Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke

      Marsh expedition in 1870, near Fort Bridger in what is today Wyoming. Professor Othniel Marsh is the bearded man in the center. Grinnell is third from the left in the broad-brimmed hat.

      Courtesy of the Scott Meyer Family.

      Fearful of attack, Grinnell and Nicholson resorted to ploy. “As the sun was setting we stopped on the borders of the stream, unsaddled our horses and built a fire, to convey the impression that we had gone into camp.” They plucked and roasted some of their ducks, filling their bellies while waiting for the full cover of darkness. Then, saddling up, they rode into the creek. For a long time they rode down the little stream, using the water to cover their tracks. Only when they’d covered a mile or more did they climb up onto the bank, there to spend a long, frigid night with no fire.

      By the next morning, Professor Marsh and the cavalry accompaniment were convinced that the two missing hunters had fallen victim to the Cheyenne, the most pervasive tribe in that region. The concern seemed to find confirmation when a search party came across two lame Indian ponies. The Cheyenne, it appeared, had killed Grinnell and Nicholson, taken their two horses, then left the crippled stock behind. But by the time the search party made it back to camp, Grinnell and Nicholson had reappeared, having backtracked and then followed the expedition’s clear trail.

      Grinnell was nonchalant about the entire incident, his main comments reflecting pride that their evasive tactics on Horse Creek had kept the cavalry from picking up their trail. “The devices we had practiced to mislead the Indians were so successful that on the following day the searchers lost our trail hopelessly.” Certainly his remarks reflected the young-man bravado that puffed the chests of many who traveled the wild lands of the West. But something more profound was also at play. Even as he labored each day as a member of an expedition whose findings would stun the scientific world, Grinnell’s own journey was more personal. On an expedition whose aim was discovery, Grinnell was discovering himself.

      IF THERE WERE TWO MORAL POLES IN THE WORLD OF GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, Cornelius Vanderbilt stood at one of them. Vanderbilt was the most important client of the brokerage house owned by Grinnell’s father, and Grinnell had known him from an early age. Commodore Vanderbilt (the title reflected ownership of a veritable flotilla, not a military background) stood at the helm of the era that would rise in the aftermath of the Civil War—the era in which Grinnell would spend the most important years of his life. Mark Twain, in his biting 1873 satire, dubbed it the “Gilded Age.” Beginning in the boom years that followed the Civil War and extending to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the Gilded Age was the heyday of the robber barons, a class of industrialists known as much for their plundering business style as for their towering business achievements.

      A survey of Vanderbilt’s life reads like a primer for the whole ilk. He offered a glimpse of what would prove to be his modus operandi in his very first enterprise. In 1811, at the age of 17, Vanderbilt borrowed money from his mother to start a ferry in New York Harbor. With screaming Oedipal overtones, he hoped to capsize the venture of his main rival—his father.

      At every juncture in his long career, Vanderbilt was in the right place at the right time with the right service—transportation. His wealth grew during the War of 1812, the 1849 gold rush, and then the Civil War. After dominating New York ferry traffic, he later came to control coastal trade between New York and New England. When George Bird Grinnell was a boy, Vanderbilt was selling his shipping enterprises and buying railroads. By 1869 he would own the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, controlling much of the lucrative transport between New York City and the Great Lakes.

      Business for Vanderbilt was war. He once wrote to an enemy promising that “I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I will ruin you.” Such was Vanderbilt’s reputation that rivals in a shipping venture to Nicaragua paid him $50,000 a month for his promise to stay out of the market.

      Vanderbilt, in short, embodied the characteristics of the Gilded Age in which Grinnell lived. As a Vanderbilt biographer described him, he was “simply the most conspicuous and terrifying exponent of his era,” an era “of ruthlessness, of personal selfishness, of corruption, of disregard of private rights, of contempt for law and Legislatures, and yet of vast and beneficial achievement.” Vanderbilt would die with a fortune estimated at $100 million, though not before cutting several sons out of his will.²

      Securing financing for Vanderbilt’s railroads would be the culminating professional achievement of Grinnell’s father, and for a while, Grinnell appeared likely to follow in his father’s footsteps.

      It was Lucy Audubon, ultimately, who would put him on a different track. She taught him a philosophy startling in the degree to which it ran counter to the prevailing ethics of the day, a discipline that leading men of Grinnell’s generation were more likely to scorn than to follow. It was a value system that stemmed from the central narrative of her life.

      Born Lucy Bakewell in England in 1787, she was the daughter of a country gentleman of modest wealth. Lucy received top-flight schooling for a girl of her generation. Her father believed that girls should be educated, if only to make them better and more engaging wives. Lucy was tutored from a young age and later attended boarding school, where she studied French, dance, and needlepoint. Her formal education was supplemented by tutors and long hours of reading in her father’s extensive library. Her father also taught her to ride, and Lucy loved the outdoors from an early age.³