11/11/2015
The LIFE & TIMES of FRANK SPRINGER
Feel-good legislations like naming a state fossil is arguably a waste of taxpayers' money.
But in the case of an official fossil for Iowa, the designation might be justified in that it would spotlight a worthy Iowa native son, hitherto forgotten by history.
Frank Springer (1848-1927) was the pioneering amateur geologist who put the fossil on the map.
But a thousand miles south of Wapello, where he was born the son of a county judge, he is still known as the lawyer who singularly charted, shaped and crafted the future of New Mexico -- if not, to some degree, the entire American West.
The sea lilly or crinoid ("CRY-noid") was the focus of the so-called "feel-good" legislations pushed in 1996 by Iowa City schoolchildren, who wanted it named state fossil.
(Iowa currently has none, although a state tree, flower, bird and rock highlight the occasional cereal box.)
The measure was lost in late-session shuffle on the Senate floor, but Lucas Elementary third-through-sixth graders vowed to try again in 1997.
Crinoids are still around and have been for 500 million years.
But the story takes a more recent bent inasmuch as their excavation, classification and, hence, appearance in pre-dinosaur textbooks of 100 years ago was nothing more than a hobby during summer vacations Back East of the Iowa lawyer, University of Iowa alum & philosophy major, who transplanted himself in New Mexico in 1873.
Today, Springer's crinoid specimens fill geology and paleontology exhibits across the U.S., including the Smithsonian Institute where a room is named for him.
But among historians of the American Southwest, Springer's
fossil-hunting is a tiny footnote to an extraordinary life.
Frank Springer was the man who brought the railroad to New Mexico and, for a half-century, presided over one of the largest hunks of private property in U.S. history -- the 1.7 million-acre Maxwell Land Grant -- a last remnant of one of the most far-flung jewels of the Spanish Crown in the New World.
And in this era of political correctness, it might be mentioned that Springer is also one for the books insofar as he was history's Caucasian good guys.
The man is both forgotten and not.
"Who ?" said the coed, working the counter at the natural history museum in the venerable old building on the Pentacrest at Springer's alma mater (Class of 1868) in Iowa City.
Around her, reflected off marble floors of what used to be McBride Hall, boast engravings and biographies in bronze and atop plexiglass podiums of famous U of I natural scientists.
Frank Springer is not among them, although upstairs in dinosaur displays and across the green at the geology department in Schaeffer Hall, glassed shelves line rooms with a thousand crinoids Springe himself collected and stashed in a drawer somewhere are pages of morphologies and taxonomies he wrote himself in Latin.
"I recognize his name from history of geology textbooks, but I had no idea he did anything else. What he did in geology alone was astonishing," said Chris Rohert, the elementary schoolteacher, who led the fray to catapult the crinoid to greatness at the Statehouse in Des Moines.
The bill she wrote described Springer as "an attorney practicing in Burlington...(who) produced many texts on crinoids...for whom a room at the Smithsonian Institution is named."
(Smithsonian officials in Washington said the room is still in use in the paleobiology department.)
While most sea lilies shuffled mortal coil eras back, live ones still around in the oceans of the world.
At one time they wafted in water at "Flowers of the Living Seas" an exhibit at the State Historical Building in Des Moines.
Along with the 150-gallon marine reef aquarium depicting Iowa as once submerged under shallow tropical seas, the exhibit showcased work of pioneering and amateur geologists, including Frank Springer.
"The Frank Springer of the exhibit is indeed the same gentleman that rose to prominence in New Mexico. His diversity of knowledge and his energy seemed to propel him forward in all his endeavors," said museum curator William Johnson.
Johnson's tone loses some of its dryness as he warms up to the subject of Springer.
And it doesn't take much urging as he -- Johnson -- another smalltown Iowa native, cut his teeth teaching youngsters paleontology at a camp located in New Mexico on what was once Springer's empire: the CS Ranch, still a formidable working cattle operation.
On his computer is a list of 18 books and articles by or about Springer with titles like, "On the Crinoid Genus and Its Bulbous Root Camarocrinous" and "An Epoch in the History of American Science".
And trading anecdotes about the Maxwell Kingdom, which are today part of New Mexico (and hence all Western) cowboy folklore, Johnson noted that Springer was unlike many benevolent despot Easterners who dabbled -- and still do in New Mexico -- hunting elk in the mountains, buying up a few thousand acres here and there and then fleeing back to the safety, sanctity and domesticity of the East.
"He lived, married, brought a career to fruition and raised his children in New Mexico," Johnson said. "His geology pursuits in Iowa were -- in context -- larks he dabbled in on vacation trips back to the land of his youth."
And say Johnson and select historians: what a career it was.
In his day, Springer was more famous than God, more powerful than Caesar and richer than both.
Described in yellowing advertising literature as "The World's Largest Real Estate", and "The Most Magnificent Private Property in American," the Maxwell Land Grant in northeastern New Mexico was the country over which Springer presided as attorney and Board of Trustees president from 1873 until his death.
Named for an Anglo man who once petitioned a governor of Spain for a grant of the Spanish Empire, the Maxwell Land Grant extends farther than the eye can see in country where even jackrabbits pack a lunch.
From mountains to high plains country Springer's empire once covered what is now an immense county: Colfax and extending 20 miles into Colorado.
"No one since the death of Frank S[ringer has been more intimately-acquainted with the company's adventure-packed past," wrote Jim Berry Pearson in "The Maxwell Land Grant", published by The University of Oklahoma in 1961.
"He had established the company on as sound a basis as possible and built the country around him. A man of rate talents praised on (two) continents for his successes as a lawyer and businessman, Springer was also a musician, had an appreciation for art and had been instrumental in the building of New Mexico Normal University (now Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. )
"George Washingtson University conferred the degree of Doctor of Science on him for his research and writings in paleontology and the university of Bonn in Germany granted him the Doctor of Philosophy. He had served as president of the board of the School of American Research (still in existence) which he helped establish in Santa Fe.."
"He made possible the building of the (State) Art Museum in Santa Fe." wrote another historian, Frank Walter in a 1927 edition of the 'New Mexico Historical Review'.
"His skill in drafting statutes is manifested in the organic acts of the Museum and the School of American Research -- which is still a prestigious archeological research center and it was his aid, quietly given, that repeatedly brought legislative support to a project which, to the other average members of the Territorial and then State Legislator seemed far outside the province of territorial and state activities...", Walter went on to write.
Springer also built gold and coal towns, supplying lumber for saloons as as well as boarding houses and schools, commissioned murals, started a a newspaper, a cement factory, got a town named for him (Springer, New Mexico) , built a dam -- is still in use -- ran a sugar beet farm, mills, a cattle ranch, a fuel company and ramrodded the odd timer, freight and construction outfits.
And he helped bring the railroad to New Mexico.
Today, Amtrak still runs across the highest railroad pass in America. The route was surveyed by Springer's partner-in-crime and University of Iowa School of Engineering drop-out, William Raymond Morley who -- disguised as a Spanish sheep herder -- secretly surveyed the railroad from Colorado into New Mexico.
Through it all, he was a lawyer, an attorney in complex wrangling for European-American stockholders, who bought out the Dutch, who bought out the Spanish, who took it from the Native Americans, who -- the antelope might ague -- didn't exactly have title in the first place.
Complex wrangling is a a prosaic term for the Colfax County War which cost countless lives in historic gun battles (where bullet holes still are evident in hotel ceilings) and secret lynchings and murders -- including the wrongful hanging a man called Archuleta and of the forever-unsolved murder of the Rev. Tolby in Cimarron Canyon.
Springer stood alone among his wealthy and powerful compatriots in fighting New Mexico's Tammany Hall -- the notorious Santa Fe Ring, a group of swindlers, sidewinders and murderers who ran roughshod from a nest in Santa Fe.
His lifework as a jurist for and against such formidable parties would have been enough for anyone else.
"In the contention between the Maxwell Land Grand & Railway Company (which) revolved in large measure around the validity of title to such vast acreage," Pearson wrote and Walters agreed and concluded: "Springer's brilliant argument and cogent presentation of the case before the United States Supreme Court that won the day and earned the young barrister the public and person praise of (the Court)."
His cloud in courtrooms and in government even played into folklore.
The powerful attorney and charter member of the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee (still possibly the most powerful arm of the state's government with remnants of gold from the days the country from four centuries ago, leftovers from the Spanish Colonial Empire) DIDN'T have Clay Allison arrested after the notorious gunslinger burst into the newspaper office one night, seized the press and horse-dragged it into the Cimarron River.
And, self-interested though it was -- Springer's was an lone voice of reason when the Colfax county War grew particularly brutal in the autumn of 1875.
It was then that, as a defense attorney calling for calm, Sprnger's motion for a continuance in a murder trail averted further violence in bloody days following the lynching of a man wrongly-accused in New Mexico's one of New Mexico's most famous unsolved murders: the gunning down in a lonely canyon on Sept. 14, 1875 of the Rev. F. Tolby of Cimarron.
Headed home from circuit preaching in E-Town (as Elizabethtown was known then) Tolby was found dead of a bullet wound, his money still on him, his horse grazing nearby.
But beyond even the land grant's confines, such as they were, Springer's mark is still felt in U.S. courtrooms today.
According to Walter, his inaugural address after his election in 1890 as New Mexico Bar Association President led to creation by Congress of the federal Court of Private Land Claims, to which -- in one version or another -- the public has recourse today.
Of his death, the entire city of Santa Fe was draped in black for days.
Of his life, a few were even moved to (better and worse) verse:
A ranch hand friend, Charles Lummis, borrowed from line camps of cowboys who were the rank and file of the Springer Empire:
"Grave and gentle and still and strong
Sits the Chief in the Council Tent
But when we come to a breakneck hill
His is the hand that is lent.
Power and of the elder stamp
Solomon must have made a deal
With Springer, dean of the Rito Camp."
Of his death, an obit had it: "Flags fly at half-mast over the Palace of the Governors and the Art Museum. The Scarpitti bust of Frank Springer in the Library of the School of American Research in Santa Fe is draped in black. The members of the Staff of the Institution are sorrow-stricken. Their friend and benefactor, New Mexico's foremost citizen... Dr. Frank Springer, president of the managing committee of the school, passed away at two o'clock Thursday afternoon."
The writer continued: "Springer's interests were so many, his achievements so remarkable and far-reaching, his life so filled with deeds of note than an adequate biography must be reserved for a later date and more ample space..."
The obit, ebullient even in those bombastic journalistic times, nonetheless went on six-and-a-half pages, not including the photograph.
But today, his name is hardly lost in the vast grasslands and near-perennially snow-capped peaks of the land grant.
The place, one of several vast holdings today remnants of one of the largest land-for-cash deals since the Louisiana Purchase, is still in the hands of Springers, old cowboys, young barristers and the matriarch, Linda Davis -- who at the age of 85 recently became a certified Emergency Medical Technician.
Still what of the crinoid's claim on its own merit to state fossil officialdom?
According to Rohret, that sea lily fossils were again rediscovered in the Great Iowa Flood of 1993 is reason enough.
She explained her quest began with student field trips after the flood uncovered more of one of the world's most beautiful and complete fossil reserves, the Devonian Fossil Gorge near what is aptly-named Coralville.
But other even more staid geologists are quick to chime in: crinoids are, quite in and of themselves, no less than enchanting.
Also called stars, lilies and sea spiders, they are harmless except to plankton and equally useless cousins of other echinoderms: starfish, sand dollars and sea cucumber.
That these "plated" creatures left us the world's most beautiful fossils is achievement enough, say the bone-hunters.
(One wrote in a state geology publication that the little fellows' remains in Iowa's Devonian Period lime layers left "a wilted garden upon the stone."
Action needed to bump the flower-like animal to state fossil is a joint resolution drafted from a House Concurrent Resolution passed May 1 decades ago.
Or say a plaque noting the man at the Museum.
And the Johnson County School District may be out another bus trip.
But, said Rohret, the path is still far from clear as, not surprisingly, the state's conservative majority take the matter less than seriously.
(One Capitol insider joked that the bill was dropped out of "fear of competition with the state rock.")
What might Springer have thought?
He probably would have been pleased for the crinoid, possibly for the encouragement to amateur students of geology.
But likely, the shaving brush moustache had to twitch at honors in his own life and life and times.
While pomp and circumstance were much the order of the day, one can only picture an old Iowa lawyer, who himself wielded hammers and drove spikes and set railroad track, trying not to squirm at yet another poem, this read publicly by a James McNary at a Sept. 8, 1922 ceremony at the New Mexico Art Museum:
"In solitude he played his flute and thought
Til finally this miracle was wrought.
The ordered working of his brain
Gave power to his gaze and through the train
Of aeons of dead years his piercing eye
Sought out Eath's secrets where they underlie
The cold-faced rocks. Then slowly page by page
He read through nature's books and age by age
He found a story there, Today the world
Is deeply in his debt for he revealed
To man the mystery the Earth concealed."
At any rate, widespread-if-not-as-yet-allied pocketsful of schoolchildren -- now grown -- geologists, historians, lawyers, mining engineers, artists, cowboys and alums of a half -dozen universities and research centers might be persuaded to say that Iowa could do worse.
