Boss Tweed's Dinosaurs

AFTERWORD - from the book

This story is based on a true incident. A gang of William Marcy "Boss" Tweed's thugs really did break into Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's studio on that day more than a century ago to smash the dinosaur sculptures. They came back later to destroy the smaller models, too, throwing the armatures in Central Park Lake and burying the pieces elsewhere in the park. Although the records make no note of it, I think it is quite likely that the famous artist could have had a young American apprentice like Orvy working for him. In any case, it makes for a good adventure tale.
Many of the people mentioned in this book are - or were, I suppose I should say - real. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins really lived, and was very famous in his day. A scientifically minded and artistically inclined boy like Orvy would certainly have known about Mr. Hawkins - particularly if, like Orvy, he had an interest in New York City and dinosaurs. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hawkins set a standard for depictions of prehistoric life. If you'd like to see what the Museum exhibit might have looked like if it had been completed, someone has built a model of it that you can look at here, if you have access to the Internet:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/8152/burpeedebusmodel.html
Plus, if you do a search on "Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins," you will find other information about him and the Museum.
P.T. Barnum, of course, who gave his name to the Barnum & Bailey Circus, is probably the best known of all the characters in this book. Thomas Nast, the brilliant cartoonist who created the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, not to mention the modern "look" of Saint Nicholas, was also a real person. So were Boss Tweed and his henchmen Oakey Hall and Peter "Brains" Sweeney. Tweed, on the run from his crimes some years later, was recognized because of Nast's scathingly accurate caricatures of him and eventually thrown into jail.
Film maker Willis O'Brien, mentioned in the prolog, was working on movie dinosaurs many years before Steven "Jurassic Park" Spielberg was born. O'Brien later became far more famous for creating and animating the original King Kong.
Andrew Green, whose idea sparked the Paleozoic Museum in the first place and who asked Hawkins to help make it a reality also existed. He was the genius behind Central Park as well as the Museum of Natural History. Few people have done as much to establish New York City's cultural life.
Edward Everett Hale, who wrote "The Brick Moon," the story that Orvy reads in the newspaper, later became much more famous for his tale, "The Man Without a Country."
It is also interesting that Herman Melville, the man who wrote the novel Moby Dick, lived in New York City at that time. Although elderly and (temporarily) all but forgotten by the American literary scene, he was working as a customs official down at the harbor. Orvy and his parents might have ridden their carriage right by this most famous of American writers and never have known it.
New York, always ahead of its time, was on the verge of the 20th Century even in 1870. One reason I wrote this book was to let me explore the city in 1870. It was a different place than it is now but in many ways, it would have been recognizable to a present-day New Yorker. The people who live there haven't really changed very much, however. Some are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in between. I believe that in order to understand who we are, we need to look at where we've been and what we were doing. That's one reason why I enjoy history, and it's another reason why I wrote this book. I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.