New Deal Workers and Fossils: Paleontology in the Early National Parks

Jobs, and fossils

Less than two decades after the National Park Service was founded in 1916, the Great Depression struck. To create millions of jobs, President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal launched relief programs from 1933 — among them the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA) — putting people to manual work on public lands. Their roads, trails and buildings are still recognizable in the parks.

Less well known is what these crews did for paleontology in a handful of parks: they made significant fossil discoveries, helped protect these non-renewable resources, and opened the way to fossil education. A few examples follow.

Big Bend: a museum in CCC barracks

The Park Service evaluated Big Bend, on the Mexican border in Texas, in 1934 and recommended it for a national park and a CCC camp; the park opened in 1944. Through much of the 1930s, CCC workers developed the Basin Area in the Chisos Mountains.

• Finding the bones: fossils such as ammonites, petrified wood and some vertebrate remains had been found nearby, but only when NPS geologist Ross A. Maxwell prospected the area from 1936 did the presence of significant vertebrate fossils become clear. Maxwell and regional geologist Charles Gould set up a small museum at the CCC camp in the Chisos Basin.
• The museum: with the CCC's help it came to hold hundreds of specimens, more than 300 on display — fossil oysters, ammonites, petrified wood, crystals, stone tools and more. A highlight was a set of hadrosaur bones found by CCC men and reconstructed by a University of Oklahoma student, O'Reilly Sandoz.
• The WPA quarries: in 1938, William S. Strain of the Texas College of Mines, hoping for a mountable dinosaur skeleton for the Texas Centennial Museum in El Paso, opened three quarries near Talley Mountain with nearly a dozen WPA men. One yielded a jumble of hadrosaur, ceratopsian, theropod and ankylosaur bones — at least 500, Strain reported. The crew moved nearly 3,000 cubic yards of rock before abandoning the site in January 1939, when clearing the overburden became too much. No mountable skeleton was ever found.
• What followed: the finds drew the Smithsonian's Charles W. Gilmore, and in 1940 Barnum Brown, who collected Alamosaurus remains there — the last dinosaur bones of his career.

The CCC worked in the Chisos Basin until 1940. On Christmas Eve 1941, a fire destroyed the museum and every fossil in it.

Dinosaur bones and geologic specimens at the Chisos museum, in converted CCC barracks. NPS photo.

Dinosaur: art and science in a relief camp

Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum found the famous dinosaur quarry in 1909, and it became a national monument in 1915. Quarrying stopped in 1922, but plans to develop the site continued — notably a 1929 report by Roger Toll to the NPS Director, which became a work plan during the Depression.

• CWA: Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration on November 9, 1933, and work on the roads to the quarry began a month later. From January 1934, CWA workers cleared debris and the overburden covering the bone layers, overseen by Albert C. Boyle, the monument's second superintendent and resident geologist after Douglass's death.
• FERA: when CWA work ended in April 1934, Boyle took charge of "Camp Esparenza," men from Utah's Transient Relief Service under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. They got housing, food and clothing, and Boyle taught them classes in a building that was both mess hall and classroom. Many trained to become visitor guides; Boyle also encouraged them to write songs and poetry.
• The first museum: Dinosaur's first museum opened in July 1936, expanded from a bone-storage building, and visitors came from many countries. After FERA funding ended in April 1937, local WPA men finished clearing the overburden. In 1938 the monument grew far beyond its original 80 acres, partly because there was no flat land for workers' camps.

WPA workers deepening a trench to expose the bone layer of what became the wall of today's quarry at Dinosaur National Monument. From one of A.C. Boyle's monthly reports. NPS photo.

Boyle was listed in American Men of Science in 1939 "for his advancement in education through teaching and research." By the time he and his 97 WPA men were discharged in 1940, nearly all the planned work was done.

Fossil Cycad: the park the CCC nearly saved

Fossil Cycad National Monument is a cautionary tale. By the time it was established in 1922, most of the exposed fossils of cycad-like plants had been taken — by unauthorized collectors, or for study elsewhere. Excavations followed to find more specimens and justify the monument's existence.

• The dig: in 1935, Roger Toll asked NPS Director Arno Cammerer for an Emergency Conservation Work camp (the program that became the CCC). That October, paleobotanist George Reber Wieland and thirteen workers from the CCC camp at Wind Cave opened six to eight pits and recovered more than a ton of specimens. Wieland reported that the CCC boys soon caught the spirit of the search, which he likened to a game of poker, and finished the work reluctantly.
• The doubts: NPS Chief Naturalist Earl Trager wrote in 1936 that the specimens "were overlain by massive hard sandstone making it almost impossible for a casual collector to obtain any specimens." By 1937, CCC workers had filled in the pits.
• The end: Wieland pressed for roads, exhibits and a museum; Cammerer suggested a display at Wind Cave instead. Requests for a CCC camp, including from Congressman Francis Case of South Dakota, were denied. The monument never had a visitor center, never officially opened, and was abolished by Congress in 1957. For a moment the CCC seemed to have revived it — with more support, it might have ended differently.

Grand Canyon: turning CCC men into geologists

Grand Canyon's rocks and fossils span more than one billion years.

• Fossil ferns: CCC men built a glassed-over trailside exhibit of fossil ferns at Cedar Ridge on the South Kaibab Trail, honoring paleobotanist David White, who described new plant species from the Permian Hermit Shale in 1929. It still exists. Most CCC-collected fossils in the park's collections come from the higher Kaibab Limestone, which forms the canyon's rim.
• Rampart Cave: in 1936, NPS junior foreman and archeologist Willis Evans found Rampart Cave, helped by changing Colorado River levels after Boulder (Hoover) Dam was built. It held ground sloth dung, pack rat middens and other Pleistocene remains. Men of CCC Company 573 — a crew of 26 — built a trail and ladders to reach it, then took turns going in with respirators, digging gently with trowels under Evans's instruction. Hundreds of fossils came out in one summer, under geologist Edward Schenk.
• Two new specialists: Michael Bobko and Julius Souch stayed on to help Schenk classify, number and preserve the finds, matching bones to a book, The Nomenclature of Paleontology, brought by men who had dug at the La Brea Tar Pits. They shellacked and packed the specimens for the Smithsonian, which sent Remington Kellogg for the cave's largest excavation in 1942. Schenk reportedly offered Bobko a lab job at Stanford; Bobko chose to go home to his family. The cave never became an exhibit, and a fire started by a visitor in 1977 destroyed much of its contents.
• Trilobites: along the Bright Angel Trail, rich in Cambrian trilobites and brachiopods, the CCC built a trilobite exhibit near Indian Garden (now Havasupai Gardens); its exact site is no longer known. Other exhibits were planned but never finished before the CCC ended in 1942.

CCC workers at a fossil fern quarry on the Kaibab Trail, 1937. NPS photo.

Men of CCC Company 573, who excavated Rampart Cave. NPS photo.

Beyond the dig

Not all of this work was digging. Natasha Smith, a paleontology master's student at the University of California, Berkeley, worked for the CWA's Field Division of Education in 1933, making dioramas for museums across the West — notably models of prehistoric horses for Scotts Bluff National Monument.

Natasha Smith modeling a horse for a prehistoric animal exhibit at Scotts Bluff National Monument. NPS photo.

There are more stories: CCC men built parts of Petrified Forest's Painted Desert Inn with petrified wood; CCC-era fieldwork produced most of Mammoth Cave's older fossil collection; and specimens across many parks trace back to CCC or WPA enrollees. The New Deal's public works programs shaped the early years, collections and buildings of several parks — and a lasting appreciation of their fossils.

Sources

Based on Megan Rich, Vincent Santucci and Justin Tweet, "Public Works Programs and Paleontology in the Early Years of the NPS," Park Paleontology News, Fall 2024, National Park Service; published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. A 1935 photograph from the Yale University archives is not reproduced.