To his great discoveries and researches in the field of
paleontology, Utah and the world are permanently indebted to the late
Dr. Earl Douglass, whose labors as a scientist took him all over the
West and East, but whose home in later years was in Salt Lake City,
where he died January 13, 1931.
Doctor Douglass was born in the
little town of Medford, Minnesota, October 28, 1862, son of Fernando and
Abigail Louisa (Carpenter) Douglass. His father was born in New York
State, December 20, 1829, and died at Jensen, Utah, January 26, 1916. In
the family were two daughters and one son. The daughters were Mrs. Ida
Douglass Battin and Miss Nettie, the latter dying at Jensen March 24,
1922.
Doctor Douglass' father was a carpenter and farmer. About
1862 the family moved to a farm a mile west of Medford. This farm proved
the source of some, of the deepest impressions made on the plastic
character of the boy. There he developed both a love for poetry and
science, and from the age of five to ten learned to read the lessons of
the bleached bones on the prairie, the beautiful pebbles of the little
stream where he waded barefooted, and came to know in an intimate
personal way the flowers, so that in later years he could look back and
write of that farm as "a land of poetry and romance to the boy."
His first schooling was acquired in a little cabin school on the
prairie. When he was twelve years old the family returned to
Medford, where he continued his education in the village school during
winters, working on the farm in the summer. In the winter of 1881-82 he
helped build a cabin in the woods, and chopped cord wood for a merchant
in Medford. In the spring of 1882 he again resumed his work in the
village school, and later took examination for a teacher's certificate.
He first taught in a Swiss-German district near Medford, and afterwards
taught in other schools in that community until 1885. In that year he
attended the Pillsbury Academy at Owatonna the following year taught a
term of school in the `Supper room" of his home village, and in August
went to live with an older sister in South Dakota, where she had taken
up a homestead. He worked on her farm and in September, 1886, again
taught a district school nearby. In 1888 he entered the spring term at
the University of Dakota (now the University of South Dakota) at
Vermilion. Here he met his only perfect ideal of a college president.
From that time he continued his college education, working in the
intervals, teaching, and finding opportunity to study geology and botany
not only from text books and the crude laboratories of that time, but in
field trips. While in the South Dakota Agricultural College in 1889 and
again in 1892 he was employed by the botanical department to collect
wild plants and start a herbarium. This was his first real scientific
collecting.
In 1890 he was sent to Mexico to join Prof. C. G.
Pringle, who was collecting plants for herbariums in the United States
and foreign countries. He went as far south as the City of Mexico, and
later returned to St. Louis to take a position in the Missouri Botanical
Gardens. In 1892, having definitely decided to specialize in geology, he
gave up his work there and returned to the South Dakota Agricultural
College in Brookings. He was one of several students who went from there
to the Iowa State College, where he was graduated Bachelor of Science in
1892. In 1894 Doctor Douglass obtained a school near Bozeman, Montana,
where he could teach and study geology.
In the Madison Valley he
made his first collection of fossil bones. This region is a part of the
rich field opened for the study of paleontology in the Rocky Mountain
region, a region which in later Mesozoic times was covered with a mild
inland sea, with a climate tropical or semi-tropical. He was one of the
first to collect what were subsequently identified as the bones of
camels, rhinoceroses, three-toed horses and other extinct animals. From
this time until 1900 he was engaged in teaching and collecting fossils
representing the different geological ages in Montana. In 1900 he was
awarded the Master of Science degree by the University of Montana, where
he taught geology, physical geography and physics. His Master's thesis,
published by the University of Montana, was his first scientific paper.
Following this he held a science fellowship in Princeton University
until 1902, which afforded him an opportunity to study intensively
geology and paleontology under the eminent Prof. W. B. Scott. He was the
first to receive this science fellowship two years in succession.
Doctor Douglass in 1901 accompanied the Princeton Scientific
Expedition to the Crazy Mountains north of Big Timber, and after the
return of most of the expedition to Princeton in the fall he discovered
and excavated from ancient sea deposits a land dinosaur called the
Duckbill Dinosaur. This discovery was sent to Princeton. He also made
what Professor Scott termed "an epoch making discovery" in fixing the
age of the Fort Union deposits by discovering fossil teeth and jaws of
mammals along with fossil leaves and fresh water shells.
In the
spring of 1902 he entered the employ of the Carnegie Museum, which had
recently been established at Pittsburgh, and was. associated with that
institution for twenty-two years. During the summers he led expeditions
into the West in search of new fossil material, and the winter months he
spent in classifying and studying and writing scientific papers to
describe the new finds. His publications were numerous and important,
including about twenty-four contributions to the literature of
paleontology and geology. These reveal the fact that Doctor Douglass was
responsible for giving the world of science seventeen new genera and
eighty-three new species of fossil vertebrates. Perhaps his chief
specialty was related to the merycoidodants. A recent publication says:
"He had mastered the entire literature relating to this interesting
group."
Doctor Douglass at different times was employed as an
expert geologist by oil and mining companies throughout the West, but
his chief interest always was in the study of evidences of earliest life
forms as recorded in the rocks of the earth crust. He was one of the
eminent paleontologists who have done most toward reconstructing an
orderly account of the development of prehistoric mammalian life. In
1908 he was sent at his request to the Uinta Basin in Utah to collect
fossil remains. With permission of the officers of the Gilsonite Company
he established a camp for the summer in an abandoned stone cabin at Well
No. 2 on the stage route from Dragon to Vernal, Utah. This was a banner
season for his work. He collected and shipped to the Carnegie Museum a
large number of fossils, among them numerous species new to science.
"The Devil's Playground" yielded numerous new fossils, among them a
collection of fossil turtles, which later was named and described by the
late 0. P. Hay. A most remarkable discovery of this season was a
complete skeleton of dolichorhinus longiceps, an early eocene forerunner
of the titanotheres, now an attractive exhibit in the gallery of fossil
mammals in the Carnegie Museum and the most perfect specimen of this
benus in existence.
In the summer of 1909 Doctor Douglass was
sent by the director of the Carnegie Museum, Dr. W. J. Holland, to the
Uinta Basin, this time to look for and collect dinosaurian remains. On
August 19, 1909, he discovered what is known as the "Dinosaur
National Monument." This was probably the largest undertaking of its kind in the
history of paleontology, and later proved to be the greatest quarry of
its kind in the world. Year after year Doctor Douglass and his able crew
brought forth new and unexpected discoveries in dinosaurs representing
many new families, genera and species. In the Carnegie Museum a slab
mount of one of these small dinosaurs is probably the most complete
skeleton of a small dinosaur ever unearthed.
Doctor Douglass
labored faithfully and unceasingly for twelve years at this wonderful
quarry. About 300 tons of fossil bones were shipped to the Carnegie
Museum, and fifty tons were sent to Washington, D. C., and the
University of Utah. A very rare skull and skeleton of an undescribed
dinosaur excavated by him rests in the storerooms of the University of
Utah.
While earnestly devoted to his scientific pursuits Doctor
Douglass never turned a visitor or inquiring mind away. Often after a
day of hard work he would trudge up the long winding path to the quarry
of ancient relics to explain some of the mysteries of the past to a
belated visitor.
The last few years of his life were devoted
mostly to expert work and his literary efforts and in making collections
of rare fossils. In 1928 he wrote a valuable and extended report on "The
Origin of Gilsonite and the Source from Which it Came." Much of his time
was spent in investigating the origin of petroleum. One of his
unpublished manuscripts on oil problems in Utah treats that subject from
the standpoint of both historical and economic geology.
While
known to the world as a scientist, Doctor Douglass was at heart a poet,
and he was an able connoisseur in painting, poetry and general
literature. As he once wrote in his diary: "I think that the element
that predominated in my nature, and has predominated all through my
life, is that of poetry."
Elsewhere he wrote: "It is the
imagination which appeals to me and I consider it the highest human
faculty. . . . I never cease to love to go over new roads and see new
scenes." At his death he left unpublished a volume of unusual poetry,
and he was also writing a popular story of the origin of man based upon
scientific and geological facts. His last publication was Fossil Records
of Utah, published in the Professional Engineer, December 30, 1930. He
often said there was more real thrill in the discovery of a new flower
than in the finding of an immense dinosaur skeleton. A great pioneer in
science, one of the ablest scientists who ever came to Utah, he was at
the same time a man of deeply religious feeling, kind and gentle, and
enjoyed the love and affection of all who had ever come into the circle
of his presence. A long and patient study of the past had brought him
that perhaps greatest of all qualities of character, a true humility,
and also a vision which was undisturbed by ephemeral conflicts and
turmoils.
On October 20, 1905, he married Miss Pearl A.
Goetschius, of Alder, Montana. Mrs. Douglass at that time was a teacher
in the public schools. Nine years earlier she had been a student in his
school at Ruby Valley, Montana, and a pupil in his class in geology.
After his marriage Doctor and Mrs. Douglass returned to Pittsburgh,
where he had bought a home. Mrs. Douglass is a daughter of John F. and
Charlotte Louisa (Whitmore) Goetschius. She resides at 139 South Twelve
East Street in Salt Lake City. Her only son, Gawin Earl Douglass, born
January 30, 1908, is a student of engineering and paleontology.
