Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,019

This is the grave of Charles Walcott.

Born in 1850 in New York Mills, New York, which is way upstate, Walcott grew up without his father, who died when he was a toddler. As the youngest of the family, his older siblings likely helped support him, but I am not sure. What I am sure about is that he did not finish high school but was super into nature and was finding fossils and that fascinated him, as it would anyone, but especially in an age when we knew a lot less about paleontology than we do today. He was messing around in a quarry looking for trilobites and found a bunch of them too. He also found a girl he could marry, the daughter of the quarry owner. But she died young, in 1876.

But Walcott continued his interests in fossils and he got to know Louis Agassiz. The world of science was small in the nineteenth century and it wasn’t so hard for an amateur to meet the best known scientists in the country. Agassiz encourages Walcott in his work. He got a job as an assistant to the state paleontologist of New York (I wonder if this job still exists today?). In 1879, he took a job with the U.S. Geological Survey. He was so committed to what he did that he just rose and rose in the USGS, become chief paleontologist in 1883 and the director of the whole thing in 1894.

Walcott basically became a senior scientist in America by the time he was in his early 40s. He was on just about every major scientific board and society in the country. He was president of both the Geological Society of America and Philosophical Society of Washington in 1901. He helped Andrew Carnegie found his charity to assuage the guilt of being a worker-murdering scumbag in 1902, the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

But Walcott also wasn’t resting on his laurels, which he easily could have done. In 1907, he was named Secretary of the Smithsonian, leaving his job as USGS director for this. But more importantly, he kept traveling to explore possible fossil sites. In 1909, he was in British Columbia when he and his team came across an amazing trove of fossils in what became known as the Burgess shale. A 508 million year old site, putting it in the Middle Cambrian, this area became Walcott’s obsession for the rest of his life. It was real good. It’s the first evidence we have of fossilized soft body parts. Now, in many ways, Walcott really was an amateur. Scientists have since rejected almost all of his conclusions about what he found, but no one questions the quality of his work for the time or the profound nature of his discoveries.

Between 1910 and 1924, Walcott returned to the Burgess shale almost every year. This was his summer expedition. He found over 65,000 fossils in those years, mostly working with his wife and sons. This was at first his second wife, but she died in 1911. He then married Mary Vaux, later famous on her own for her wildflower paintings. They married in 1914. She was 54 years old at this time herself, so this was very much a mature relationship, yet her father, who still lived, strenuously objected to it. She hadn’t married and instead had taken care of his ass since she was like 17, so you can see where he would not want that disturbed and prioritized himself over his daughter’s happiness. Not good though. But good for Walcott and Vaux.

One of Walcott’s issues that he couldn’t imagine that entire classifications of animals had disappeared over time, so he tried to shimmy fossilized animals into current biological classifications where they didn’t belong. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that this was corrected, so it’s not like he was rejecting any kind of scientific consensus at the time. This all became far more famous in the 1980s, when Stephen Jay Gould wrote about it all in Wonderful Life. The Burgess shale is right in the Canadian Rockies, in BC but just over the border from Alberta. This meant it was a gorgeous area to work and Walcott knew it. So he became a really good photographer of the Rockies too.

Fossils were definitely Walcott’s scientific legacy. But he had other interests too. Flight fascinated him, as it did so many people when this amazing experience was now available to people. But what would it mean for science? What was possible here? In 1914, he called scientists together from around the country for a conference to promote aeronautic science. This led Congress to pass a law creating what became known later as National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which existed all the way up until 1958, when NASA took it over.

Now, here’s a weird thing–Walcott hated the Wright Brothers. Walcott wanted to undermine the claims that the Wright Brothers had been the first to fly. So he worked with Glenn Curtis, another early aviation guy, to take an early proto-plane developed by former Smithsonian head Samuel Langley back in 1903 and make adjustments to it that made it flyable. But the problem of course is that this was a complete lie. The proto-plane could not fly, this is why it was a proto-plane and not the one we remember. But Walcott and Curtis wanted to take credit away from the Wrights. This did indeed lead to controversy over who really was the first person to fly. This did not get solved until after Walcott’s death either. Finally, in 1928, the Smithsonian came out and said that the aviation pioneers were definitively the Wrights. But it feels to me at least that this really discredits Walcott’s entire career.

There’s an entire website dedicated in great deal to the Walcott/Curtis war with the Wrights. I know nothing of this story, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy, but assuming that is it accurate, the issue seems to be two-fold. First, the Smithsonian had funded Langley’s plane and so when it failed, Congress was super skeptical about continuing to fund such operations, especially since the failure had come straight from the Smithsonian’s head. Second, Walcott had been the guy doing most of the fundraising for Langley and so it was personal. With rumors floating around that Congress might fund aeronautical research, Walcott wanted to make sure that it came through him and the Smithsonian. Still, pretty nasty bit of insider politics.

Walcott died in 1927, at the age of 76.

Charles Walcott is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC.

In 1934, Vaux gave a bunch of money to establish the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal for the National Academy of Sciences to give an award to someone doing work in Precambrian and Cambrian history. It is given every five years. If you would like this series to visit some of its winners, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles White, who won in 1934, is in Grand Canyon, Arizona. No one else who has won it has an identifiable grave, but I am sure I can find some other geologists and paleontologists. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.