Ferdinand V. Hayden Might be the most influential Westfield native most of us have never heard of.
A poor child in a troubled family, Hayden is the main reason why Yellowstone National Park’s 150th anniversary can be celebrated. Hayden’s name appeared in his recently aired four-part series ‘Yellowstone 150’, narrated by actor Kevin Costner.
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was born in September 1828 or 1829 to Asa and Melinda Hayden of Westfield. His father had a prison record and died of alcoholism before Ferdinand was a teenager. Due to her neglect Melinda divorced Asa and she moved to Rochester, New York and remarried.
Soon after, she sent Ferdinand off to live with his aunt and uncle on a farm in Lorain County, Ohio. Her Aunt Lucretia and her husband welcomed Ferdinand into her family. She offered to adopt him, but she declined, saying he didn’t want to be a farmer.
Instead, he hiked fifteen miles (15 miles) to Oberlin College. At the age of 16, he appeared in person to the president, who arranged for the boy to enroll in college preparatory school. Hayden attended his 1846 freshman class.
Oberlin’s classmates recalled that Hayden was “an enigma to most teachers and classmates, who thought of him as ‘a fanatical dreamer who never conquered in real life.'” “
Hayden graduated from Oberlin College, graduating in 1850 with a “distinct taste for the natural sciences.”
After Oberlin, Hayden taught in schools in Ohio before returning to New York, where he enrolled at Albany Medical School, where he studied medicine and geology, graduating in 1853. One of his professors persuaded Hayden to participate in a geological survey. He goes to Nebraska Territory to collect fossils. This adventure put Hayden on a path to explore geological sites along the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers for the rest of his 1850s.
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was born in 1828 or 1829 in Westfield, Massachusetts.submitted by a third party
When the Civil War broke out, Hayden enlisted in the Union Army as a “volunteer surgeon.” This was the only medical procedure in his life. He became the Chief Medical Officer of the Army of Shenandoah and was awarded the Medal of Honor as a lieutenant colonel.
After the war, Hayden accepted a position as professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent his seven years in the position largely absent as he spent time researching and reporting findings in the Nebraska Territory and the Rocky Mountains.
In 1867 he was appointed Geologist, U.S. Territorial Geogeographic SurveyHayden is credited with discovering the first American dinosaur fossil, spending nearly two years at the site with geologist and paleontologist Fielding Meek. During the expedition, the resident Sioux nicknamed Hayden “the man who picks up running stones”.
In 1871, Hayden was chosen to lead the first federally funded geological survey in what was then known as the Yellowstone Valley. Congress appropriated his $40,000 (nearly $110,000 at today’s valuation), and Hayden used it to assemble his 36-member discovery party.
Professionals include botanists, meteorologists, zoologists, ornithologists, mineralogists, agricultural statisticians, entomologists, geomorphologists, secretaries, doctors, ambulance drivers, hunters, wagonmasters, wagonmen, and cooks. It included people, waiters, photographers such as William Henry Jackson, and artists such as Thomas Moran. Two army officers were assigned as military guards.
Members of the 1871 Hayden Expedition gather around a table at a campground in Yellowstone Valley in 1871. Survey leader Ferdinand V. Hayden is seated on the right in front of the tent.submitted by a third party
In addition to tents and stoves, Hayden carried 21 mules, 27 horses, 5 wagons, 2 ambulances, wet and dry bulb thermometers, aneroid and mercury barometers, and an inclinometer. I requested a sextant (to measure the angle of inclination), a prismatic compass, and an odometer.
For six months, members of the expedition surveyed the area and collected “extensive collections in all branches of geology, mineralogy, botany, and natural history.” He cited “unique opportunities for observation and research” and praised the virtues of Yellowstone’s lathe as “an ideal field laboratory”.
Hayden wrote in one report that geysers in Iceland would “sink to insignificance compared to the hot springs of the Yellowstone and Firehole Basins.” At the end of August 1871 Hayden wrote: Our success is complete. ”
Aided by Jackson’s large-format photographs and Moran’s paintings, Hayden sent Congress his “Preliminary Report of the U.S. Geological Survey of Montana and Parts of Adjoining Territories.” That book, and images by Jackson and Moran, helped persuade members of Congress to pass the Yellowstone Preservation Act. Signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. The first national parks were born and the designation spawned an international movement to protect wild places for their “intrinsic and recreational value”.
Thomas Moran’s painting of Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon was one of several submitted to Congress in support of Ferdinand Hayden’s efforts to protect the area that became the world’s first national park. (Smithsonian American Art Museum)Thomas Moran / Smithsonian American Art Museum
In 1871, at the age of 43, Hayden married Emma C. Woodruff, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant. they had no children. He resigned from his professorship at the University of Pennsylvania a year later to devote himself to government work. Hayden was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, was a foreign member of the Geological Society of London, and served for many years as a geologist with the United States Geological Survey.
Suffering from ataxia, a progressive disease of the central nervous system, Hayden was forced to stop exploring and resigned from his government post in 1886. A year later he died and was buried in Philadelphia on December 22, 1887, at the age of 58. At Woodlands Cemetery.
His name lives on in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley. The town of Hayden, Colorado is named after him, as are several mountain peaks, his two subspecies of snakes, snails, and Hayden Hall at the University of Pennsylvania.
Norm Roy, a retired copy editor for The Republican, lives in Florida and travels in an RV. He is eager to hear about the adventures of his travels from his readers. His e-mail his address is: [email protected]
