Grinnell would be a prolific writer throughout his life, including two dozen books, hundreds of magazine and journal articles, thousands of letters, and a short, unpublished memoir. While his writing could be forceful and passionate, particularly when advocating for a cause in which he believed, it rarely offered much insight into Grinnell as a person. (This is particularly notable in contrast to today’s “reality” tidal wave of shallow introspection ad nauseum.) Yet in his writings about the land surrounding Fort Bridger, Grinnell offered several revealing glimpses of the degree to which he was moved by what he saw around him. “North, south, east and west the eye rests upon mountains piled on mountains,” he wrote of the Uinta Range. “Truly it is a grand scene, and a lover of nature may well be exercised if, for a time, he forgets all else in contemplating it.”14 Of the Green River, Grinnell wrote that “[e]ach mile of the river’s length presents fresh charms, and the thoughtful mind is awed and purified by the contemplation of these, some of the grandest works of Nature.”15
Grinnell, who had come to the West in search of the “wild and wooly,” had found something more profound. At times, Grinnell’s descriptions took on the explicit overtones of religion:
Parks there are, where the tall pines and the cottonwoods, with their silvery foliage, stand as if arrayed at the command of the most skillful of gardener; where green meadows, dotted with clumps of trees, or with little copses, stretch away toward the rocky heights beyond and seem almost to reveal the hand of man in the artistic beauty of their design. But no gardener planted these towering trees, nor was human skill evoked to lay out these delightful parks; the hand of a greater being than man is visible in all these beauties—the hand of God.16
On September 20, 1870, George Bird Grinnell celebrated his twenty-first birthday in a ruggedly beautiful campsite along the Henry’s Fork River. After a cheerfully aimless youth, Grinnell was entering adulthood with bigger thoughts on his mind.
In addition to a view of nature in full pristine splendor, the Fort Bridger stage of the Marsh expedition also exposed Grinnell to “a glimpse of the old-time trapper’s life in the Rocky Mountains of thirty years before.” Grinnell needed a new horse and was told that three trappers encamped on the Henry’s Fork might be willing to trade. He rode out to find Ike Edwards, Phil Mass, and John Baker. Each trapper had an Indian wife and “a large flock of children of various sizes.” The oldest of the trappers had been in the West for decades and experienced the height of the beaver-trade era. Grinnell was fascinated by the fact that “they still supported themselves, in part at least, by trapping beaver.” They invited Grinnell to stay over. He eagerly accepted and “spent some days full of joy and interest in this old-time camp.”17
They slept in teepees and lived off the land. “The river bottom and the hills were full of game; the stream full of trout.” In the early mornings, Grinnell accompanied the old mountain men on forays to run traplines, usually returning with “one, two or more beaver.” It was a lifestyle that Grinnell embraced to his core. “Their mode of life appealed strongly to a young man fond of the open,” he remembered, “and while I was with them I could not imagine, nor can I imagine now, a more attractive—a happier—life than theirs.” Nor was there any hint of exaggeration when Grinnell wrote that “I desired enormously to spend the rest of my life with these people.”18
By October, though, the Fort Bridger stage of the Marsh expedition was complete. The party left behind the high adventure of the Rockies “and then spent several weeks in seeing what all tourists see.” In Salt Lake City, Professor Marsh discussed his fossil findings with Brigham Young, who believed that the ancient horses provided evidence for the existence of the lost tribe of Mormon and Moroni described in the Book of Mormon. Marsh’s young field assistants, meanwhile, “flirted with twenty-two daughters of Brigham Young in a box at the theatre.” Then it was on to California, where the expedition visited Yosemite Valley and the “Big Trees.” By Thanksgiving, Grinnell found himself back at Audubon Park, contemplating his future in the company of his parents.19
TO A DEGREE THAT GRINNELL HIMSELF MIGHT NOT YET HAVE APPRECIATED, his adventures with the Marsh expedition represented the most important formative events of his life.
The expedition itself was a scientific triumph. Marsh carted thirty-five boxes of fossils back to Yale, where the contents became the foundation for the great Peabody Museum collection. In addition to Eohippus, Marsh and his assistants had discovered 100 extinct species new to science. Marsh, already a rising star, emerged from the voyage as one of the preeminent paleontologists of his day. His genealogy of the horse (eventually constructed using findings from this and subsequent Marsh expeditions) was acknowledged by no less than Charles Darwin as the most significant evidence for the theory of evolution since the 1859 publication of Origin of Species. Marsh’s young assistants won their own share of fame, including a detailed article about their adventures in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, one of the most widely read journals of the day.20
The Marsh expedition provided Grinnell with a unique exposure to the West that would shape his thinking in fundamental ways. He became one of the last members of his generation—of any generation—to experience the West as it had been. Grinnell had traversed unexplored land, hunted for subsistence, dodged hostile Indians, and for a brief time lived the life of an 1830s trapper—anachronistic even in 1870.21
Yet even as he lived out this “primitive West,” as he called it, Grinnell was on the cutting edge of something wholly new. Professor Marsh, in the words of historian William H. Goetzmann, “had discovered a new Western horizon.” Marsh—with Grinnell along for the ride—was in the forward guard of a new generation of explorers. Their predecessors had seen the West primarily through the prism of territorial rivalry and/or commercial opportunity. Marsh saw buried in western sands the “rich rewards” of “scientific truths.”22
There was another important aspect to Grinnell’s time with the Marsh expedition. Five months of digging up fossil remains had given him a tangible experience with the fragility of life—indeed the fragility of whole species. Like Lucy Audubon’s philosophy of self-denial, the notion that nature was fragile ran directly counter to a core tenet of Gilded Age and robber baron belief—the “myth of inexhaustibility.”23 According to this belief, nature, and the western United States in particular, was an untapped land of Goshen, a collection of unbounded resources to be developed and exploited for the betterment of humankind. A generation of early western settlers, and then their children in the Gilded Age, drew inspiration from writings such as Lansford W. Hastings’s The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California in 1844:
I can not but believe, that the time is not distant, when those wild forests, trackless plains, untrodden valleys, and the unbounded ocean, will present one grand scene, of continuous improvements, universal enterprise, and unparalleled commerce: when those vast forests, shall have disappeared, before the hardy pioneer; those extensive plains, shall abound with innumerable herds, of domestic animals; those fertile valleys, shall groan under the immense weight of their abundant products; when those numerous rivers shall teem with countless steam-boats, steam-ships, ships, barques and brigs; when the entire country, will be everywhere intersected, with turnpike roads, rail-roads and canals; and when, all the vastly numerous, and rich resources, of that now, almost unknown region, will be fully and advantageously developed.24
Hastings’s vision of complete human conquest provides a stark counterpoint to Grinnell’s celebration of the wild Green River landscape created by “the hand of a greater being than man.”
Grinnell’s first reactions to the West were more visceral than intellectual—but they were not superficial. He craved the adventure and was deeply affected by the beauty of what he saw. In an 1873 article in Forest and Stream magazine, Grinnell would write of the Green River Valley that “the sportsman or naturalist will find here much to attract and delight him. And perhaps