Merely six months after the Civil War began to rip the country asunder in 1861, John Bell Hatcher first opened his eyes in Cooperstown, Illinois, on October 11. He was the second son of John B. Hatcher, born in Stark County, Ohio, in 1835, and Margaret Columbia O’Neal, born in Brown County, Illinois, in 1842. The genealogical roots of John B. are entwined with the “Quaker and Dorset Hatchers from England,” according to the Hatcher Families Genealogical Association, who document that this lineage comprised two relatively unconnected families known to be related through DNA testing. The largest was Quaker and began with William, born about 1705 in Buck Co, Virginia. Many of William’s descendants migrated to Virginia’s Loudoun and Fauquier Counties before heading due west, where many settled in Ohio. The second, smaller family, with primarily Catholic roots, arrived around 1850 from Dorset, England, and settled in Minnesota. In all, John B. and Margaret would foster a plentiful set of siblings for John Bell that included four brothers and six sisters, the last being born in 1887. But like his forebearers, John B. was restless and, soon after John Bell was born, migrated from Cooperstown, Illinois, southeast to the fertile farmlands near the town of Cooper in Greene County, Iowa. There, John B. mixed labor in the fields with teaching at the nearby schools during the winter months. Scant material survives with which to paint a detailed portrait of John Bell’s early life. However, according to an account from Hatcher’s father, John Bell’s quest for intellectual satisfaction started early on and was manifested in:
. . . the lad’s determination when he was but a mere boy to amass useful knowledge, patiently sitting for hours pouring over his books when his comrades of like age about him were bent upon sports and pastimes. He was an indefatigable student of books and a very keen observer. . . .
Often sickly as a child, John Bell studied under his father’s tutelage, in addition to attending local schools when he was able.1
Throughout his life, Hatcher chronically suffered from an ailment that he characteristically called “rheumatism.” Although the severity of these episodes seemed to vary, during instances when the afflication was especially acute, Hatcher could be disabled from performing mundane daily activities for weeks or even a month or two at a time. Today, there is a strong suspicion among some members of the families descended from John Bell that the source of his chronic ailments was a disease called Type 1 osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a name that basically means “imperfect bone formation.” The descendants’ suspicion derives from the fact that this disease, which can be genetically transmitted, has been diagnosed in some of their family members. Sometimes referred to as “brittle bone disease” in common parlance, OI results from “a faulty gene that reduces either the amount or the quality of type 1 collagen throughout the body,” and symptoms range from bone pain, common fractures due to low bone density, fatigue, short stature, spinal curvature, “triangular” skull shape, brittle teeth, and loose joints. Given Hatcher’s physical characteristics, complaints, and strenuous fieldwork, it’s clear that if he suffered from OI, it was a relatively mild type of the disorder.2
Fortunately, the onset of adolescence saw the boy gain strength to the point where he began to work in the nearby coal mines, which allowed him to stash away some savings. While laboring in the mines, he occasionally came across fossils of plants and other ancient organisms preserved in the 300-million-year-old layers of rock. Naturally fascinated, he amassed a modest collection and developed an interest in geology and paleontology to a degree that he used his hard-earned savings to enter Grinnell College in 1880 or 1881. However, he soon aspired to obtain the best education possible on his favored subjects and invested the remainder of his savings to enter and study at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1882. Playing into Hatcher’s decision was an unfortunate natural disaster that befell Grinnell and its college community; a tornado devastated the town on June 17, 1882, decimating the campus and killing thirty-nine people, including two students.3
One obvious advantage of gaining an education at a prestigious university such as Yale is the knowledge one obtains, especially in the discipline that one desires to pursue. However, a less commonly acknowledged, yet equally essential, benefit is the contacts one fosters with prominent professionals already established in the field. As a student at Sheffield, Hatcher would cross paths with some of the most preeminent and powerful scientific professionals in the world, let alone the nation. As a young man, Hatcher had become especially attracted to Yale through its highly acclaimed professor of geology, James Dwight Dana, whose books he had zealously studied. But how had the “Sheff,” as it is endearingly nicknamed, gained such scientific prominence?4
Although Yale College was founded in 1701 as an institution to train young men as ministers in the Congregational Church, Sheffield Scientific School did not arise until 1847. During much of that interim, especially from the late 1700s on, the administration of Yale was deeply engaged in, and often divided by, the contemporary controversies that pitted advocates for the establishment of a full-fledged university against those who continued to resist the expansion in the curriculum that would be required to elevate the institution beyond a seminary.
In the 1730s, students for old Yale College were drilled during their program in Latin, Greek, and occasionally Hebrew. Supplementary subjects included logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, and especially rhetoric and oratory, as would be required for members of the clergy. By the 1740s, freshmen still focused predominantly on Latin, through Virgil and Cicero, some New Testament Greek, and arithmetic. But sophomores broadened out into Horace, logic, geography, algebra, geometry, and the intricacies of grammar. Juniors also tackled trigonometry and natural philosophy, while seniors emphasized metaphysics and ethics, to explore “the tough problem of how to reconcile man’s newly emancipated reason and natural law with the old theology and Christian Law.”5
Strong currents of the sea change heralding the expansion of scientific education did not break on Yale’s shores until the hiring of Benjamin Silliman as a professor of chemistry and natural history in 1802, and no one was more shocked than Silliman himself, who had studied law but never studied chemistry. But there were few if any professionals proficient in both chemistry and natural history in the United States at that time. So Silliman delayed the start of his actual teaching for two years and crammed for his new gig by studying chemistry at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, before embarking for London and Edinburgh to continue his preparation where he became interested in geology. Silliman was an excellent teacher, as well as an influential public lecturer on the benefits of science—so much so that he is often anointed as the “patriarch” of science in the United States, despite the fact that he wasn’t an equally influential scientific researcher. Another accomplishment was his acquisition of numerous collections of minerals and other objects related to natural history, which served as the foundation of the collections for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale.6
Even more formidable waves washed ashore in New Haven during 1847, when the Department of Philosophy and the Arts was established to provide instruction in the natural sciences, among others. It was out of this department that the graduate school and Sheffield Scientific School would eventually evolve.7
From 1836 to 1837, Silliman employed a precocious young scientist named James Dwight Dana as his assistant after he graduated under Silliman’s tutelage in 1833. Having worked for the US Navy as a mathematics teacher in the interim, Dana then joined the prestigious United States Exploring Expedition led by Charles Wilkes, where he served as a mineralogist and geologist when the first American global geographic and scientific foray sailed throughout the Pacific between 1838 and 1842. His voluminous monographs that resulted from his research on the journey ranged from volcanoes to corals and crustaceans. These, along with his seminal works on mineralogy, including his System of Mineralogy of 1837 and Manual of Mineralogy in 1848, catapulted Dana into the upper echelon of the nation’s scientific community. Dana succeeded Silliman to become the Silliman Professor of Natural History and Geology, in 1850, and persistently promoted the expansion of Yale College into a full-fledged university that had begun with the establishment of the Department of Philosophy and the Arts in 1847, the same year that Harvard, Yale’s then and current archcompetitor in the academic arena, initiated the Lawrence Scientific School. At the commencement ceremony of 1856, just a year after his hiring, Dana declared:
. . . Yale is determined to be up to the times. The desire is manifest that the College, as it now stands, shall not longer mark the limit of American training in literature or science. . . . Why not have here, The American University—where nature’s laws shall be taught in all their fullness, and intellectual culture reach its highest limit.8
In the same address Dana prophetically advocated for the establishment of a museum of natural history to support learning and research in the natural sciences:
The museum . . . should be a spacious one, containing collections connected with all the subjects taught in the school. . . . [with specimens in natural history, presumably including fossils; seeds; soils; and collections illustrating mines and metallurgy] In fact, the museum should lecture to the eye. . . . It should be a place where the public passing in and out, should gather something of the spirit, and much of the knowledge, of the institution.9
In 1858, New Haven financier Joseph Earl Sheffield donated over $100,000 to purchase the old Medical Department building, complete with two newly renovated wings for the scientific school. In recognition of Sheffield’s patronage, Yale’s Corporation christened this institution the Sheffield Scientific School during the commencement of 1861. By 1883, an armada of prominent scientific instructors had landed at Yale to teach a burgeoning Sheffield student body of 207 graduates and undergraduates from no fewer than twenty-five states and the District of Columbia. Among the sixteen professors, notables included the chairman and executive officer, George J. Brush, who handled mineralogy; Daniel C. Eaton, in charge of botany; and Addison E. Verrill, who headed up zoology and geology. Tuition for an undergraduate cost $150 per year—roughly $3,400 in modern dollars.10
As stated in the Sheffield’s Annual Reports published in 1883 and 1884 when Hatcher was a student, the school’s mission was formulated to fulfill the scientific and technological needs of Connecticut:
It is in its purposes, and in the kinds of work it undertakes, peculiarly adapted to the wants of our State. We are preeminently an industrial community, but industrial in those departments which are based upon the most extended studies of natural science, and upon the application of the most recent results of these studies. Consequently it is here that a school devoted to the pursuit and encouragement of such studies finds its natural field.11
Requirements for admission to the freshman class were daunting. Candidates, in addition to being at least fifteen years old and providing references from former instructors or other “responsible persons” documenting sufficient moral character, were required to pass a broad battery of exams administered over five days—three in late June and two in mid-September. The subjects for examination ranged from the more classical, such as English, history of the United States, geography and Latin, to the more scientifically pertinent disciplines of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.12
A three-year course of instruction followed, including two terms of courses taken by all students during the first year and a regimen of more specialized courses conducted over the final two years, once the student had chosen what we would call his major area of interest. During the more generalized freshman year, first-term classes encompassed German, English, composition, spherical trigonometry, plane analytical geometry, physics, chemistry, and elementary drawing. In the second term, students continued to tackle the subjects of language, physics, chemistry, and plane analytical geometry, while also delving into physical geography, botany, and various aspects of drawing, including isometric drawing, shading, tinting, and the principles of orthographic projection.13
Having successfully run the gauntlet of these intimidating courses, juniors and seniors could finally set sail toward their preferred professional goal, with their options including chemistry, civil engineering, dynamic engineering, agriculture, natural history, premedical studies or premining and metallurgy studies. Hatcher, of course, chose natural history, which the faculty at the time saw fit to divide into four subdisciplines: geology, mineralogy, zoology, and botany. So his junior year entangled him in classes involving theoretical chemistry, qualitative analysis, mineralogy, botany, German, French, zoology, physiology, and physical geology. During his senior year of 1884, he would have continued to investigate geology, including field trips and lab work; zoological lab practices, lectures, and excursions; botanical studies in the herbarium and the field; vertebrate anatomy; meteorology; and French. Presciently, his final year culminated with the submission of his first research paper, a graduation thesis entitled “On the Genus of Mosses termed Conomitrium.” Although no transcripts recording Hatcher’s performance in these courses still exist, his scholarly determination as a student culminated in the spring of 1884, when he secured his bachelor of philosophy degree.14
During the course of his rigorous routine of studies, Hatcher showed his collections of Carboniferous fossils from the coal mines to George J. Brush, professor of metallurgy and director of the Sheffield Scientific School. Brush, who, along with professor of paleontology Othniel Charles Marsh, was one of the three original curators and a trustee of the Peabody Museum, recognized Hatcher’s self-motivated initiative and, in turn, introduced Hatcher to Marsh. Like Hatcher, Marsh had studied under Brush while a student at Yale. As soon as he had his diploma in hand, Hatcher, the consummate poker player, laid his cards on Marsh’s table. In the early summer of 1884, Hatcher marched with calm confidence into Marsh’s office. At stake were his years of self-financed education, as well as his future. When Marsh inquired as to the newly minted scientist’s purpose, Hatcher was direct: “I want a job collecting fossils, anywhere, anytime, at any salary.” It might have been the most subservient statement that Hatcher would ever make for the rest of his career.15
In showing his hand to the ever imperious and often pompous Marsh, Hatcher was, in effect, bidding to join in a burgeoning revolution surrounding scientific and especially paleontological knowledge in the United States. For the most part, American geology and paleontology, as well as other scientific disciplines, languished in the shadows of European universities and museums throughout the early 1800s, with American students traveling to Europe for scientific training, as we saw with Silliman. But in the wake of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and his subsequent commission for the Lewis and Clark expedition from 1804 to 1806, during which their Corps of Discovery explored the northern extent of the nation’s new territory, the US government eventually passed the Pacific Railroad Survey bill in 1853 to find the best routes for railroads from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. This initiative further triggered a number of federally funded surveys after the Civil War that brought together explorers, engineers, scientists, and topographers in a common effort to chart the western landscape under the leadership of dauntless expeditionary luminaries such as John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, and George Wheeler. These forays found a significant number of vertebrate fossils that were first evaluated primarily by Joseph Leidy, a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the prestigious Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and Europe began to take note of North America’s evolutionary riches soon after Darwin published his seminal study On the Origin of Species. But by the 1870s, Leidy found his role as the nation’s most prominent paleontologist under threat by two young, ambitious, and wealthy competitors, who began to explore the American West for fossils themselves. One was Edward Drinker Cope, whom Leidy fostered in Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the other was the person to whom Hatcher made his appeal, O. C. Marsh. Just five years before Hatcher enrolled at Sheffield, both field crews of Cope and Marsh had made momentous discoveries of new dinosaur species in the frontiers of Colorado and Wyoming. So with his bold bid to Marsh, Hatcher stood on the precipice of joining this remarkable and raucous paleontological revolution. But would his gambit work?