MEMORIAL to BARNUM BROWN (1873-1963) G. EDWARD LEWIS U. S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado Barnum Brown, the Last and Most S
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MEMORIAL TO BARNUM BROWN (1873-1963) G. EDWARD LEWIS U. S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado Barnum Brown, the last and most successful of the great fossil hunters who led expeditions to the far corners of the earth during the Golden Age of vertebrate paleontological exploration, died on 5 February, 1963. Nothing short of a book would be adequate to do justice to this remarkable man's full life, his explora- tions, and other scientific achievements: he was associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1897 to 1963; although he did not explore the South Sea Islands, Madagas- car, or the Antipodes, he ranged far and wide over the major continents of the world and covered vast areas literally step by step. Barnum's parents were of old American stock: William Brown was a Virginian, born in 1833, who travelled westward to Wisconsin, where he married Clara Silver near Monticello, where she was born in 1840. They loaded their possessions into an ox-drawn covered wagon in 1859 and headed westward with their first child, Clara Melissa. They averaged 10 miles a day on the way to Kansas Territory where, near Lickskillet in Osage County, a second daughter, Alice Elizabeth, was born on 4 January 1860. Nearby in the same county was a place underlain by coal where they built a one-room cabin on Carbon Hill, to the west of which Carbondale sprang up some years later. The cabin doors were closed by flaps of canvas; the windows were covered with greased paper; there were cots, packing boxes, and barrel chairs for furniture. William Brown was a good farmer and a good man with livestock and animal transport. He began by raising corn, hogs, and cattle, but when the war broke out northeastern Kansas was in a turmoil, overrun by partisan irregulars of South and North, so he had to fall back on freighting for the government to support his family. When he was away with his wagon train, Clara Brown, her two small daughters, and a Newfoundland dog—who never let visiting Indians dismount—held down the cabin with no man in the house, never daring to state a preference for either side because sometimes Mrs. Brown had to feed Confederates in the morning, Yankees at noon, and deserters or renegades at night. The war ended at last; the crops and livestock could be raised in peace once more, and the family turned to removing coal for household use and for sale. The Browns' first son, Frank, was born 12 October, 1867; Barnum, the youngest child, was bom on 12 February, 1873. p 19 Downloaded from http://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-pdf/75/2/P19/3427655/i0016-7606-75-2-p19.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 P 20 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY The wagon train grew to half a dozen covered wagons, each with a capacity of 6 tons and drawn by three yokes of oxen. Every year William Brown made the round of frontier posts during spring, summer, and autumn, hauling supplies from the railhead at Fort Leavenworth by way of a roughly triangular route to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and back to Osage County. The farm, crops, livestock, freighting, and coal business prospered until there were 640 acres of productive land, 500 head of cattle, 31 hired men, and a hired girl to help Clara Brown in a new 10-room house. Barnum cut corn, fed livestock, stripped and sold coal, and thus became a paleontologist, because his favorite task was to follow the stripping plow and pick up the fossils that popped out of the overburden: as a small boy he got his first two specimens in this way, "a petrified cornucopia and a piece of fossil honeycomb" that show his first collections to have been corals and not vertebrates. The collection grew apace to the point where his mother made him move it from overflowing bureau drawers to the laundry shed outside the house, where a small museum began to take shape. His travels began in 1889 when Barnum and his father set out over the old wagon trail together in a horse-drawn rig; they slept on hay carried in the wagon bed. The buffalo had been killed off so recently that there were still many shaggy, hair- covered skulls strewn across the prairies. In the Nebraska Sand Hills they heard a skirmish-line-like fusillade one day; it turned out to be market hunters slaughtering Prairie chicken for shipment to the big cities. When they stripped the bark from old cottonwoods at Fort Laramie, Minie balls rained to the ground, in testimony of the few years since an exchange of shots with hostile Indians. On to Montana they went, up the Yellowstone to Mammoth Hot Springs and Yellowstone Lake; the last outpost of troops was encamped near the Springs. Barnum, always a skillful angler, caught many large trout, some of which were exchanged with the Quarter- master for provisions to be used on the return to Kansas. Barnum was camp cook, and he collected specimens, including Indian relics. More than half a century later, as many of us can attest, he could still rustle a mouth-watering camp meal from a few simple staples in no time at all. Barnum and his father were back at Carbon Hill 4 months after they left, having averaged 25 miles a day throughout a journey of some 3000 miles. Barnum was now 16 years old. There was no high school in Carbondale, so he was sent to Lawrence to finish school and, for 4 years thereafter, to attend the Uni- versity of Kansas, where he earned his A. B, degree in 1897. During his freshman year he took a course under Prof. S. W. Williston and was on his way to becoming a vertebrate paleontologist, along with E. C. Case and Elmer Riggs; they were among those taken on a field trip to Nebraska and South Dakota to collect fossil vertebrates in the summer of 1894. Barnum had already published his first report on Mound builders discovered in Wyandotte County, Kansas in the Students' Journal for June of that year. They met field parties from Yale, Princeton, and Nebraska before they returned to Lawrence in August with a large collection of Cenozoic mammals and Cretaceous marine reptiles. Barnum began his long and happy Downloaded from http://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-pdf/75/2/P19/3427655/i0016-7606-75-2-p19.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY P 21 association with dinosaurs in the summer of 1895, when they found a skull of Tricera- tops in Wyoming. He met an American Museum party under the direction of J. L. Wortman in the summer of 1896, worked with that party for a time, and made a very favorable impression. His lifetime employment began when the American Museum hired him after graduation in 1897 to lead an expedition that was to collect dinosaurs from the Morrison Formation in Wyoming; this association lasted for 66 years. He was Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology until 1910, Associate Curator from 1910 until 1926, Curator from 1927 until 1942, and Curator Emeritus for 20 years until his death. He registered for postgraduate studies at Columbia University in 1897 and 1898 but had to discontinue them when H. F. Osborn sent him to Pata- gonia in the latter year. Lehigh University awarded him the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa in 1934. Aboard ship with J. B. Hatcher of the Princeton Patagonian Expedition, Barnum headed for the Argentine on his first adventure in foreign lands. Hatcher was a renowned poker player who gathered a rich harvest on the trip, but on the last night before arrival he called Barnum Brown on the last hand; Barnum held three queens to Hatcher's three tens, and the last pot made up for all previous losses. Back to the United States with a rich haul of Cenozoic mammals in 1901, Barnum spent the next 10 summers on expeditions to collect all manner of fossil vertebrates, from the Pleistocene mammals of the Conard Fissure in Arkansas to the Cretaceous birds and reptiles of Kansas, New Mexico, and Montana; he made a reconnaissance trip to Canada in 1909. Curatorial work and research in the Museum filled Barnum's winter working days during the first decade of this century. He made many friends in and around New York; among them, Miss Marion Raymond Brown of Oxford, New York. They were married in Oxford on 13 February 1904. During the scant half dozen years of this happy marriage, she went with him on western expeditions, and his only child, Miss Frances Raymond Brown, was born. She is now Dean of Residence and Student Affairs at Radcliffe College. Marion Brown died after a short illness on 9 April 1910. Barnum now sought the solace of hard work on expeditions to foreign fields: in 1910 he went to Cuba and Mexico, and thence to western Canada. He led expeditions to the badlands of the Edmonton and Belly River Formations in Alberta, where they worked along the Red Deer River from a flatboat for six field seasons, 1910-1914 and 1916, and collected a superb assemblage of dinosaurs. He returned again to Cuba in 1918 and to Alberta in 1939. He led two more expeditions to the western United States in 1918 and 1919, after which he was away for 3 years on leave of absence. The Museum sent him to India (and present-day Pakistan) from 1922 until 1924, and to Burma in 1924, to collect Cenozoic mammals.