DISCOVERY OF THE LOUP FORK BEDS OF KANSAS AND SUBSEQUENT WORK THERE,
1877 AND 1882–84
About the first of July, 1877, I received orders to go north to the Loup
Fork River in Nebraska to search for vertebrate fossils in beds of the
Upper Miocene, called by Hayden the Loup Fork Group. I happened to meet,
however, an old line hunter, Abernathy by name, who had brought into
Buffalo his last load of buffalo hides, and he told me that a little
above his cabin, on the middle branch of Sappa Creek in Decatur County,
there was the skull of a mastodon, sticking out of the solid rock.
As a visit to his house would not take me far out of my way, I followed
his lead; and thanks to the observation of this old hunter, who was
scalped in front of his door the next year by a band of hostile Kiowas,
I had the privilege of discovering the rich fossil beds of the Loup Fork
Group in northwestern Kansas, and found enough to do without crossing
into Nebraska.
The whole country north of Buffalo was without human habitation until we
reached the old man’s cabin. On our way there, as we were driving one
sultry day down the long slope to the south branch of the Soloman, we
chanced to look behind us, and as high as the eye could reach, the air
was as black as midnight with flying dust, dry grass, and buffalo chips.
Experience had taught us what all this meant. Will Brouse laid the whip
to the ponies, but they did not need it. They, too, had taken fright,
and tore down the hill at breakneck speed. On reaching the valley, we
came upon a perpendicular bluff, over twenty feet high, impinging on the
level flat, and Will swung the horses under its protecting shelter. We
sprang out, and while one of us unhitched and tied the horses, the rest
caught hold of the wagon and held it down. In an instant all was dark,
while the rush of a mighty wind swept over us with a terrible roar and
passed on, leaving a calm in its wake. As we followed its trail along
the river, we found large trees twisted off at the stump or broken to
pieces, their branches scattered like straws.
About sundown one evening, the old man pointed out, in a side draw of
the middle fork of the Sappa, his mastodon. I sprang from the wagon,
shouting, “It’s a monster turtle!” And so it proved to be, a great land
turtle, over thirty inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, and fifteen
inches high; _Testudo orthopygia_ Cope called it. The back of the
carapace was sticking out of a ledge of grey sandstone. We applied our
picks, and soon had the specimen collected. (Fig. 22.)
Now began an extremely interesting search for this new fauna in Kansas.
The rocks in this part of the state usually consist of gray sand
cemented together with washed chalk and soluble silica. The foundation
on which these beds were deposited is the Niobrara Group of the
Cretaceous. The river beds were cut in this soft lime, and later on the
wash of the land mingled the whiting with the sand and gravel which the
streams brought down from the mountains. The tops of the hills are
capped with this conglomerate gray sandstone in ledges many feet in
thickness, and as the materials composing it easily disintegrate, great
masses of it lie at the bases of the cliffs, resembling old mortar. I
called them mortar beds, and the stratigraphers have adopted the name.
Indeed, they are mortar beds not only in name, from a fancied
resemblance to mortar, but in fact, as all the early settlers can
testify. It was no trouble for them to find beds so soft that the
material could easily be dug out, and when mixed with water and spread
with trowels over the inside walls of a sod house, it made a very
comfortable home. When it comes to comfort, the settlers of the
short-grass country have gained nothing by building frame instead of sod
houses. The early settler’s sod house was cool in summer and warm in
winter, and those who live in more modern houses in order to keep up
with the times will even now speak with regret of the change.
[Illustration:
FIG. 22.—FOSSIL SHELL OF GIANT LAND TURTLE, _Testudo orthopygia_.
Discovered by Charles Sternberg in Phillips Co., Kansas.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 23.—THE SNAKE-NECKED ELASMOSAURUS, _Elasmosaurus platyurus_.
Discovered in the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous. Restoration by
Osborn and Knight. (From painting in American Museum of Natural
History.)
]
Not only did I secure a number of specimens of these great turtles, so
abundant at this time, but also large quantities of the remains of a
rhinoceros. Cope thought it hornless, and named it _Aphelops megalodus_,
but since then Hatcher has found that the male bore a loose horn on the
end of the nasal bones.
I also got specimens of the great inferior tusked mastodon, _Trilophodon
campester_ Cope. This remarkably primitive mastodon had a lower jaw that
projected beyond the molar teeth for two feet in a straight line, with a
socket on either side, containing two powerful tusks that terminated in
chisel points. One specimen, which I discovered in 1882 for the Museum
of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, had a jaw four feet long, including
the tusks, which extended eighteen inches beyond the end of the jaw.
A set of jaws was brought me by my son last fall. It belongs to a new
form of this gigantic pachyderm, which, during the Loup Fork times,
inhabited northwestern Kansas and a vast territory west and northwest as
far as the John Day basin in eastern Oregon. A remarkable peculiarity of
this specimen is that the symphysis is greatly elongated and curves
downward thirteen inches below the level of the alveolus, which bears
the great molar teeth. This individual was an old animal, as he had shed
his first dentition and all the premolars and molars of the second
except the very last, those which we call wisdom teeth. Even these are
well worn; so the days of the mastodon’s life must have been numbered
even if he had escaped his enemy, the great saber-toothed tiger, which
preyed on him and the other herbivorous animals of the day.
The length of these remarkable jaws is four feet and one inch. The
height at the condyle, where they connect with the skull, is thirteen
and a half inches; length of molar, nine and a quarter inches; height of
crown, two and one-half inches; distance between the two molars, four
inches. The sockets for the great inferior tusks are two feet long and
six inches in diameter, and the huge recurved tusks themselves must have
been over four feet long. Only a sight of these peculiar jaws, with
tusks above and below, can give the reader an idea of the formidable
appearance of this early mastodon. By the large size and downward
curvature of the lower tusks, this mastodon suggests the great
_Dinotherium_ of the Lower Pliocene of Europe. I regret for America’s
sake, but I am glad for the sake of the world, that these jaws of the
largest mammal ever found in Kansas will find their last resting-place
in the great British Museum, where many of my finest discoveries have
gone.
Another splendid set of lower jaws I found in 1905 in the Sternberg
Quarry, of which I shall speak later, for the Royal Museum of Munich,
Bavaria. Part of the symphysis was broken off, as were also the inferior
tusks. The length of the jaw as preserved is two feet, six inches and a
half, and the height of the condyle, fourteen inches. In the center of
the grinding surface, the height is nine and a half inches. The length
of the molar is about seven and a half inches, and the width three and a
half. This is Professor Cope’s _Trilophodon_.
We found near this mastodon many chisel-like tusks that had fallen out
of their respective jaws and lay scattered with the other bones. By
comparing this specimen with the new species, it will be noticed that
there is quite a difference in size, though evidently they were about
the same age, as in both cases all the teeth have been discarded except
the last molars.
The teeth of these animals were kept sharp by the sand that adhered to
the roots on which they lived. Falling into the pits and valleys between
the crests of enamel, it scoured away the dentine and cementum, and kept
the great grinders ever sharp and ready for use. It is a distinguishing
characteristic of these early mastodons that their tusks have a strip of
enamel along the inside, while the modern elephants’ tusks have only a
vestige of enamel at the extreme tip that is quickly worn off.
Another remarkable inhabitant of Kansas during the Loup Fork Period was
the three-toed horse, an animal but little larger than the new-born colt
of an ordinary farm horse, which evidently lived in herds, judging from
the great quantity of loose teeth that we have found. Its toes were
spreading, which enabled it to walk over bogs and mossy quagmires on the
shores of lakes or rivers, and thus escape the fangs of bloodthirsty
tigers by venturing farther out on the soft ground than they dared to
follow.
In 1882, while employed by the Agassiz Museum, I found the famous
Sternberg Quarry at Long Island on Prairie Dog Creek in Phillips County.
I had been exploring for weeks the region at the head of the branches of
Deer Creek, which spread out in the divide like a fan; but although once
in a while, especially in the neighborhood of Bread Bowl Mound, I had
found fragments of the bones of Loup Fork animals in the sod, I had not
met with much success, as the rocks here disintegrate so easily and hold
moisture so readily that the whole country is covered with grass. There
are thirty-three streams in this county as a result of the immense
amount of moisture which accumulates in these sandstone beds and is
carried to the surface in springs.
One very hot day I started to cross the divide to Prairie Dog Creek. I
had the wagon sheet stretched over the bows, the sides lifted to admit
the breeze, and sleepy with the heat, I let the horses go on about as
they pleased; not noticing, until the level rays of the sun warned me
that it was time to camp, that I had gone farther east than I had
intended. I had my camp outfit with me, however, and as I saw a bunch of
trees in a ravine a mile from the creek I knew that there must be water
there. So the three requisites, grass, wood, and water, were at hand.
After pitching the tent, and starting supper, I found to my delight a
large exposure of hard siliceous rock, consisting of sand and chalk held
firmly together by soluble sand, which proved to be the bottom ledge of
a deposit of gray sandstone. I soon found above it a mastodon’s bones.
My joy knew no bounds, however, when following the narrow draw up to its
head, I found that it cut through a quarry of rhinoceros bones, which
were sticking out of the sand on either side, while the narrow ditch at
the bottom was filled with toe bones, complete or in fragments, and
broken skulls and teeth without number. I have collected fossil
vertebrates and plants since I was seventeen years old, but this is the
greatest deposit of fossils that I have ever discovered.
I shall never forget how, carried away with enthusiasm, I took
possession in the name of Science of the largest bone bed in Kansas. I
did not stop to ask whether anyone else had any interest in the land,
nor did I think it necessary. I had grown so used in my own case to
putting aside every other consideration for the sake of the advancement
of science that it did not occur to me that anyone else might take a
different view. But one day, as I was working in the ravine, an old man,
plowing corn, drove up to its eastern edge. When he made the turn, he
chanced to look across and saw me, pick in hand, diligently uncovering
the skull of a rhinoceros from the sandbank on the other side. He
instantly shouted with all the strength of his lungs, “What are you
doing?”
“Digging up antediluvian relics,” I shouted back. We both shouted as if
we were a hundred yards apart.
“Well,” he called, “get out of there!”
“All right,” I answered in the same loud tones, and kept on working.
The old man, whose name I learned later was Mr. Overton, disappeared,
and I heard no more of him until I went into Long Island for food, or
grub as they say in the West, and was told that he had come in to a
justice of the peace and asked for a warrant to arrest me for collecting
these old bones. He never again came directly to me, either that year or
the following, but people told me that he went around to all the
justices in that part of the country, trying to get his warrant.
Finally, however, they managed to convince him that I was not harming
him, and was benefiting science.
Two years later, in 1884, I was employed by the late Professor Marsh to
explore this same fossil bed. The bones which I was after now were
covered by fourteen feet of moulding sand and a four-foot ledge of hard
rock, the heavier bones lying on the sandstone, the lighter ones mingled
with the sand above. This sand and rock had to be removed by pick and
scraper, which meant that there was a large amount of heavy labor before
us. Therefore, having more means at my command than I had had before, I
drove up to Mr. Overton’s door and offered him forty dollars a month to
work for us with his team during the whole summer, with the
understanding that I was to have all the fossils found. This offer he
gladly accepted, and I found him a very careful worker. Not only did he
do the rough work well, but when we got a floor laid bare above the
bones, he proved to be a most careful collector. My other assistant on
this expedition was a Mr. Will Russ, who afterwards became a skilful
dentist.
Our method of work was first to cut down and remove the sand and rock
for a space twenty feet wide and perhaps a hundred long, using a plow
and scraper. Then we cleaned up our floor and uncovered the bones with
oyster knives and other tools which we had made to suit our purpose.
One, I remember, was a hoe straightened out at the shank and cut off at
the corners to make a diamond-shaped tool. With this we could work under
the high bank, and take out specimens which we could not reach
otherwise. Trowels and diggers of various patterns were used also.
The bones which we were collecting lay scattered along both sides of the
ravine for a quarter of a mile, often in pockets or pot-holes in the
gray sandstone. Of this there are two layers, about fourteen feet apart,
the interspace being filled with beds of fine moulding sand, with some
whiting from the underlying chalk, which constituted the land surface
when these fresh-water beds were deposited. There are also beds of sand
that have been washed clean by the currents of the flood-plain of some
ancient river, for the exposed section shows all the different deposits
of an overflowed valley. Above the washed sand is a stratum of sand and
clay, indicating that here was a quiet place where the muddy backwater
deposited its load. This layer, upon exposure, cracks in all directions,
like the mud at the bottom of a puddle after the water has evaporated.
It has always been a problem to account for the number of the animals
represented here, and for the fact that the bones are so scattered. All
parts of the skeletons are mingled in the greatest confusion, with no
two bones in a natural position. One is, of course, forced, after an
observation of this country, to agree with Drs. Matthew and Hatcher that
these bones were deposited in the flood-plain of a running stream and
not in great lakes, as was believed by older geologists. But the only
supposition upon which I can account for the intermingling of all the
bones of the skeletons on the bottom sandstone layer is that the fine
sand through which the bones were distributed, becoming saturated with
water, was converted into a quicksand, in which the bones sank until
they reached the impenetrable layer below; the heavier bones of course
being at the bottom.
What caused the death of the countless individuals in the Sternberg
Quarry, is a question not easily answered. The authorities quoted above
believe that during the Upper Miocene Period, there were many
water-courses separated, by slightly elevated divides and broad
flood-plains, with possibly here and there small lakes, where the dense
vegetation had clogged some sluggish stream. But during a rainy season
of unusual duration, the whole region for many miles must have been
converted into a series of lakes; and all the animals in the vicinity,
after having gathered at the highest points they could find to escape
death, must have been finally overwhelmed by some great flood that
covered every inch of ground. Then after maceration took place, the
bones might have been scattered by other floods.
A theory of my own, equally plausible, is that the animals were buried
beneath a sandstorm, which tore loose the fine sand of the flood-plain,
and scattered it in suffocating volumes over the frightened multitudes
which had herded together in search of safety or courage.
This land, now three thousand feet above sea level, was only a few feet
above when these rhinoceroses moved over it in countless herds.
Everywhere were swamps filled with sponge moss, and tropical streams,
whose wealth of vegetation formed thick jungles along their banks. On
firmer ground, great areas were covered with a dense growth of rushes,
through which the paths of these animals were the only trails; while
higher up still, the soft damp soil gave a foothold to forests, through
which the great mastodons sounded their trumpet calls, as they roamed
about, tearing up trees with their powerful trunks and feasting upon the
rich, juicy roots.
[Illustration:
FIG. 24.—THREE-TOED HORSE, _Hypohippus_.
From the Middle Eocene of Colorado. (After Gidley.) In American Museum
of Natural History.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 25.—FOSSIL RHINOCEROS, _Teleoceras fossiger_.
From Sternberg’s quarry at Long Island, Phillips Co., Kansas.
Collected by Wortman; mounted in the American Museum of Natural
History. (After Osborn.)
]
That year, 1884, in which I explored the quarry at Long Island, was a
memorable one, not only because we secured a large carload of rhinoceros
bones, but also because we had with us Mr. J. B. Hatcher, who afterwards
helped to build up three great museums of vertebrate paleontology,—the
museums of Yale and Princeton and the Carnegie Museum. With the last he
was connected at the time of his death in 1904, just twenty years after
he made his first collection of vertebrate fossils with me. A bright,
earnest student, he gave promise of a future even then by his perfect
understanding of the work in hand and the thoughtful care which he
devoted to it. I have always been glad that I had the honor of being his
first teacher in the practical work of collecting, although he soon
graduated from my department, and requested me to let him take one side
of the ravine while I worked the other. He employed Mr. Overton’s son
with a plow and scraper, and got out a magnificent collection with no
further instructions from me.
That same year Professor Marsh came to my quarry and leased it from the
owner, and I never saw it again until 1905, when I came into my own once
more, and in addition to the splendid mastodon, mentioned earlier in
this chapter, found the material for two perfect mounts of the
rhinoceros. One is to be mounted at Munich, the other at Bonn.
With Professor Osborn’s consent, I give a photograph of the fine
specimen (Fig. 25) which Dr. Wortman secured in 1894 from this quarry
for the American Museum. A vast collection from the same spot is stored
in the National Museum in its original packages, with which I filled a
car in 1884. I saw there a whole case filled with the skulls of the
rhinoceros _Teleoceras fossiger_, which I secured in great numbers at
Long Island.
It is strange to think that the foundation on which these beds of
fresh-water deposits lie unconformably is the great Cretaceous sea
bottom, whose tilted and uplifted strata tower two thousand feet above
the carboniferous rocks in eastern Kansas. The Republican, Smoky Hill,
and Kansas rivers have carved their way through all these strata, so
that by following down these streams, one can get cross sections of the
country.
I have often asked men who were sure that there must be coal beneath the
surface, why, instead of hiring a man to dig a hole for them, they did
not hitch up their buggies and follow the valley of the Smoky Hill,
beginning at the Colorado line. The first stratum exposed is of course
the recent, with its sandy loam; in it, here and there, a crumbling
buffalo skull or an eroded implement. Then comes the Pleistocene
deposit, consisting of clay, sand, and fragments of rock mingled
together. From this formation I secured over two hundred teeth of the
great Columbian Mammoth. Next come beds of black shale with giant
septaria, the Fort Pierre Group of the Cretaceous, whose upper beds we
explored in Montana in 1876 for dinosaurs. In this formation, in Kansas,
I found a new species of _Clidastes_. The specimens are now in the
Kansas University collection, and the species has been named by Dr.
Williston _Clidastes westi_, in honor of the Kansas University
collector, the late Judge E. P. West.
We have not gone far down the river below the forks, before this
formation, which at McAllister topped the hills, passes under the river.
Then reddish and blue chalks occupy the country for some miles, and in
turn disappear to give place to yellowish and blue chalks, which finally
make way for the blue and almost white chalks that run under the river
near the mouth of Hackberry Creek in eastern Gove County.
At White Rock in Trego County the hard white limestone, in fortification
blocks, is piled ninety feet high. Further down appears the post
limestone of the Fort Benton Group, with its characteristic _Inoceramus_
shells; while in central Kansas, brown and white sandstone and
brilliantly colored clays occupy the whole region for sixty miles,
giving place at last to the hard limestones and the friable shales and
sandstones of the Upper Carboniferous. No coal, except very shallow
veins in the Upper Carboniferous and the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous,
has even been found in this big ditch, which, less than a quarter of a
mile wide at the head of the Smoky Hill branch at Wallace, broadens out
to a width of several miles at the mouth of the Kansas River.
It is impossible to compute the vast amount of mineral matter which has
been cut out from these Kansas plains and carried by the river into the
Mississippi and on to the Gulf. Since the first narrow trench cut its
way through the hardened ooze of the Cretaceous ocean bed, all the
flood-plains of the Missouri and the Mississippi below Kansas City have
been enriched by the material that once covered these valleys of Kansas,
and the delta below New Orleans has been partly built up by it.
It may interest my readers and give them a glimpse into the daily
routine of a fossil hunter’s life, if I quote one or two notes from a
diary which I kept during my work in these Loup Fork beds.
“Friday, July 11.—This is to record the most successful day since we
have been in the field. We have collected three sets of under-jaws,
three skulls. It has been extremely hot. We have put in eight hours of
hard work.”
“Saturday, July 12.—To-day I got out and packed our three skulls and
three lower jaws. They were within the space of a square yard. We got
some very fine bones, and best of all, a perfect front foot in position,
a perfect humerus, a perfect femur, except proximal articulation, the
premaxilla of a cat with a huge canine (saber-toothed tiger). We got
great quantities of the bones of the feet, an axis, and one other
vertebræ in good state of preservation, a fine scapula, etc. This
afternoon has been the hottest day of the season, but this evening the
wind changed to the north, and it is quite cool. I got in addition to
the specimens mentioned a maxilla of a saber-toothed tiger. The enormous
young canine was two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide.”
I might go on and quote indefinitely, but the story would be about the
same. I recall, however, one or two incidents connected with my work in
this field, which may be amusing or interesting to my readers.
Once in 1882, while collecting for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of
Harvard University, I met an old gentleman and his dear old wife, the
hair of both showing upon it the snows of many winters, sitting on a
board laid across a dry-goods box to which two wagon wheels had been
attached. A team of ponies harnessed with rope instead of leather, with
lines of the same material, completed the outfit. The old man and his
wife sat up very straight and dignified and demanded of me what I was
doing in that part of the country.
“Oh,” I answered, “I’m looking for rhinoceros bones in the loose sand of
the hills here.”
“Well,” the old man said, “I am interested in these old bones myself. I
don’t claim to be a scholar; in fact, I am quite illiterate, but I think
when this earth was in a molten state, these old hippopotamuses wallowed
around in the mud and got congealed in the rocks.”
The following incident I did not find quite so amusing. One day I
discovered turtle shells sticking out on either side of a narrow gulch
which cut through a large deposit of sand. In digging out those already
in sight, I found many more; collecting in all some twenty fine
specimens, but all quite small. Following down the gorge, I discovered
that it opened out, on Beaver Creek in Rawlins County, into a great
amphitheater several acres in extent and almost denuded of vegetation;
an ideal place for fossil hunting, as the elements had been digging out
and removing the sand for ages. And sure enough, I soon stumbled upon
the complete shell and skeleton, four feet in diameter, of a specimen of
Cope’s _Testudo orthopygia_; but it nearly broke my heart to find that
while the specimen had weathered out in a perfect condition, some
vandal—for I shall ever maintain that the wanton destruction of life
that now is or of the remains of life that once was, is wicked,—some man
had chopped it all to pieces with a mattock.
Passing on in a not very pleasant frame of mind, I came upon another
individual of huge proportions, which had suffered the same fate, and
then upon another; all that this rich-looking ground afforded had been
utterly ruined.
Angry at the thought that any man should commit such sacrilege,—for to
me these footsteps of the Creator in the sands of time are sacred,—and
bitterly disappointed, since I knew that I should very likely never
again come upon such huge specimens of the reptilian life of that age, I
walked into camp blinded by hot tears, and failed to notice a stranger
who was sitting there on a box.
“Some infernal vandal has been up this ravine,” I shouted to Will, “and
dug up with a mattock three of the finest turtles I ever saw.”
As if he had been shot, the man jumped from the box and exclaimed in
accents of heartfelt contrition, “It was me. I was out here digging
roots to build a fire with, and ran across them. I didn’t know they had
any value, and I wanted to see what was inside of them and dug into
them.”
His surprise and dismay were so comical that the murder vanished from my
heart, and overwrought as I was, I broke out into a fit of
uncontrollable laughter which used me up for the rest of the day.
Another time I had a rather unusual experience. My assistant, a Mr.
Wright, and I were digging out rhinoceros bones on Sappa Creek. We had
noticed a house on the other side of the creek, although dense timber
cut off most of its surroundings, and happening to look toward it once,
we saw a girl of about sixteen years rush out from the timber and begin
to climb the steep hill toward us. I never saw anyone run so fast up so
steep a hill. Her strength failed her, however, when she got to us, and
it was some time before she could tell her story. It seems that her
mother had gone out to milk, and as the ground was slippery from a rain
of the night before, she had fallen and dislocated one of the bones in
the palm of her hand.
All the men were away and had taken all the horses, and it was seventeen
miles to the nearest doctor. The girl, knowing that we were digging up
bones, had concluded that we could set them, and had come to us for
help. Although I had never attempted anything of the kind before, I
could not resist the poor child’s appeal and went to the house. The
mother lay moaning on her bed, and would answer nothing when I asked
whether I should try to set her hand. But as the girl was very desirous
that I should make the attempt, I decided to do so. So while Mr. Wright
held the arm, I put splints and a roller bandage under the hand, which
was laid on a table, and then forcibly pushed the bone back into its
natural position. After which I bandaged the hand tightly. I left
directions with the girl to hang a can of water with a small hole in it
over the hand, so that the water might drip on it and by evaporation
cool it and prevent inflammation. My instructions were carried out by
the brave girl, and her mother’s hand was soon as well as ever.
In these last chapters I have often wandered far afield, for it would
have taken too long to relate all the events of my various expeditions
in consecutive order. Hoping that my readers will pardon the
digressions, I return to the expedition of 1877.
Russell Hill proved a most efficient assistant, and it has always
grieved me that he should in later years have given up work in the
fossil fields for the practice of medicine. Will Brouse, too, was an
enthusiastic worker; he was not satisfied to be relegated to the pots
and kettles and horses, and not only did his duty as our teamster and
cook, but soon accomplished almost, if not quite as much in the field as
any one of us. I never had a more congenial party in all the years of my
field work.
But one day in August I received a bulky letter from Professor Cope.
“Turn over all the outfit to Mr. Hill,” he wrote, “and go at once to a
new field discovered in the desert of eastern Oregon. Go to Fort
Klamath, Oregon, and from there to Silver Lake, to a man by the name of
Duncan, the postmaster. He will guide you to the fossil bed in the heart
of the sage-brush desert. You will likely find human implements mingled
with extinct animals. You are to go secretly; tell no one where you are
going. Have your mail sent by a circuitous route, so you cannot be
traced.”
I received the Professor’s order with excitement and great joy; but in
spite of his injunction to start at once and without communicating my
intention to anyone, I could not bring myself to leave for the Pacific
Coast, to be gone for an indefinite time, without bidding good-by to my
father and mother, and I concluded that even if someone should find out
where I was going and try to follow me I could easily give him the slip
and get to the field first.
Buffalo, the nearest railway station, was seventy-five miles away, a two
days’ journey, with our big load of fossils. So I mounted my riding pony
and made the long trip the next day, reaching the station at sunset,
tired and sore. My pony, however, endowed with the enduring power
characteristic of a good Indian pony, was still fresh enough to shy at a
rattlesnake in the road, and as I happened to be sitting sideways in the
saddle, throw me to the ground within a few feet of the snake.
That night I went to my home in Ellsworth County, bade my dear ones
good-by for an indefinite length of time, and was back at Buffalo again
at midnight of the following day. My boys met me at the station with my
roll of blankets, tools, and baggage, and away I went to “fresh fields
and pastures new.”