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

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СКАЧАТЬ already a rising star, emerged from the voyage as one of the preeminent paleontologists of his day. His genealogy of the horse (eventually constructed using findings from this and subsequent Marsh expeditions) was acknowledged by no less than Charles Darwin as the most significant evidence for the theory of evolution since the 1859 publication of Origin of Species. Marsh’s young assistants won their own share of fame, including a detailed article about their adventures in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, one of the most widely read journals of the day.²⁰

      The Marsh expedition provided Grinnell with a unique exposure to the West that would shape his thinking in fundamental ways. He became one of the last members of his generation—of any generation—to experience the West as it had been. Grinnell had traversed unexplored land, hunted for subsistence, dodged hostile Indians, and for a brief time lived the life of an 1830s trapper—anachronistic even in 1870.²¹

      Yet even as he lived out this “primitive West,” as he called it, Grinnell was on the cutting edge of something wholly new. Professor Marsh, in the words of historian William H. Goetzmann, “had discovered a new Western horizon.” Marsh—with Grinnell along for the ride—was in the forward guard of a new generation of explorers. Their predecessors had seen the West primarily through the prism of territorial rivalry and/or commercial opportunity. Marsh saw buried in western sands the “rich rewards” of “scientific truths.”²²

      There was another important aspect to Grinnell’s time with the Marsh expedition. Five months of digging up fossil remains had given him a tangible experience with the fragility of life—indeed the fragility of whole species. Like Lucy Audubon’s philosophy of self-denial, the notion that nature was fragile ran directly counter to a core tenet of Gilded Age and robber baron belief—the “myth of inexhaustibility.”²³ According to this belief, nature, and the western United States in particular, was an untapped land of Goshen, a collection of unbounded resources to be developed and exploited for the betterment of humankind. A generation of early western settlers, and then their children in the Gilded Age, drew inspiration from writings such as Lansford W. Hastings’s The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California in 1844:

       I can not but believe, that the time is not distant, when those wild forests, trackless plains, untrodden valleys, and the unbounded ocean, will present one grand scene, of continuous improvements, universal enterprise, and unparalleled commerce: when those vast forests, shall have disappeared, before the hardy pioneer; those extensive plains, shall abound with innumerable herds, of domestic animals; those fertile valleys, shall groan under the immense weight of their abundant products; when those numerous rivers shall teem with countless steam-boats, steam-ships, ships, barques and brigs; when the entire country, will be everywhere intersected, with turnpike roads, rail-roads and canals; and when, all the vastly numerous, and rich resources, of that now, almost unknown region, will be fully and advantageously developed.²⁴

      Hastings’s vision of complete human conquest provides a stark counterpoint to Grinnell’s celebration of the wild Green River landscape created by “the hand of a greater being than man.”

      Grinnell’s first reactions to the West were more visceral than intellectual—but they were not superficial. He craved the adventure and was deeply affected by the beauty of what he saw. In an 1873 article in Forest and Stream magazine, Grinnell would write of the Green River Valley that “the sportsman or naturalist will find here much to attract and delight him. And perhaps he will even be tempted, as I once was, to sever for a time the ties that bind him to his eastern home.”²⁵

      Far from severing his ties to the East, though, Grinnell was about to secure them. In the contest between Lucy Audubon and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt appeared to have won.

      Less than a month after his return to New York, remembered Grinnell, “I entered my father’s office at 36 Broad Street, as a clerk without pay.” His father, by 1870, was Vanderbilt’s principal Wall Street agent. His father’s business partner was Horace F. Clark, Vanderbilt’s son-in-law. George Bird Grinnell, it appeared, would follow in his father’s footsteps. “[O]n talking it over with my father I found that he was anxious to have me go into business, to relieve him, and ultimately to take his place. This seemed the proper thing to do.”²⁶

      The Marsh expedition had awakened in Grinnell a deep passion, but for the time being anyway, he would cede to the wishes of his father. The great engine of the Gilded Age was barreling forward, and instead of jumping off, Grinnell was climbing aboard. As for pursuit of his western dreams, “the knowledge of the grief this would give my parents pulled me back again.”²⁷

       CHAPTER THREE

       “Barbarism Pure and Simple”

       Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.

      —GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, July 1872

      I had always had a settled dislike for the business,” was George Bird Grinnell’s understated summary of his time at his father’s firm, Geo. B. Grinnell and Company.¹ After the adventure and excitement of five months in the wild and wooly West, Grinnell settled in, as best he could, to his new life as a Wall Street broker. With his father as tutor, he learned the basics of buying and selling stocks. There were also more complicated lessons, including the high-stakes transactions of purchasing stocks—especially railroad stocks—“on a margin.” The risks of such deals would later become painfully apparent. But in the exuberance of the early 1870s, Grinnell remembered that there was no thought but that prices “would go much higher.”²

      Grinnell, eager to please his parents, kept his nose to the grindstone during the long and tedious days at the brokerage house. His escape came in the evenings, when he retreated to Audubon Park, there to pursue his love for the outdoors through various vicarious activities. One outlet was a continuing relationship with Professor O.C. Marsh. Marsh had asked Grinnell to keep his eye out for the fossils and osteological materials that were “constantly coming into the menageries and taxidermists’ shops in New York.” When Grinnell found interesting pieces, he secured them for Marsh. Grinnell also took up a hobby popular among hunters and anglers of the day, taxidermy, with birds as his particular focus. Most nights, Grinnell wrote, he would spend “two or three hours of the evening down in the cellar, where I had an excellent outfit for mounting birds.”³

      None of these activities, though, sufficed to fill the void he felt for true adventure. “In the summer of 1872 I was anxious again to go out West.” In particular, Grinnell wanted to undertake the quintessential western activity of the day—the buffalo hunt. “[T]hese hunts of the Indians [had] been described to me with a graphic eloquence that filled me with enthusiasm as I listened to the recital, and I had determined that if ever the opportunity offered I would take part in one.” With the assistance of Major Frank North (who had guided the Marsh expedition up the Loup River), Grinnell arranged for a hunt, and not just any hunt. Grinnell, guided by Frank North’s younger brother, Luther “Lute” North, would accompany an entire tribe of Pawnee Indians on their annual foray in the wild Republican River Valley of western Kansas.⁴

      THE BUFFALO THAT GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, AT AGE 22, SOUGHT TO kill, had been a fixture on the Great Plains of North American for thousands of generations.

      Ancestors of the modern buffalo walked across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia sometime between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago. One of these ancestors, Bison latifrons, was 20 percent larger than a modern buffalo and carried an intimidating rack of horns spreading seven feet. Bison latifrons shared СКАЧАТЬ