When I compare what I have lost with what I have gained, what I
have missed with what attained, little room do I find for pride? I
am aware how many days have been idly spent, how like an arrow,
the good intent has fallen short or been turned aside. But who shall dare
to measure loss and gain? In this wise? Defeat may be victory and
disguise. The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide. Loss and Gain
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. If you've ever visited Colorado, or if you're lucky
enough to live here, then you know it's an outdoor enthusiast's playground. Hiking,
biking, skiing, The list goes on and on. But there's another
side to the centennial state that most people will never see. It's a side
that's a little darker, a little more sinister, and a little bit strange.
Welcome to Strange Colorado. Months and months ago, I received an episode
suggestion from a man named Ryan. He informed me that he is a geologist
here in Colorado who specializes in front range geology, and he knew of a
story all about drama and intrigue in sabotage and infighting, everything a good reality
TV series would have, but it was all surrounding dinosaur bones. Of course,
I was intrigued, and I immediately got to work researching this topic and
soon discovered that it was a huge undertaking for some one who is not a
geologist or a paleontologist at all. So I have been procrastinating covering this story
since I discovered it, But today I figured, what the heck I think
we all know by now. I am not a scientist or an expert in
really anything. I'm just here to share the fun stories that I come across
in the best way I can, and that's what I'm going to try to
do today. This episode is all about what's known as the Bone Wars and
the other rush to Colorado that you probably haven't heard of. Now, much
of this story takes place in other parts of the US, but I promise
Colorado is featured heavily, so just hang in there. This is a story
worth our time. If there's one thing that gets mentioned most often on this
podcast, it's probably the gold Rush. Without the insatiable hunger that man has
for the yellow, shiny element that lies beneath our soil, Colorado would look
a lot different today, but there was another rush that Colorado experienced that most
of us probably have never heard of. So now, as we like to
do around here, we're going to take it way way back. I've mentioned
this on previous episodes, and I feel like it's probably a fairly obvious fact,
but prehistoric Colorado was a vastly different place than the Colorado we know today.
If you've ever been to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and taken
a stroll through the Prehistoric Journey exhibit that's up on the third level, which
you should do, highly recommend. When you enter this exhibit, it you
start in a dark hallway that just has screens on the wall, and it
shows you the formation of the Earth. From here, you walk progressively through
each phase in our history as a planet, but specifically Colorado. It features
all of the life forms and plant life and animals that have existed on this
land before we got here. It's fascinating and immersive and really educational too.
I could go into detail about all of the different eras in Colorado history,
but a lot of you would probably shut this episode off if I did,
so, We're just going to kind of do a speed walk through some of
them. So, like I said in the exhibit, you start at the
creation of the Earth and then you kind of fast forward to three hundred million
years ago in the Paleozoic, where we had mountains, but they were different
mountains than we do now. And we see trees as tall as one hundred
feet up rivers, streams, coastlines. We have millipedes that are five feet
long, and cockroaches as big as housecats. This is one era in history
I would never personally wish to visit. But the Earth continues to change and
grow and wobble around in space, and we see many different types of eras.
We have a sandy tropical phase, a gooey shoreline era, and we've
even been completely submerged under an ocean. And then about one hundred and fifty
million years ago during the late Jurassic period, when Colorado is a tropical,
hot, marshy mass of plant life. This is when the dinosaurs are really
living their lives. And I mean big dinosaurs. We have apatosaurs, the
big long necked dinosaurs, and stegosaurs, we have t rexes, and they're
all here when they meet their doom. And even though it's still a contested
event. I'm just going to go ahead and say an asteroid's lammed into the
earth. Whatever happened, all of their bodies were able to be mass preserved
in the marshy wetlands here in our state, which we now call the Morrison
Formation. As the eons tick by, the bodies of these massive prehistoric creatures
decompose and the calcium in their bones converts to minerals through different natural processes,
and now we have fossils that are essentially rocks in the exact same shape as
the bones once were. Sometimes you even get an impression of the skin and
the texture of the skin and feathers around the fossils, so we can actually
see what these guys looked like on the outside too. There's also things like
footprints and petrified wood, plant impressions and insects that are similarly preserved in this
formation. In places like this, it's an incredible find for scientists because basically
what happens is you get an entire world of ancient life all preserved together in
one location. So we have this gorgeous deposit of ancient life just sitting in
Colorado in the middle of all of this rush for gold and silver and coal
and everything else that's going on. Meanwhile, a man by the name of
Arthur Lakes is born in eighteen forty four in the Channel Islands. He was
the son of an Episcopalian minister, and thus he kind of followed in his
father's footsteps, and in eighteen sixty three he attended Oxford University, that's nothing
to sniff at, where he studied theology and natural sciences. During this time,
especially in Europe, natural history was really becoming a fascination and a growing
field in science following the publication of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The ideas of
survival of the fittest and all of the things that Darwin presented in this book
opened up a whole new vista of possibilities to the scientific community, and the
rush to find the evidence to prove and further this seri was on, especially
given that just a few decades previously, the very first fossiles were actually identified
as having belonged to extinct ancient reptiles. In eighteen forty one, an anatomus
named Sir Richard Owen actually coined the term dinosauria, which means terrible lizard,
to cover the whole group of these massive fossils of reptiles that they were digging
up. Now, it's not like people had never found fossils before this,
but typically they were attributed to having belonged to an extinct race of giant humans,
or they were dragons and monsters. As Lakes is coming up in the
world and discovering and studying the natural sciences at Oxford University, he is essentially
getting a front row seat to the breaking news in the scientific world related to
what would become paleontology. Around this time as well, or a little bit
before. In eighteen fifty four, a man named Ferdinand Hayden discovered fossils along
the Missouri River during his expedition of the Americas. And in case you're curious,
the fossils were actually teeth that had belonged to an iguanodon. So here's
Lakes studying and learning about all of this and seeing the growing intensity that surrounds
dinosaurs. And while the discovery of the fossils wasn't exactly at gold Rush level,
becoming immortalized in the annals of scientific history by making a discovery or naming
a dinosaur was its own kind of thrill that more and more men of science
were chasing, and Lakes had a nap for geology. He could read the
layers of the earth like a book. He could tell you where coal deposits
were, or where gold and silver would likely be. He was passionate about
his interests, and he was very talented at them as well. In eighteen
sixty six, Lakes decided to make the trip over to New Brunswick, Canada,
because, like so many men of his day, he wanted to get
to the American wild West. So he worked his way there and finally arrived
to Colorado in January of eighteen sixty seven. Here he set up shop in
what is now Golden and helped establish the Calvary Episcopal Church there, being that
he was in ordained Episcopalian minister. He worked under Bishop George Randall, who
soon hired him to teach writing and drawing at the local prep school known as
Jarvis Hall. And if you're at all familiar with Colorado colleges, you know
that Jarvis Hall is now part of the Colorado School of Mines. This area
in Colorado was ideal for Arthur Lakes. He absolutely loved nothing more than being
outside in all of the splendor that the Colorado Rockies had to offer, and
just hiking all through the different exposed geological layers and sketching and drawing and mapping
everything out that he came across. His passions were teaching and sketching and writing,
and he was good at all of them. And luckily for Lakes,
those three passions combined beautifully for what he was doing now. Of course,
as I said, Lakes was well aware of fossils and their potential existence in
Colorado. So in June of eighteen seventy four, Arthur was out hiking South
Table Mountain and he had a group of students with him, because one of
his favorite things to do was to take his students out into the world to
actually physically see and experience all of the things he was teaching. He would
have them sketch things and just really get a hands on experience in his class,
which sounds amazing. I mean, don't you just love it when teachers
are that way, they're the best ones. It was on one of these
hikes that one of his students, a kid named Peter Dotson, stumbled across
a massive tooth. They packed it up and brought it back to the School
of Mines, and the geologist there, Edward Berthoud, decided to wrap it
up and send it to a man named O. C. Marsh, who
was at the time the leader in paleontology and a professor at Yale. In
fact, he was the very first US professor of paleontology ever. But they
never heard anything from Marsh because you see, while all of this was going
on in Colorado and Arthur Lakes was busy minding his own business and thoroughly enjoying
his life that he had set up for himself, O. C. Marsh
was embroiled in a level of scientific drama that could rival any episode of The
Real Housewives. Now this is where the bone Wars come into play, and
we're gonna have to leave Colorado for just a few minutes because you're gonna want
to hear this. See, Marsh had a nemesis. We all usually have
someone we don't like or don't get along with, but very rarely do you
ever achieve the level of an actual nemesis, an enemy like Superman versus Lex
Luthor level hatred for someone in your life who was Marsha's Lex Luthor. You
might ask it was a man named Edward Cope. A little bit of backstory
on these two guys. Marsh was born in eighteen thirty one in New York
to a modest family of farmers. His mom died when he was just three
years old, and his father's ambitions for his son didn't extend past just handing
him the farm when he got old enough. But Marsh had ambition. He
was smart, and he had a passion for science, and luckily for him,
he also had a very wealthy uncle who wanted to invest in that passion.
He saw Marsh creating a real future and making a big impact in the
scientific community with the right amount of funding, so he paid for his nephew
to attend Yale University, where he would graduate with his Masters. After graduation,
he traveled to Germany to study the new and growing field of paleontology.
It was here in Germany that he met the twenty three year old Edward Cope.
Cope was younger than Marsh by nine years, but he came from money.
His family was a very wealthy family from Pennsylvania, and in fact they
were so wealthy the reason Cope was in Germany at all was because they didn't
want him to have to participate in a little thing called the Civil War,
So they got their son the heck out a dodge and sent him overseas.
While these two men came from very different backgrounds, their love and passion for
science and their interest in the new field of paleontology led them to becoming really
fast friends. After the conclusion of the Civil War and the dust had settled
enough for these men to return home, that's exactly what they did in eighteen
sixty four. They would keep in touch and maintain their friendship for a few
years after this. They even went on to name new species of dinosaurs that
they had discovered after each other. But the more fossils and new species they
each discovered, and the more strides they were making in their field, the
more and more they started to recognize that they were competing with each other,
and, as men sometimes do, they lost their ever loving minds in the
spirit of competition. It's safe to say that at this point they went from
friends to phreenemies to just enemies in pretty quick succession. The first shot across
the Bow actually came from marsh himself. You see, Edward Cope had come
across a quarry filled with fossils, and it was located in New Jersey.
He invited marsh Up to come check it out, because who else could appreciate
it better than his paleontology bestie. Once marsh saw just how chock full of
a new species and fossils this quarry was, he secretly went behind Cope's back
and contacted the owner of the quarry and made a deal with him to make
sure that any new fossils that they found going forward would be secretly sent directly
to marsh and be kept from Cope's knowledge. That's dirty pool right there.
Cope would later describe this as the beginning of the end for their friendship.
In retaliation, Cope decided that he was going to hurry up and get his
findings of a brand new species of pleiosaur published. But in his hurry,
he made a little bit of a mistake. When reconstructing the fossil to present
this new species of pleosaur to the world, he accidentally attached the head of
this pleiosaur to the end of its tail. Embarrassing. Yes, but it's
not like these mistakes didn't happen. I mean, if you've got the time,
google the Magdeburg Unicorn. That is a wild ride. But maybe the
worst part of this embarrassing puzzle piece being put in the wrong location was that
Cope was made aware of this mistake only when he revealed the fossil to the
world published his findings, and Marsh came in with a I think the head's
on the wrong end. It was a huge blow career wise to Cope,
and he was furious at Marsh. Cope hurriedly corrected his mistake and republished his
findings, and he even went so far as to attempt to purchase every single
copy of the American Philosophical Society Journal, where he had published the original findings
with the mistake, but it was too late. It was already out there.
Marsh actually wrote later saying that when he informed Cope of this mistake,
his vanity received a shock from which it had never recovered, and he has
since been my bitter enemy. Well, du Marsh. So it was all
out in the open then, and they pretty much just hated each other from
here on out. The rivalry was fierce, and it reached a fever pitch,
with one or the other sending spies to dig sites. One of them
even blew up a quarry filled with fossils just to keep the findings out of
the other's hands. The one thing that can be said from Marsh, though,
is that he really was very good in his field. He knew what
he was doing. He became the professor of paleontology at Yale, the first
one ever, and then he actually went on to be appointed as the chief
paleontologist for the US Geological Survey in Washington, O. C. Marsh was
paleontology in the US during this time, and even though Cope had gone so
far as to actually purchase and take over the American Naturalist Journal, which was
the premier publishing journal for all of the scientific discoveries, so that he could
shove Marsh out and not let him publish anything. I mean, you can't
go up against the actual government in this case. In the end, their
rivalries and exploding each other's dig sites would lead to both of them ending up
completely broke and destitute, out of work and dying alone. A classic case
of egos unleash and running rampant and running themselves right into the ground. But
it was thanks to this insane rivalry that the field of paleontology took huge strides
forward, the push to discover new species and get them published, and to
dig more into evolution and the different phases of the geological eras and the animals
that belonged in them experienced unprecedented growth and discovery during this time. So we
do have them to thank for that. So let's take it back to Colorado
and Lakes sends this tooth that he's found into O. C. Marsh at
Yale at the time, and he doesn't hear back because Marsh is a little
bit preoccupied with his own issues that he's got going on. Had Marsh paid
attention, he would have realized that this tooth was actually the first tooth ever
found belonging to a Tyrannosaurus rex. But we wouldn't know about that until the
year two thousand, when a doctor Kenneth Carpenter at Yale rediscovered the tooth back
in storage somewhere and figured out the story behind it. I met that was
a good day for him. March twentieth, eighteen seventy seven years after this
tooth gets sent into Yale, Lakes is again out and about collecting with a
friend named Henry Beckworth. He and a group of other local Golden Nights were
looking for fossilized plant life along the Dakota Hogback, which is what the Morrison
Formation here in Colorado is called. On this scouting expedition, rather than finding
a plant, they came upon a massive bone. This would be the first
of many bones found at this site, and Lakes sent the information once again
to OC Marsh at Yale, who once again ignored it. Since he didn't
hear back from Marsh on this one, he knew he had something major,
so he decided to reach out to the next best thing, and that was
Marsh's rival, Edward Cope. As soon as Marsh heard that Lakes was working
with Cope on a brand new massive discovery in Colorado, he immediately swooped in
and hired Lakes right out from under Cope's nose, and thus began the start
of what is known as the Dinosaur Bone Rush underneath the supervision of Arthur Lakes.
As they excavated the site over the next two years, they would find
apatosaurs, Stegosaurus, diplodocus, small crocodiles, amongst many other species. It
was a jackpot. Lakes actually traveled up and down the Morrison Formation uncovering more
and more species of dinosaur bones, even all the way up into Como,
Wyoming. As these excavations were taking place, Lakes would sit and paint the
scene or sketch the scene. He often used the medium of watercolors and pencils,
and he was very detailed in his drawings and depictions of the sites,
so much so that different layers of the earth were identifiable. We know now
today how the sites were excavated thanks to these drawings, and even different workers
in the field are recognizable from his sketches. After basically becoming the dinosaur Guy
of the wild West, in eighteen eighty Lakes was hired on as a full
time professor of geology at the Colorado School of Mines. For fifteen years,
Lakes continued to collect and store all sorts of fossils as he came upon them.
There were drawers and drawers filled with different fossils, and even today we
are still taking them out and cataloging them. He would also go on to
write a textbook called the Geology of Colorado or Deposits in eighteen eighty eight,
and then the Geology of Colorado Coal Deposits. In these books, he apped
out and sketched all of the coal fields in the state. And this book
was actually the foundation for the coal industry in Colorado for the next long,
long while. He was a genius basically, and during this time he was
a really popular guy, not just for the dinosaur bones. If you remember,
his forte is geology. So he was able to accurately pinpoint locations in
the state that would be likely to contain gold or silver or coal based on
the geologic formations he could see from the surface. This was huge. This
made people lots of money. I actually went back and found an article from
July twenty fourth, eighteen ninety seven in The Indicator from Pueblo that detailed the
findings of Professor Arthur Lakes about how productive he believed the Laplata District would be
in terms of gold and silver or In the article, it stated that he
believed it looked as though the area could be very productive. Spoiler alert.
He was absolutely right. Arthur Lakes was sort of one of those men who
lived his work, and it actually wasn't until eighteen eighty three when the thirty
nine year old bachelor finally married. Unfortunately for us, he married a sixteen
year old named Edith Slater, one of his students. You Arthur, but
I mean, according to all reports they were relatively happy, I guess,
and they had three children, boys named Arthur, Harold, and Walter.
But in eighteen ninety two, just eleven years later, Edith died after being
sick for a while. It was at this time that Lakes transferred to a
more lucrative job, working as the editor of the Colliery Engineer in Denver.
In eighteen ninety eight, would experience another loss when astray bullet from a pellet
gun fired by Arthur Junior ricochet and hit his nine year old baby brother,
Walter in the eye, killing him. They buried Walter next to Edith.
So aside from marrying a sixteen year old, he was a legend in geology
and paleontology and just the sciences in general. He was a dynamo in Colorado
history, as far as the formation of many of our programs and our coal
industry here. He's not a name that comes up often, but I think
it's mostly because he preferred to live a quiet life, being outside and sketching
his sketches and writing his books and teaching. He didn't want fame and glory
and all of that. He just wanted to pursue his passions and be happy,
and he did just that right up until November twentieth in nineteen seventeen,
when on one of his many travels documenting and learning and teaching and public speaking,
he died unexpectedly, probably from heart failure. As I said, his
works are still being combed through today. His catalogs and discoveries and boxes and
boxes of fossils and his sketches are some of the most important in regards to
the history of paleontology and how they excavated sites. Many of them actually hang
in what is now known as the Arthur Lakes Library at the School of Mines.
Now, if you want the chance to really get a first hand look
at the types of locations that Arthur Lakes was discovering and working in here in
Colorado, your best bet is to visit the amazingly preserved site of Dinosaur Ridge,
located off Alameda Parkway in Morris And, Colorado. I used to take
my kids there all the time when they were little. You know, most
kids go through that dinosaur phase. I never really left mine, but it's
an excellent opportunity to get outside for a really great walk. It is uphill,
so just beware, but all along the walkway you'll see the preserved footprints
of different species of dinosaurs, You'll see bones, and the views are immaculate.
There's also a visitor center with all sorts of fun dinosaur related goodies and
trinkets and toys and bones that you can buy for yourself. And there's a
play area for kids that's dinosaur themed. They can dig up their own dinosaur
bones out of the sand and climb around on dinosaurs. I highly highly recommend
it. It's actually one of the highest ranked track sites for dinosaurs in the
US and the world. And the best part is it's a nonprofit that is
dedicated to educating all of the visitors there about the science and the history of
all of the fossils and the resource is located in and near Dinosaur Ridge,
and teaching people how to take care of and make sure we preserve important sites
like these in the future. And you can find all of this information as
well as tickets and other helpful tips for planning a visit at Dino Ridge dot
org. So while marsh and Cope died broke and alone and ruined Lakes died
really fulfilled. So I guess the moral of this story is let's be a
Lakes, not a marsh or Cope. And while this one doesn't really have
any spooky aspects to it, maybe it's worth giving a ponder to the question
if we had dinosaurs here, why don't we have dinosaur ghosts? That would
be something. Sources for today's episode include Wikipedia, Colorado, Encyclopedia dot org,
and Dino Ridge dot org. Thanks for listening, Please remember to rate,
review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find
me on Facebook and Instagram at Strange Colorado Podcast. If you have a strange
story of your own or an episode suggestion, you can reach me at Strange
Colorado Podcast at gmail dot com.