In later years the Cope-Marsh battlefield shifted to Washington, D. C. Marsh proved himself an able power broker, and Cope saw his own prospects decline, helped along by poor investments that dried up his funds. In 1882 John Wesley Powell, director of the newly formed U.S. Geological Survey, named Marsh the survey's vertebrate paleontologist. When the government cut off Cope's funding for publication of work from an earlier survey, he suspected that Powell and Marsh were behind the decision. He haunted government offices in an attempt to get Congress to restore his funding. 'A great deal depends on official position,' he wrote bitterly to his wife. 'It regulates everything, especially society. It makes less difference what a man knows than what office does he hold. Hence inferior men like Powell and Marsh may have great influence, simply because they have gotten position. It makes little difference how this was done.'

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For Cope, the last straw came in December 1889 when the secretary of the interior ordered him to turn over some of his specimens to the government. Cope, who had collected the specimens at his own expense, was outraged, and he went on the attack, using the press as a weapon. 'I don't think writing private letters of a critical kind to such hardened sinners as Marsh and Powell does the least good; especially in the case of Marsh,' he wrote to another paleontologist. 'But when a wrong is to be righted, the press is the best & most Christian medium of doing it. It replaces the old time shot gun & bludgeon & is a great improvement.'

On January 12, 1890, the New York Herald printed the first of a series of articles about the feud. Cope had been preparing his attack for years, and he let loose with everything he had. 'Unable to properly classify and name the fossils his explorers secured,' Cope said, Marsh 'employed American and foreign assistants who did the work for him and to which he has signed his name.' After citing a number of works that Marsh had allegedly either plagiarized or had his assistants write, Cope did give his rival credit for one work–'the most remarkable collection of errors and ignorance of anatomy and the literature on the subject ever displayed.'

Powell counterattacked in the same article. Cope, he said, was what he considered a'species fiend,' one who would 'ransack the earth for leaves or bones or fragments of shell and then rush into print that their names may be quoted as the discoverers.' The fact that Marsh was equally culpable apparently didn't trouble him. Powell wrote that '. . . Professor Cope's mental and moral characteristics unfit him for any position of trust and responsibility. In addition to his great vanity, which leads him into vicious species work, he is inordinately jealous and suspicious of every other worker, and these two traits combined give him that hysterical temper and gift of voluble denunciation rarely found in persons of his sex.'

Marsh's comments appeared a week later. 'If my language may seem severe,' he wrote in a tone of pained resignation, 'it should be remembered that for ten years I have suffered these attacks in silence, because it seemed to be due to the positions I have held to abstain from all personal controversy.' He went on to describe his first meeting with Cope in 1863, claiming that even then he had'some doubts as to his sanity.'

He saved his most damning story for last: the tale of the Elasmosaurus. In the 1870s Cope had written extensively about this large aquatic reptile, and he had set up a reconstructed skeleton at the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. When Marsh examined the skeleton, he told the Herald, he noted that Cope had transposed tail and neck. 'When I informed Professor Cope of it,' Marsh reported, 'his wounded vanity received a shock from which it has never recovered, and he has since been my bitter enemy.' Furthermore, Marsh contended that Cope then attempted to recall all the copies of his scientific paper with drawings of the incorrect restoration. 'I returned to Professor Cope at his request the one he sent me,' Marsh said, 'but have two others, which I since purchased.'

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