The Horse

CHAPTER 1

The Dawn of the Horse

Equine Evolution and Bone Wars

The enticing and seducing whisper of the Wild West was summoning Othniel Charles Marsh. The Civil War had been over for three years, and the vast, windswept prairies and majestic cloud-piercing mountains motioned for American Manifest Destiny. The war-weary nation was licking its wounds and trying to forget four years of unforgiving slaughter that left 750,000 Americans dead but ultimately unshackled 4.2 million human beings from the bondage of chattel slavery. For many like Othniel Marsh, the untamed West was the epitome of freedom and the essence of the rugged frontier spirit.

Born into modest means in Lockport along the Erie Canal in western New York, Marsh, a dour, scraggly bearded thirty-seven-year-old bachelor, had nothing tying him down. He purchased a train ticket to the newly established Wyoming Territory and methodically packed and bundled the bare necessities of a paleontologist: notebooks, pencils, shovels, picks, a well-worn straw boater hat, and, of course, a six-shooter pistol. In short order, restless men and women like Othniel Marsh transformed the West.

The providential opportunities were as endless as the horizon stretching seamlessly beyond the eternal grassland prairies and cascading foothills of the Rocky Mountains, to the sparkling, wave-crested waters of the Pacific. Fortunes awaited in the boomtown gold and silver mines. Fertile and vacant land hungered for the cultivating cleaves of the plow and the ranching hoofbeats of horses and cattle. Ferocious fur-bearing beasts howled from the rogue silhouettes of the snowy peaks. Adventure and amusement beckoned from whiskey-soaked saloons, sweaty bordellos, and dodgy gambling dens west of the Mississippi River.

Within this Gilded Age of upheaval, war, and shifting cultural and economic landscapes, railroads opened the door to westward expansion and, in the process, unlocked a window to our petrified past. The so-called Bone Wars between 1868 and 1892 witnessed a frenzy of trailblazing-and, at times, ruthlessly cutthroat-fossil expeditions and momentous discoveries. Rival fossil hunters and bone collectors scoured and combed the rich beds of (what are now) Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Montana.

To climb the professional ladder and attain the accompanying financial windfalls of celebrity status, callous and vindictive American and European paleontologists resorted to bribery, theft, sabotage, violence, and slander. Allegiances were fickle, and alliances fleeting. In this contentious age of embryonic Darwinian evolution, unearthing fossils meant fame, fortune, and academic immortality.

Given the increasing popularity of paleontology, and with successive and seemingly unearthly finds dominating the press and captivating popular imagination, in 1866 the millionaire financier, banker, and philanthropist George Peabody donated $150,000 ($3 million in today's money) for the construction of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. In a brazen act of nepotism, the institution promptly appointed its benefactor's nephew, Othniel Charles Marsh, professor of paleontology (the first such academic position in North America) and a trustee of the museum. Marsh was an unlikely candidate to seize the crown of early American paleontology.

Subsidized by his uncle, Marsh had previously studied geology, anatomy, and paleontology at Yale, followed by three years at various institutions in Germany. Although not yet established, he was talented, keen, energetic, and-most importantly, given the sizable expense of research excursions-fully funded. In 1868 Marsh packed his duffle, holstered his pistol, and bought passage (quite ironically as it would turn out) on one of the first "iron horse" trains to chug west on the overland route of the newly constructed Union Pacific Railroad.

During a quick pit stop on the Nebraska-Wyoming border, Marsh took the opportunity to stretch his legs and chat with the locals, explaining in the process the purpose of his trip: he was a fossil hunter. To his surprise, he was presented with fragments of bones that residents had unearthed while digging a well. He quickly assured them that they were not human remains nor, much to their disappointment, those of prehistoric saber-toothed tigers.

Marsh realized, as he later wrote, that they were "many fragments and a number of entire bones, not of man, but of horses, diminutive indeed, but true equine ancestors." Upon further examination, Marsh had acquired the bones of four separate horse species, including a small, odd-looking horse "scarcely a yard in height, and each of his slender legs was terminated in three toes." Financed by a $100,000 inheritance from Peabody, who passed away in 1869, Marsh returned to the Wild West on numerous archaeological research trips to dig fossils, hunt bison, and dodge danger.

During one of these adventures in 1870, Marsh ran into Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the theater in Salt Lake City. The Mormon leader immediately set about interrogating him about his equine fossils. Bewildered by the intense probing, Marsh politely answered the questions while his team of Yale paleontology students, in the words of participant C. W. Betts, "flirted with twenty-two daughters of Brigham Young in a box at the theatre."

Mormon theology posits that the horse was present around 589 BCE, when the prophets arrived in the Americas. According to 1 Nephi 18:25, from the Book of Mormon, "And it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise, as we journeyed in the wilderness, that there were beasts in the forests of every kind, both the cow and the ox, and the ass, and the horse." Young's persistent line of questioning now made sense to Marsh. He was looking for hard scientific evidence to corroborate the spiritual passage.

The seemingly lawless, no-holds-barred competition among bone collectors unfolding on the front lines of American settlement was set against the bloody backdrop of the American Indian Wars. Caught up in this cyclical frontier violence, not to mention the perils posed by rival paleontologists, Marsh and his team carried rock hammers in one hand and, in true Indiana Jones fashion, Colt revolvers or carbine rifles in the other.

During one expedition in 1872 in southwest Wyoming Territory, for example, Edward Drinker Cope, the rival paleontologist, had been spying on Marsh's team from a craggy outcropping. At dusk, when the team packed up, Cope crept down to the site. Emerging from the skulking shadows, he was elated to find a skull fragment, several teeth, and other assorted bones. The unique combination of anatomical features represented in his looted specimen all pointed to a new, undiscovered dinosaur species. Instant fame and the satisfaction of publicly humiliating his archnemesis Marsh was as good as carved in stone.

What Cope did not know until after he had touted the discovery and published an academic paper on his groundbreaking new fossil was that he had been set up, duped, and played for a fool. Marsh had been aware of Cope's clumsy espionage and deceptively instructed his diggers to "salt" the ground with the skull, teeth, and bones of miscellaneous fossil species. The credulous Cope arrogantly took the bait. When his blunder was publicly exposed, he had to recant his findings and, in the process, tarnished his reputation. Marsh got the better of his chief adversary in this round of the Bone Wars.

In addition to clashing with Cope, Marsh was often a spectator to the fierce skirmishes between the US Cavalry and mounted Indigenous warriors during the last colonizing campaigns of American progress. On one harrowing expedition near the Bighorn Basin of northwest Wyoming, Marsh hired a young army scout named William Cody as a tracker. Before arriving at their destination, the future Buffalo Bill galloped away to investigate a scuffle with Pawnee warriors. Later in the day, these same Pawnee horsemen became boisterously captivated when Marsh, an influential advocate for Indigenous rights, showed them some ancient fossils of their most prized possession: horses.

On another occasion, Marsh met and chatted cordially with the famed Oglala Lakota (Sioux) leader Red Cloud. Marsh listened with solemn interest as Red Cloud methodically articulated the plight and starvation of his people. The combative atmosphere on the Northern Plains was aggravated by the encroachment of settlers onto unceded Sioux land and the corruption of federal politicians and agents known as the Indian Ring.

Furious with the treatment of Red Cloud and the Sioux, Marsh traveled to Washington and met personally with high-ranking members of the Ring, who brushed him off like an old fossil and stonewalled him at every opportunity. They even tried to discredit Marsh by circulating falsehoods that he was a drunkard who committed scandalous and depraved sexual acts with his "Yale Boys" while excavating fossils out west.

Eventually Marsh secured an audience with President Ulysses S. Grant, alerting him to the frontier tinderbox fueled partially by the corruption of his own cabinet. The Sioux, stressed Marsh, received nothing more than "frayed blankets, rotten beef, and concrete-hard flour." His humanitarian efforts on behalf of Indigenous peoples did not go unnoticed. "I thought he would do like all of the other white men, and forget me when he went away," Red Cloud remembered. "But he did not. He told the great father [President Grant] everything just as he promised he would, and I think he is the best white man I ever saw." By this time, however, Grant had lost control of his own administration, and his subordinates, including those in the Indian Ring, were running roughshod over his policies and his presidency.

Othniel Marsh, an eccentric and awkward paleontologist, had headed out west to find and catalog equine fossils. In the process, he helped to bring down one of the most infamous and corrupt political rings in American history. In 1875, after Marsh's tireless petitioning on behalf of Red Cloud and all Indigenous peoples, and a series of scathing newspaper reports, the Indian Ring, or "Trader Post Scandal," was finally exposed. Numerous members, including prominent politicians, were forced to resign from their positions or faced impeachment trials. Appalled by the brazen embezzlement of the Ring, in the spring of 1876 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer even testified on behalf of the Sioux. Three months later, he would die at their hands.

While this encounter in June 1876 along the greasy grass of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory may have been Custer's Last Stand, it was also, in a sense, the last stand of Indigenous autonomy and self-determination. The Sioux won the battle, but with their Ghost Dance massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890 at the hands of the US Cavalry, they lost the war, sealing the fate of Indigenous peoples across the United States.

By 1900, their total population hit its historic nadir at 237,000 survivors, and their land holdings had been reduced to 52 million acres from 155 million only fifteen years earlier. With Indigenous peoples removed, relocated, shattered, and subjugated, the West was open for business for miners, farmers, ranchers, trappers, and fossilists.

As the ongoing Bone Wars intensified, with the aid of Peabody's money, Marsh bribed the diggers of other paleontologists, including Cope, to reroute the most exotic, complete, and valuable fossils to him at Yale. Ironically, or perhaps hypocritically, like the corrupt Indian Ring he had helped to unmask, Marsh was not above using unscrupulous tactics to further his own financial and professional agendas. "Within a few years, Marsh had so many crates of fossilized bones stored in the attic of Yale's Peabody Museum," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Philipps in Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, and Future of the Mustang, "that he had to prop up the ceiling with extra beams." Following his death in 1899, it took a team of paleontologists over sixty years to unpack and inventory his enormous collection of fossils.

Having assembled this vast trove, which included the partial remains of more than thirty ancestral species of the horse, Marsh began the arduous task of trying to piece together the complex puzzle of equine evolution. In doing so, he catapulted British naturalist Charles Darwin's audacious new theory of evolution forward by cataloging the fossilized ancestral sequence to the modern horse. He started the hereditary branch at one hoof, the most obvious recent relative, and worked backward to those species with multiple toes. "The line of descent appears to be direct," Marsh announced, "and the remains now known supply every important form." He labeled his early, small, three-toed Wyoming specimen Eohippus, or "dawn horse."

Inadvertently, and initially unknowingly, Marsh became entangled in the rancorous and heretical debate surrounding evolution among the British scientific community following Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. We must remember that in Darwin's day, evolution was a perverse and profane assault upon the doctrines of Christianity. To many, including academics, it was blasphemous pseudoscientific rubbish.

Equine evolution was originally thought to be an orderly and direct chronological branch, staunchly obedient to the simple, uncomplicated organic laws of natural selection. Distinguishable anatomical modifications and adaptations were easily identified, specifically those amendments to feet and teeth, with successive specimens stacked like Russian nesting dolls. This galloping journey from ancient ancestor to existing Equus was frequently touted as the literal textbook example of unambiguous "straight line" evolutionary progression and the ever-popular exhibit A for museums.

This evolutionary canard is known as orthogenesis: an outmoded theory that variations follow a particular direction and are not merely sporadic or fortuitous. In short, orthogenesis would imply that evolution has a clear objective, a single-minded commitment to a desired end state or biological ambition, and that each extinct relic somehow gave rise to a superior replacement. "The orthogenetic template has . . . influenced millions of lay people," concedes distinguished paleontologist at the University of Florida Bruce MacFadden, "many of whom visit natural history museums with turn-of-the-century exhibits that convey 100-year-old ideas." Naturally, evolution is an interlaced forest of tangled trees, full of branches, twigs, blind turns, and, more often than not, dead ends.