National Museum of Natural History Unearthed

Operation Crossroads

The “Able” test of Operation Crossroads, the first atomic bomb dropped on the Bikini lagoon, on July 1, 1946. It was detonated at a height of 520 feet above the ground. Credit: Government photo in the public domain.

For some reason I do not fear the Atom Bomb era that is with the world. There are and will be I am confident, still enough good men and women in this world to control properly the various advancements of men.

So wrote Smithsonian scientist Leonard P. Schultz on July 8th, 1946, from the U.S.S. Bowditch, the ship on which he had witnessed—one week earlier—the U.S. government’s detonation of an atomic bomb over the remote Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Schultz was one of two Smithsonian scientists who formed part of Operation Crossroads, the beginning of a program of nuclear testing that stretched into the late 1950s.

Leonard P. Schultz and Joseph P.E. Morrison were curators and seasoned field collectors at the U.S. National Museum (today called the National Museum of Natural History) in Washington, when, on January 28, 1946, the U. S. Navy asked the Smithsonian to send experts to the Marshall Islands—part of a team of botanists, zoologists, geologists, and oceanographers from universities, oceanographic institutes, and government research bureaus. After two weeks of hurried preparations, Schultz and Morrison left Washington, D.C., for California, where they joined the U.S.S. Bowditch.

The participation of Smithsonian scientists on military expeditions was not new. Indeed, Shultz had been on the 1937 U. S. Navy Expedition to the Phoenix Islands, and Waldo Schmitt had been assigned to the 1941 and 1942 Navy expeditions to the Galapagos. However, the size and scope of the Bikini surveys far exceeded any earlier Smithsonian/military cooperative projects.

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Text courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

 

The Smithsonian/Roosevelt African Expedition 1909-1910

Edmund Heller.  Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Libraries are books, right?  Yes, and more… when the Smithsonian Institution Libraries acquired the Russell E. Train Africana Collection we became the proud protectors of field notebooks, photographs, glass slides, correspondence, and original drawings from naturalists, such as Edmund Heller pictured at right, and explorers in Africa during the past 200 years, as well as posters, newspapers, tea cups, and other memorabilia illustrating the fascination with African exploration among the folks back home.  We even have the shot-gun of missionary and anti-slavery activist David Livingstone (1813-1873; “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) and poisoned arrows from a poachers’ camp that was broken up by Mr. Train’s safari group in the 1950s.

More to the point at present, the Africana collection includes original photographs and manuscript materials from the Smithsonian/Roosevelt African Expedition of 1909-1910, that complement the Smithsonian’s own Archives and Museum records.  For example, there are over 100 glass slides, many of them hand-colored, showing Theodore Roosevelt, the hunting party, native peoples, and various wild animals.  There is also a substantial cache of field notes, documents, typescripts for articles, newspaper clippings, photos, and correspondence from Edmund Heller (1875-1939), the American naturalist who was one of the Smithsonian’s representatives on the safari with Roosevelt and was in charge of preserving the big-game specimens (see photos below).

 

Images of Edmund Heller's manuscripts from the expedition (left and center) and the title page of Roosevelt and Heller's Life Histories of African Game Animals (right). Images courtesy of Leslie Overstreet.

In his  African game trails (New York, 1910), compiled from articles that he wrote for Scribner’s Magazine during the course of the expedition, Roosevelt speaks highly of Heller, both as a preparer of specimens and as a comrade in the field. 
After their return, the two co-authored Life-histories of African game animals (New York, 1914 - see above image at far right).

Heller made a remarkable career of expeditions and specimen collecting throughout the world:

• the Galapagos Islands & Peru (1898-99) for Stanford University;

• Alaska & British Columbia (1900) for a U.S. biological survey;

• East Africa (1907) with Carl Akeley for the Field Museum;

• East Africa (1909-10) with Roosevelt for the Smithsonian;

• British East Africa & Abyssinia (1912) with Paul Rainey;

• Central Asia (1916-17) with Roy Chapman for the American Museum of Natural History;

• Central Africa (1919) for the Smithsonian;

• and Central Africa again (1923-26) for the Field Museum.

Heller’s last years were spent, presumably more restfully, as the director of zoos in Milwaukee and San Francisco.

The Russell E. Train African Collection, including the Roosevelt and Heller materials, are held in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, one of SI Libraries’ rare-book rooms, in the National Museum of Natural History.

Leslie K. Overstreet, Curator of Natural-History Rare Books, Smithsonian Institution Libraries