Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

Grinnell and Nicholson’s initial instinct was to spur their horses and run, but the wildfire—whipped by a vicious wind—burned up the hill “at an inconceivably rapid rate.” A backfire, they realized, was their best defense. As they had seen the soldiers do on the Loup River, they quickly set a small blaze. The backfire, as Grinnell described it, “checked the flames so that we were able to reach a gravelly knoll.” There, they held on to their horses as the wall of flames burned around them, “near enough to singe the hair on our faces and on the horses.”

As they caught their breath and soothed their mounts in the wake of the blaze, the lost hunters felt a renewed sense of urgency about hostile Indians. The smoke from the fire, they feared, would draw the attention of anyone within a range of several miles. Armed only with shotguns, meanwhile, the two hunters would have little ability to stand off a hostile approach. They briefly considered cutting across the open plains in the hope of picking up the expedition’s trail but quickly decided against such a course. Better to backtrack, sticking close to Horse Creek—a “guide that would not fail them.” Once back to their starting point, they could easily find the tracks of Marsh, the cavalry, and the rest of their party. In the meantime, night was nearly upon them.

Marsh expedition in 1870, near Fort Bridger in what is today Wyoming. Professor Othniel Marsh is the bearded man in the center. Grinnell is third from the left in the broad-brimmed hat.

Courtesy of the Scott Meyer Family.

Fearful of attack, Grinnell and Nicholson resorted to ploy. “As the sun was setting we stopped on the borders of the stream, unsaddled our horses and built a fire, to convey the impression that we had gone into camp.” They plucked and roasted some of their ducks, filling their bellies while waiting for the full cover of darkness. Then, saddling up, they rode into the creek. For a long time they rode down the little stream, using the water to cover their tracks. Only when they’d covered a mile or more did they climb up onto the bank, there to spend a long, frigid night with no fire.

By the next morning, Professor Marsh and the cavalry accompaniment were convinced that the two missing hunters had fallen victim to the Cheyenne, the most pervasive tribe in that region. The concern seemed to find confirmation when a search party came across two lame Indian ponies. The Cheyenne, it appeared, had killed Grinnell and Nicholson, taken their two horses, then left the crippled stock behind. But by the time the search party made it back to camp, Grinnell and Nicholson had reappeared, having backtracked and then followed the expedition’s clear trail.

Grinnell was nonchalant about the entire incident, his main comments reflecting pride that their evasive tactics on Horse Creek had kept the cavalry from picking up their trail. “The devices we had practiced to mislead the Indians were so successful that on the following day the searchers lost our trail hopelessly.” Certainly his remarks reflected the young-man bravado that puffed the chests of many who traveled the wild lands of the West. But something more profound was also at play. Even as he labored each day as a member of an expedition whose findings would stun the scientific world, Grinnell’s own journey was more personal. On an expedition whose aim was discovery, Grinnell was discovering himself.

IF THERE WERE TWO MORAL POLES IN THE WORLD OF GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, Cornelius Vanderbilt stood at one of them. Vanderbilt was the most important client of the brokerage house owned by Grinnell’s father, and Grinnell had known him from an early age. Commodore Vanderbilt (the title reflected ownership of a veritable flotilla, not a military background) stood at the helm of the era that would rise in the aftermath of the Civil War—the era in which Grinnell would spend the most important years of his life. Mark Twain, in his biting 1873 satire, dubbed it the “Gilded Age.” Beginning in the boom years that followed the Civil War and extending to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the Gilded Age was the heyday of the robber barons, a class of industrialists known as much for their plundering business style as for their towering business achievements.

A survey of Vanderbilt’s life reads like a primer for the whole ilk. He offered a glimpse of what would prove to be his modus operandi in his very first enterprise. In 1811, at the age of 17, Vanderbilt borrowed money from his mother to start a ferry in New York Harbor. With screaming Oedipal overtones, he hoped to capsize the venture of his main rival—his father.

At every juncture in his long career, Vanderbilt was in the right place at the right time with the right service—transportation. His wealth grew during the War of 1812, the 1849 gold rush, and then the Civil War. After dominating New York ferry traffic, he later came to control coastal trade between New York and New England. When George Bird Grinnell was a boy, Vanderbilt was selling his shipping enterprises and buying railroads. By 1869 he would own the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, controlling much of the lucrative transport between New York City and the Great Lakes.

Business for Vanderbilt was war. He once wrote to an enemy promising that “I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I will ruin you.” Such was Vanderbilt’s reputation that rivals in a shipping venture to Nicaragua paid him $50,000 a month for his promise to stay out of the market.

Vanderbilt, in short, embodied the characteristics of the Gilded Age in which Grinnell lived. As a Vanderbilt biographer described him, he was “simply the most conspicuous and terrifying exponent of his era,” an era “of ruthlessness, of personal selfishness, of corruption, of disregard of private rights, of contempt for law and Legislatures, and yet of vast and beneficial achievement.” Vanderbilt would die with a fortune estimated at $100 million, though not before cutting several sons out of his will.

Securing financing for Vanderbilt’s railroads would be the culminating professional achievement of Grinnell’s father, and for a while, Grinnell appeared likely to follow in his father’s footsteps.

It was Lucy Audubon, ultimately, who would put him on a different track. She taught him a philosophy startling in the degree to which it ran counter to the prevailing ethics of the day, a discipline that leading men of Grinnell’s generation were more likely to scorn than to follow. It was a value system that stemmed from the central narrative of her life.

Born Lucy Bakewell in England in 1787, she was the daughter of a country gentleman of modest wealth. Lucy received top-flight schooling for a girl of her generation. Her father believed that girls should be educated, if only to make them better and more engaging wives. Lucy was tutored from a young age and later attended boarding school, where she studied French, dance, and needlepoint. Her formal education was supplemented by tutors and long hours of reading in her father’s extensive library. Her father also taught her to ride, and Lucy loved the outdoors from an early age.

Lucy Audubon: The creed of Grinnell’s boyhood tutor, “self-denial,” flew in the face of the conspicuous consumption of Gilded Age America.

Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.

In 1801, when Lucy was 14, she moved with her family to America, eventually settling in a Pennsylvania country estate with the bounteous name of Fatland Ford. They lived a half mile from the estate of a well-to-do French family, the Audubons. Overcoming a residue of British–French antipathy, Lucy’s father became a hunting partner of John James, the Audubon’s dashing, long-haired son. When the young Audubon first met Lucy, he recorded in his diary that he was smitten by her “je ne sais quoi” (an attribute not so readily apparent in her photos as the quintessential old widow). The two married in 1808 and moved to Kentucky, where John James began a decade-long series of financial misadventures. By 1819, the Audubons were bankrupt, and for a brief time, John James was even jailed for his debts. There would be other, even greater tragedies—the Audubons lost two infant daughters to sickness. Two sons, Gifford and Woodhouse, would survive childhood—though they would not outlive their mother.

Having failed at business, Audubon was determined to make a living in the field that fueled his passion—painting. He scraped by—drawing portraits at $5 a head, teaching art at two girls’ schools, and working as a taxidermist in a museum. Since a young age, though, Audubon had loved to paint birds, and it was toward this endeavor that he increasingly turned. He began to travel in search of new subjects, eventually building a portfolio detailing hundreds of species. But it would be decades before he achieved any kind of financial reprieve. In the meantime, John James was often away from home for long periods of time, sometimes years, as he traveled the American West and later toured Europe in an effort to secure patrons and a publisher.

Lucy Audubon, meanwhile, who had grown up in a life of privilege and wealth, became the breadwinner for herself and her two young sons. One of the few professions open to women was teaching, and Lucy began to conduct classes out of her home. Later she and her children took up residence with a wealthy plantation owner in Louisiana, teaching the local children in exchange for a place to live and a small salary. For two decades, she faced constant fears about putting food on the table, the indignities of asking for credit, and the struggle of single parenthood. It was a time of remarkable sacrifice—of subordinating her own needs and desires in favor of her family. Indeed self-sacrifice became the creed by which she lived, a way of putting her life into a broader context. While Audubon struggled for recognition and financial success, Lucy supported him, encouraged him, guided him, and advised him with a sound judgment that the artist lacked. And she held the family together.

For John James Audubon, recognition would come long before financial success. With Lucy’s encouragement, Audubon in 1826 took his collection to England. In Europe, Audubon would earn fame as both an artist and a naturalist. But not until the publication of Birds of America in the late 1830s did the Audubon family achieve its first semblance of financial security. In 1841, when Lucy was 54 years old, Audubon bought the tract of land along the Hudson River that would become Audubon Park. In 1842 he completed construction of a grand house, proud finally to have provided the home that he felt his wife deserved. He called it Minniesland, a reference to his pet name for Lucy.

For a few years at Minniesland, Lucy enjoyed a short interlude of repose. Her decades of hard work, it appeared, had come to fruition. With his two sons assisting him (and living in their own houses at Audubon Park), John James labored on the last of his great works, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Lucy took pleasure in her home, the company of her sons, and a growing brood of grandchildren. But it would not last.

In 1844, Audubon’s eyesight began to fail him. Soon he could no longer paint the exacting details that defined his work. In 1847, Audubon suffered a stroke that crippled his mind. He spent the last years of his life in a desperate fog of senility, dying in 1851 at the age of 65. Lucy had known tragedy before, but still worse events lay ahead. In 1856, her son Gifford suffered a fall that left him an invalid. Lucy rented out the house she loved and moved in with Gifford and his family, helping to care for him.

In 1857—the same year that George Bird Grinnell and his family moved to Audubon Park—Lucy began teaching again to supplement the family income. Grinnell would later write that Grandma Audubon “seemed to be doing for her sons and their families something like what she had been doing for her husband during much of the time of their marriage, earning the bread for the family.”

She began to sell off pieces of Audubon Park, including the property purchased by Grinnell’s father. Young George accompanied his father to the closing, and he was struck by Grandma Audubon’s “great relief, satisfaction, and even gratitude.” The scene moved him, “though for years afterward I did not understand its meaning.”

Even with her land, Lucy’s assets could provide no protection against the next waves of calamity to strike her family.

The sons of John James Audubon apparently inherited their father’s weakness in matters financial. In Grinnell’s words, “neither he nor his sons were businessmen.” In 1859, Woodhouse Audubon invested a large sum in the publication of a new edition of his father’s Birds of America. The new book was sold to subscribers, most of whom happened to reside in the South. When the Civil War broke out, the investment turned into a near complete loss. Creditors placed liens on Audubon Park.

Gifford, meanwhile, having languished since his accident, died in 1860, Lucy at his side. Lucy would soon watch the death of Woodhouse too. Devastated by the death of his brother and the pressure of his financial losses, Woodhouse fell ill. He died in 1862. The next year, to stave off her sons’ creditors, Lucy sold her remaining property at Audubon Park and moved in with a granddaughter in Washington Heights. Over the years, she sold off paintings from her husband’s collection, including the original plates for Birds of America, which at least provided an income until her death in Louisville at the age of 87.

One painting that Lucy did not sell was a large work by her husband called The Eagle and the Lamb. The painting must have had special significance: She hung it, out of all her husband’s works, in her bedroom. The painting, as she knew, was also a favorite of her student George Bird Grinnell. Before her journey to Louisville, the last journey of her life, Lucy wrote a short note in a shaking hand to Grinnell. “Dear young friend,” it began. She worried in the note about the possibility of an “accident” on the trip, perhaps her way of expressing concern about the hardship of travel on the very old. If anything were to happen, she directed Grinnell to “take possession of the Eagle & Lamb, with all the love & esteem for yourself & parents that is possible for our hearts to feel.” Lucy survived the trip to Louisville, though she died shortly thereafter. Her will would also specify that the painting should go to Grinnell. It hung in his home for all his life.

Grinnell would sum up the life of Lucy Audubon in an essay he would later write about her husband: “The great lesson of his life lies in our recognition … that he triumphed in the strength of another, who molded his character, shaped his aims, gave substance to his dreams, and finally, by the exercise of that self-denial which he was incapable of as a long-sustained effort, won for him the public recognition and reward of his splendid talents.”

The greatest lesson that Grinnell would learn from Lucy Audubon—the greatest lesson of his life—was her creed of self-denial. Self-denial, preached Grandma Audubon, was the “key to success in life.”

For Lucy, sacrifice made possible the success of her husband and the stable upbringing of her children. Their successes became hers, and appropriately so.

Grinnell, only fourteen at the time that Lucy left Audubon Park, could not yet know the importance of the boyhood lesson that he would one day apply to the broad world around him. His teacher had sown a seed, but the conditions for cultivation were not yet present. For many years, in fact, it appeared that young George Bird Grinnell might instead follow the path of those to whom too much is given. In the West with the Marsh expedition, though, came the first signs of Grinnell’s great awakening.

THE BASE OF OPERATIONS FOR THE THIRD AND MOST SIGNIFICANT stage of the 1870 Marsh expedition was the southwest Wyoming outpost of Fort Bridger. Jim Bridger, “King of the Mountain Men,” had established the fort in 1843, and it became an important way station for westbound travelers. Now two months into their voyage, Grinnell was proud that he and his Yale companions had come to look like the frontiersmen they idolized: “Bearded, bronzed by exposure to all weather, and clothed in buckskin, you might take them at first glance for a party of trappers.”

For the Marsh expedition, Fort Bridger was the gateway to the greatest scientific discoveries of the journey. In the basin to the south of the fort, the expedition uncovered Eohippus, the earliest known member of the horse family, and also the “extraordinary six-horned beasts later described by Marsh as Dinocerata.”

Grinnell certainly shared in the pride and excitement of these discoveries. In his memoirs he noted briefly that the “three trips that the expedition had already made resulted in great collections of fossils, which were of extraordinary interest.”

Grinnell had earned the respect of Professor Marsh, known as a difficult taskmaster. Indeed the 1870 expedition would represent the beginning of a long professional relationship between the two men. Still, Grinnell’s writings leave little doubt about the aspect of their journey that excited him the most, and it was not paleontology.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”