FURTHER WORK IN THE KANSAS CHALK, 1877
I spent the winter of 1876–77 with Professor Cope, first at Haddonfield,
then at his new home on Pine Street, in Philadelphia.
At Haddonfield the commodious loft of a large, old-fashioned barn was
fitted up as a workshop, and I had also a bed here. I boarded with a Mr.
Geismar, Professor Cope’s preparator, but I had a standing invitation to
eat dinner every Sunday with the Professor and his wife and daughter, a
lovely child of twelve summers.
I shall never forget those Sunday dinners. The food was plain, but
daintily cooked, and the Professor’s conversation was a feast in itself.
He had a wonderful power of putting professional matters from his mind
when he left his study, and coming out ready to enter into any kind of
merrymaking. He used to sit with sparkling eyes, telling story after
story, while we laughed at his sallies until we could laugh no more.
I never knew his wit to fail him. I remember being present at a meeting
of the Academy of Science, in Philadelphia, at which he was up for
re-election to the office of recording secretary, and was defeated.
Among others, Professor William Moore Gabb made some remarks against
him. Cope’s only defense was “Now, William, more gab!”
I attended also the dinners which he gave to his hosts of friends in the
city, and the luncheons at which Mrs. Cope entertained the young men to
whom the Professor gave lectures in his own home. He told his funniest
anecdotes on these occasions, and used to call on me for my story of the
old farmer who, while at work hoeing corn in a stump-field on the side
of a hill, saw a hoop-snake at the top take its tail in its mouth and
begin to roll down towards him. Springing behind a stump, he struck at
it with his hoe handle, into which the sting at the end of the snake’s
tail entered deeply. In less than an hour the handle had swelled up to
the size of a man’s leg.
I believe that this story-telling of which he was so fond was for Cope a
form of relaxation from his heavy work in the study, and that his
ability to give himself up so thoroughly to it in his leisure hours was
what enabled him to accomplish in his life an amount of work such as few
men have ever accomplished. It would take a volume even to name the
titles of all the products of his industrious brain. One of them alone,
the great Volume III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata,” often called “Cope’s
Bible,” has over a thousand pages of text, beside many fine plates. It
was published by the Government, in 1884.
Before starting back to outfit another expedition to the Kansas Chalk, I
secured the services of Mr. Russell T. Hill, an able young man who was
working in the Academy under the Jesup Fund; and upon our arrival at
Manhattan, I hired Mr. A. W. Brouse as teamster and cook.
About the last of March we started with a team of ponies and a light
spring wagon upon our long and extremely tedious journey across the
state of Kansas, to our headquarters at Buffalo Park. At Chapman Creek,
a few miles from Junction City, we were stopped by high water. A raging
torrent twenty feet deep filled the bed of the creek; neither man nor
beast could have crossed it alive. We were, therefore, horrified to see
a farmer, sitting on a seat on top of two sets of side-boards in a
lumber wagon, come driving down into this fearful flood. I called to him
to stop, and asked him what he was going to do.
“I must come over,” he shouted.
“Why,” I answered, “the water is twenty feet deep, and running like a
mill race. You’ll be swept away.”
“But I have not had my mail for a week. I must come over,” he shouted
back.
“Well,” said I, “you big fool, why don’t you go down to the railroad
bridge, just below here, and walk over?”
“By Chimmeny,” he said, “I hadn’t thought of that!”
As we were now in the antelope country, we were rarely out of antelope
meat. One morning we saw a buck antelope standing close to the railroad
track, watching an incoming train. I remarked, as I urged the driver to
hurry up his horses, that perhaps someone would shoot the animal from
the train. And sure enough, as the train passed, a window flew up, and a
man with a revolver shot the buck through the neck. It began to describe
a circle, its feet planted together, and springing from the wagon, I cut
its throat with a butcher knife, while the boys held its horns.
Another time, as we were traveling along over the prairie, we suddenly
came upon a young antelope hidden securely in the center of a bunch of
grass. We should not have seen him at all from the ground, but being
above him on the wagon seat, we looked right down on him. The boys
jumped out, and approaching the little chap carefully, were just
spreading out their arms so as to be ready to grab him, when he sprang
to his feet so quickly that their hands were thrown into the air, and
darted off. The boys started after him at the top of their speed, but
they might as well have tried to catch a streak of lightning.
One day we were camping at the spring on Hackberry, south of Buffalo,
when a couple of men rode up to us. They said that they were cowmen, and
that they had lost their outfit. I invited them into my tent, and after
supper gave them the boys’ bed, the boys themselves climbing into the
covered wagon.
Early in the morning one of the men wakened me and asked for a revolver.
There was an antelope in camp, he said. I handed him a Smith and Wesson,
and peeped out, to see a fine buck standing just at the end of the wagon
tongue, looking over the tent and wagon. The stranger opened fire at
three or four paces and emptied the revolver. Then throwing it down as
of no account, he asked for a gun. I gave him a Sharp’s rifle and a
cartridge belt. In the meanwhile the antelope had walked a few yards
away and turned to look at us. The man fired several shots, and threw
down the rifle also, and as the boys were by this time climbing out of
the wagon, one with a Winchester, the other with a little Ballard, he
borrowed from them first one firearm and then the other, and blazed away
without once drawing blood. Finally the buck deliberately moved over the
hill and out of sight, while the man swore that it had a charmed life.
We thought otherwise, however, and the boys followed it; soon returning
with it swinging from a gun, which they carried on their shoulders like
a pole.
I recall another ludicrous incident connected with this expedition. We
happened to be at Buffalo Station once when Professor Snow, the
much-loved Kansas naturalist, and at one time the chancellor of the
State University, was in town with a large party of students, on his
annual insect hunt.
The old Chisholm cattle trail led through Buffalo, and one day the owner
of a large herd of Texas cattle, who was passing through, noticed
Professor Snow and his party out on the prairie with their nets in their
hands, running about as if possessed. It happened to be the first time
that he had ever seen insect collectors at work, and his curiosity was
aroused.
“What are those men doing?” he asked Jim Thompson, the storekeeper.
“Catching bugs,” was the laconic reply.
“I don’t believe it,” said the cowman. “They are grown men.”
“All right,” said Jim, “you can find out for yourself if you want to.”
The man started off after the Professor, and I waited, with a good deal
of curiosity, to hear his report of the conversation. On his return he
was in a brown study. The Professor had taken him into his tent, and
shown him hundreds of mounted insects, reeling off their names to him
until his head whirled.
“Well, did I tell you the truth?” Jim asked.
“That man,” said the cowman, “is the smartest man I ever saw. He knows
the names and surnames of all the bugs in this country.”
On the thirtieth of April we drove down to the Smoky, thirty miles south
of Buffalo, and got caught in a quicksand, but managed to save both team
and wagon. We camped at the mouth of a large ravine with plenty of grass
in it.
All that night it blew a perfect gale. Did you, dear reader, ever try to
sleep in a tent when the wind was high and the canvas flapped about you,
waking the fear that at any moment the pegs might pull out or a seam
part? Do you know what it is to lie, deafened by thunder and blinded by
lightning, while the rain and sleet dash against the thin covering which
is all that separates you from the fury of the storm? It is not a
pleasant experience, and yet in all the years that I have gone camping,
although I have expected time and again to find my tent torn to shreds
over my head, my fears have never once been realized. Even in the most
terrible storms my tent has stood securely, and I have escaped without
serious inconvenience.
On this trip, however, we did have a disagreeable experience. A cold
rain continued for four days, and the tent sprang a leak right over my
bed. Moreover, the buffalo chips were so wet that we could not build a
fire, and had to eat cold food and sleep in wet blankets.
Among the difficulties with which we had to contend on this expedition
was a defective wagon wheel. One day, as we were driving along a slope,
our lower wheel dished out, and dumped us, load and all, to the ground.
Upon examination, we found that the maker had used a hub whose mortises
were too large for the spokes. The latter had been held in place by
wedges which had been painted over so that they should not be detected.
The man who sold us the wagon had guaranteed it for a year, but
unfortunately, he lived two hundred miles away. When the necessity
arises, however, one can solve any problem somehow; so we took off the
tire, put back the spokes and wedges, heated the tire in a fire of
buffalo chips, and reset it. We tried to drive carefully after this and
avoid sloping places, but it generally happened that when we least
expected it, we would fall by the wayside. Most aggravating of all, when
we did take the defective wheel back to the man who guaranteed it, he
gave us another even more unreliable than the first. It is a mystery to
me how manufacturers can play such miserable tricks on their customers.
We were much inconvenienced also by the illness of one of our horses. He
often gave out on the open prairie, in one case, I remember, three miles
from water. The only vessel we had in which to bring it to camp was a
gallon jug, and it kept one person busy getting enough for our use. We
were finally obliged to get another horse in place of the sick one; and
our bad luck persisting, hit upon one which had evidently been trained
to the wheel of a coach, for as soon as the last trace had been hitched,
he was off like a shot. Fortunately, his mate could not run as fast, so
that they simply went round in a circle, and the boys, watching their
chance, caught hold of the wagon and got aboard.
This horse was continually giving us trouble. One day when we were about
to cross Hackberry Creek I went ahead with my pick and struck the dry,
cracked clay of the bed, to see whether it would hold. As I could not
break through, I concluded that we could cross safely, and beckoned to
Will Brouse to come on. Whereupon that miserable mustang, taking his bit
between his teeth, came down the hill with the load at full speed, and,
dashing onto the hardened clay, broke through into the thick mortar
below.
The boys, jumping out, managed to get both horses unhitched before they
went down, and quickly hitched them to the hind axle of the wagon, to
save the load of fossils which we were hauling to the station. Then
began a performance of that tantalizing trick which horses know so well
how to play. Rowdy would make a rush forward, as if he intended to haul
out the load in a hurry, but the moment he felt the collar press his
neck, he would fall back against the wheel, while his mate went through
the same performance. So they see-sawed up and down, until I could stand
it no longer, as the wagon was slowly sinking. I took the lines, and
putting all my will-power into the command “Get out of this!” I forced
them to pull together and haul the wagon out to solid ground. Then when
we unhitched them, they ran away and scattered singletrees, nuts, and
bolts all over the prairie.
South of the river we found some fine examples of large _Haploscapha_
shells, some of them a foot in diameter. The valves of this shell are
shaped a little like a woman’s bonnet, and the name Conrad gave it,
“_Haploscapha grandis_,” may be freely translated “The great hood.”
(Fig. 17.)
[Illustration:
FIG. 17.—FOSSIL SHELLS, _Haploscapha grandis_.
(After Cope.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 18.—CHARLES STERNBERG AND SON TAKING UP A LARGE SLAB OF FOSSILS
FROM A CHALK BED IN GOVE CO., KANSAS.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 19.—CAMP AND WAGON OF THE FOSSIL HUNTERS ON GRASSWOOD CREEK,
CONVERSE CO., WYOMING.
]
We found many fish and saurians or mosasaurs also. Very different was
our method of collecting them then from what it is now, for fossil
hunting is as capable of improvement as any other form of human
endeavor. Then we went over, in a few months, all the chalk in western
Kansas, which lines the ravines on either side of the Smoky Hill and its
branches for a hundred miles; now it takes us five years to get over the
same ground. Then we dug up the bones with a butcher knife or pick, and
packed in flour sacks with dry buffalo grass, which we pulled with our
fingers. Some strange animals were created by Cope and Marsh in those
early days, when they attempted to restore a creature from the few
disconnected bones thus carelessly collected. Now we take up great slabs
of the chalk, so that we can show the bones _in situ_, that is, in their
original matrix, so that they may be the more easily fitted together in
their natural relations with each other.
When, after much careful exploration, we find, sticking out of the edge
of a canyon or wash, the bones of some “ancient mariner” of the old
Cretaceous ocean, we first lay bare a floor above the bones by picking
away the rock. Then I, usually stretched at full length on this floor,
with a crooked awl and a brush, uncover the bones enough to be able to
determine how they lie, often keeping up the tedious work for hours.
When the position of each bone has been ascertained, my son George, who
for years has been my chief assistant, and I cut trenches around the
specimen, and, hewing down the outside rock two or three inches, make a
frame of 2 × 4 lumber, cover the bones with oiled paper, and fill the
frame with plaster. As the fossil rarely lies level, it is necessary to
have the cover ready to nail on, a board at a time, while the plaster is
being poured in. This results in a panel of even thickness, with every
bone in or near its original position, or at least in the position in
which it was buried.
After the plaster has hardened comes the difficult labor of digging the
rock away from underneath. One has to lie on one’s left side and work
with a light pick, using great care, so as to cut away the rock just
enough to allow the frame to come down by its own weight. If force is
used very likely the rock, with its enclosed fossil, will be torn from
the frame, and the specimen ruined. Afterwards the rock is leveled off
even with the frame, and the bottom nailed on. The case is then placed
in a larger box with excelsior carefully packed around it.
The illustration (Fig. 18) shows a huge panel in process of being cut
out. George and I spent two weeks of heavy labor upon another. Luckily,
it was preserved in chalk hard enough to allow of its being lifted
without breaking. The slab was about four inches thick, and weighed at
least six hundred pounds, yet he and I handled it entirely alone,
getting it boxed and into the wagon ourselves.
My old friend, Dr. S. W. Williston, who in the seventies was in charge
of collecting parties for Professor Marsh, and is now a noted authority
in paleontology and professor of that science in the University of
Chicago, describes this specimen in his great work on North American
plesiosaurs, a Field Columbian Museum publication. He says: “The
specimen of _Dolichorhynchops osborni_, herewith described and
illustrated [Fig. 20], was discovered by Mr. George Sternberg, in the
summer of 1900, and skilfully collected by his father, the veteran
collector of fossil vertebrates. The specimen was purchased of Mr.
Sternberg in the following spring for the University of Kansas, where it
has been mounted and now is. When received at the museum, the skeleton
was almost wholly contained in a large slab of soft, yellow chalk, with
all its bones disassociated, and more or less entangled together. The
left ischium, lying by the side of the maxilla, was protruding from the
surface, and part of it was lost. The bones of the tail and some of the
smaller podial bones were removed a distance from the rest of the
skeleton, and were collected separately by Mr. Sternberg. The head was
lying partly upon its left side, and some of the bones of the right side
had been macerated away. The maxilla indeed had disappeared.
“The task of removing and mounting the bones has required the labor of
Mr. H. T. Martin the larger part of a year, and is as finally mounted,
an example of great labor and skill on his part.... The skeleton, as
mounted, is just ten feet in length. The neck in life must have been
thick and heavy at the base. The trunk was broad; the abdominal region
short between the girdles; the short tail was thick at its base. The
species was named in honor of Professor H. F. Osborn, of Columbia
University.”
In his introduction Dr. Williston speaks of the great scientific value
of this specimen of the plesiosaurian family, of which he says:
“Thirty-two species and fifteen genera have been described from the
United States, and in not a single instance has there been even a
considerable part of the skeleton made known.”
I am glad that the University of Kansas owns this splendid denizen of
her ancient Cretaceous sea.
My collection in the Royal Museum of Munich is said by Dr. H. F. Osborn
to be the finest prepared collection of Kansas Chalk and Texas Permian
vertebrates in the world. A recent letter from my friend Dr. Broili, an
assistant there, says that the collection contains over eighty-five
distinct species of extinct vertebrates. Among these, there are eighteen
species and seven genera new to science. Seven papers have been
published describing this material, by J. C. Merriam, A. R. Crook,
Charles R. Eastman, F. B. Loomis, F. Broili, L. Neumayer, and L.
Strickler, respectively; and it has been illustrated by forty plates.
The lamented German paleontologist, Dr. Carl von Zittel, under whom I
served the Munich museum for several years, wrote me that I had erected
here “an immemorial monument” to my name.
Here rests, far from its native shores, the most complete skeleton of
the Cretaceous shark, _Oxyrhina mantelli_ Agassiz, ever discovered in
any formation. It formed the basis for the inaugural address delivered
by Charles R. Eastman before the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.
I discovered this specimen while conducting an expedition for Dr. von
Zittel. I was entirely alone, and camping on one of the ravines that
score the southern slope of the Smoky Hill valley, south of Buffalo
Park. I had already found a number of flattened disks, the centra of
fish vertebræ, which Dr. Williston had assured me belonged to a species
of shark, as he had found teeth associated with them. I was delighted,
therefore, to find here a continuous string of them leading into a low
knoll. I quickly shoveled away the loose chalk and cleaned up the floor,
to find the whole column, nearly twenty in length; while the skull was
represented by great plates of cartilaginous bone, containing some two
hundred and fifty teeth from the roof and floor of the mouth. The larger
teeth were over an inch long and covered with a shining, dark-colored
enamel. They were as sharp and polished as in life, and lay in or near
their natural positions.
This is the first time and, I believe, the only time that so complete a
specimen of this ancient shark has been discovered. The column and other
solid parts were composed of cartilaginous matter which usually decays
so easily that it is rarely petrified. I suppose my specimen was old at
the time of its death, and bony matter had been deposited in the
cartilage. It is not very likely that such a specimen will ever be
duplicated. Dr. Eastman’s study of this skeleton enabled him to make
synonyms of many species which had been named from teeth alone.
Among the most valuable of my further discoveries in the Kansas chalk
beds was that of two nearly complete skeletons of that great sea
tortoise, _Protostega gigas_ Cope. The type had already been described
by Professor Cope from a number of disconnected bones which he found
near Fort Wallace in 1871.
[Illustration:
FIG. 20.—SKELETON OF THE PLESIOSAUR, _Dolichorhynchus osborni_.
Discovered by George F. Sternberg and collected by Charles Sternberg.
After Williston. (Now in the Kansas State University.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 21.—FOSSIL LIMB BONES OF THE GIANT SEA TORTOISE, _Protostega
gigas_.
Collected by Charles Sternberg.
]
In 1903 I was so fortunate as to find a practically complete skeleton of
_Protostega gigas_ in normal condition, that is, with the bones all in
or near their original positions. The late Dr. J. B. Hatcher, whose
death in the very noonday of his glorious career as a fossil hunter cast
a gloom over the world of paleontology, purchased this specimen from me
for the Carnegie Museum. It has been described in the Memoirs of the
Carnegie Museum by Dr. G. R. Wieland, the authority on extinct turtles,
under the title “The Osteology of _Protostega_.” He says, on page 289:
“The third of a century which elapsed since Cope’s discovery of
_Protostega gigas_, has not sufficed to bring forth a complete
restoration of any single individual of these great sea-turtles. How
welcome then has been the discovery during the last two years by Mr.
Charles Sternberg in the Niobrara Cretaceous of western Kansas, of the
nearly complete specimens of _Protostega gigas_ which permit the present
description of the organization of the limbs, the most important of the
parts yet undescribed as well as the very least likely to be recovered
in complete form.” (Fig. 21.)
This rare fossil was briefly mentioned by Professor Osborn also in
_Science_ as a “complete skeleton of _Protostega_ which lay on its
dorsal surface with fore limbs stretched out at right angles to the
median line of the carapace, measuring six feet between the ungual
phalanges.”
A second specimen, which I discovered and sold directly to Dr. W. J.
Holland, the director of the Carnegie Museum, is thus described by Dr.
Wieland on page 282 of the Memoirs, under the heading “Specimen No.
1421, Carnegie Museum Catalogue of Vertebrates”:
“This fine fossil is from the Niobrara Cretaceous of Hackberry Creek.”
(I should like to correct this mistake. It was found about three miles
northwest of Monument Rocks in a ravine that empties into the Smoky,
east of where Elkader once stood.) “The _ex situ_ portions of the
original skeleton, which had weathered out and are secured in more or
less complete condition, include the left humerus, radius, ulna, etc.
The _in situ_ portion consists of the right anterior part of the
skeleton, and was secured on a single slab of matrix, in which it still
remains intact, as shown in the accompanying drawing by Mr. Prentice,
including the lower jaw in oblique inferior view, the skull, the
T-shaped nuchal (plate) and two marginals. It will be seen what
exceedingly satisfactory information is furnished by the present
specimen as compared with all other examples of _Protostega_ hitherto
found. Specimen 1420 [my first specimen] is more complete than any other
at present discovered. As originally embedded in its matrix of chalk,
nearly every element was present in an exactly or approximately natural
position. Unfortunately, the collector of this surprisingly complete
fossil, in an attempt to remove and separate the bones from their
original matrix of chalk, mismarked some of them, and also made it
impossible to either replace more than a few of the marginal elements,
or to determine the outlines of any of the plastral elements. Such work
is difficult enough in well-equipped laboratories. However, none of the
bones of the limbs are broken, and Mr. Sternberg redeemed himself by
discovering and securing in such excellent condition No. 1421, as just
related.”
I learn from one of the Museum’s staff that this specimen is to be
mounted this summer of 1908, and placed on exhibition. As long as the
Carnegie Museum stands, this splendid example of the great sea-tortoise
will be admired by lovers of nature. In shape it is very like the
present-day turtle of the Mediterranean. Its huge front paddles, with a
span of ten feet, were armed with horrid claws. The hind ones were
stretched out parallel with the body and used as sculls by this “boatman
of the Cretaceous.”
An account of my work in the Kansas Chalk would not be complete without
some mention of my discovery, in several small localities, of the
crinoid _Uintacrinus socialis_ Grinell. According to Mr. Frank Springer,
our noted American authority on this subject, only seven localities were
known in 1901; he did not know of my discoveries. I can bear witness
with him, though, to the rarity of this species. During the fifteen
years in which I have gone over the chalk exposures again and again, I
can remember only three localities of these fossils, the Martin
locality, another three miles to the east of it, and a third on Butte
Creek near Elkader. The first has yielded the finest specimens among
those which were described by Mr. Springer in his magnificent treatise
on _Uintacrinus_, published by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Harvard University.
Last year, however, my son George found two splendid specimens about
fifty feet apart, further east than they had been discovered before. The
locality is south of Quinter, in the southern part of Gove County,
thirty-seven miles east of the Martin locality. These two colonies each
contained about forty calices. As usual, they are flattened out on the
under side of a calcareous slab about a quarter of an inch thick and
beveled off as thin as paper at the margins. One slab was sent to the
Senckenberg Museum in Germany, while Mr. Springer secured the other.
The calyx, or as we have called it, “the head,” has ten long arms, some
of them about thirty inches long.[1]
Footnote 1:
A restoration of the _Uintacrinus_ is shown in the same illustration
(Fig. 11_a_) in which the _Clidastes_ is represented.
These beautiful globular animals were stemless, and evidently lived in
swarms, as single specimens are never found. According to Mr. Springer,
when death overtook one of these swarms, it fell to the bottom, where
the first individuals were buried in the soft mud and preserved, while
the others, not being so protected, disintegrated. The limy plates of
the calices and those of the arms, which were thus mingled together
above the perfect specimens, became compressed into a hard slab, in the
bottom of which the perfect specimens are firmly impressed.
Great numbers of these creatures have been discovered in the English
chalk, but they consist only of the disintegrated plates.