By Michael Crichton

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William Jason Tertullius Johnson, the elder son of Philadelphia shipbuilder Silas Johnson, entered Yale College in the fall of 1875. According to his headmaster at Exeter, Johnson was “gifted, attractive, athletic and able.” But the headmaster added that Johnson was “headstrong, indolent and badly spoilt, with a notable indifference to any motive save his own pleasures. Unless he finds a purpose to his life, he risks unseemly decline into indolence and vice.” 

Those words could have served as the description of a thousand young men in late nineteenth-century America, young men with intimidating, dynamic fathers, large quantities of money, and no particular way to pass the time. 

(Crichton 2017, 5)

“Well, Professor, I am interested in the study of fossils.” 

“You are interested? You say you are interested? Young man, these fossils” – his hand swept wide, gesturing to the room – “these fossils do not invite interest. They invite passionate commitment, they invite religious fervor and scientific speculation, they invite heated discourse and argument, but they do not thrive on mere interest. No, no. I am sorry. No, no, indeed.” 

(Crichton 2017, 13)

“You expect everything to be easy because you are rich,” Lewis would chuckle, watching him fumble and swear. “But the plate doesn’t care how rich you are. The chemicals don’t care how rich you are. The lens doesn’t care how rich you are. You must first learn patience, if you wish to learn anything at all.” 

(Crichton 2017, 17)

Everyone who attended the exposition saw this oddity, although few considered it of any value. Johnson was among the majority when he noted in his journal, “We already have the telegraph, providing communications for all who desire it. The added virtues of voice communication at a distance are unclear. Perhaps in the future, some people will wish to hear the voice of another far away, but there cannot be many. For myself, I think Mr. Bell’s tel-phone is a doomed curiosity with no real purpose.” 

(Crichton 2017, 21)

Marsh was well aware that he was serving as a tour guide to the scions of the rich, who might later be properly grateful for his part in turning their young boys into men. He understood further that since many prominent ministers and theologians explicitly denounced ungodly paleontological research, all research money in his field came from private patrons, among them his financier uncle, George Peabody. Here in New York, the new American Museum of Natural History in Central Park had just been chartered by other self-made men such as Andrew Carnegie, J Pierpont Morgan, and Marshall Field. 

For as eagerly as religious men sought to discredit the doctrine of evolution, so wealthy men sought to promote it. In the principle of the survival of the fittest they saw a new, scientific justification for their own rise to prominence, and their own often unscrupulous way of life. After all, no less an authority than the great Charles Lyell, friend and forerunner of Charles Darwin, had insisted again and again, “In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails.” 

(Crichton 2017, 24-25)

Even so, the Sioux lands might have been respected had not Custer discovered gold during a routine survey in the Black Hills in 1874. News of gold fields, coming in the midst of a nationwide recession, was irresistible. 

“Even in the best times, there’s no way to keep men from gold,” Gall said. “And that’s a plain fact.”

Although forbidden by the government, prospectors sneaked into the sacred Black Hills. The army mounted expeditions in ‘74 and ‘75 to chase them out, and the Sioux killed them whenever they found them. But still the prospectors came, in ever increasing numbers. 

Believing the treaty had been broken, the Sioux went on the warpath. In May of 1876, the government ordered the army to quell the Sioux uprising. 

“Then the Indians are in the right?” Johnson asked.

Gall shrugged. “You can’t stop progress, and that’s a plain fact.”

“We will be near the Black Hills?”

Gall nodded. “Near enough.” 

Johnson’s understanding of geography, always vague, allowed his imagination free rein. He stared out at the wide-stretching plains, which seemed suddenly more desolate and unappealing.

“How often do Indians attack white people?”

“Well, they’re unpredictable,” Gall said. “Like wild animals, you never know what they’ll do, because they’re savages.” 

(Crichton 2017, 44-45)

Established thirty years before, Salt Lake City was a village of wood and brick houses, carefully laid out in a regular grid pattern, and dominated by the white facade of the Mormon Tabernacle, a building, Johnson wrote, “of such breathtaking ugliness that few edifices anywhere in America can hope to surpass it.” This was a common view. Around the same time the journalist Charles Nordhoff called it “an admirably-arranged and very ugly building,” and concluded that “Salt Lake need not hold any mere pleasure traveler more than a day.”

Although Washington claimed this as the Territory of Utah, and therefore a part of the United States, it had been established as a Mormon theocracy, as the scale and importance of the religious buildings made clear. Cope’s group visited the temple, the Tithing House, and the Lion House, where Brigham Young kept his multitudinous wives. 

Cope then had an audience with Presiden Young, and he took his own wife with him to meet the elderly patriarch. Johnson asked what he was like. “Gracious man, gentle and calculating. For forty years, the Mormons were hounded and persecuted in every state of the Union; now they make their own stat, and persecute the Gentiles in turn.” Cope shook his head. “You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become the victimizers with a shilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.” 

“Are you saying Mormons are fanatics?” asked Morton, the minister’s son.

“I am saying their religion has made a state that does not halt injustice, but rather institutionalizes it. They feel superior to others who have different beliefs. They feel only they possess the right way.” 

(Crichton 2017, 65-66)

The Plains Indians of the nineteenth century were colorful, dramatic, mystical, warlike people. They captured the imagination of all who saw them, and in many ways they stood, in the popular mind, for all American Indians. The antiquity of their rituals, the intricate organization of their way of life, was much admired by liberal thinkers. 

But the truth was that the Plains Indian society that Westerners saw was hardly older than the white American nation that now threatened its existence. The Plains Indians were a nomadic hunting society organized around the horse, as were the Mongols of Asia. Yet there had been no horses in America until the Spaniards introduced them three hundred years earlier, changing Plains Indian society beyond recognition. 

(Crichton 2017, 99-100)

In 1876, scientific acceptance of dinosaurs was still fairly recent; at the turn of the century, men did not suspect the existence of these great reptiles at all, although the evidence was there to see. 

Back in July 1806, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, explored the south bank of the Yellowstone River, in what would later become Montana Territory, and found a fossil “semented [sic] within the face of the rock.” He described it as a bone three inches in circumference and three feet in length, and considered it the rib of a fish, although it was probably a dinosaur bone. 

More dinosaur bones were found in Connecticut in 1818; they were believed to be the remains of human beings; dinosaur footprints, discovered in the same region, were described as the tracks of “Noah’s raven.” 

The true meaning of these fossils was first recognized in England. In 1824, an eccentric English clergyman named Buckland described “the Megalosaurus or Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield.” Buckland imagined the fossil creature to be more than forty feet long, “and with a bulk equal to that of an elephant seven feet high.” But this remarkable lizard was considered an isolated specimen. 

The following year, Gideon Mantell, an English physician, described “Iguanodon, a newly-discovered Fossil Reptile.” Mantell’s description was based largely on some teeth found in an English quarry. Originally the teeth were sent to Baron Cuvier, the greatest anatomist of his day; he pronounced them the incisors of a rhinoceros. Dissatisfied, Mantell remained convinced that “I had discovered the teeth of an unknown herbivorous reptile,” and eventually demonstrated that the teeth most resembled those of an iguana, an American lizard. 

(Crichton 2017, 107-108)

…readers who inspect photographic books, as I have done, should be extremely careful about the captions. There has emerged a new breed of photo book in which authentic pictures of the West are accompanied by bleak, elegiac prose. The captions may seem to fit the pictures, but they do not fit the facts – this sad, melancholy attitude is a complete anachronism. Towns such as Deadwood may look depressing to us now, but they were exciting places then, and the people who inhabited them were excited to bethere. Too often, the people who write captions to photographs indulge their own uninformed fantasies about the pictures and what they mean. 

(Crichton 2017, 288)

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References

Crichton, Michael. 2017. Dragon Teeth: A Novel. N.p.: HarperCollins.

ISBN 978-0-06-247335-6