For the better part of this century, visitors to the third floor of Macbride Hall have been able to look into the chocolate brown eyes of three musk oxen. Standing atop a sugar-coated promontory meant to simulate the desolate snow-swept landscape of Canada's Barren Ground, the musk oxen have fascinated generations of inquisitive children, and have intrigued many older and more sophisticated visitors to Mammal Hall.

As the decades have passed, fewer and fewer people visiting the museum have known the remarkable story of how these animals came to be a part of the University of Iowa's impressive natural history collection.

It is a story that deserves retelling now, because—with a new diorama under construction—no more will the shaggy brown-eyed trio stand in stark solitude within the glass exhibit case familiar to so many Iowa students and alumni.

The tale of the musk oxen begins in the 19th century with an Iowa farm boy, Frank Russell. Born in Webster County, Russell graduated from Fort Dodge High School, taught school for one year, and then came to the State University of Iowa to acquire his scientific training. The year was 1888.

By his junior year, Russell's future course became clear. On a trip to Canada to obtain bird specimens for the university museum, Russell, classmate Arthur Smith, and Charles C. Nutting, professor of systematic zoology and curator of the university's Cabinet of Natural History, met Roderick Ross MacFarlane. A chief agent for the Hudson Bay Company and a respected ornithologist, MacFarlane urged the three to plan an expedition into the Far North—a region hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdiction of the Northwest Mounted Police.

MacFarlane was concerned that the musk ox, one of the few animals able to endure the deadly cold and isolation of Canada's Barren Ground, was on the verge of extinction. Hunted for their hides, the musk oxen were being exterminated by northern Indians and Eskimos who made daring forays into a timberless wasteland to procure the skins that bought them tea, tobacco, and ammunition from Hudson Bay Company outposts.

Prompted by scientific curiosity and his own desire for Arctic exploration, Russell immediately volunteered to undertake such an expedition.

Frank B. Russell 1892BS, 1895MS

He would have to wait two years to begin the adventure that had ignited his imagination. But shortly after his graduation in 1892, Russell headed north, to the upper shores of Manitoba's Lake Winnipeg. He needed to harden himself to the intense cold that could so easily deaden his resolve on the long-anticipated hunt for the musk ox. And he needed to learn the ways of the North: how to drive a dog team, how to run through unpacked snow on snowshoes more than six feet long, how to survive on a diet of tea, fish or dried meat, and grease, how to win the cooperation of native peoples he must depend on as guides into an unknown land.

A letter from Professor Nutting outlined for Russell what the university and its Board of Regents asked him to do:

You are expected to advance in every reasonable way the scientific objects of your expedition, which are:

1. A full collection of the Mammals of the regions visited, especially the Musk-ox; Caribou, Polar Bear and Wood Buffalo, if such can be had.
2. A full collection of the Birds, especially those breeding in the far north, of which a full series of eggs, young, and specimens in summer plumage, is desired.
3. A collection of Insects and such Invertebrates as you can find means of procuring.
4. Notes and specimens, so far as practicable, of the Flora of the country.
5. Notes and specimens regarding the Geology and Paleontology of the regions visited.
6. Ethnological specimens illustrating the life, habits, manufactures, etc., of the natives. Notes of songs, folklore, traditions, religious conceptions and myths, are especially desired.
7. Meteorological observations, particularly at your winter post, for which a set of instruments has been provided by the United States Weather Bureau.

It was a tall order, but not such an unusual one—given the times. In fact, Russell's expedition was just one of several undertaken on behalf of the university. In the last decade of the 19th century, other naturalists were dispatched to the Bahamas, Nicaragua, and the Bay of Fundy with the same aim: to collect specimens for Iowa's Museum of Natural History.

Russell's adventures in discovering the unknown were unusual, though, in that he was a solitary traveler, not part of an expedition team. Ironically, despite Nutting's assurance that "this University does not desire you to imperil your life in its service," no budget for the expedition was appropriated. According to Russell's account, "the project must have been abandoned, had not President Chas. A. Schaeffer generously advanced the necessary amount to meet the expenses incurred during the first year."

Russell probably posed for this studio photo in Iowa City after his return from the Arctic. He would go on to Harvard in 1895, where he earned degrees in anthropology and was appointed to the faculty. Russell married Theresa Peet, an Iowa alumna, in 1900. A prolific writer and respected ethnologist, he died in Arizona in 1903, the victim of tuberculosis. Successful as his northern expedition was, Russell ultimately paid for it with his life.

By the time Russell spent a winter in Manitoba, traversed the great Canadian prairie, and headed north through Calgary and Edmonton, he was prepared for one of the most treacherous parts of his trip—a perilous voyage down the ice-choked Athabasca River to Fort Chippewyan. The intrepid Iowa farm boy was not dissuaded. Typically spending his mornings in collecting, his afternoons in preparing his specimens, Russell continued to push north, toward Great Slave Lake and Fort Rae.

Having spent 18 months in collecting over 600 specimens of mammals and birds, Russell was well acquainted with the hardships of the North. He had endured the painful snowshoe sickness, the mal de racquette, that afflicted native and naturalist alike. "It seemed as if my ankle joints grated dry as I scraped along in the torturing dog-trot," he would later write in his book, Explorations in the Far North. "Truly, the heavy hunting snow-shoe . . . 'is a weariness to the flesh.'"

He had gone hungry when food ran out and had learned to eat whatever was available at other times. Even at the Hudson Bay outposts, provisions were mean."Our fare consisted of boiled dried caribou meat, so black, tough and covered with hairs that the sight of it soon became repugnant," Russell wrote, though he appreciated the feasts that followed successful hunts.

"Look down in pity upon 'the savage and his marrow bones' if you will, but you might perhaps relish that same marrow if you had 'hustled' for those bones yourself as I had done, or you might, after running fifty miles, pass your plate a second time for bouillon made of blood carried to camp in a caribou's stomach," he admonished the uninitiated. "Even the tendons were eaten, and the feet also, after roasting them until the hoof could be knocked off."

Russell had suffered the howling slap of incessant wind and had survived the cold, the greatest barrier to settlement in the Far North. On one 175-mile run across the ice of Great Slave Lake, he noted that "the temperature ranged from fifty to sixty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit . . . [Though] we became comfortably warm after running a few minutes and had accomplished nearly half of our day's journey before the first gleams of dawn . . . had appeared . . . toward evening . . . the whips fell mercilessly on the heavy coats of the tired team, our limbs moved mechanically as if they had lost the sense of feeling, our hands became so numb that we sometimes had to use our teeth, instead, in loosening the sled lines."

Russell remembered, in his book, how "the ice formed a solid mass in my beard, causing my voice to sound muffled, and in time froze against my cheeks; my eyelashes were nearly always covered with frost, which seriously interfered with the sight; the vapor from our heated bodies gathered in feathery crystals on the hair of our capotes, so that we were . . . hardly recognizable as human beings."

"On the 4th of March [1894] I told a party of four who had come to the fort for ammunition for the hunt, that I was going with them whether they wanted me to do so or not," Russell would later write. Johnnie Cohoyla, a petty Dog Rib chief, "finally consented to 'look after me,' which meant to look at me doing my own work."

In return, Russell agreed to pay two skins, the equivalent of one dollar a day, and to supply tea for the hunting party. Since the Board of Regents was paying him a salary of $30 per month, Russell was sure to lose money on the expedition to hunt the musk oxen, the most difficult North American mammals to obtain.

To find the elusive creatures, the hunting party would have to travel nearly 400 miles northeast of Great Slave Lake, north of the Arctic Circle, and more than 200 miles beyond the tree line. Hauling their own firewood through blizzards that raged almost continuously, the men had little protection against the elements. "On the musk-ox trip I used a single blanket, and during the last week gave that away and used the [caribouskin] robe alone," Russell would later note in Explorations in the Far North.

With seven musk oxen of his own to skin and haul out of the Barren Ground, the Indians—who had been certain the trip would kill Russell—now refused him any assistance at all. After spending a day sawing the skulls in half so they would fit on the narrow sled, Russell badgered Cohoyla for some of the help he was being paid to provide. The exchange was fruitless, as Russell later recorded in his book: Cohoyla "refused to carry a skeleton for me at any price, not even a head or half a split skull would he carry, though I gave him two robes for carrying back to the lodge."

If finding and killing the musk oxen was a feat, returning the specimens to Fort Rae was even more an accomplishment for the young Iowa naturalist.

It had been three weeks since the hunt began when the party started back. "My load extended over both ends of the sled and was nearly as high as my shoulder," Russell wrote. With food rationed and nearly gone, the party traveled up to 18 hours a day. Russell, whose load weighed over 500 pounds, pushed on the sled and carried a pack on his back to help his four-dog team.

After a week of running over a frozen landscape, the beginning of the spring thaw made travel even more arduous. "The snow softened just enough to cause it to stick to our snow-shoes," Russell wrote, "so that it made them heavy to carry, and, worse still, lumps of ice would accumulate every few minutes which soon blistered the bottoms of our feet over the entire surface."

Russell recorded his return to the Hudson Bay Company outpost: "As my weary dogs crept over the hill into Rae and dragged the load of five complete skins and heads of musk-ox in front of the door which they had left two months before, they sank down utterly worn out. I lifted them out of the harness and prepared my evening meal with slow exhausted movements, but sustained by a devout feeling of thankfulness that the journey had been successful."

Incredibly, though Russell had attained the primary goal of the expedition, he did not head south with the collection he was sending back to Iowa City. Leaving his faithful dogs—Nudjuk, Treff, Major, and Corbeau—with whom he had "hunted, eaten, and slept together for the last time," Russell headed down the Mackenzie River, traveling in a 14-foot birchbark canoe some 450 miles beyond Fort Good Hope to reach the Arctic Sea. Dodging ice floes, he paddled west another 100 miles to join up with an American whaling steamer heading out from Herschel Island.

Cree hunting snowshoes from Grand Rapids, Manitoba, typical Eskimo slippers, a beaded carrying strap collected near Fort McPherson, and a charming ivory harness swivel from the Diomedes Islands are just a few of the items Russell secured for Iowa's Museum of Natural History.

Sailing around the top of Alaska, the ship stopped on the Siberian coast, where Russell obtained beautifully carved walrus ivory and other Eskimo artifacts. Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Frank Russell became the first explorer ever to descend the Mackenzie to its mouth and then reach civilization by sailing around Alaska.

Russell's sojourn in the North began in August 1892 and ended with a hero's welcome to Iowa City on November 2, 1894. His explorations took him "from the Saskatchewan River to the mouth of the Mackenzie, and from Lake Winnipeg and Bathurst Inlet to the Rocky Mountains, embracing an area of nearly a million square miles." As a result, Iowa's Museum of Natural History owns a rich collection of bird and mammal specimens of the Far North, as well as priceless ethnological material from both the Eskimo and Indian tribes Russell met on his journey.

To commemorate the expedition, Museum of Natural History director George Schrimper has planned "The Frank Russell Memorial and Centennial Exhibit" that will open to the public at summer's end. A 35-foot painted mural will place the three mounted musk oxen within the context of the Barren Ground, where wolves and man are the only predators they know. And, for the first time, the story of the indomitable alumnus who secured the musk oxen for the University of Iowa will be told as part of the exhibit.

photos by Ed Trebes