A Mudshow Season

Rock Springs, WY. 100 miles. 70 F. Perfect circus weather. The early American Circus was more than just a form of entertainment. The circus aspired to astound and educate as well, to spark debate and awe. (We still do.) For every fakery offered by Phineas T. B. the traveling sideshows and museums attached to the circus offered a dozen objects of true natural curiosity. !9th Century American sought enlightenment, debate, and education in a open forum no longer encountered in more modern times. A few miles from Rock Spings the Flaming Gorge a fossil bed of spectacular proportions provided the backdrop for one of the more unusual 19th Century philosophical and scientific feuds. For 20 years, roughly from 1870 to 1890 two American naturalists, O.T. Marsh of Yale, and Edward Drinker Cope of Haverford College waged what became known as the Bone Wars, across the vast landscape of the America West. From the Bones Wars arose the modern science of paleontology. The cost to both men was enormous, and their animosity knew no boundaries. Marsh was the heir to the vast Peabody fortune. In his pursuit of fossils he would he expend his entire worth, E. D. Cope, perhaps the greatest of all American scientists would sacrifice everything in his efforts to one up Marsh. Between them they would describe dozens of the dinosauriia that still populate the imaginations of our children. And ironically, when all was said and done, the reputations of both men would be eclipsed by another bone digger who came to visit the Flaming Gorge, Mr Barum Brown of the American Museum of Natural history, named of course for the circus man who ignited so many imaginations. (By the way, Cope got the last laugh. When the time came fpr taxonomists to describe the human species Homo Sapiens, t’was Cope’s skull in museum finery that came to represent our kind.)