Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.
An artist’s depiction of a Dinohyus hollandi, a 20-million-year-old scavenger distantly related to today’s swine. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.
The desire for vengeance is an old story and not uncommon. It’s one I share, one we all probably share. Once, I had a boss who made me loathe a job I loved. After eight hours, I’d leave work thankful I survived another day of intentional obstructions, impediments meant to delay progress or produce failure. I learned later the boss did the same to others. You’ve experienced something similar, haven’t you? What did you do? I bit my tongue, completed my contract, and moved on. At the time, I’d wished I had a chance to strike back, to return the favor.
This story is not about vengeance, however. Not really. Rather, it’s about unintended consequences and the actions of ordinary citizens. Olaf Peterson was a thin man with a long, thin neck and gaunt face. In the one black-and-white photograph of him on display in Agate Fossil Beds National Monument’s visitor center, he sports a mustache and what might be a rectangular goatee. His dark trousers are filthy, spotted with light-colored dirt from working one of the fossil quarries.
Although dirty, two of the men beside him, his field crew, smile for the camera. The other squints as if he’s glancing into the sun. Unlike these men, Peterson looks tired and unhappy. The pick ax he leans on could be more than a prop; it could be what he needs to keep from falling over. The pall of exhaustion, underscored by dark crescents beneath each eye, leave Peterson appearing as black in mood as the tie clipped to the white shirt he wears. One can’t blame him.
William J. Holland, Peterson’s boss, directed the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was brilliant, ambitious, and committed to making the Carnegie Museum an equal to older, more prestigious institutions such as New York’s American Museum, Chicago’s Field Museum, and the U.S. National Museum in Washington, D.C.
Peterson, a Swedish immigrant, brilliant himself, felt insecure; he worried about his job and prospects. When his brother-in-law, the paleontologist John Bell Hatcher, died unexpectedly in July 1904, Peterson, Hatcher’s field assistant, was working in western Nebraska. Distraught, he wanted to return home to aid his sister and attend the funeral. Holland, however, refused Peterson’s request. More important for Holland was the discovery of fossils that put the Carnegie Museum on the map.
William J. Holland photographed during the years he served as chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. Photo courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Research Library.
Holland got his wish. The twenty-million-year-old mammal fossils Peterson dug up that summer—Palaeocastor, Menoceras, Calicothere, and Beardog—made the Agate Springs quarries a classic paleontological site, the source for these species’ type specimens. Holland’s quest for prestige also led to immortality of a sort: eternal association with an extinct scavenger.
While working against his wishes, Peterson unearthed a never-before-named bison-sized entelodont, a relative of swine, at the Agate Springs quarries. As discoverer, Peterson gained more than bragging rights, professional prestige, and job security.
With discovery came naming privileges and sweet vengeance. To honor his boss, Peterson named this scavenger with a three-foot-long skull and bone-crushing teeth the Dinohyus hollandi: “Terrible Pig” Holland. Holland, the “Terrible Pig,” became the punch line of paleontological jokes. As described in a recent post, Holland’s ambition alienated James and Harold Cook; it impelled them to preemptively claim the fossil hills—University and Carnegie Hills—for the benefit of science.
A “Terrible Pig” on display at the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument visitor center. This skeleton is a reproduction cast from the original remains recovered by Peterson and other excavators early in the Twentieth Century. Photo by Fred MacVaugh provided courtesy of the National Park Service.
We can’t know in hindsight what might have happened a little more than 100 years ago had Holland and the Carnegie Museum succeeded in claiming the Agate Springs fossil quarries and, as was their desire, excluded competing museums and universities from excavating the bone bed. We might have a park; a Carnegie Museum paleontologist did, after all, discover dinosaur quarries in 1909 that six years later became Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado and Utah. But we might not, if not for the Cooks. Maybe, too, it was Holland’s experience at the Agate fossil quarries that influenced his later handling of the dinosaur quarries discovered the year after Peterson and his field crews withdrew from Carnegie Hill.
Today, as you know, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument is one of 397 units in the national park system. Despite widespread present-day discontent with the federal government, a majority of Americans, including remarkably similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans, agree that the preservation of public lands as national parks (and forests) is one accomplishment Congress has gotten right. Continued preservation and protection of these lands, moreover, according to a recent nonpartisan voter survey, is considered a patriotic duty by liberals and conservatives alike.
As the National Park Service approaches its 100th anniversary on Aug. 25, 2016 (this coming Saturday is its 96th anniversary), we should remember that national monuments like Agate Fossil Beds represent more than common ground, American ground. It and others like nearby Scottsbluff National Monument display America at its best, as the writer Wallace Stegner once proclaimed: “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”
The operative word in Stegner’s claim is “we,” as in “We the people.” National parks aren’t the products of government alone; they’re the products of ordinary citizens like James and Harold Cook and their descendents—people like you and I who care enough to act to protect places of natural and cultural importance not only for us but for others.
This spirit inspired the Cooks to preserve the Agate Springs Ranch fossil quarries as well as Scottsbluff, where for a time in the 1930s Harold, a local citizen, worked as volunteer park custodian. Because of this ethic of preservation the Cooks and ordinary citizens like us embrace, people from around the world visit and tour not only one of the world’s most significant Miocene Epoch fossil sites but also places—Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—that symbolize the pioneering spirit characteristic of the hundreds of thousands of emigrants, including immigrants, who passed through Nebraska and by Scottsbluff’s towering cliffs.
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger