The train left at eight o’clock in the evening from the cavernous interior of the Grand Central Depot in New York. Finding his way through the station, Johnson passed several attractive young women accompanied by their families, but could not quite bring himself to meet their curious eyes. Meanwhile, he told himself, he needed to find his party. Altogether, twelve Yale students would accompany Professor Marsh and his staff of two, Mr. Gall and Mr. Bellows.
Marsh was there early, walking down the line of cars, greeting everyone the same way: “Hello, young fellow, ready to dig for Yale?” Ordinarily taciturn and suspicious, Marsh was here outgoing and friendly. Marsh had handpicked his students from socially prominent and wealthy families, and these families had come to see their boys off.
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.”
Here Marsh found himself surrounded by the children of the strongest. Marsh privately maintained to Bellows that “the New York send-off is the most productive part of the field trip,” and his thinking was firmly in mind when he greeted Johnson with his usual “Hello, young man, ready to dig for Yale?”
Johnson was surrounded by a cluster of porters who loaded his bulky photographic equipment aboard. Marsh looked about, then frowned. “Where is your family?”
“In Philadelphia, si— Professor.”
“Your father did not come to see you off?” Marsh recalled that Johnson’s father was in shipping. Marsh did not know much about shipping, but it was undoubtedly lucrative and full of sharp practices. Fortunes were made daily in shipping.
“My father saw me off in Philadelphia.”
“Really? Most families wish to meet me personally, to get a sense of the expedition . . .”
“Yes, I am sure, but you see, they felt to come here would strain—my mother—who does not completely approve.”
“Your mother does not approve?” Marsh could not conceal the distress in his voice. “Does not approve of what? Surely not of me . . .”
“Oh no. It’s the Indians, Professor. She disapproves of my going west, because she is afraid of the Indians.”
Marsh huffed. “She obviously knows nothing of my background. I am widely respected as the intimate friend of the red man. We’ll have no trouble with Indians, I promise you.”
But the situation was altogether unsatisfactory for Marsh, who later muttered to Bellows that Johnson “looks older than the others,” and hinted darkly that “perhaps he is not a student at all. And his father is in shipping. I think nothing more need be said.”
The whistle blew, there were final kisses and waves for the students, and the train pulled out of the station.
Marsh had arranged for them to travel in a private car, provided by none other than Commodore Vanderbilt himself, now a whitened eighty-two-year-old tucked into his sickbed. It was the first of many agreeable comforts that Marsh had arranged for the trip through his extensive connections with the army, the government, and captains of industry such as Vanderbilt.
In his prime, the crusty Commodore, a hulking figure in a fur coat worn winter and summer, had been admired by all New York. With ruthless and aggressive instincts, as well as a sharply profane tongue, this uneducated Staten Island Ferry boy, the son of Dutch peasants, had come to control shipping lines from New York to San Francisco; later he took an interest in railroads, extending his mighty New York Central from the heart of New York all the way to burgeoning Chicago. He was always good copy, even in defeat; when the secretive Jay Gould bested him for control of the Erie railway, he announced, “This Erie war has taught me that it never pays to kick a skunk.” And on another occasion, his complaint to his lawyers—“What do I care for the law? Haint I got the power?”—had made him a legend.
In later years Vanderbilt became increasingly eccentric, given to fraternizing with clairvoyants and mesmerists, communing with the dead, often on pressing business matters; and though he patronized outrageous feminists such as Victoria Woodhull, he still chased girls a quarter of his age.
Some days before, New York newspaper headlines had proclaimed “VANDERBILT DYING!,” which had roused the old man out of bed to bellow at reporters: “I am not dying! Even if I was dying I should have vigor enough to knock this abuse down your lying throats!” At least, this was what the journalists reported, though everyone in America knew the Commodore’s language was considerably saltier.
Vanderbilt’s railway car was the last word in elegance and modernity; there were Tiffany lamps, china and crystal service, as well as the clever new sleeper beds invented by George Pullman. By now, Johnson had met the other students, and noted in his journal they were “a bit tedious and spoiled, but all in all, an adventure-seeking lot. Yet we all share a common fear—of Professor Marsh.”