Bright Lights, Bold Adventure: 1846-1878

To the Territories

A keen observer among them was John Strong Newberry, the geologist associated with the Smithsonian's inner circle of naturalists, who were already proving crucial to the scientific evaluation of the continent. Newberry, more detached than other members of his party, examined the canyon floor and the surrounding landscape, and wrote, "The broad valleys, bounded by high and perpendicular walls, belong to a vast system of erosion, and are wholly due to the action of water...." Newberry's insights into this uplifted province had profound significance for science everywhere. Yet his observations were but a small part of a general assessment of the American territories that was then being undertaken by men attached to expeditions of all sorts. These scientists and non-professionals recorded, collected, and classified unceasingly in what William H. Goetzmann has described in Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West as "the great empty laboratory of the West."

Lieutenant John Frémont could be seen as the first explorer to receive Smithsonian help. He had operated under the Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers, which was reorganized in 1838 into a separate arm of the military dedicated to exploration and development. Plant specimens collected on Frémont 's second and third expeditions-to the Great Salt Lake and the Pacific Northwest and to California, respectively-became the subject of the sixth volume in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, written by John Torrey, the Princeton botanist, and published in 1854.

After Frémont 's expeditions came the railway surveys, which probed Western ranges for egress to the Coast and the fulfillment of a dream that only a few years before had seemed preposterous-transcontinental travel. The Smithsonian was already on board. Taken together, these expeditions-military and adventurous- formed the "grand reconnaissance" of the Western regions of the continent that was carried out by government and augmented by private institutions, state universities, and occasionally by private initiative, with overlapping jurisdictions and mandates. They usually counted among their members at least one representative of the Smithsonian.

John Torrey was just one of several prominent naturalists to offer early assistance to Spencer Baird. Another was Asa Gray, also a botanist. (Baird's only interest in the object of their study was as fodder for his vertebrates. ) Anatomist Joseph Leidy received assistance from Baird, who considered some of the men in the field to be members of what he, now the authoritative curator of the National Museum, thought of as his scientific sect.

Among the far-flung soldiers, surveyors, and scientists were a relative few who enjoyed an extraordinarily warm relationship with the high priest in the Castle and those around him. John Strong Newberry was one of these. Staying in a Mohave village while on the Grand Canyon expedition, Newberry wrote to fellow geologist Ferdinand Hayden, then in Washington, "I should be very happy to be one of your pleasant circle at the Smithsonian this winter." Newberry complained good-naturedly of sand in his fare; he missed, he added, "eating comforting food, sleeping on good beds, washing clean and dressing neatly every day, and having a good time generally."

This tension between wilderness and civilization, between hard, empirical reality in the field and the ideal of science pursued beneath the gaslights of the Smithsonian, paid rich dividends. The early piggybacking of research onto Western exploration can be seen as science's taking advantage of activities of the state, with Spencer Baird as the chief instigator and provisioner.

With the tacit approval of Joseph Henry, Baird's scientific preparations included the occasional diplomatic to turn to the White House. His efforts in this regard increased, and, by the end of the 1850s, Baird had recruited and trained hundreds of staff members and associates to carry out his procedures. At one time, he had as many as 1,000 people collecting for the Smithsonian, with the help of various branches of government.

The Institution's bounty quickly grew from 6,000 natural-history specimens to 150,000 items, all cataloged. For his "missionaries," as he termed them, Baird often assembled the provisions himself. These included scientific instruments of various sorts, guns, powder and shot, dissecting tools, preservative whiskey doctored to make it unpalatable, arsenic, beads, mirrors, and egg blowers.

Military officers who collected for the Smithsonian made up a long and distinguished list. Significant expeditions so affiliated with the Institution included that of Captain Howard Stansbury, who explored and surveyed the valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1849-50; Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves' expedition down the Zuni and Colorado rivers in 1851; Captains Randolph B. Marcy's and George B. McClellan's Red River exploration in 1852; the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey under Major William H. Emory; and the four major railway-surveying explorations. In fact, for three years, 1851 through 1854 the height of the library controversy and the clamorous erection of the Castle-Baird dealt with specimens and information collected on no fewer than 26 expeditions.

The 13 Pacific Railwav Reports, lavishly published between 1855 and 1860, marked "the advent of specialization and teamwork in the study of natural sciences," as Herman J. Viola wrote in Exploring the West. Baird himself wrote the zoological sections for three volumes, as well as the one for Sitgreaves' Zuni River trip. Despite a plethora of geological, botanical, biological, ethnographic, and cartographic material about the West, the Reports presented, of necessity, a somewhat scattered view of what was still a great empty laboratory.

The huge store of specimens, reports, and artifacts lodged at the Smithsonian waited to be examined. Sturdy exhibit cases in the Great Hall of the Castle constituted the National Museum, minuscule compared to the bulk of accumulated material, and meanwhile more objects arrived-bird skins, pickled snakes, bows and arrows, skeletons, fossils, dried plants, artworks.

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian's secular missionaries endured more than the sand in the food John Strong Newberry had written of. John Feilner, a Bavarian mapmaker with the U.S. Army in the Pacific Northwest, was involved in a battle with Modoc tribesmen near Klamath Lake, in California, killing a chief. Feilner himself was later killed by Sioux along the upper Missouri while collecting for the Institution. Lieutenant Gouverneur Kemble Warren, a member of the Topographical Engineers, conducted three surveys of the Great Plains, all the while collecting. Present at the Blue Water Creek massacre of the Sioux by U.S. cavalrymen in what would become Nebraska in 1855, a saddened Warren picked up 100 of the Smithsonian's finest Indian artifacts.

A year later, Warren led an expedition to Yellowstone country that included Baird's protege, Ferdinand Hayden, a dreamer and a ladies' man who was destined to become a renowned geologist. During the first month, Hayden sent 291 specimens back to the Institution. He and Warren eventually fell out over who should receive the most credit for the items collected, and, on an 1857 trip to the Black Hills, the question of loyalty arose: Should it be paid to the War Department or to the Smithsonian?

Hayden came down unabashedly on the side of science. Despite differences and intense acrimony in the field-Hayden later blustered to Baird about Warren, "I intend now either to whip him or shoot him"-the two rivals sent back 2,647 specimens, including 423 of Hayden's beloved rocks.

Hayden then joined the last of the Topographical Engineers' expeditions, to the upper Yellowstone, in 1859, another contentious, demanding, cartographically incomplete but scientifically fruitful trip. It led Hayden to conclude, with some understatement, "Such expeditions as these are great things to bring out the weakness of human nature."

Receiving Hayden's geological treasures back home was Fielding Bradford Meek, a balding, somewhat deaf, fine invertebrate paleontologist who was often disturbed by the mostly young, avid naturalists known collectively as the Megatherium Club. The club was named for the extinct sloth once found in Pleistocene America. The name was frivolous, but the association was highly valued, reflecting the interests of this tightly knit group of Smithsonian naturalists.

In addition to Hayden, Torrey, and Newberry, Castle life included James G. Cooper, who had grown up in the presence of friends of his father-Audubon, botanist and paleontologist Thomas Nuttall, and Henry R. Schoolcraft, ethnologist; Edward D. Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker who in his lifetime would name and describe fully a third of North America's fossil vertebrates; and the prominent naturalists William Stimpson, William Healey Dall, and the Midwestern explorer of the Northwest territories, the enthusiastic but moody Robert Kennicott, who was only 22 when he first arrived at the Smithsonian.

Other young scientists came and went at the Castle, catered to by Baird while they were between the often dangerous, always difficult fieldwork and the brilliant, fraternal classifying factory the Smithsonian had become. Accommodations were found for them in Renwick's excesses, the Castle towers. "By the kindness of professor Henry," Baird's daughter, Lucy, later wrote, "many of the unused rooms, too high up for business purposes...were assigned to such young students as lodgings. They supplied their own furniture and linen...."

They dined in the basement, their exchanges of bright "conduction" -conversation- lubricated with oysters and ale when there were private funds available, although one Megatherium rule was "Never let your evening's amusement be the subject of your morning's reflections." Such a pleasant, unprecedented social collaboration, an American scientific Camelot, seemed equal to any challenge. But even the Megatheria, like the grand reconnaissance of the American West, felt the chill of civil war.

Slavery overrode all other questions in the public's mind. Before slavery ended in the District of Columbia in 1850, slave pens could be seen not far from the Castle's doors. Now talk of secession complicated all discourse in America, and at the Smithsonian. too. Personally, Henry felt that the Union was untenable, and that the South should be allowed to secede. He counted among his friends Southerners and Southern sympathizers, including Jefferson Davis, the Senator from Mississippi who was to become president of the Confederacy; Davis was the chief proponent of the transcontinental railway, and a long-standing friend of the Smithsonian. But Henry also could claim, if not close friendship with, at least the warm personal regard of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican from Illinois who opposed the extension of slavery to the territories and who was elected President in 1860.

Henry took no public position on slavery, as he had taken none on Darwinism, a characteristic avoidance of politics. The Smithsonian had never convinced some in Congress of the Institution's importance, or even made clear to them the nature of its mission. As late as 1861, there were still Senators who considered the Smithsonian "a sort of Iying-in hospital for literary valetudinarians," in the words of liberal newspaper editor Horace Greely, and Henry was careful not to provide ammunition for any more weighty accusations.

Later, Lincoln and some of his cabinet members attended an anti-slavery lecture at the Smithsonian that was given by Greeley, a war radical. Henry had a dim view of even this show of partisanship within the Institution, and endured the ridicule of abolitionists by insisting upon total objectivity. After war broke out and throughout its duration, no flag flew from Smithsonian towers - a tacit statement of scientific neutrality and a considerable display of willpower.

A week after the fall of Fort Sumter, in April 1861, Baird, who had been busy putting away duplicate birds from the Wilkes expedition, wrote, "City in wild state of confusion in consequence of the refusal of Maryland to permit the passage of [Union] troops." He prepared for a possible Confederate assault on the city by packing away rare eggs and birds. His wife, Mary, had an "hysterical attack," but recovered. By early May, Baird was back to "labeling exotic reptiles," while crowds of soldiers visited the Smithsonian. The curator was not to be distracted.

Some members of the government thought federal troops should be billeted at the Smithsonian; Henry deflected this idea, suggesting instead that, if the need became pressing, the Institution could be used as an infirmary while carrying out its scientific mission. The Patent Office Building saw temporary duty as a hospital-the poet Walt Whitman served there as a nurse - and, in the meantime, Joseph Henry beseeched his friend George G. Meade, of the Topographical Engineers, who led the Great Lakes Survey, not to leave science to become cannon fodder.

The various goals of Henry and Baird must have seemed unattainable. At the end of 1861, Baird noted, "Terribly gloomy here. I don't know what is to become of Smithsonian matters." Publicly, Henry put the Institution at the service of the government, seeking, as historian and former editor of the Joseph Henry papers Nathan Reingold has written, "a way of accomplishing a disagreeable but necessary task." In the Annual Report of 1862, Henry wrote, "Although the immediate object of war is the destruction of life and property, yet [it] is not a condition of evil unmingled with good. Independent of the political results which may flow from it, scientific truths are frequently developed.... New investigations as to the strength of materials, the laws of projectiles, the resistance of fluids, the applications of electricity, light, heat, and chemical action...are all required."

Among the opportunities provided by war were the collection of facts about the Army's "moral and economical condition", statistics of all sorts, and "illustrations of surgical anatomy which is perhaps unrivaled", if barbaric. Clearly, Henry's scientific objectivity had in no way been compromised.

He deplored the disruption of his meteorological observations and other programs; the Smithsonian continued to support expeditions where possible, but the endowment was affected by inflation and the decline in the value of state bonds in which it had again been invested. Work was further hampered by the rising costs of printing and international exchange. But the Smithsonian still served as the medium for scientific and literary communication between the United States and Europe, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In the first year of the war, it added to the store of meteorological data important observations from the English expedition sent to the Arctic in search of the Franklin party, observations relating to temperature, wind, atmospheric pressure, and "miscellaneous phenomena, such as auroras, weather, specific gravity of sea-water, ozone, &c."

To date, the Institution had distributed more than 80,000 specimens and 10,000 publications to learned societies around the world. Its burgeoning "Miscellaneous Collections" provide an indication of the vast variety of Smithsonian concerns. (A set of tables acquired for converting various foreign measurements included "the standard adopted in the great trigonometrical survey of Austria.") The Smithsonian was far from moribund.

In 1862, the Smithsonian manufactured 1,000 bottles of Laborraque's disinfectant for use in Washington's hospitals. Experiments went on in the Castle. Special devices cast light to distant navigational stations, inspiring conflicting interpretations of what went on at night at the mysterious Smithsonian. Henry was supposedly aiding the War Department in perfecting signaling. "Many a time," according to Paul H. Oehser in Sons of Science, "Professor Henry's companion in these studies was President Lincoln, glad to leave the scene of turmoil...."

One night the President and the Secretary were visited by a citizen who believed Confederate spies to be at work in the Castle. "What do you have to say to that, Professor Henry?" Lincoln reportedly asked his host, in mock severity. Henry explained to the man that every night a meteorological instrument had to be read with the aid of a lantern, and that nothing was taking place that might aid the Confederacy.

In 1863, Smithsonian Regent and Congressman George E. Badger, of North Carolina, was voted off the board by Congress for "giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the Government," and was replaced by Louis Agassiz. That same year, Henry, Smithsonian Regent Alexander Dallas Bache, and Rear Admiral Charles Henry Davis were placed on Lincoln's special commission to investigate "and to report upon any subject of science or art," thus establishing the National Academy of Sciences.

Like the Permanent Commission to advise the Navy on "questions of science and art," founded earlier and made up of the same three men, the academy accomplished little. As Nathan Reingold put it, "Physics and chemistry in the mid-nineteenth century were not obviously pregnant with warlike possibilities."

Henry performed at least one unusual service for Lincoln. The President asked him to interview one of the spiritualists popular at the time in whom Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had faith. The man produced sounds that seemed to come from various parts of the room, and Henry could not explain the phenomenon. He later learned of the existence of a mechanical device that could be attached to the arm and activated by flexing the biceps, setting off electrical impulses. The public exposure of this device reportedly earned Henry the enmity of the nation's mediums.

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian's bright young men continued to labor in various parts of the Castle. A typical day began with their emergence from odd places, uttering the imaginary call of the megatherium ("How! How!" ). They breakfasted together, spent an hour afterward fraternizing in Baird's office, and then went off to deal with the bounty of the Smithsonian, much of it specimens from the American West.

"It is five o'clock, when the Megatherium takes its prey," Robert Kennicott wrote in the winter of 1863, "that the most interesting characters of the animal are seen. Then it roars with delight and makes up for the hard work of the day by much fun and conduction...."

Anyone could sup with the Megatheria, but they respected only scientific accomplishment, and could be wickedly critical. Hop-and-jump races about the Great Hall were not uncommon. A photograph of four Megatheria reveals William Stimpson formally posed, and Kennicott with his arm draped over another man's shoulder in an obvious burlesque. Such lightheartedness may have been in reaction to the paroxysms of war, opportunism, and fierce political combat beyond the insulating sandstone walls.

Kennicott wrote poignantly, also in the winter of 1863, "...D-n civilization. Not that I see much of it either for T live constantly here at the Smithsonian among a set of naturalists nearly all of whom have spent their lives in the wilderness."

Joseph Henry kept his distance from Megatherium exuberance. The sudden death of his son late in 1862 left him graver than usual; life in the Castle seemed at times almost intolerable. During the summer, the Henrys' living quarters, exposed to the afternoon sun, turned into a furnace, made worse by fleas that Henry blamed on Baird's interminable collections. The visiting scientists burned too much gas, in Henry's view, illuminating their studies and, presumably, their revels. Henry wrote a note to Baird suggesting that the "making [of] the Smithsonian building into a caravansary has been carried a little too far."

Things quieted down for a time, and then, as Stimpson wrote to Hayden in February 1863, "The Megatheria is revived. Kennicott, God bless him, has come back. Barrel of ale in the cellar. Digestion howls in the Den at Dinner. Jolly Conduction."

The Institution performed extemporaneous services for various branches of government. Henry, as head of the Government Lighthouse Board, experimented with substitutes for whale oil that could be used in lighthouses. And the collections continued to grow: "the great Ainsa or Tucson meteorite" from the Southwest, shells, reptiles, fishes from Cuba, and birds, birds, birds, which made up a significant portion of the 50,000 duplicate specimens distributed that year.

The Smithsonian reprinted lectures by such scientists as W.D. Whitney, of Yale, and Charles M. Wetherill ("the modern theory of chemical types"); members of the French Academie des Sciences and the Royal Society of London also expanded the sources of the Institution's knowledge.

Ethnological research included work on "American aborigines" by foreign scientists. The 500-page book of meteorological observations published by the Government Printing Office contained diverse information pertaining to plants, birds, and other animals. The Smithsonian distributed meteorological bulletins from abroad, as well as star charts and tables, and expeditions continued to probe the United States and Mexico, Central and South America, Hudson's Bay Territory, Labrador,and the West Indies.

Henry pointed out that for the four years of the war, much time had also been devoted "to investigations required by the public exigencies"-in other words, the hostilities. These investigations included experiments to verify aspects of various governmental reports and the inspection of materials sold by government contractors and inventors, many of them frauds. "These facts," Henry wrote, "will be deemed a sufficient answer to those who have seemed disposed to reproach the Institution with the want of a more popular demonstration...."

The Civil War was an unprecedented disaster for the country, and a great trial for the Smithsonian. Despite Henry's efforts to remove its science from the overriding political issues of the day, the Institution was subject to divisions of loyalty and purpose that mirrored the country's. The various, far-flung scientific endeavors, like the Megatheria's sporadic conviviality, belied what seems to have been a general sense of malaise.

More of the Smithsonian's wartime activities would be known but for the fire that broke out on a cold day in January 1865, on the second story of the main building. A stove set up temporarily by men working on the art gallery had been improperly vented, and around three in the afternoon Henry heard a "loud crackling noise." To his dismay, he discovered the western section of the roof burning.

During the scramble that followed, his chief clerk, the assiduous William J. Rhees, saved a box of bonds deposited in the Secretary's office. Baird gathered up museum catalogs, correspondence, and-naturally- those collections he could evacuate with assistance. Fielding Meek brought up buckets from the basement, only to discover that the water in them was frozen.

Before they could be extinguished, the flames consumed most of the collected papers and effects of James Smithson. Also lost were perhaps as many as 80,000 copies of letters Henry had written and received, his notes on scientific experiments, two complete libraries obtained by the Smithsonian, manuscripts to be published, and $10,000 worth of equipment. Charles Bird King's entire collection of portraits of prominent Indians who had visited Washington also burned. Worst of all, approximately 190 of John Mix Stanley's portraits of members of 43 Western tribes, his life's work, perished in what Secretary Henry termed the "sad catastrophe."

Meanwhile, the career of Robert Kennicott, the most irrepressible and appealing of the Megatheria, an exemplar, would take on tragic overtones. Kennicott may have been impulsive, but he was also dedicated, and he had a grand vision of scientific achievement that played a part in an important moment in American history.

A natural-history curator at Northwestern University before coming to the Smithsonian, in 1857 Kennicott had conducted a four-month collecting expedition in what became western Canada. His boyish enthusiasm masked a determination that, two years later, took him as the Institution's representative deep into both British America and Russian America-Alaska. "As a devotee to science," he wrote, "I think it decidedly my duty....'

He gained the respect and cooperation of the men of the Hudson's Bay Company, to the immense benefit of Baird, the Smithsonian, and the United States. From the missionaries, trappers, Indians, and Eskimos Kennicott met, precious artifacts and previously unknown species flowed south to the Smithsonian. These connections were sustained by Spencer Baird, and proved of incalculable benefit to the Smithsonian over the years. Back from Washington would come the usual John collecting tools and items requested by Kennicott, to be used for barter and gifts. In one letter, Kennicott asked Baird for no fewer than 5,000 sewing needles, three pounds of thread, five dozen pipe beads, and "gold and silver tinsel hatcords." The whiskey to be used for preservation that Baird sent, presumably undoctored, was often consumed before it reached its destination.

Kennicott traveled as a native, enduring hardship and isolation. Civilization seemed most tolerable to him when he was away from it. Near the Arctic Circle on Christmas morning in 1861, in minus 40 degree weather, he smoked his last cigar-to the health of the Megatheria, according to his journal-and set out on a 12-hour "constitutional" by dogsled.

Back at the Smithsonian in the winter of 1862-63, dealing with his materials, Kennicott yearned for the harsh extremities of the natural world. In 1865 he was chosen as one of the principals in the Western Union Telegraph Expedition, a massive effort to locate a cable route to Asia that would take him and his men across unexplored territory from the Yukon River-which flows from far northwest Canada through central Alaska-to the Bering Strait.

From the beginning, Kennicott's efforts were hampered by the expedition's ranking military officers, ambitious men who lacked both experience in the North and a respect for science, referring derisively to the naturalist's concerns as "bugs." Kennicott had chosen not to fight in the Civil War, and this, plus his knowledge of Northern terrain, made him the object of the officers' resentment and jealousy.

Many of the supplies Kennicott requested were denied him. Eventually this brightest hope of Arctic exploration found himself stranded on the lower Yukon with only two companions, essentially abandoned. One morning in May 1866, Kennicott was found dead near the encampment, apparently of a heart attack.

He had been only 30. His equally young assistant, William Dall, termed his death a kind of murder. "Not by the merciful knife but by the slow torture of the mind," Dall wrote to his future wife. "By ungrateful subordinates...by anxiety to fulfill his commands, while those that gave them were lining their pockets in San Francisco." Dall took over command of the expedition's scientific corps, and became extremely important to science. Western Union canceled the expedition after a successful laying of the transatlantic cable, but Dall stayed on in the North to fulfill his mission. His perseverance in the field added to the store of charts, notes, and thousands of specimens of incalculable value to science and, as it turned out, to politics.

Armed with this knowledge, Baird was able to testify convincingly about the resources of the great Northwest, and to tip Congressional scales toward "Seward's Folly"-the purchase of Alaska-one of the most important acquisitions in American history and one that was indirectly affected by the enterprise of young Robert Kennicott.

After the Civil War, the opening of the American West began in earnest, with a new vision building upon those previously held. The West had been seen periodically as a land of deliverance, of desolation ("the Great American Desert" ), of serenity, and, finally, of bounty, this last inspired in part by the Homestead Act and practical scientific advances. "The last ten years," Henry Adams wrote of years following the war, "had given to the great mechanical energies-coal, iron, steam-a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements- agriculture, handwork, and learning...."

Tied to America's more muscular expansionism were dreams of fortunes to be made in real estate, in minerals, in farming, and in countless schemes, but the naturalists dreamed of another bonanza: new species and revelations awaiting discovery in the physical resources beyond "the shining mountains."

The Army set out to obtain accurate information about the West; it was particularly concerned with belligerent Indians and potential new American settlement Surveys were envisioned, to be conducted by latter-day scientific argonauts with strings attached to the Smithsonian. However, the Institution was not limited to the American West. In 1866 alone, expeditions with Smithsonian assistance could also be found in British and Russian America, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and the Sandwich Islands (today known as the Hawaiian Islands). Even W.H. Hudson, the future author of Green Mansions, wanted to provide specimens-birds-from "Buenos Ayres", but he also wanted more money than the Smithsonian was willing to provide.

Two famous Western surveys became de facto extensions of the Castle. In 1867, Baird told his friend Ferdinand Hayden that the state of Nebraska needed a leader for a survey of the state's resources. A doctor of medicine as well as a geologist, Hayden undertook the job with typical enthusiasm, and over the years sent Baird all his natural-history specimens. His trans-Missouri exploits so captivated Congress that in 1869 it underwrote an expansion of the effort, and named it, under the aegis of the Department of the Interior, the United States Geological Survey of the Territories.

Hayden's dedication to collecting earned him nickname, among the Sioux, of "Man-who-picks-up-tones-running." Among scientists, the speed and exu-berance of his scientific travels brought into question the reliability of his reports, although no one discounted the awesome amount of terrain covered by the former Megatherium.

Hayden's accomplishments included a thorough reconnaissance of western Wyoming and Colorado. Some of his best "acquisitions" were people, among them his resident paleontologist, Edward Drinker Cope, of the Phila-delphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Cope convinced Hayden in 1873 to issue bulletins that gave quick credit to scientists for their discoveries. A year later, Cope dis-covered the Eocene fossil beds of northern New Mexico that contained distinctive remains of early mammals. (Cope would later become embroiled in a famous paleon-tological controversy with the equally renowned Othniel C. Marsh, a long-time friend of Baird's.)

Hayden's young photographer, William Henry Jackson, with whom he spent nine expeditionary seasons, essentially invented the role of intrepid photographer in the American West. Working with a heavy box camera and tripod, a portable darkroom, chemicals, easily shat-tered glass plates, and a mule, Jackson took thousands of photographs, including the first and most memorable of the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. (Hayden wanted that unique country set aside as a national park, a suggestion originally made by George Catlin as earlyas 1832.)

Another artist, Thomas Moran, was allowed by Hayden to accompany the expedition out of Ogden, Utah, that entered the little-known and even less understood Yellowstone country. In 1872, Moran produced the great, heroic American landscape painting, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which today hangs in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.

Photographer and painter influenced each other's work, lending detail and scope. The photographs had the most scientific value, however. Hayden wrote in his fifth annual report that they were "of the highest value...nearly 400 negatives of the remarkable scenery o: the routes as well as the canyon, falls, lakes, geysers and hot springs.... They have proved...of very great value in the preparation of the maps and this report." Jackson would go on to produce the first photographs of Colorado' Mountain of the Holy Cross, as well as of that state's ancient cliff-dwellings in the Mancos Valley of Mesa Verde.

In 1867, the Army hired the leader of the California Geological Survey, Clarence Iking, a renaissanc man of daunting intellectual and social abilities, to con-duct a scientific appraisal of the 40th parallel from California to the Great Plains. This roughly coincided with the transcontinental rail route that was expected to attract both trains and settlers. Icing contributed to the Smithsonian; he also exposed a massive gem hoax that put both science and himself in a good public light.

In 1871, Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler, of the Army's Engineer Corps, began a massive survey beyond the 100th meridian, an ambitious attempt to sys tematically partition and map the American West. Icing" survey served as a model. Wheeler, who lost three men to the Apaches in the Southwest, donated more than 62,000 specimens to the Institution. The Western surveys contributed substantially t the knowledge of geology, ornithology, paleontology, botany, entomology, and zoology in the inter-mountain West-and to the Smithsonian's collections. They involve the Institution in the ongoing drama of the unraveling the continent's past, a colossal study of ancient forma-tions and cultures, and, as scientists began to see, of the present, too.

The best known "surveyor" of them all, the nary most resonant of the West during this period, was John Wesley Powell, who would go on to play a significant role at the Smithsonian Institution.

Profile: Beyond the Plateau

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