Natural History Hero

On the western-bound train, Charles Henry Morrill watched the besieged Nebraska land whiz past. Where corn once grew tall, there were bare scarred fields. A second year of Rocky Mountain locust swarm had devastated the land and the hopes of many homesteading farmers. It had also dimmed prospects for the farm implement store Morrill established after he moved his young family to a homestead south of Stromsburg. Farmers without crops had no use for Morrill’s plows, sickles, hoes and pitchforks.

Morrill was on his way to South Dakota to pan for gold. It was a last-ditch effort to save his family farm. His wife, Harriet, and their young children would await his return in their 16 x 16-foot wooden house he’d had built for them. Many homesteading families lived in sod homes, but Morrill had greater ambitions.

From the train window, Morrill couldn’t see where his journey would lead. Ultimately, he wouldn’t make it to South Dakota to search for gold. Instead, he would encounter a different kind of treasure in Nebraska’s Badlands. Fossils of ancient creatures fascinated him and compelled him to devote the fortune he would one day make to preserve natural history wonders for all Nebraskans.

By the time, he reached Fort Robinson in Western Nebraska, Morrill realized odds of striking gold in South Dakota weren’t good. He accepted the offer of a reliable wage as the trading post clerk there and stocked shelves, kept books and sold goods.

One day he noticed a long row of white tents nearby. He learned that men were digging for fossils under the guidance of O.C. Marsh, a world-renowned archaeologist from Yale University. Marsh was one of the first bone diggers to explore Western Nebraska. Considered America’s version of Darwin, Marsh had discovered the first pterosaur fossils in America, as well as the remains of dinosaurs, including Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Allosaurus.

Morrill joined the team for the Hat Creek excavation in Nebraska’s Little Badlands – an area featuring buttes, deeply cut crevices and narrow rocks stretching skyward. As Morrill investigated the area, bones crunched under his feet. These were the bodies of animals that traveled across Nebraska before the Ice Age.

There were large mammals resembling ancient rhinoceros. These titanothere fossils dated back 35-38 million years. On the North American continent, they have only been found in the Chadron Formation, a region that stretches from western North Dakota to Northwest Nebraska.

There were tiny horses and enormous turtles that thrived in the vast rolling plains with long grass for food and shelter and watering holes to quench thirst. They’d likely died during a drought. Their remains baked in the soil, forever linking them to Nebraska.

O.C. Marsh instructed his men to pack up their finds. The fossils were leaving the state for museums in the East.

That troubled Morill.

“It seemed desirable that the remains of these remarkable creatures be preserved for the state,” he later wrote in his autobiography, The Morrills and Reminiscences.

He came away from his first bone-digging experience determined to find a way to do that. He would get the chance 16 years later when he teamed up with an energetic young fossil-hunter named Erwin Barbour.

Morrill rejoined his family in Stromsburg to give farming another try. This time, they succeeded. They added 400 more acres to their 160-acre homestead and made improvements to the house. As the children grew, Morrill turned over more farming responsibilities to them and focused on other business ventures.

He befriended Gov. Albinus Nance, a fellow Polk County resident, who hailed from nearby Osceola. Morrill accepted a position as personal secretary to the governor, splitting time between the Lincoln State Capitol and the family farm. His work with Nance connected him to some of the state’s most powerful men. 

Morrill left Nance’s administration and became president of the Bank of Stromsburg. It marked a successful turn in his career, which would lead to additional ventures with land banks and corporations. These political and social connections led to his appointment to the Board of Regents at the University of Nebraska, where he would serve for more than a decade, starting in 1890. Erwin Barbour, a university hire who’d come on board the following year, would reignite Morrill’s passion for Nebraska’s natural history.

Erwin barbour believed the Nebraska State Museum at the University of Nebraska could become a world-renowned institution. It just needed a big-deal artifact that could rival the stuff in history museums back East.

Right before he assumed his post as the museum’s new director in 1891, he traveled to the Agate area in Western
Nebraska on his own dime. He discovered an artifact that would be the envy of any institution’s – the Daimonelix, or Devil’s Corkscrew, a tall, spiraled helix rising from the depths of the earth. 

“Their forms are magnificent; their symmetry perfect; their organization beyond my comprehension,” he wrote.

The mysterious formations left scientists puzzled for many years until it was ultimately determined enormous extinct rodents had made them. 

Barbour shipped the fossils to the university and traveled to Lincoln to begin his new job. There were so many fossils – and they were so heavy – that they made the museum floor sag.

Morrill summoned Barbour to his office after learning of Barbour’s adventure in Western Nebraska. Barbour feared he was in trouble for bringing “only” 70 fossils from his dig. He was surprised to learn that Morrill had called him there to tell him that he’d finance Barbour’s future expeditions. Morrill also arranged free rail transportation through his contacts with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.

In the early 1900s on a trip to Agate, near Harrison, Barbour found a bevy of fossils in one of two conical hills. There were prehistoric horses, rhinos and beavers the size of large dogs.

With more than 3,000 acres to explore, visitors to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument today can view exhibits featuring animals, such as the Dinohyus, which resembles a cross between a bison and a pig, and the Daphoenodon, a “bear dog.”

At the time that Barbour joined the university, the museum’s fossil assortment was more for teaching than for public viewing. That would change due to his and Morrill’s advocacy for a new state museum, which would one day hold incredible finds like the remains of a wooly mammoth discovered by chickens.

After his flock of chickens unearthed a wooly mammoth on a Lincoln County Ranch in 1921, Henry Kariger wrote a letter to alert Barbour of the find. Barbour asked him to leave the
remains for spring, when he could send a crew. Kariger ignored him and dug up the bones and brought them to the 1922 State Fair. Barbour visited the exhibit and bought the fossils for $250 (about $4,100 today). Most of the parts sat in storage for several years, but two legs and some ribs were used to create an arch at the old state museum.

Barbour sent an excavation team to the ranch in 1923 but couldn’t find any more fossils of the mammoth.

No matter. Barbour and Morrill had another elephantine project underway. They wanted to transform the State Museum of Natural History from its two room-collection in Nebraska Hall into a public attraction, like the Field Museum, a popular natural history museum in Chicago.

Morrill believed the state needed to
finance the building because it would then truly belong to the public. Initial plans called for the new Morrill Hall – Barbour insisted the building be named after his biggest fan and financial supporter – to cover about 100,000 square feet and
feature four hallways of exhibits.

Morrill offered to donate $10,000 for aesthetic improvements, such as floor tiles and murals.

Nebraska legislators agreed to finance the new building, but at about 40 percent of the original size. The cornerstone was placed in 1926 and about a year later, the new natural history museum opened at Morrill Hall. It included halls for exhibits and classrooms.

Morrill’s health was failing, but he made it to the dedication ceremony in May 1927. Unable to travel by automobile, his family worked with the railroad to create customized hospital car. Outside the train window, the view was remarkably different from all those years ago when Morrill witnessed ruined lands. This time corn grew on fertile fields. Farmhouses dotted the landscape. Small towns thrived along the rail line.

As dignitaries and academics gathered to celebrate the culmination of what began more than 50 years earlier with the discovery of fossils in Nebraska’s panhandle, Morrill was too frail to stand and deliver the speech of his life. Stepping in for his father who was physically unable to give the speech, Arthur Morrill told the story of how his father had gone west to save his family. He’d returned with an additional self-imposed mandate to keep Nebraska’s natural history treasures safe.

Standing in front of the world’s largest mammoth on display, it’s easy for visitors to the University of Nebraska Museum to feel small. “Archie,” named because the mammoth was Archidiskodon species, first debuted as an exhibit in 1933. The 14-foot tall and 25-foot long Columbian mammoth anchors Morrill Hall’s four floors of historical displays of mostly Nebraska artifacts. Joining Archie in Elephant Hall are Tuskers – prehistoric elephants – and smaller fossils of contemporary elephants, for scale. Like bison before them, elephants once roamed Nebraska. Mammoth remains have been found in 90 of 93 counties. Today, more than 100,000 people annually visit the exhibitions. In Lincoln, Archie is a mascot as beloved as Herbie Husker.  

Exploring Morrill Hall is a walk through Nebraska’s natural history. Flanking Elephant Hall, a gallery features a 9-foot tall camel. The Rhino Gallery includes several species of the animal once common to Nebraska. There are murals of Morrill, his wife, Harriet Morrill, Barbour, and Samuel Avery, who was the university chancellor at the time of Morrill Hall’s opening.

Displays feature ferocious sabertoothed tigers and a giant Bison latifrons, which lived on the Plains 20,000 years ago and had a horn span of about seven feet. The museum celebrates Nebraska’s Native American tribes and their cultures with photos and tribal flags.

Insect life features in another exhibit. Missing from the collection is the Rocky Mountain locust.

It became extinct 30 years after Morrill took the journey west, where he fell in love with natural history.

Bearing the Moniker Morrill
By MEGANFEENEY

Charles Henry Morrill shaped many Nebraska communities and preserved the state’s natural history. A few places were lucky enough to keep his name, too.

Chimney Rock pierces the cornflower Nebraska sky. For hundreds of years, it’s symbolized hope - something Charles Morrill never relinquished, despite setbacks in Iowa as a farmer and in Nebraska as a farm implement entrepreneur.

When Cheyenne County voters decided in 1908 to split their county and name the new northern part Morrill County after the prominent businessman, farmer and philanthropist, they weren’t necessarily making that connection between the person and the landmark.

But it’s hard to imagine a pairing of two better icons that represent Nebraska striving and opportunity and the steadfast belief in it.

Residents in the small community of Collins in Nebraska’s western panhandle knew that without irrigation their crops would fail. Since settlers of this Nebraska town had come from Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1886 they’d suffered summers of drought.

Working together, community members dredged an irrigation canal eight miles long. The access to water was part of a new beginning. When the Burlington Railroad decided to build a depot and set up an agent less than one mile south of Collins, Morrill, president of the Lincoln Land Company, laid out a tract of land for a town.

With the railyard and the access to water, the new town of Morrill thrived as it welcomed the beginning of the 20th century. People erected residences and set up businesses, schools and churches. Today visitors to the village, located in Scotts Bluff County, explore artifacts from its earliest days at a museum located in the Morrill Public Library.

These everyday objects – post cards, feed sacks, match boxes – evoke visions of all the people who owed part of their newfound prosperity to Morrill’s foresight.

Laughing groups of school children pour into Morrill Hall, the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln, where they ogle exhibits and enjoy hands-on learning areas.

Morrill, a member of the Board of Regents, funded expeditions that led to the discovery and cataloguing of much of the museum’s collection. The museum houses fossil elephants, more than a million specimens of vertebrate fossils and other natural history artifacts.

Nebraskans may consider some of the earliest life that existed in the area when a sea covered the land and ancient sea creatures throttled through the deep. Or they can silently thank Morrill for funding the discovery of things like the titanothere skeleton on exhibit. Morrill’s financing allowed these treasures to remain close to home.