Paleontology in the United States Federal Service, 1804-1904

During the century between Lewis and Clark's exploration (1804-1806) of the Louisiana Territory and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, federally sponsored work in paleontology in the United States passed through three general stages in its organizational and institutional history. Before the Civil War, naturalists and geologist-paleontologists actively contributed to federally sponsored geology, mostly as part of topographic exploration in the West. They worked only under discontinuous contracts, using specimens and stratigraphic data mostly collected by others, to date and correlate strata and describe fossil biotas. In the decade and a half after 1865, a proportionally larger number of paleontologists served in the field with the geological and geographical surveys of the territories. A few of these paleontologists gained continuing Federal contracts with the territorial surveys toward the end of the 1870's, although their work was still restricted by the rapid geological reconnaissances of these organizations. Beginning in 1879, however, paleontologists were hired as full-time, permanent staff members of the new U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), whose organic act merged some of the functions of the territorial surveys and required the new agency, at the conclusion of its investigations, to deposit all its specimens in the U.S. National Museum. USGS paleontologists contributed detailed, field-based stratigraphic paleontology to support the agency's programs in economic and general geology, for immediate practical results and the longer term expansion of knowledge, as deftly merged by Directors King and Charles D. Walcott, but not by Director John Wesley Powell.