Hayden, Ferdinand (1829–1887)

Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, American geologist and paleontologist, was a prominent figure in the scientific exploration of the northern plains and northern Rocky Mountains from the early 1850s to the 1880s. His writings made important contributions to Earth science and also helped familiarize the American public with the scenic wonders of the West.

Born in Westfield, Massachusetts, and raised by relatives in rural upstate New York, Hayden was largely self-made as an Earth scientist. He worked his way through Oberlin College and then studied at Cleveland Medical School and Albany Medical College, which awarded him an MD in 1853. Yet his medical activity was limited to service as a Union Army surgeon during the Civil War. Well before the war, he had become an active field researcher in geology and paleontology, and he returned to them when hostilities ceased.

In Albany, Hayden joined a group of young followers of James Hall, the state geologist of New York. Hall encouraged Hayden to accompany another Hall protégé, Fielding Bradford Meek, to the Dakota badlands in 1853 to collect fossils. After this initial trip, Hayden returned to the northern plains for two more years, working sometimes on his own and sometimes with Meek, who concentrated on the paleontological aspects of their work. Hayden's skill was in rapid geologic reconnaissance—accurately inferring the underlying structure of large areas from widely separated outcrops. Later in the 1850s, Hayden served as a geologist on three more expeditions to the upper Missouri valley. These required considerable enterprise on Hayden's part since there was as yet no sustained and consistently funded program of natural history exploration in the West. Hayden established the stratigraphy of the upper Missouri valley and in the process discovered the remains of extinct megafauna such as camels, horses, and members of the elephant family.

After his wartime medical service, Hayden accepted a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania; yet he continued to spend much of his time in the West. Hayden's survey is now funded by an annual appropriation from the Department of the Interior and has produced a voluminous body of annual reports, bulletins, and miscellaneous publications. This corpus indicates the height of Hayden's national prominence as a public scientist. Along with his solid contributions to geology and paleontology, he was a popularizer and wrote promotional works that helped “sell” the Rocky Mountain West to Easterners as a land of scenic grandeur. He included the prominent landscape photographer William Henry Jackson in his expeditions of the 1870s. Such efforts helped establish the Yellowstone National Park and familiarized the public with the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde.

Political pressures in Washington forced the coordination of the multiple western surveys under the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1879. Hayden was a leading contender for the directorship of this new agency but was outmaneuvered by his rivals Clarence King and John Wesley Powell. King became the first head of the USGS and was followed by Powell 2 years later. Hayden was sidelined, though he continued his fieldwork in the West. Failing health forced him to resign from the USGS in 1886, and he died the following year.

...