Samantha Wagner is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at New York University, and 2025-2026 Consortium Keith S. Thomson Research Fellow.
In my dissertation project, I study the entanglement of the earth sciences, Indigenous knowledge about fossils and geology, and battles over land in the trans-Mississippi West throughout the nineteenth century. I make two related contentions: First, that Indigenous people across the Great Plains used their knowledge of their land’s geologic history, fossil contents, and mineral wealth to assert their sovereignty over their land, to construct a history of extinction that emphasized continuity and persistence, and to negotiate and resist land theft. Second, that outside fossil collectors, geologists, and paleontologists used their study of geology, paleontology, and mineralogy to assert an expertise in Native land, to construct a history of extinction that emphasized discontinuity and rupture, and to shape, profit from, and promote the theft of Native land.
Fossils and geology may seem a minor consideration in a century that saw immense violence and wide-spread dispossession. But fossils, rocks, and minerals informed how people thought about the earth’s history and their ongoing relationship to it. Though earth scientists did not take center stage in the patchwork quilt of violence that stretched across the Great Plains by the late nineteenth century, my research shows that they stayed at military forts and relied on soldiers for their expeditions, eliminated Indigenous voices from their field books and reports, promoting a narrative of the earth’s history that erased Indigenous people past and present, and created maps of the earth and its contents that enabled settlers to carve out sections of land ripe for extraction. Resisting this military and rhetorical violence, Indigenous people on the Great Plains retained and reasserted their knowledge of their land, its contents, and its history. Telling stories of the land that emphasized ancient chaos and the entanglement of humans and other-than-human beings, they illuminated the connection between the present land and the world of the ancient past. I assert that, by passing down these competing ways of viewing the earth’s layers, shapes, and contents, Indigenous knowledge holders and outside earth scientists both used geology and paleontology to lay claim to the land in their present moment.
Funding from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine allowed me to travel to four member institutions: the Smithsonian Institution, the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel, and the Linda Hall Library. At each site I had the chance to explore a wide range of sources, all of which have shaped my thinking about my project and many of which form the backbone of multiple chapters in my dissertation.
At the Smithsonian Institution I read a number of reports produced by the United States Geological Survey and explored the papers of affiliated paleontologists and museum administrators including Lester Frank Ward, Samuel H. Scudder, Timothy William Stanton, Edward Oscar Ulrich, George Brown Goode, Richard Rathbun, and Spencer Fullerton Baird. My research there focused primarily on the final decades of the nineteenth century, the years of the biggest government-sponsored surveys of the Western United States. Reading the papers of the men who played so central a role in the expansion of fossil collecting and display in the final three decades of the nineteenth century, I saw how an increasingly competitive scientific environment drove their desire for ever more access to ever more fossiliferous land. After the Civil War, as the United States Geological Survey documents attest, the federal government finally began to fully embrace the earth sciences as a tool for military exploration and financial gain, creating a mutually beneficial relationship built on a shared desire to seize Western lands. Exploring collections at the National Anthropology Archives at the Smithsonian, I also had the opportunity to see how the study of fossils and the quest to claim Western, fossiliferous land informed and was informed by archaeology, sociology, and anthropology. The leaders of United States Geological Surveys collaborated with scientists working in these fields and requested funding to study Indigenous people past and present as part of their efforts to survey Western lands.
In my time at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia I read a huge volume of letters written to and from leading scientists in the early and mid-nineteenth century, including J. Peter Lesley, John Wesley Powell, and Roderick Impey Murchison. Studying the correspondence between leading geologists and paleontologists on both sides of the Atlantic, I charted the development of stratigraphic mapmaking over the course of the century. Correspondence between mapmakers in different states and even across the Atlantic revealed the messy realities of trying to implement uniform and universal color-coding and naming conventions. The back-and-forth between mapmakers hinted at the persistence of an underlying uncertainty about how to divide and categorize the ancient history of the earth. Placing this research in conversation with the documents I read at the Smithsonian, I was able to map a transition from geology and paleontology as science for science’s sake to a crucial tool in the shaping and execution of westward expansion for the United States government, military, and settlers by the final decades of the nineteenth century.
At the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel, I had the opportunity to read the papers of leading paleontologist, Joseph Leidy. Leidy’s correspondence with a wide range of interlocutors demonstrated just how important his connections to people in the field, both white and Indigenous, were to the work he was doing. An early proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Leidy also revealed in his correspondence that fossil collectors began to seek out human remains and fossils of earlier hominids in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Leidy and his peers embraced this search as part of their efforts to discover the “missing link” between apes and humans. His extensive correspondence reveals a complex web of fossil collectors, miners, and leading intellectuals, all of whom were working in tandem to excavate the earth and interrogate its contents.
Finally, at the Linda Hall Library, I had the chance to study textbooks on geology and paleontology alongside the earliest examples of stratigraphic maps, those produced by William Smith in England in 1790 and then republished and popularized in 1815. Looking at sources designed to guide stratigraphic mapmaking, the study of geology, and the study of human evolution published between 1790 and 1880, I gained a sense for how ideas about the history of the earth shifted over the course of a century. Books written by Thomas Wright and J.L. Comstock, which spoke to an audience with no or limited experience in the earth sciences, offered me a window into the spread and popularization of geological and paleontological knowledge and a picture of just how important a role people living in the Western United States, who had no scientific training, played in collecting fossils and studying the earth by the second half of the nineteenth century.
My Consortium-supported research at all four of these member institutions has allowed me to advance my project significantly over the course of the past year. During my time at the Smithsonian Institution, I was able to draft a chapter of my dissertation that relied heavily on United States Geological Survey reports and correspondence between Smithsonian scientists and government officials. My research at the American Philosophical Society forms the backbone of the third chapter of my dissertation which explores the emergence of paleontology and geology as distinct fields of inquiry and their rise to prominence first among U.S.-based scientists and then in the eyes of the United States government as well as an emerging class of wealthy industrialists by the final few decades of the nineteenth century. The research I carried out at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel and the Linda Hall Library sits at the heart of the fourth chapter of my dissertation, which deals with the relationship between leading earth scientists, white and Indigenous informants and collectors in the West, and the impact of Darwin’s theory on the handling of human remains and hominid fossils. The documents of William Smith and early-nineteenth-century geology and paleontology textbooks, which I had the opportunity to study at the Linda Hall Library, are also central to the second chapter of my dissertation, which deals with the emergence of stratigraphic mapmaking as a coveted skill and the impact of the technology on the Western United States by the middle of the century.
The research I was able to conduct thanks to funding from the Consortium touches nearly every aspect of my dissertation. Of course, none of this work would have been possible without the generosity of the archivists and librarians at the member institutions I visited. As I continue to write the dissertation, I am so grateful to the Consortium and its member institutions for supporting my work.