B&C Member Spotlight—Childs Frick

By PJ DelHomme

The son of a wealthy industrialist, Childs Frick could afford to explore—first with a rifle, then with a pick and shovel. The early Boone and Crockett Club Member was initially attracted to hunting big game specimens for museums. Eventually, he shifted his sights to big bones from prehistoric times.

Anyone into fine art knows the Frick name. Henry Clay Frick was a wealthy industrialist and business partner with Andrew Carnegie in the late 19th century. He was also an art collector. Today, the Frick Collection houses works from the Renaissance masters through the 19th century. And then there was his son, Childs, who preferred fossils to Vermeer and wild places to Wall Street. As a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Frick shared his time and his fortune to help set aside habitat for pronghorn and other animals. 

Born in 1883, Childs grew up in Pittsburgh, a city built on the back of his father's coke (the mineral) empire. Frick tromped through the woodlots in the great outdoors. Early trips to Canada and the American West sparked a fascination with wildlife. Like many Club members, he was a hunter and a collector. He graduated from Princeton in 1905 and set sail to British East Africa (Kenya) in 1909. While in Africa, he collected specimens for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. This gave him just a taste of adventure, and he traveled to Ethiopia in 1911. He collected hundreds of mammals for the Carnegie and thousands of birds for the Smithsonian. The specimens collected on these two trips became the foundation of the African mammal collection at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

LEFT: Henry Clay Frick. RIGHT: Childs Frick, 1901.

The Original Bone Collector 

In 1913, he fell in love and married Frances Shoemaker Dixon. A brief stint managing the family's business affairs proved that Childs belonged in the backcountry, not behind a desk. World War I brought another shift. Frick became a member of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1915. There, he met member Henry Fairfield Osborn, then the president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). In 1916, he asked Osborn to recommend an area on the Pacific Coast that was suitable for paleontological fieldwork, a place that might be of interest to AMNH. Osborn suggested that Frick work with fellow Club member John C. Merriam, a professor of paleontology and historical geology at the University of California. At the same time,  Frick joined the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant in the Air Corps. While stationed in California, he took advantage of the opportunity to study the region's geological and paleontological history and fell in love again—this time with fossils. As a result of his work in California, Frick produced a publication on the paleontology and geology of the area, which apparently impressed both Merriam and Osborn.

In September 1917, Osborn wrote to Frick, offering him an appointment as assistant curator in vertebrate paleontology at AMNH. Frick declined the position because of his enlistment. After the war, though, Frick was unanimously appointed as an assistant in vertebrate paleontology at the AMNH in June 1919. He was elected a trustee in 1920. Frick loved fossils, and he didn’t mind spending his family fortune on it. He was the driving force behind the Frick Laboratory of Vertebrate Paleontology, a hub of research attracting top minds like Morris Skinner and Theodore Galusha. Frick was a stickler for documentation on every specimen collected. 

Over decades, Frick and his team amassed a staggering collection of more than 200,000 fossil mammals. This wasn't just quantity; it was quality. Miocene and Pliocene fossils were carefully cataloged and formed the backbone of the AMNH's collection, offering unprecedented insights into mammalian evolution. Frick himself dove into the research and published extensively. His most notable work was titled Horned Ruminants of North America, published in 1937. Of interest to hunters, this book catalogs and identifies the early ancestors of our big game species like elk and pronghorn. 

The Boone and Crockett Connection

Frick wasn't one for flashy displays of wealth. Rather, he cut checks from his family’s fortune for things that most interested him, namely big game and big fossils. At the AMNH, Frick hired his own collectors to supply fossils from the field and his own lab assistants who extracted the fossils from the surrounding material when they made it to the museum. After his death in 1965, his entire collection, along with meticulous records, was donated to the museum. A new building, the Frick Building, was completed in 1973 and housed his collection of fossils.

The Frick family fortune climbed into the billions, but it didn’t last. While other entrepreneurs invested their riches, the Fricks spent their fortune on art and adventure.

Frick's passion wasn't limited to animals that had been dead for thousands of years. He was a staunch conservationist and fundraiser for big game and their habitat. As chief fundraiser for the Sheldon National Antelope Refuge in Nevada and Oregon, Frick played a crucial role in establishing this vital sanctuary for pronghorn and other wildlife. Frick also served as the chair of the Club’s “American Committee,” with the goals of, according to its bylaws: "To further the conservation and preservation of threatened and vanishing forms of wild life in the various regions of the world by: (1) stimulating, promoting and financing research into the status and ecology of threatened species of wild life; (2) publishing and disseminating information dealing with the current status of all wild life; and (3) lending assistance to national and international organizations concerned with wild life conservation, with special reference to activities outside the United States." For 25 years, members of the committee, most of whom Boone and Crockett members, worked toward these goals. Frick was a generous contributor to the cause. 

Pronghorn race across Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge. Image Courtesy of Gail Collins, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Childs Frick is hardly a household name in conservation, but his impact on paleontology is undeniable. He wasn't a showman; he was a builder, a meticulous researcher, and a quiet philanthropist who understood the importance of preserving the natural history of the world, both the living and the dead. In paleontological research, he preserved the dead. In working to establish early wildlife refuges like the Sheldon National Antelope Refuge, he helped the conservation of wildlife living today and into the future. 

Member Spotlights

Boone and Crockett Club members have come from a cross-section of famous accomplished people whose lives and careers have written and recorded the history of this country since the late 19th Century. They have been naturalists, scientists, explorers and sportsmen, writers and academicians, artists, statesmen and politicians, generals, bankers, financiers, philanthropists, and industrialists. Their diversity of ideas and activities during their careers have made the Boone and Crockett Club rich in its fellowship and achievements. To read more member spotlights, just click here. 

PJ DelHomme writes and edits content from his home in western Montana. He runs Crazy Canyon Media and Crazy Canyon Journal.