Public Works Programs and Paleontology in the Early Years of the NPS

Article by Megan Rich, Vincent Santucci, and Justin Tweet
for Park Paleontology Newsletter, Fall 2024

Introduction

In less than two decades after the establishment of the National Park Service (NPS) in 1916, the country was beset by the Great Depression. In response to the need for millions of new jobs across America, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiated several relief programs beginning in 1933, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Civil Works Administration (CWA), to provide manual labor jobs on public lands. Workers gained employment opportunities and feelings of purpose while performing important conservation tasks that included forestry, construction of infrastructure, and natural resource management.

These efforts resulted in the construction of roads, trails, buildings, and other structures recognizable across parks to this day. A lesser-known contribution of these public works programs was the support provided to a variety of paleontology-focused projects in a handful of national parks. The supervision of CCC, WPA, and CWA workers led to significant fossil discoveries in the national parks, enhanced protection of these non-renewable resources, and presented opportunities for fossil education. Below are but a few examples these ordinary workers making extraordinary contributions to the field of paleontology.

Big Bend’s First Museum in CCC Barracks

The NPS evaluated the Big Bend area along the Mexican border in Texas during 1934, and this rich and scenic resource area was soon recommended for the establishment of both a national park and a CCC camp. The next year, Congress passed legislation to acquire the land, but it would be nearly a decade before the park opened to the public in 1944. For much of the 1930s, CCC workers, with the help of NPS staff, developed the Basin Area in the Chisos Mountains, including clearing a campground area, constructing a road into the basin, and contributing to the park’s paleontological history.

NPS geologist Ross A. Maxwell was assigned to prospect the Big Bend area in 1936. While fossils such as ammonites, petrified wood, and some vertebrate remains had been found nearby in the preceding decades, it was not until his prospecting that the presence of significant vertebrate fossils in Big Bend was clearly known. Maxwell and regional geologist Charles Gould then set about creating a small museum at the CCC camp in the Chisos Basin.

Figure 1: Dinosaur bones and geologic specimens on display at the Chisos museum in converted CCC barracks in the area which would eventually become Big Bend National Park.

NPS Photo.

With the help of the CCC workers, the museum came to house hundreds of specimens, with more than 300 on display (Figure 1). The collection included fossil oysters, ammonites, petrified wood, crystals, stone tools, and other geologic material. One of the most notable displays featured hadrosaur bones that had been discovered by CCC men and reconstructed by a University of Oklahoma student, O’Reilly Sandoz. The CCC workers did more than just construction work or physical labor, however. Some enrollees were also assigned to do the lettering for signs and labels of displays at the museum, and at least one other was tasked with arranging specimens.

Elsewhere in the park, another paleontological initiative was taking place with support from a different public works program: the Works Progress Administration (WPA). William S. Strain, who taught at the Texas College of Mines and Mineralogy, hoped to obtain a mountable dinosaur skeleton for the Texas Centennial Museum in El Paso, Texas. In 1938, Strain opened three quarry sites near Talley Mountain with the help of nearly a dozen WPA men.

One of the quarries produced a sizeable number of disarticulated specimens, an assemblage which included hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, theropods, ankylosaurs, and more. The inexperienced crew worked diligently, and Strain reported that at least 500 bones were collected. It would be decades before this material was studied in detail. The WPA workers quarried nearly 3,000 cubic yards of rock, then abandoned the fossil site in January 1939 after the task of removing the overburden became too great. A mountable skeleton was never recovered.

While Strain’s primary goal was not achieved, he and the WPA workers showed that the area itself was rich with fossils. This attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, which sent paleontologist Charles W. Gilmore to evaluate the WPA work and prospect for additional discoveries. The success also brought Barnum Brown to Big Bend in 1940, where he would eventually collect Alamosaurus remains, the final dinosaur bones collected in his career. Regarding his prospecting near the WPA quarries, he found one fragmentary dinosaur specimen but did not deem the discovery noteworthy.

CCC workers continued developing the Chisos Basin area until 1940. The area continues to produce important vertebrate specimens to this day, and many WPA-era collections were later studied in greater detail, especially under the supervision of Wann Langston Jr., a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The museum in the modest former CCC barracks was destroyed by a fire on Christmas Eve, 1941, as were all the fossils within. While much of the immediate results of the work done by these public works programs in Big Bend were short-lived, the park’s beginnings and early paleontology research are inextricably linked with the CCC and WPA.

Inspiring Art and Science in CCC Workers at Dinosaur National Monument

The establishment of Dinosaur National Monument and its famous quarry is widely recognized in discussions of geoconservation. The site of dinosaur bones protruding from stone quickly became a tourist spot following its discovery by Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum in 1909. In 1915, the federal government declared the quarry area a national monument.

Work on the quarry ceased in 1922, but plans on developing the quarry further were frequently discussed in letters, including by the eminent paleontologist Barnum Brown. Another example is a 1929 report by Roger Toll, who in that year transitioned from superintendent of Rocky Mountain National Park to Yellowstone, written to the Director of the NPS. This report helped serve as a work plan during the Great Depression when various relief programs supported construction efforts to protect the in situ fossils and preserve the quarry for future scientific research and public education.

President Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration (CWA) on November 9, 1933, and work on improving the roads to the quarry at Dinosaur National Monument began only a month later. Starting in January 1934, CWA workers cleared quarry debris and the overburden covering the bone-bearing layers. These efforts were overseen by Albert C. Boyle, the second superintendent of Dinosaur National Monument, who was installed as resident geologist at the monument in the early 1930s after the death of Earl Douglass. He promoted the dinosaur locality by giving lectures and teaching geology at local schools and clubs and shared this knowledge and excitement with the men at the CWA camp.

In April 1934, CWA work at the monument and nationwide ceased, so Boyle petitioned that Dinosaur be supported through the CCC. By June of that year, Boyle was in charge of a new group of men, known as “Camp Esparenza,” [sic] from the Transient Relief Service for Utah, also known as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The workers were provided housing, food, and clothing, and Boyle taught them classes in a building that served as both a mess hall and classroom. Many received enough training to become guides for visitors, and they all received opportunities to better themselves for the future. Boyle also encouraged them to compose songs and write poetry. Morale was high among the FERA workers, and they remained at the camp as long as they could, accomplishing tasks with a personal sense of pride.

In July 1936, Dinosaur’s first museum opened to the public, which was expanded out of a storage building used to house bone specimens. Dr. Boyle would work here 12–15 hours each day, and the monument saw visitors from many countries. The funding through FERA ended in April 1937, and work on clearing the overburden was completed by local WPA men (Figure 2). The following year, the monument’s borders increased substantially beyond the original 80 acres designated for the quarry area, in part due to the lack of flat land for workers’ campsites and housing.

Figure 2: WPA workers deepening a trench to expose the bone layer of what would become the wall of the current Quarry at Dinosaur National Monument. Sourced from one of A.C. Boyle’s monthly reports.

NPS photo.

Dr. Boyle was recognized in 1939 and placed on the directory for American Men of Science “for his advancement in education through teaching and research.” By the time Dr. Boyle and his 97 WPA men were discharged in 1940, nearly all of the proposed work at Dinosaur had been completed.

How the CCC Nearly Saved Fossil Cycad National Monument

Fossil Cycad National Monument has long served as a cautionary tale for management of sensitive park resources. By the time of its establishment in 1922, most of the cycad-like plant fossils that had been exposed at the surface had been removed through unauthorized collecting or taken to other locations for study. In the following decades, excavations took place to recover more specimens to justify the monument’s continuation, including work by a team of CCC men.

In the summer of 1935, Roger Toll wrote a letter to Arno Cammerer, the third director of the NPS who was in office for much of the New Deal period. Toll asked the director for an “ECW camp” (the Emergency Conservation Work program, which became the CCC) to locate additional fossil cycads at the monument. In October of the same year, paleobotanist George Reber Wieland and a crew of thirteen workers who had been based at a CCC camp at Wind Cave National Monument resumed research on the land.

Wieland and his men opened six to eight excavation pits to recover more fossils, which was viewed as a massive success with more than a ton of uneroded specimens collected (Figure 3). Wieland reported to the director in November, “The material now in hand will in itself afford an ample exhibit... The CCC boys after a few days got into the spirit of the search, after all quite like a game of poker and worked splendidly, finally closing the work with reluctance, as we had come near a point where we could get material at will – though there is yet needed much more exploratory work.”

Figure 3: Yale paleobotanist George Wieland supervising CCC workers excavating fossil cycads at Fossil Cycad National Monument in 1935.

Photo from Yale University archives.

While 1935 ended on a hopeful note, the following years saw continued frustration for the monument. NPS Chief Naturalist Earl Trager expressed doubt in any retrievable fossils from Fossil Cycad, writing in 1936, “the specimens [recovered from Wieland’s excavations] were overlain by massive hard sandstone making it almost impossible for a casual collector to obtain any specimens.” By 1937, the excavation pits had been filled and leveled by CCC workers from Wind Cave.

Throughout this period, Wieland hoped to begin construction of roads, exhibits, and buildings such as a museum or visitor center. While Wieland was insistent on an on-site display like that of Dinosaur National Monument, the lack of surficial specimens led to Director Cammerer suggesting a fossil cycad display at Wind Cave’s visitor center instead. This was not well-received by Wieland, and he continued his efforts despite a lack of agency interest. Later, congressmen like Francis Case of South Dakota requested funds for public works and a CCC camp at Fossil Cycad, possibly diverted from the camp at Wind Cave, but was similarly swiftly denied.

Soon enough, the New Deal era ended and so too did CCC work in or near Fossil Cycad. The monument never had a visitor center or museum and never officially opened to the public. In 1957, Fossil Cycad National Monument formally lost its status as an NPS unit when Congress passed legislation to abolish the monument. Briefly, though, it seemed as if intervention by CCC workers may have revived the park, and perhaps greater financial support of these efforts could have given Fossil Cycad a different ending.

Turning CCC Workers into Geologists at Grand Canyon

The geology of Grand Canyon spans back in time over one billion years, as do the fossils found within its stunning layers. In the early years of the NPS, the park garnered attention from naturalists such as Charles Doolittle Walcott, John C. Merriam, and Edwin McKee. During the 1930s many CCC projects took place at Grand Canyon, most of which are well-documented by photography. One example is the construction of a trailside fossil fern exhibit at Cedar Ridge on the South Kaibab Trail built by CCC men in the 1930s (Figure 4). The small glassed-over exhibit, which still exists today, was built in part to recognize the work of paleobotanist David White who described new fossil plant species from the Permian Hermit Shale in 1929. Most fossil specimens in Grand Canyon’s collections that are attributed to CCC enrollees come from a much stratigraphically higher unit, the Kaibab Limestone, which forms the rim of the Canyon.

Figure 4: CCC workers in the field in 1937 at a fossil fern quarry on the Kaibab Trail at Grand Canyon National Park.

NPS photo.

Another notable fossil site is the much younger Rampart Cave, which once was a refuge for giant ground sloths and other Ice Age animals. In the summer of 1936, NPS junior foreman and archeologist Willis Evans discovered Rampart Cave in Grand Canyon in part due to the changing water levels of the Colorado River following construction of the Boulder (later renamed Hoover) Dam. In the cave was an abundance of sloth dung, pack rat middens, and other Pleistocene fossil remains. Evans immediately recognized the location’s significance, and soon the men from CCC company 573 were enlisted to assist in the excavations led by geologist Edward Schenk (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Men of CCC Company 573 who excavated Rampart Cave.

NPS photo.

The first task in excavating Rampart Cave was to make it accessible. The CCC crew of 26 spent several weeks constructing a trail to the cave, then built ladders to get up and inside. Men worked by taking turns, using respirators to go in and collect fossil bones and sloth dung, before coming out to rest and breathe fresh air once again. Evans instructed the CCC men on how to dig gently with trowels and small tools to avoid damaging specimens. Hundreds of fossils were recovered over the span of a short summer collecting season.

Most of the CCC crew that worked at the cave were reassigned to other responsibilities once the excavation was completed, but two men, Michael Bobko and Julius Souch, were selected to help Schenk classify, number, and preserve all the collected fossils. According to an interview of Bobko by his granddaughter in 1993, the two utilized a book called The Nomenclature of Paleontology, which was brought by men who had made digs at the La Brea Tar Pits. Under Schenk’s guidance, they matched the bones from the cave to those seen in the book to inform their identifications. The men gave numbers to all specimens, applied shellac, and packed them into cardboard boxes to be shipped to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian would later send Remington Kellogg to perform the largest excavation of Rampart Cave in 1942, though much of this material remains unstudied.

Once the work was completed, Schenk purportedly invited Bobko to assist him at Stanford as a lab technician. Doing so would have given Bobko an education equivalent to a degree in geology, but Bobko declined in favor of returning home to his family after the completion of his CCC enrollment. Bobko himself had taken many photographs during the excavation of the CCC crew at work and of the fossils they were excavating, which remain in Grand Canyon’s collection. The NPS hoped to turn the area into a public exhibit, but this did not come to fruition, and much of the cave’s contents were destroyed by a fire started by a visitor in 1977.

Rampart Cave and the Kaibab Trail saw the most extensive interaction between CCC workers and fossil resources at Grand Canyon. One other location, the Bright Angel Trail, which contains many Cambrian fossils such as trilobites, brachiopods, and invertebrate trackways, was also the site of much CCC work. A trilobite exhibit was built by the CCC near a garden spot along the trail known as Indian Garden (today called Havasupai Gardens), but the precise location of the exhibit and associated quarries is not well known today. The Bright Angel Shale crumbles easily, and the overlying layers threatened to obscure the exhibit, so exposed fossils were removed and housed in museum collections. Other exhibits were proposed during the CCC era, but due to the abundance of CCC projects at the canyon, funding necessities, and the impending end of the CCC in 1942, not all could be completed.

Conclusion

These are only some examples of the many interactions between regular citizens employed in public works programs with the fossils of America’s national parks. While most programs focused on construction projects, others employed people for more creative pursuits. Natasha Smith, a Master’s student of paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, worked for the CWA’s Field Division of Education in 1933 creating dioramas for museums across the western US (Figure 6). Most notably, she created models of prehistoric horses (the focus of her degree) for Scotts Bluff National Monument. Smith showed that work relating to fossil resources was not just men conducting fieldwork, but that artists, teachers, and women scientists also made their mark in this early period of the NPS.

Figure 6. Natasha Smith modeling a horse to be used in a prehistoric animal exhibit at the visitor center of Scotts Bluff National Monument.

NPS photo.

Other noteworthy stories include CCC men constructing portions of Petrified Forest’s Painted Desert Inn using petrified wood, CCC-era fieldwork contributing to the bulk of Mammoth Cave’s older fossil collection, and specimens from various parks attributed to CCC or WPA enrollees. There are doubtless even more fossil tales linked to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that have yet to be revealed. The public works programs of the New Deal launched the early years, collections, and construction of several NPS areas, and this resulted in increased appreciation for important fossil resources, which persists to this day.

Suggested Readings

• Wick, S. L. and Corrick, D. W. (2015). Paleontological Inventory of Big Bend National Park, Texas. National Park Service, Fort Collins, Colorado.

• Strain, W. (1940). Report on Works Progress Administration Paleontological Project. Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. NPS Archives.

• Carpenter, K. (2018). Rocky start of Dinosaur National Monument (USA), the world’s first dinosaur geoconservation site. Geoconservation Research 1(1):1-20. https://doi.org/10.30486/gcr.2018.539322

• Biedelman, R. G. (1968). Administrative History: Dinosaur National Monument. NPS Archives.

• Santucci, V. and Hughes, M. (1998). Fossil Cycad National Monument: A Case of Paleontology Resource Mismanagement. In National Park Service Paleontological Research 3. V.L. Santucci and L. McClelland, eds. NPS/NRGRD/GRDTR-98/01. Lakewood, CO: National Park Service Geological Resources Division, 84–89.

• Santucci, V. and Tweet, J. (2020). Grand Canyon National Park: Centennial paleontological resource inventory (non-sensitive version). Natural Resource Report. NPS/GRCA/NRR—2020/2103. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado.

Related Links

• Big Bend National Park (BIBE), Texas—[BIBE Geodiversity Atlas] [BIBE Park Home] [BIBE npshistory.com]

• Dinosaur National Monument (DINO), Colorado and Utah—[DINO Geodiversity Atlas] [DINO Park Home] [DINO npshistory.com]

• Grand Canyon National Park (GRCA), Arizona—[GRCA Geodiversity Atlas] [GRCA Park Home] [GRCA npshistory.com]

• NPS—Geologic Time

Fossils and Paleontology