That night, Johnson recorded in his journal:
Cope spent the morning sketching, which he does with great rapidity and talent. I have learned a lot about him from the others. He was a child prodigy, who wrote his first scientific paper at the age of six, and he has now (I believe him to be 36) published some 1,000 papers. He is rumored to have had a love affair before his marriage that was broken off, and then, perhaps in despair, he traveled to Europe, where he met many of the great natural scientists of the day. He met Marsh in Berlin for the first time and shared correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs. He is also considered to be an expert on snakes, reptiles and amphibians in general, and fish. Sternberg and the students (except Morton) are devoted to him. He is a Quaker, and peace-loving to the core. He wears wooden false teeth, which are remarkably life-like; I wouldn’t have known. In this way and nearly every other, he is utterly different from Marsh. Where Marsh is plodding, Cope is brilliant; where Marsh is scheming, Cope is honest; where Marsh is secretive, Cope is free. In all ways, Professor Cope shows greater humanity than his counterpart. Professor Marsh is a desperate, driven fanatic who makes his own life as miserable as the lives of those he commands. While Cope shows balance and restraint, and is altogether agreeable.
It would not be long before Johnson took a different view of Cope.
The train descended out of the Rocky Mountains to Great Salt Lake City, in the Territory of Utah.
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 President 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 state, 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 chilling 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.”
“I don’t see how you can say—” began Morton, but the others jumped in. Morton and Cope were always at loggerheads on religious subjects, and the arguments became tedious after a while.
“Why did you see Brigham Young?” Sternberg asked.
Cope shrugged. “There are no known fossil deposits in Utah now, but there are rumors of bones in the eastern regions near the Colorado border. I see no harm in making friendships for the future.” And he added, “Marsh met him, last year.”
The following day Mrs. Cope took the Union Pacific train back east, while the men traveled north by narrow gauge railway to Franklin, Idaho, “an alkali flats town,” Johnson noted, “with nothing to recommend it save that rail and stage lines enable one to leave it as soon as possible.”
But in Franklin, while buying stagecoach tickets, Cope was suddenly accosted by the sheriff, a large man with small eyes. “You are under arrest,” he told Cope, taking him by the arm, “and charged with murder.”
“Whom am I supposed to have murdered?” Cope asked, astonished.
“Your father,” the sheriff said. “Back East.”
“That’s ridiculous—my father died last year of a heart attack.” Despite being a Quaker, Cope was known for his flashing temper, and Johnson could see that he was doing his utmost to remain civil. “I loved my father with all my heart—he was kind and wise and supportive of my irregular scholarly wanderings,” he said with deep fury.
The sudden display of eloquence took everyone aback. The men all followed Cope and the sheriff to the jail, from a polite distance. It turned out a federal warrant for his arrest had been filed in the Idaho Territory. It also turned out that the federal marshal was in another district and would not return to Franklin until September. Cope, said the sheriff, would have to “cool his heels” in jail until then.
Cope protested that he was Professor Edward Drinker Cope, a United States paleontologist. The sheriff showed him the telegram stating that “Prof. E. D. Cope, paleontologist” was the man wanted for murder.
“I know who is behind this,” Cope said angrily. He was turning purple in the face.
“Now, Professor . . .” Sternberg said.
“I’m fine,” Cope said stiffly. He turned to the sheriff. “I propose to pay the telegraph costs to verify that the charges against me are untrue.”
The sheriff spat tobacco. “That’s fair enough. You get your father to cable me back, and I’ll apologize.”
“I can’t do that,” Cope said.
“Why not?”
“I already told you, my father’s dead.”
“You think I’m a fool,” the sheriff said, and grabbed Cope by the collar, to drag him into the jail cell. He was rewarded by a series of lightning-swift punches from Cope that knocked him to the ground; Cope proceeded to kick the sheriff repeatedly while the unfortunate man rolled in the dust and while Sternberg and Isaac cried, “Now, Professor!” and “That’s enough, Professor!” and “Remember yourself, Professor!”
At length, Isaac managed to drag Cope away; Sternberg helped the sheriff to his feet and dusted him off. “I’m sorry, but the professor has a terrible temper.”
“Temper? The man is a menace.”
“Well, you see he knows that Professor Marsh sent you that telegram, along with a bribe to arrest him, and the injustice of your behavior makes him angry.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the sheriff sputtered, without conviction.