The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  During the Russian Revolution of 1917, as the Communist Party leader Vladimir Lenin rose to power, the “Reds,” aka Bolsheviks, seized control north of the Mongolian border. Czar Nicholas II was executed with his family the following summer, as Russia descended into civil war. Chinese forces still occupied Mongolia, but the Bolsheviks soon took Urga with the help of a “Red Mongolian” named Damdiny Sükhbaatar, founder of the Mongolian People’s Army. Urga’s name was changed to Ulaanbaatar, “Red Hero.”

  Into this remote, volatile world stepped a young Wisconsin native and New Yorker with what some called a “flamboyantly crazy scheme” to explore the Mongolian Gobi for his employer, the American Museum of Natural History. His name, soon to be known throughout the world, was Roy Chapman Andrews.

  In 1837, a group of Yankee pioneers headed west from New Hampshire on behalf of the New England Emigrating Company to settle the Northwest Territory. Just above the Illinois border, a couple of hours north of the new city of Chicago, they stopped at a location that reminded them of home. On a bluff of the Rock River, the Yankees founded what became the town of Beloit, Wisconsin. Their factories came to make bicycles, plows, paper, waterwheels, and much more, but, nostalgic for the New England culture they’d left behind, the settlers also created organizations devoted to science, religion, and “all the adjuncts that contribute to happiness, thrift, and the elevation of society”—public parks, churches, a Philharmonic Society, an opera, and Beloit College, a progressive institution with ties to Harvard.

  In January 1884, Cora Andrews and her husband, Charles, a druggist, had a baby boy, naming him Roy. The Andrews family lived in a two-story house near pastures and creek-cut forests, and west of town they kept a cabin where they often spent their weekends. Cora, who enjoyed books about travel and history, read Robinson Crusoe aloud to her son over and over—

  He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road…

  The best-loved stories of Roy’s childhood involved wild animals and scientific exploration. As he tramped around with a camera and a notebook, he recorded whatever he saw. From the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, his “bible,” he learned about migration patterns. With a book on taxidermy, he set upon the local fauna. The Andrews attic soon became a small Wunderkammer of “minerals, fossils, stuffed animals, insects, bird skins, Indian artifacts, and dried plants,” Charles Gallenkamp wrote in Dragon Hunter, a biography of Andrews. Becoming a naturalist felt less like a decision than an identity preordained. Andrews later wrote, “I was born to be an explorer.”

  At Beloit College, where Andrews majored in zoology, the school’s Logan Museum of Anthropology often brought in guest lecturers. During his senior year, an assistant curator of geology from the American Museum of Natural History came to talk about the eruption of Mount Pelée, the kind of event that could not have excited Andrews more. The AMNH, founded in 1869, was by now nearly forty years old. Major names in industry and finance—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors—supported the institution, often gathering at black-tie fund-raisers. The Dinosaur Hall had opened only recently, on a February afternoon in 1905, featuring an enormous fossil Brontosaurus that the AMNH paleontologist Walter Granger had found at Como Bluff, Wyoming. The museum had spent years preparing and mounting the skeleton, using cast Apatosaurus parts, a stand made of “repurposed pipes and plumbing fixtures,” and the bones of four different specimens. Nothing so large had ever been mounted at the museum, or anywhere. Luminaries such as Nikola Tesla and J. Pierpont Morgan gawked at it at a four o’clock Dinosaur Tea. The tail alone of the first sauropod ever mounted measured 31 feet long. “It didn’t feed on flesh, but my, I wouldn’t want to meet it!” a reporter heard one woman say.

  Half a million people visited the museum each year. Details about research expeditions filled the pages of its American Museum Journal (later renamed Natural History), to which the Andrews family subscribed. By the time the vulcanologist appeared at Beloit College, Andrews had identified the institution as the place where he most wanted to work. He stalked the visiting curator and made him go look at some deer heads and birds he’d taxidermied for Moran’s Saloon, then asked him for a job. At the curator’s suggestion, Andrews wrote to the museum’s director, Hermon Bumpus. In return he received a polite rejection—there were no openings, but Bumpus said to stop by the museum if ever he visited New York City.

  Andrews was barely out of his cap and gown before boarding an eastbound train. On July 5, 1906, he arrived in Manhattan aboard the Twenty-Third Street ferry, with thirty dollars in his pocket. “The magic city” was “more beautiful than anything of which I had dreamed,” he later wrote. “I knew it was my city.”

  At eleven the next morning he called on Bumpus. The museum occupied twenty-three acres between Seventy-Seventh and Eighty-First Streets at what is now Central Park West. The neo-Romanesque towers on the east and west corners of the southern façade gave an impression of “baronial splendor.” Twenty-five scientists worked at the AMNH, overseeing an extensive collection that included “birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, insects, botanical specimens, minerals, fossils, and anthropological material,” Gallenkamp wrote. Nine years earlier, the museum had bought the “bone wars” maven Edward Drinker Cope’s collection of ten thousand fossil mammals, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, a vertebrate paleontologist who had studied under Cope at Princeton, had recently named Tyrannosaurus rex based on bones that the prolific fossil hunter Barnum Brown had found in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana several summers earlier. AMNH expeditions were “penetrating some of the earth’s remotest areas in search of scientific data and collections,” Gallenkamp wrote.

  Visiting the museum surely made Andrews want the job all the more, but again, he received disappointing news. Pressing the director, he said it wasn’t a position he wanted, but rather a home, if only mopping floors. And so it was that Andrews was hired as a custodian in the taxidermy department at an institution “in which men worked who to me were as gods.”

  Before long, Andrews was off the mop and pursuing an advanced degree at Columbia University. He studied with Osborn, who had become the museum’s director. Osborn had founded Columbia’s zoology and paleontology programs, and had arranged an academic partnership between the museum and the school, tying scientific research to the art of conservation and curation. He also had a pedigree. His father had founded the Illinois Central Railroad. His uncle was J. P. Morgan. His connection to Childs Frick, a steel-fortune heir and museum trustee, generated a small staff of hired fossil hunters who helped the vertebrate paleontology department build out its collection. It was Osborn who had sent Barnum Brown to Montana, leading to the discovery of T. rex, and to Canada, where Brown competed affably with the prolific Kansas hunter Charles Hazelius Sternberg for vertebrates. Osborn also commissioned increasingly sophisticated, lifelike museum exhibits that drew large crowds, widening the public’s interest in the natural sciences.

  “But one had to take him in context,” wrote the AMNH curator Edwin H. Colbert, an Osborn protégé. “He had grown up in the lush days of the Robber Barons, and he viewed society as a highly stratified arrangement, in which he occupied a top stratum.” That stratum, as it concerned Osborn, included some disturbing ideas that future admirers would find difficult to reconcile. For instance, he would praise a 1915 book, The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, a “pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism that warns of the decline of the ‘Nordic’ peoples,” Jedediah Purdy wrote for The New Yorker. The book “influenced the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and Africa and banned migrants from the Middle East and Asia,” Purdy noted. “Adolf Hitler wrote Grant an admiring letter, calling the book ‘my Bible,’ which has given it permanent status on the ultra-right.” Osborn believed in evolution but rejected the idea of hum
ankind’s descent from apes, suspecting that Asia, not Africa, would prove to be “the evolutionary ‘staging ground’ in which both the dinosaurian and mammalian life of the planet had evolved and dispersed,” Douglas Preston wrote in Dinosaurs in the Attic, a history of the AMNH.

  Andrews, meanwhile, focused on whales. There he was, in the summer of 1912, age twenty-seven, peering off a page of the New York Times—fit and clean-shaven, with a receding hairline, a cleft chin, and the creamy complexion particular to photographs of the age. The article placed him among a rising generation of adventurers, mostly Ivy League men who appeared determined to “solve the geographical, anthropological, zoological, and botanical mysteries that have lain veiled for ages,” the Times reported. Over a hundred major expeditions were launching that very summer. While his peers were bound for places like the Amazon jungle and the Congo, Andrews was headed for “the unknown section of North Korea, never visited by white man.” The expeditions altogether represented what the newspaper called “the most vivid example of the mighty effort of science to make the enigma of life somewhat clearer.”

  But Andrews also craved adventure. After Gallenkamp published his biography, in 2001, a reviewer observed that “Andrews’s career was a straight line from Beloit, Wis., to the cover of Time magazine,” noting:

  George Lucas denies the rumor that he modeled Indiana Jones after the explorer-zoologist Roy Chapman Andrews, but readers of the enormously entertaining Dragon Hunter will certainly be inclined to believe it. On his first journey to East Asia in 1909, when he was 25 years old, Andrews spent two weeks stranded on a deserted island; fended off sharks after his boat was capsized by a finback whale; survived typhoons, heatstroke, poisoned bamboo stakes, headhunters, and 20-foot pythons… He delivered two babies, pulled several teeth, and amputated a man’s mangled hand. He also sampled opium; befriended Mother Jesus, Yokohama’s most famous madam; enjoyed the pleasures of Shimonoseki, “the hardest-drinking port in the East”; and along the way collected 50 mammals, 425 birds, and a new species of ant. And that’s just in the first 35 pages…

  To little surprise, Andrews fell in love with a fellow naturalist and adventurer. On October 7, 1914, he married Yvette Borup, a photographer and the sister of George Borup, who in 1909 had helped Robert Peary claim the North Pole. The couple made their home just outside New York City, in Bronxville, but planned to spend most of their time in the field—Korea, Borneo, “Darkest China”—beyond the knowledge and reach of most of the rest of the world. By 1918, Andrews was venturing into Mongolia, looking for bighorn sheep, the “supreme trophy of a sportsman’s life.” There, he delighted at the similarities between Mongolian roebuck and Virginia deer. He learned not to travel at night or camp near villages lest he be attacked by brigands. He declared the traditional Mongolian home, the ger, a genius piece of architecture, and the Gobi a natural wonder—towering sand dunes in one place, “almost as smooth as a tennis court” in another, and, often, “the most desolate waste of sand and gravel.”

  Yet the Gobi crawled with life. Andrews saw a herd of antelope so vast that from a distance it appeared to be a field of yellow grass. Crested lapwings “flashed across the prairie like sudden storms of autumn leaves.”

  And the city! “The world has other sacred cities, but none like this,” Andrews wrote after visiting Urga—

  It is a relic of medieval times overlaid with a veneer of twentieth-century civilization; a city of violent contrasts and glaring anachronisms. Motor cars pass camel caravans fresh from the vast, lone spaces of the Gobi Desert; holy lamas, in robes of flaming red or brilliant yellow, walk side by side with black-gowned priests; and swarthy Mongol women, in the fantastic headdress of their race, stare wonderingly at the latest fashions of their Russian sisters.

  The Chinese quarter felt like a frontier outpost, reminding him of Wisconsin. “Every house and shop was protected by high stockades of unpeeled timbers, and there was hardly a trace of Oriental architecture save where a temple roof gleamed above the palisades,” he wrote. The main city square was an “indescribable mixture of Russia, Mongolia, and China. Palisaded compounds gay with fluttering prayer flags, ornate houses, felt-covered yurts, and Chinese shops mingle in a dizzying chaos of conflicting civilizations.”

  Andrews knew he had to return to Mongolia, and to the Gobi in particular. Marco Polo had traversed the desert en route to the Chinese court of Kublai Khan in the 1270s, but afterward “came centuries of silence, as though the desert had disappeared,” noted Troy Sternberg, a researcher in geography at Oxford University. Andrews wrote, “There is no similar area of the inhabited surface of the earth about which so little is known.” Back home in New York, he plotted a scientific expedition more ambitious than any on record, pitching it as a way to prove his boss’s belief about the origins of humankind: he intended to search the Gobi for bones.

  As far as anyone knew, knowledge of eastern Asia’s fossils rested “almost entirely upon the report on a small collection of teeth and fragmentary bones purchased in the medicine shops of Tientsin [China] and described by a German named Schlosser.” When Western colleagues teased that the AMNH explorers would find everything “obscured by sand,” Andrews argued that while Mongolia had been “crossed and recrossed by some excellent explorers, mostly Russian,” none of the country had been “studied by the exact methods of modern science.”

  The proposition of a Mongolian expedition was dangerous, given the region’s political instability. Outsiders were suspect to the Chinese, the Mongolians, and the Russians. Mongolia wasn’t just politically volatile, it was remote—mounting an expedition would be expensive. The country presented “unusual obstacles to scientific research,” such as forbidding terrain, unpredictable weather, and armed bandits. Summer temperatures easily reached 110 degrees in the shade (if shade could be found), and winter’s sharp winds dropped the temperature to 50 degrees below zero, with the power to freeze livestock where they stood. One could not travel to Mongolia from Siberia or China by “roaring train.” The only roads were dirt trails that nomads and merchants had followed by habit and instinct for thousands of years. People crossed the Gobi by horse or Bactrian camel, a double-humped “relic of the Pleistocene” that fascinated Andrews as a moody spitter whose “great flat feet” were “natural road-makers.”

  A friend, Charles Coltman, had recently traveled from China to Urga by car, giving Andrews a new idea. No scientist had ever attempted a major expedition by automobile. A car caravan could carry the research team, while camels would haul the fuel, food, and gear to prearranged points. Over lunch with Osborn in New York, Andrews proposed the idea for what he called the Central Asiatic Expeditions, explaining that the project would run for the next five to ten years:

  We should try to reconstruct the whole past history of the Central Asian plateau—its geological structure, fossil life, its past climate, and vegetation, and general physical conditions, particularly in relation to the evolution of man. We should make collections of its living mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. We should map the unexplored parts and little known regions of the Gobi Desert.

  Andrews envisioned an interdisciplinary team and support staff—paleontologists, geologists, topographers, paleobotanists, Mongolian guides, Chinese taxidermists. “As we sat in the mess tent at night discussing the day’s work, it was most interesting to see how puzzling situations in geology would be clarified by the paleontologist; how the topographer brought out important features which gave the key to physiographic difficulties; and how the paleontologist would be assisted by the paleobotanist or geologist in solving stratigraphic problems,” he later wrote. James “J. B.” Shackelford, a cinematographer, would document the expedition with still photos and film, and Andrews, who had already published a popular book called Whale Hunting with Gun and Camera, would write about the experience for a general audience. By basing the operation in Peking, the party could enter the Gobi from the south by way of the Chinese city of Kalgan, the gateway to the Great Wall and the Mong
olian plateau.

  Altogether the project would cost at least $250,000. The museum could afford to spend only five thousand a year, but Andrews believed he could raise the rest of the money. Already he was known as someone who felt as comfortable in a room full of the rich and powerful as he did in the backcountry, and who could coax big checks from millionaires by turning the “dry achievements of science into something with popular appeal,” as Helena Huntington Smith put it in The New Yorker. Andrews, she noted, had an unusual advantage: “Scientific capacities, it seems, are not too commonly combined with social ones.”

  Andrews quickly lined up backers such as the railroad magnate and statesman W. Averell Harriman and the soap-and-toothpaste manufacturer Sidney Colgate. The Dodge brothers provided customized open-body cars with heavier springs, larger fuel tanks, stronger tires, and pull-hooks bolted onto the front and back chassis. Dodge’s advertisements for “the covered wagon of the Gobi Desert” featured Andrews as a celebrity explorer, which suited him fine. “Most people derive a thrill from public applause, but they often feel called upon to hide their delight behind a vast pomposity. Roy Chapman Andrews has better sense than that; he enjoys it without pretense,” The New Yorker noted, adding, “Probably few men are having a better time.”