip beyond a list of the countries visited. On returning to Yale for his senior year, Grinnell was elected—in good Yale fashion—to Scroll and Key, a secret society. He offered no hint of what he might want to do after graduation, though he did describe himself as being “in great fear lest my degree should be withheld on account of my poor scholarship.” Beyond this concern, his descriptions of his last year in college are bland: “I roomed in the old south college, and the room faced the green.”18
Opportunity, though, was on the horizon—opportunity that would extend Grinnell’s horizons far beyond the south college green.
IN THE SPRING OF 1870, A FEW MONTHS BEFORE GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL would graduate from Yale, a rumor swept the campus. A professor named Othniel Charles Marsh, it was reported, intended that summer to lead a scientific expedition to the far west. The expedition was to be manned by a dozen recent Yale graduates with the purpose of searching for dinosaur bones.19
For perhaps the first time in his life, Grinnell felt the spark of genuine inspiration. “This rumor greatly interested me,” he remembered, “for I had been brought up, so to speak, on the writings of Captain Mayne Reid.” Captain Reid, in fact, might almost have been speaking for Grinnell when he wrote in his novel Wild Life that “I as well as others yearned for the life beyond the confines of our secluded valley, and sighed for a participation in those deeds of which now and then a rumor reached our ever-attentive ears.” Grinnell had long harbored the desire to visit the western scenes described by Reid and Audubon “but had supposed they were beyond my reach.” Now, suddenly, an opportunity stood within range. “I determined that I must try.”
It took several days for Grinnell to summon the courage to present himself before the intimidating Professor Marsh, who looked a bit like Ulysses S. Grant, the man then president. When Grinnell finally interviewed, the professor discouraged him, promising only to inquire about the young man’s credentials. Grinnell, painfully aware of his record at Yale, could hardly have been optimistic. But when Grinnell went back for a second interview, he learned that he had been accepted as a member of the Marsh expedition.
For the first time, George Bird Grinnell was aiming in a direction that he himself had set—west. In a matter of weeks, Grinnell would depart on a five-month, 6,000-mile journey that would change the course of his life.
PROFESSOR OTHNIEL CHARLES MARSH WAS ABOUT TO EMERGE AS one of the most important scientists of his day. He was the nephew of George Peabody, a wealthy investment banker and a man considered by some to be the father of modern philanthropy. Today, museums throughout the Northeast still carry his name. Peabody was generous to Marsh too, having supported his education, first at Andover, then Yale, then in Europe. Marsh proved a brilliant student, discovering two important reptile fossils while still in college.20
During his time in Europe, Marsh convinced his uncle to give money for the establishment of a new natural history museum at Yale as well as an endowed chair in paleontology—the first in the United States. In 1866, Marsh returned to New Haven to occupy the endowed chair and to manage the museum. Two years later, Marsh made the discovery that set the stage for Grinnell’s first great adventure.
In 1868, while traveling in the West, Marsh read an intriguing story in an Omaha newspaper. According to the report, a railroad construction worker had unearthed ancient bones while digging a well. They were, declared the paper, from the skeleton of an ancient man. Marsh was determined to investigate and managed to convince a train conductor to make an unscheduled stop at the site, a remote location known as Antelope Station. While the train cooled its engine, Marsh sifted through the mound of dirt beside the well. “I soon found many fragments and a number of entire bones, not of a man, but of horses diminutive indeed, but true equine ancestors.” He had discovered Protohippus, a three-toed, miniature horse. “I could only wonder,” he later wrote, “if such scientific truths as I had now obtained were concealed in a single well, what untold treasures must there be in the whole Rocky Mountain region?”21
Marsh intended to find out. He had attempted to line up an expedition for 1869, but intense Indian