Czar Nicolas I ruled Russia from 1825 to 1855. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Despite his growing recognition in the academic world, Dexter Marsh continued in his ordinary work around Greenfield, ringing wedding bells for the church, running errands for town hall, guarding the door of the county courthouse, and shoeing horses, mending stairs, and doing whatever other odd jobs the townspeople needed done. But his success with fossils had expanded his sense of himself. His mind was elsewhere. There was a big world beyond his own little corner in western Massachusetts, and Marsh wanted to be part of it. 

His ambitions rose from being known in Greenfield and even Boston and Philadelphia to more exciting places across the Atlantic. He sent butter and maple sugar to a Christian mission in Constantinople. He received a box of minerals from Smyrna, probably from a missionary who had roots in Massachusetts. He helped Dr. Deane pack up footprint specimens to send to Gideon Mantell, the English doctor generally credited with one of the first dinosaur fossil discoveries. Mantell showed those footprint specimens at a meeting of the Geological Society of London and read a letter by Dr. Deane into the record, but this action elevated Deane’s prestige along with Hitchcock’s while giving no recognition to Marsh. 

Perhaps as a refusal to be overlooked, Marsh took an interesting initiative. In May of 1847, facilitated by an Amherst College professor, Charles Upham Shepard, he sent a letter introducing himself to an American businessman living in St. Petersburg, Russia, who was also a corresponding member of the Boston Society of Natural History. Marsh asked the businessman to orchestrate the delivery of a gift of fossil footprint specimens to Czar Nicholas I. Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, the American was never able to complete the transaction. In November of 1849, Marsh had to pay freight again, just to have the fossils returned. 

Why would he choose the Czar of Russia for this act of personal diplomacy? Why not the young Queen Victoria? Perhaps it was simply that the Boston Society of Natural History had a member living in Russia that put the Czar in mind. But also, Marsh would have known that the British geologist Roderick Murchison had persuaded Czar Nicholas to commission him to explore geology in Russia in 1841. Marsh thus may have believed that the Czar had a special interest in geology and fossils. In any case, that he made such an effort confirms that Dexter Marsh had come to regard himself not merely as a laborer, but as a man of the world.

Next chapter: Dust to Dust