He helped support three older brothers enrolled in the Methodist Episcopal Conference by working as a shoemaker for 6 years, before attending Wesleyan University.

On September 16, 1842, he married Mary E. Beckford;[9] he continued his practice, and was elected mayor of Lynn in 1852 on a temperance platform.

In Quindaro, Mudge and his family operated a waystation of the Underground Railroad, aiding slaves fleeing from Missouri,[13] He lectured around the state, and in 1864 delivered a series on "Scientific and Economical Geology" to the legislature in Topeka while the bill to establish the first state geological survey was being debated in the House.

He has spoken three times in Representative Hall, to large audiences whose close attention attests how deeply they are interested in his lecturesAfter Watson Foster withdrew due to opposition, and George C. Swallow was accused of disloyalty, Mudge was appointed as the stage geologist and the director of the first Kansas Geological Survey by Governor Thomas Carney.

[15] Mudge was responsible for surveying 212,000 km2 (82,000 sq mi) of mineral and soil resources by the end of the year, with a budget of US$3,500 and a staff of five.

He collected footprints near Junction City in 1865, and invertebrates and Late Cretaceous deciduous leaves near Ellsworth in 1866, and more plants and a saurian in 1869 from the Republican River near the northern state line.

He initially corresponded in this fashion with Fielding Bradford Meek at the Smithsonian (primarily concerning molluscs), Leo Lesquereux (plants), Edward Drinker Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (vertebrates), Othniel Charles Marsh at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, Louis Agassiz at Harvard, and James Dwight Dana at Yale.

While he initially planned to ship the specimen to Cope, he heard of Othniel Charles Marsh's interest and sent it instead to his former acquaintance from Connecticut.

After his dismissal from KSAC in 1874, Mudge wrote to Marsh: When you were here, you stated that you should like to employ one or more young men to collect fossils in western Kansas.

Mudge primarily focused on the Kansas Chalk from 1874 to 1876, but from 1876 to 1879 he expanded into Colorado discovering some of the first Jurassic dinosaurs in the American West.

[19] According to Blackmar, "in one year he shipped over three tons of fossils, etc., to New Haven" [10] Marsh's rival Cope in turn had Oramel Lucas and Charles Hazelius Sternberg seeking out new finds.

In 1877, Cope's team was making remarkable finds at Como Bluff, Wyoming near Cañon City, Colorado, and Marsh sent Mudge to establish a quarry near the location.

[5][6][7] As long as science has a name and place in the great central plains of the North American continent, Prof. Mudge will not be forgotten as a scientific explorer and discovererWith John D. Parker of Lincoln College (now Washburn University), Mudge founded the Kansas Natural History Society in 1867 (which became the Kansas Academy of Science in 1871).

From Dale Russell's 1967 Systematics and Morphology of American Mosasaurs:[25] ... special mention is due to Prof. B. F. Mudge, who collected for Marsh during the summers of 1874–1876.

The industry and thoroughness with which he work [sic] the Niobrara Chalk, the excellence and number of his specimens, and the relative accuracy and completeness of his field journal were outstanding for his timeMudge was not a prolific publisher of scientific papers.