With seatbelts fastened, staff from Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s mammals section began a long journey—one that would last about seven months, log hundreds of miles, and yet never take them beyond the borders of Allegheny County.
Whenever they could find dedicated chunks of time from August 2012 to February of 2013, curator John Wible, collection manager Sue McLaren, and scientific preparator Lisa Miriello would make the trek to and from their offices in the museum’s Edward O’Neil Research Center to a storage location near Pittsburgh.
Once there, they would go big-game hunting. Armed with little more than their laptops, the trio took on the task of inventorying the contents of the space, which for decades has served as the final resting place for some 2,000 skulls and skeletons also known as the “big bone collection.”
Think a dedicated section of an airplane hangar and rows and rows of oversized bookshelves with a functioning kind of Dewey Decimal system. Putting your hands on a specific specimen isn’t always foolproof.
“As with a book that has been incorrectly shelved in a library, a comprehensive inventory can be the best way to discover errors in shelving and ensure that everything in the database is present and in the proper location,” McLaren says. Logistical challenges were created in the 1990s when this valuable part of the museum’s collection—regularly used for research and education—was relocated off-site to make way for the museum’s Alcoa Foundation Hall of American Indians.
After securing competitive federal funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the team’s mission was to confirm the inventory and record the exact location for each specimen. On paper, it seemed like a simple enough undertaking. The reality of the task was another story.
“It was hard, tedious work,” Miriello recalls. “We were going up and down ladders and at times dealing with very heavy specimens.”
All the while they couldn’t shake the feeling that the project was taking on a life of its own— the life of Childs Frick.
The eldest son of wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick and Adelaide Howard Childs was the man responsible for bringing back a great deal of new knowledge about both the mammals and birds of East Africa.
During his two scientific expeditions to the continent in 1909-1910 and 1911-1912, Frick, then a young biologist, collected and donated some 500 mammals to Carnegie Museums. His finds would eventually become the stars of the Museum of Natural History’s popular Hall of African Wildlife—all the more remarkable considering that Frick’s father and Andrew Carnegie, once wildly successful business partners, had suffered a contentious falling out. Still, Childs remained true to his Pittsburgh roots. After all, it was in the woods near his boyhood home (now Frick Park) where he first started investigating then identifying, tagging, and preserving. His early captures were small, mostly rabbits and raccoons.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1883, Frick attended Sterrett School and Shady Side Academy and then went on to Princeton University. After graduating in 1905 but before marrying and settling down, he decided to pursue his first love—and it led him to Africa.
Adventure with a touch of luxury
Africa wasn’t an unusual destination for 20th-century men of means. It seems the opportunity to conspicuously display wealth (a typical safari would cost $10,000 a month in today’s economy), sportsmanship (aka bragging rights) and generosity (public gifts to public institutions) was a rite of passage.
And Africa was chock-full of game, notes McLaren. Of the 5,400 species of mammals scattered throughout the earth, Africa is home to 800, not to mention 57,000 species of plants, 2,000 species of amphibians and reptiles, more than 2,300 species of birds, and a heck of a lot of insects.
Perhaps the most prominent conservationist of the time was Teddy Roosevelt. In 1909, the then former president and his son, Kermit, embarked on their own African scientific expedition, giving the rewards—mammals, reptiles, birds, and plants—to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
On the heels of Roosevelt’s journey, Frick and his group, which also included wellrespected ornithologist and naturalist Edgar Mearns, arrived in Djibouti in November 1911 after enduring three weeks at sea.
Dubbed the Abyssinian Expedition, this was Frick’s second and by far the more fruitful and better documented of his two scientific treks to the continent—although his field notes have not been located. Mearns’ journals, however, are part of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and have proved helpful to Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s project.
The expedition is also the subject of a new website that Miriello and company have been working on in conjunction with their painstaking, behind-the-scenes inventory.
Lisa Miriello, Sue McLaren, and John Wible showcasing a hippopotamus humerus and the skulls of a lion and hippopotamus inside the museum’s research collection storage for mammals.
“We wanted to recreate the route—the actual route—that Childs Frick took, and highlight points along the way where he collected some of the major specimens on view in the museum”—animals that have educated and been loved by generations of Pittsburghers. Also in the works: a multimedia app that will highlight Frick’s countless contributions to the Hall of African Wildlife.
The site’s map—plotted with the help of James Whitacre of the museum’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab—starts where Frick’s party landed, and then traces where they traveled south by foot, horse, ox wagon, and camel through what is now Ethiopia and Kenya. After hitching a ride on the Uganda Railway, which had been completed just a decade earlier, the group reached its final stop in Mombasa in September 1912.
The animals within the hall’s beautifully rendered dioramas have reached across both distance and time to find some sense of immortality. That’s a romantic notion; McLaren offers a far more practical perspective. “This is really a story of recycling,” she says, noting that early museum displays focused mainly on the large, exotic animals without the context of plants and animals living in the same habitat that a diorama provides.
“Today, our audience understands that the large mammals are part of an ecosystem,” she continues. “When we decided to create the watering hole diorama we took the irreplaceable Santens taxidermy and ‘recycled’ Frick’s mammals from standalone Victorian glass and mahogany cases into the East African locations that are depicted in this diorama. From the far left in dry savanna to the far right in wet savanna, this diorama represents three actual locations in Kenya.”
Frick’s own story is one of reinvention. From bachelor to married man, Pittsburgher to New Yorker, biologist to paleontologist; Frick redefined himself upon his return from Africa.
Marrying in 1913, he and his wife, Frances Dixon, settled in Long Island, N.Y. As a wedding gift, Frick’s father presented them with a mansion, aptly named Clayton after Childs’ childhood home, where they raised their four children.
As Frick grew older, he started a new journey—a journey that prompted him to trade in his rifles for chisels and picks. His quarry was no longer living species, but fossils. He committed himself to this pursuit with the same intensity that sustained him on his African expeditions. Not surprisingly, he amassed some 200,000 specimens and became a curator, trustee, and benefactor of the American Museum of Natural History. Many of the fossils he collected now reside in the museum’s Childs Frick Building, dedicated in 1973.
However, the connection he formed as a young man with Carnegie Museums remained constant throughout his life. Frick was named an honorary curator of mammals in 1920, a title he would hold until his death in 1965. He is buried in Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery, not far from his childhood home.
“He came from a privileged family,” Miriello says, “but Frick made his own path.”
“Today, people don’t connect hunting with conservation. But Frick was taking a scientific view of what he was collecting.”
– SUE MCLAREN, COLLECTION MANAGER FOR MAMMALS
“These trips could be brutal,” Miriello says. An account from the Albany Evening Journal put it this way: “The country to be traversed and explored by this party is one of the wildest and most dangerous parts of Africa, and it will be necessary for the explorers to have many native guides and soldiers to insure the safe progress of their expedition. Food is scarce in that region of Africa and the route laid out is beset by many other hardships and dangers, such as lack of water, exposure to disease, and attack by men and beasts.”
To defend against such attacks, armed security guards known as askaris were an essential part of the entourage, as were tent attendants and porters who managed all the carrying, cooking, and cleaning. As Miriello notes, despite the dangers and hardships, taking time out to enjoy certain luxuries—like afternoon tea and biscuits—was non-negotiable.
A checklist provided by Percy C. Madeira’s Hunting in British East Africa (1909), a reference book Frick would have likely consulted, suggests that the savvy hunter should never be without tins of tea, coffee, chocolate, fruit, jam, marmalade, cheeses and butter, sacks of flour, rice and sugar, and bottles of assorted spirits. These items were on hand to supplement the steady diet of freshly procured game meat, as well as native dishes such as zebra brains fried in hippo fat and elephant feet.
According to files in the museum’s archives, other perhaps surprising safari staples included not only tables and chairs but tablecloths and napkins, umbrellas, and collapsible bathtubs, in addition to the more predictable mosquito netting and toilet paper.
Childs Frick (above) with a mountain nyala and at camp (far right) with Edgar Mearns (far left) in 1911-12.
Success, however, was measured by collecting, preserving, and documenting as many species as possible. And on that score, McLaren says, Frick hit the mark—African buffalos, gerenuks, giraffes, mountain nyalas, wildebeests, warthogs, and zebras (both the Grevy’s and plains varieties) as well as rabbits, rodents, primates, shrews, bats, and hyraxes. But unlike many of his peers, Frick didn’t simply take aim at the largest targets (the males of the species); he collected examples of adult females, sub-adults, and juveniles. His goal, adds McLaren, was to provide the museum with a more accurate representation of the animal kingdom.
“Today, people don’t connect hunting with conservation,” she says. “But Frick was taking a scientific view of what he was collecting.”
For starters, very little of what Frick and team collected went to waste. Roosevelt, Frick, and men like them were considered conservationists because they not only had an interest in the animals they hunted, but supported expanded scientific understanding of the animals for their ultimate preservation and the habitat in which they live. Roosevelt, for example, established the first National Parks in the United States, protecting part of the natural world with unique animals, plants, and geological features.
To Pittsburgh with love
Frick understood the importance of acting quickly to preserve what he collected. For example, the skins and skeletons of his prey were treated with drying agents like arsenic and salt. He had one objective in mind: to make sure these animals had safe passage back to Carnegie Museums, where he knew the finest taxidermists awaited their arrival.
Brothers Remi and Joseph Santens were indeed waiting—waiting to make history. The Santens were more than taxidermists; they were artists. Their mounts of Frick’s reticulated giraffe and mountain nyalas, which remain on view today, were the first to be displayed in the United States. More than 100 years later, their work—complete with amazing details, such as flexing muscles and bulging veins—still stands today in the museum’s Hall of African Wildlife, designed to bring to life the continent’s savanna, rainforest, desert, and mountain ranges.
All mammals in the watering hole diorama, one of the museum’s most popular displays, were collected by Childs Frick. Museum taxidermists led by Remi Santens (on ladder) place skin on a giraffe, circa 1910. The Carnegie’s giraffes were the first full mounts displayed in the United States.
The animals within the hall’s beautifully rendered dioramas have reached across both distance and time to find some sense of immortality. That’s a romantic notion; McLaren offers a far more practical perspective. “This is really a story of recycling,” she says, noting that early museum displays focused mainly on the large, exotic animals without the context of plants and animals living in the same habitat that a diorama provides.
“Today, our audience understands that the large mammals are part of an ecosystem,” she continues. “When we decided to create the watering hole diorama we took the irreplaceable Santens taxidermy and ‘recycled’ Frick’s mammals from standalone Victorian glass and mahogany cases into the East African locations that are depicted in this diorama. From the far left in dry savanna to the far right in wet savanna, this diorama represents three actual locations in Kenya.”
Frick’s own story is one of reinvention. From bachelor to married man, Pittsburgher to New Yorker, biologist to paleontologist; Frick redefined himself upon his return from Africa.
Marrying in 1913, he and his wife, Frances Dixon, settled in Long Island, N.Y. As a wedding gift, Frick’s father presented them with a mansion, aptly named Clayton after Childs’ childhood home, where they raised their four children.
As Frick grew older, he started a new journey—a journey that prompted him to trade in his rifles for chisels and picks. His quarry was no longer living species, but fossils. He committed himself to this pursuit with the same intensity that sustained him on his African expeditions. Not surprisingly, he amassed some 200,000 specimens and became a curator, trustee, and benefactor of the American Museum of Natural History. Many of the fossils he collected now reside in the museum’s Childs Frick Building, dedicated in 1973.
However, the connection he formed as a young man with Carnegie Museums remained constant throughout his life. Frick was named an honorary curator of mammals in 1920, a title he would hold until his death in 1965. He is buried in Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery, not far from his childhood home.
“He came from a privileged family,” Miriello says, “but Frick made his own path.”
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