Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Author’s Note
“Biography,” observed Oscar Wilde, “lends to death a new terror.” Even in a work of fiction about
individuals long dead, there is reason to consider his sentiment.
Readers unfamiliar with this period of American history may be interested to know that Professors
Marsh and Cope were real people, their rivalry and antagonism depicted here without exaggeration—
in fact, it has been toned down, since the nineteenth century promoted a degree of ad hominem excess
that is hard to believe now.
Cope did go to the Montana badlands in 1876, and discovered the teeth of Brontosaurus,
essentially as recounted here.*
The antagonism between Cope and Marsh that played out over ten years is compressed here into a
single summer, with some changes. Thus, it was Marsh who made the false skull for Cope to find, and
so on. However, it is true that on many occasions the workers of Cope and Marsh fired on one another
—with much more serious intent than suggested here.
The character of William Johnson is entirely fictitious. I would not read this novel as history. For
history, read Charles Sternberg’s detailed account of Cope’s trip to the Montana badlands in The Life
of a Fossil Hunter.
I am indebted to E. H. Colbert, the eminent paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of
Natural History, for first bringing the story of Marsh and Cope to my attention; in his kind
correspondence he suggested a novel about them; he also provided me with my first leads in his
books.
Finally, readers who inspect photographic books, as I have done, should be extremely careful about
the captions. There has emerged a new breed of photo book in which authentic pictures of the West
are accompanied by bleak, elegiac prose. The captions may seem to fit the pictures, but they do not fit
the facts—this sad, melancholy attitude is a complete anachronism. Towns such as Deadwood may
look depressing to us now, but they were exciting places then, and the people who inhabited them
were excited to be there. Too often, the people who write captions to photographs indulge their own
uninformed fantasies about the pictures and what they mean.
All the events of 1876 occurred as reported here, except that Marsh did not lead a party of students
west that year (he had gone every year for the previous six, but remained in New Haven in 1876 to
meet the English biologist T. H. Huxley); that all of Cope’s bones traveled safely on the Missouri
steamer, and no one continued on to Deadwood; and that Robert Louis Stevenson did not go west until
1879. The descriptions of the Indian Wars are accurate, sadly so, and from a vantage of some