Dexter Marsh was finally published in Benjamin Silliman's American Journal of Science in November 1848, when he submitted a letter describing his work with fossil footprints. By this time, he had opened his museum in a room added to his home on Clay Hill in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Yale's Charles Shepard had provided him with a letter of introduction to an American contact in Russia who might be able to help convey a gift of fossil footprints to Czar Nicholas I. (The attempt was unsuccessful.) Clearly, although he seems to have remained humble, Marsh now saw himself as a man of the world, not merely a manual laborer in small-town New England.