EXPEDITION TO THE JOHN DAY RIVER IN 1878
During the winter 1877–’78 I camped on Pine Creek, Washington, exploring
the swamps in the neighborhood and fighting against water to secure
specimens. We had dug a large shaft down to the bed of gravel, twelve
feet below the surface, in which bones were to be found, but every
morning we found that the hole had filled with mud and water over night,
and we had to spend hours bailing it out. When we finally got it clear
again, we had little time or strength left for securing fossils. This
performance had to be repeated day after day, and of course the farther
we excavated, the more water there was to be bailed out. I don’t think
that we were dry a single day that winter. But luckily the water was
warm, and we did not suffer from colds.
On the twenty-third of April I started with a team and wagon from Fort
Walla Walla, accompanied by my two assistants, Joe Huff and “Jake”
Wortman, the latter at that time an intelligent young man from Oregon,
who had been introduced to me the winter before by my brother, Surgeon
George M. Sternberg, at that time post surgeon of Fort Walla Walla.
During the past six months Wortman had been my guest at my camp on Pine
Creek. Afterwards he became known to science as Dr. J. L. Wortman.
We skirted the Blue Mountains in a southwesterly direction, traveling
through the beautiful wheat-fields of that fertile region; and striking
south at Cayuse Station on the Umatilla Reserve, we climbed the long
slopes of the mountains and plunged down into the Grande Rounde, once
the bed of an ancient lake, but now a lovely valley nestling among the
hills. From this point we drove south to Baker City, and leaving behind
us the jagged peaks of the Powder River Mountains, struck the John Day
River at Canyon City.
On the second of May we camped on the other side of the mountains in a
large meadow. The boys went hunting and got a deer. On the third, our
road led us again through rugged mountains, covered in places with ice,
and we had to cut footholds for our horses, as they were smooth-shod. We
passed through a large mining gulch, where men were at work
placer-digging for gold. The whole surface of the country had been dug
over, and was disfigured with holes and ditches and heaps of earth.
On the fifth of May, after passing through Canyon City, we started for
the John Day Basin. It snowed nearly all day. On the road we met a man
who told us of a rich fossil leaf locality, on the Van Horn ranch; and
after a sixteen-mile drive we found the place and secured some very fine
specimens. The leaf impressions were found in a soft, shaly clay-stone,
and were very abundant, representing well-preserved Tertiary flora. That
night we feasted on a large salmon trout which I caught in an irrigation
ditch.
On the sixth (I am following my notebook) we worked all day. I collected
two hundred specimens, and Mr. Wortman eighty-five. They were all very
fine, and represented the oak, the maple, and other species. I secured
some fish vertebræ also. This is another case in which I lost credit for
early discoveries. I was told by Professor Cope, a few years before his
death, that these specimens had never been examined.
In this same locality there is a bed of rock so light that it floats. I
threw a large mass of it at some object in the water, and was amazed to
see it float off down the stream. It was the first time that I had ever
seen a rock lighter than water.
On the seventh of May, after a journey of fifteen days from Walla Walla,
we reached Dayville, a mile below the crossing of the South Fork of the
John Day River. One of the first men I met was a certain Bill Day, whom
I soon after hired as assistant. He had for years been making
collections of the fossil vertebrates here, usually sending them to
Professor Marsh. I was able to secure a large and fine collection from
him and another mountain man, a Mr. Warfield, who had also spent much
time collecting fossils. Both men had been employed by Professor Marsh
during his expedition in this region, and were very careful workmen.
We camped on Cottonwood Creek and prepared to pack into the Basin, or
Cove as it has been called. For a hundred and fifty miles of its course,
the John Day flows east, skirting the Blue Mountains, but here at
Cottonwood or Dayville, it has turned north and cut a great canyon, four
thousand feet deep, through the heart of the mountains, the so-called
Grande Coulée, since known as the Picture Gorge. At the foot of this
canyon, the mountains swing away from the river in a great horseshoe
bend, closing in upon it again several miles below. This amphitheater,
three miles wide and thirteen long, is a scene of surprising beauty. The
brilliantly colored clays and volcanic ash-beds of the Miocene of the
John Day horizon paint the landscape with green and yellow and orange
and other glowing shades, while in the background, towering upward for
two thousand feet, rise rows upon rows of mighty basaltic columns,
eight-sided prisms, each row standing a little back of the one just
below, and the last crowned with evergreen forests of pine and fir and
spruce. But no pen can picture the glorious panorama.
Ever since Cretaceous times, when a quiet inland sea laid down the
thousand feet of Kansas chalk, here in the John Day region vulcanism has
held sway; almost until to-day. Indeed I have often seen the summit of
old Mount Hood wreathed with menacing clouds of smoke, as if she were
preparing to pour forth again her floods of molten lava and devastate
the region.
When volcanic action first began, great masses of ashes must have been
thrown out over the country, settling in the lakes and covering the
remains of animals which had been accumulating there for ages. Then
floods of lava, one after another, poured out over the forests, until
they lay buried beneath two thousand feet of volcanic rock. Where did
this immense mass of molten rock come from, and how? A dike crosses the
Basin, and for fifteen miles the basaltic columns lie along its edges
like cordwood; so we know that some of the lava at least was squeezed up
out of the earth’s crust through narrow cracks.
I remember once, as I was standing with Uncle Johnnie Kirk, the hermit
of the Cove, in front of his cabin, he pointed to the basaltic cliffs
that towered above us, and observed gravely, “All vegetable matter.” He
had found at the base remains of the forests which the lava had
engulfed, and had concluded that the whole mass represented similar
remains.
Before moving the outfit into the fossil beds I took my pony and started
off to spy out the land. Following a horse trail that led up the gentle
slope west of the canyon represented in Dr. Merriam’s picture of the
Mascall Beds I reached a tableland, which proved to be the divide
between Cottonwood and Birch creeks. Here I found that the trail leading
down to the mouth of Birch Creek was very steep—one could have greased
one’s boots and slid the whole distance of several hundred feet. I was
afraid to ride down and led my pony, but I soon learned that an Oregon
pony has long, well-developed legs and can climb up and down better than
I could myself.
When I reached the river at the mouth of the Grande Coulée, I found to
my dismay that all the rich-looking green and brown fossil beds were on
the other side, where the amphitheater which I have mentioned is cut out
of the flank of the mountains. As a boy I had learned to swim
dog-fashion, and as the river was not over thirty or forty feet wide,
and I was determined, after coming so far, to find some fossils and a
good camping ground, I decided to strip, jump out as far as I could, and
paddle the rest of the way across.
No sooner thought than done. In I sprang, discovering too late that I
had reckoned without my host and that the river, which had been penned
in for miles by the walls of the canyon, was here flowing away from its
prison with amazing swiftness and power. My weak little body was as
helpless as a straw in its grasp: down I went, and striking a boulder at
the bottom, was flung up five feet into the air, I took in breath and
closed my mouth as I went down again; tossing me hither and thither like
a cork, beating me against rocks and hurling me high into the air, the
river bore me swiftly on, until at last, thank God! it tired of its toy,
and threw me to one side into deep water, under a willow whose welcoming
branches I eagerly clasped. There I hung until I had regained my
strength enough to pull myself out.
But the fossil vertebrates of the John Day beds were still across the
river and the questions which I had crossed the mountain and risked my
life to answer were still waiting for replies. Unwilling to return home
beaten I walked up and down the river shore, and was delighted to find
an old boat caught in a pile of driftwood. I dug it out with my bare
hands, only to find that its seams had parted and that its bottom was as
full of holes as a sieve. Not dismayed, I found a bed of sticky clay
with which I calked my ship, and venturing again into the flood, managed
to get to the other shore before the boat sank.
I found a place to camp lower down, at the mouth of a canyon which
opened out into the level country, and on a little creek that ran in
front of Uncle Johnnie’s cabin. I was very well pleased with my
explorations in the fossil beds also, for I found the skull of an
Oreodon, a hog-like creature which, judging from the abundance of skulls
and skeletons, must have lived in droves during the time when this rock
was being deposited in the lakes of this region. These animals were
herbivorous in habit. Uncle Johnnie always referred to them as bears. He
often brought a skull into camp with the remark, “Here’s another bar’s
head. I’ve killed hundreds of ’em in ole Virginia.”
I returned to camp much elated, and was planning to pack the outfit into
the Basin the next day, when to my disgust Joe Huff, who owned the
horses, refused to pack them, as he did not want to run the risk of
injuring them. It was useless to tell him that he had been hired to do
what I wanted, etc.; he was not to be moved. So I paid him off, and saw
him start for his home near Moscow, Idaho, riding bareback. I felt sorry
for him, but he had a stubborn fit on, and there was no doing anything
with him. After I had hired Bill Day, he wanted me to overlook the past
and re-employ him, but it was too late then.
I suppose Bill Day must have weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds,
but he was an expert hunter and a keen observer. He owned a herd of
ponies and furnished me with all that I wanted, and as he knew every
inch of the fossil beds and all the best camping grounds, his services
were invaluable. He kept our larder supplied with venison, also. I think
my success in that region was largely due to his assistance. I was also
indebted to a Mr. Mascall, a man who lived on the second bottom of the
river. He had an extra log cabin behind the one he lived in, and he let
us use it as a storeroom for our extra supplies of food and for our
fossils, when we began to secure them.
This Mr. Mascall had a wife and daughter, and when we came in from the
fossil beds, after several weeks of camping out, it seemed almost like
coming home to be able to put our feet under a table, eat off stone
dishes, and drink our coffee out of a china cup, and to sleep on a
feather bed instead of a hard mattress and roll of blankets. Then Mr.
Mascall was a good gardener, and always had fresh vegetables, a most
enjoyable change from hot bread, bacon, and coffee. I shall not soon
forget his hospitality.
[Illustration:
FIG. 26.—SKULL AND TUSKS OF IMPERIAL MAMMOTH, _Elephas imperator_.
In American Museum of Natural History.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 27.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) Upper John Day
exposure.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 28.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.) Middle John Day
exposure.
]
When all was ready, we were taken across the river in Mr. Mascall’s
boat, swimming our horses. Then the packs were adjusted, and the
wearisome climb up the face of the mountains began. It usually took us
half a day to reach the summit. Then we climbed down steep slopes and
over spurs of the hills, until we reached Uncle Johnnie Kirk’s
hospitable cabin, a 12 × 14 structure of rough logs with a shake roof.
He kept bachelor’s hall and lived all alone, except when some cowman or
fossil hunter came along. We pitched our tent near his house.
Not far away there was a tract of bad lands, called the Cone, the
largest in the John Day Basin, covering, I should judge, a section of
land. It was cut into the usual fantastic forms, peaks, ridges, and
battlements, and slender spires sometimes a hundred feet high, and as
thickly clustered as those of some old Gothic cathedral. Their summits
were crowned with hard concretions, which protected their almost
perpendicular sides from destruction by the elements.
The drainage canals spread out through this territory like the ribs of a
fan, converging at the entrance, and woe to the man who chanced to be
caught in one of them during a rain, for the steep slopes shot the water
down into them with such amazing rapidity that before he could turn
around he would be engulfed in fathoms of water. We always climbed up to
some high point the minute we heard the rain strike the rocks above us,
and waited until the storm was over and the water had run out. A ditch
containing twenty feet, sometimes, of water would dry up as soon as it
stopped raining, so steep was the slope of its bed.
I was continually impressed in this region by the power of running
water. Not only is this manifested in the mighty canyons which have been
carved out during the course of ages from the solid rock, but I stood
transfixed with astonishment once, at the mouth of the little creek in
front of Uncle Johnnie’s cabin, on finding it dammed by a mass of
basaltic rock, weighing at least twenty tons, which had been brought
from its native hills, three miles away, by a flood of water, and left
stranded here. All the side canyons that empty into the John Day River
have dumped their loads of boulders there, in some places damming the
stream or creating a series of rapids.
I soon found that all the ground in the fossil beds which was easy to
get at had been gone over. Here and there we would run across a pile of
broken bones and a hole from which a skull had been taken. When I asked
Bill what he had meant by leaving the bones of the skeleton behind, he
answered, “We were only looking for heads, though we sometimes saved
knucks and jints.” This accounts for the scarcity of skeletons among the
first collections made. I saw to it that my party should care for every
bone discovered.
I realized then, that if we were to make our expedition a success, we
should have to climb where no one before us had dared to go. It was a
serious matter to scale those almost perpendicular heights; one took
one’s life in one’s hand in attempting it. They were, of course,
entirely bare of vegetation, and where the slope was not too steep, they
were covered with angular fragments of rock which rolled from under
one’s feet and were likely to send one flying into the gorge below. But
I laid the situation before my two men, explaining to them that unless
they were willing to face the danger, we should have to give up the
expedition, as we had explored the safe ground without results; and they
courageously agreed to follow where I led.
So every morning we started out for a day of perilous enterprise, each
with a collecting bag over his shoulder and a well-made pick in hand.
The latter was used not only for digging out fossils, but was absolutely
indispensable as an aid in climbing, and as an anchor in case we began
to slip. We were never sure when we left camp in the morning that we
should all meet there at night, since a single misstep on those cliffs
would mean death or worse than death on the pitiless rocks below; but
every day we gained confidence and grew more skilful in the use of our
picks.
Far above the pick-marks of the fossil hunters who had preceded us, far
above the signs of the mountain sheep that inhabited these wilds, we
made our way, cutting niches for our feet as high above us as we could
reach, and drawing ourselves up with bodies pressed to the rock. At each
niche we rested, and scanned the face of the cliff for the point of a
tooth or the end of a bone, or for one of those concretions, among the
thousands that everywhere topped the pinnacles or projected from the
rocky slopes, whose skull-shaped form revealed the treasure that was
hidden away within. When a fossil was found we first cut out of the face
of the cliff a place large enough to stand upon, and then carved out the
specimen.
I could tell of a hundred narrow escapes from death. One day I was
standing on a couple of oblong concretions, about a foot in length, with
a chasm, fifty feet deep and three or four feet wide, immediately in
front of me. After I had searched carefully the surface of all the rocks
in sight, I started to jump over to a narrow ledge on the other side of
the gorge. Suddenly both concretions flew from under my feet, and I was
plunging head downward into the gorge when by a violent struggle in
mid-air I managed to throw my elbows on the ledge; and I hung there
until I could find a foothold and pull myself out onto solid rock.
Another time I was climbing a steep slope which was capped by a
perpendicular ledge. I thought, however, that I could climb over it to
the top of a ridge that ran back into the hills, where I could find a
way down. For understand, we could never go back the way we had come, as
we could not relax our muscles sufficiently to enable us to find with
the tips of our toes the niches by which we had climbed up. So we had to
be sure that we could get to the top and find a way down from there. On
this occasion I was so busy searching the face of the rock for fossils
that I worked for hours, climbing up niche after niche, without noticing
very much where I was going, until chancing to look upward, I discovered
that an escarpment of the top ledge leaned over the slope that I was
scaling, rendering it impossible for me to reach the top. I fully
expected that I should have to cut out a place to sit in and wait until
the boys missed me and looked for me. They could then reach the top of
the ledge by some other way, and lower a rope to me. But I was delighted
to find at last a perpendicular seam in the rocky ledge, which proved
wide enough to admit my body. So I climbed to the top as a man climbs a
narrow well, with my back braced against one side and my feet planted
against the other.
But such experiences as these, instead of making us timid, only spurred
us on to more dangerous attempts. To show how reckless we became, I
remember that once Bill found a skull in a perpendicular cliff of
solidified volcanic mud, the termination of a ridge that ran far back
into the hills. The skull was located about twenty feet up the face of
the cliff, and too far below the surface of the ridge to be reached from
above; so that there was no way to get at it but by scaling the cliff. I
cut niches on one side, and Bill on the other, and we climbed up until
we could reach the specimen with our picks, clinging to a niche with one
hand and wielding the pick with the other. I worked with my right hand
and Bill with his left.
The rock was very hard, and it took a long while to hew out the
specimen. While we were at work, we heard a mountain sheep bleating for
her young. By reaching up we could get our hands over the edge of the
cliff, and pull ourselves up so that we could just peek over. Sure
enough, the sheep was coming down the ridge toward us in great
excitement, rending the air with calls for her lamb. I began to imitate
the bleat of her offspring, and she increased her speed toward us with
every sign of relief.
“What if she should butt us off?” I said to Bill, and the position we
were in, clinging to the face of the rock with our toes and fingers,
made the idea so inexpressibly funny that he began to laugh, louder and
louder the more I tried to hush him up. When I had led the sheep up to
within ten feet of us, she concluded that we were not her lost lamb, and
turning like a flash, started on a run for the mountains a mile away.
Out of a side canyon came the lamb, and fell in behind its mother; and
we could see the dirt flying out behind them until they appeared to be
about the size of a rabbit and a ground squirrel.
One day Bill and I were out together in the beds, and when we got back
to dinner, Jake did not show up. We were not much concerned about him,
as we concluded that he had found a specimen and was digging it out; but
when we came in at night and there was still no Jake, we made up our
minds that he had either fallen and killed himself or that he was lying
in some gulch with a broken limb. In great anxiety we started out into
the Bad Lands to find him.
It was a dangerous enough expedition in the daytime, but doubly so at
night, and we risked our lives many times; but we did not give up until
we had made the desolate region ring with our calls. At last, about
midnight, with fear and sorrow in our heart, we returned to camp. By the
moonlight I saw what appeared to be a human form in Jake’s bed. I rushed
to it and threw off the blankets, and there, sleeping peacefully, lay
Jake. We had a great mind to take him out into the Bad Lands and pitch
him off into a canyon. It seems that he had been to the mountains, three
miles away, where a small exposure of the John Day beds could be seen
from camp; and when he returned and we were not in, he had not worried
about us, but had eaten his supper and gone to bed, while we were making
ourselves hoarse shouting for him. This incident illustrates a
peculiarity of youth—its thoughtlessness as to the anxiety which it may
be causing its elders.
Among the fossil remains which we secured in these John Day beds, were
the limbs of a huge _Elotherium humerosum_, so named by Cope on account
of the great process on the humerus. We found the specimen in Haystack
Valley, lying on its side, with its toes sticking out of the face of a
slope. There were thousands of feet of volcanic rock above it. Following
in with pick and shovel, we cleaned up the floor, to find, when we
reached the center of the humeri and femora, that they had been cut
through as smoothly as if it had been done with a diamond saw. I knew,
of course, that there had been a fault here, and that the earth in
slipping down had severed the bones. The question that interested me was
which side had gone down and how far. If the side toward the open
valley, then the rest of the skeleton must have been destroyed by the
wash, as the slope above the bones lay at an angle of 45 degrees to the
floor on which they lay. If, on the other hand, the mountain side had
gone down, and the slip had not been too great, I should be able to find
the rest of the bones. Inspired by this hope, we put in several days of
hard work, and were delighted to find the severed bones three feet below
the original level.
What a shaking and trembling of the earth’s crust there must have been,
when miles of the mountain mass slipped down three feet toward the
center of the earth! No wonder that when a similar fault occurred at San
Francisco, the puny works of man fell in ruins. The bones of this
_Elotherium_ are now on exhibition in the American Museum, which
purchased the Cope collection, including the material that I secured
through eight seasons in the field in charge of his expedition.
I had found in the Cottonwood beds that lie on top of the John Day
Miocene the cannon-bone, or long cylindrical foot bone, of a large
camel. As I closely studied this bone, which is composed of opposite
halves, separated by a thin septum of bone in the center, with a
medullary canal on each side, the conviction came to me that the two
halves had once been distinct, like the metacarpals and metatarsals of
the pig. With this idea in mind, I was constantly looking for a camel in
the older beds, and I cannot express my delight when one day, as I was
exploring the John Day beds, I came across a skeleton which had been
weathered out and lay in bold relief on the face of a slope. I knew
before I picked up the cannon-bone that my belief was verified, and when
I took up the two bones separately, the fact was proved beyond a doubt
that in this ancestor of the living form the metacarpals of the fore
foot and the metatarsals of the hind foot were respectively distinct. As
the species represented by this specimen was new to science, Professor
Cope named it in my honor _Paratylopus sternbergi_. A skull of this
species was afterwards found by Dr. Wortman, and both specimens are now
on exhibition in the American Museum.
I arrived at this conclusion with regard to the cannon-bone of the
ancient camel as Darwin, Marsh, and Huxley arrived at the conclusion
that the ancient horse had three toes. They recognized that the splint
bones of the horse represented the side toes of rhinoceroses, one on
each side of the middle metacarpals and metatarsals respectively, and
they decided that they were the remnants of side toes in the ancestor of
the horse. And later we also found a three-toed horse.
I secured also in these beds the skull of a peccary and an oreodont,
both new, and used as the types of Cope’s description, and a couple of
carnivores; one, called by Cope _Archælurus debilis_, about the size of
the American panther, the other a dog about the size of a coyote. Cope
gave the name _Enhydrocyon stenocephalus_ to this genus and species. A
splendid skull of the rhinoceros _Diceratherium nanum_ Marsh, was
another of my discoveries here. All the specimens, with the skull of a
rodent from the same beds, are now on exhibition in the American Museum.
Of course these are but a few of the many specimens secured in these
beds; hundreds are stored away in the drawers and trays of the Museum. I
was told that it would cost twenty-five dollars to get a typewritten
copy of the list of John Day fossils in the Museum. In that list are
many specimens which my party secured or which I purchased from Warfield
and Day. Professor Cope once wrote me that my collection there
represented about fifty species of extinct mammals.
One day in July I left Jake Wortman in the field and started for
Dayville, leading a pack pony. I intended to stay all night with Mr.
Mascall, leave my load of fossils, and take back a load of provisions.
Bill Day had lost one of the horses, and as a large band of Umatilla
Indians was encamped on Fox Prairie at the summit of the mountains,
about six miles east of our camp in the Cove, he had gone off in that
direction to look for it.
When I reached the high mountain above Dayville, I could look down into
the narrow valley of the John Day. Although it was noon, there was no
smoke rising from the chimneys of the houses. The fields of wheat were
ripe for the cradle—they had no machines in that region, and not only
cradled their grain, but threshed it with horses, who tramped it out—but
no one was working in them, and there was no stock in the pastures. What
could it mean? I asked myself; and as I followed the long trail down to
the river, my heart was full of fearful forebodings. Had a pestilence
killed all these people whom I knew so well? Or had they all fled, with
their horses and cattle, from Indians on the warpath?
Without expecting to hear a response, I called, when I reached the
river, for Mr. Mascall to come over with his boat and take me across. To
my delight, I saw him come out of his house and take the trail down to
the boat through the woods that covered the first river bottom. All the
while that he was unlocking the boat and rowing across, I kept shouting,
“What’s the trouble? Where are all the people?” But not until I had got
aboard with my pack and saddle, and we had started back, would he answer
the questions which I had been asking myself ever since I left the top
of the mountain.
It seems that three hundred Bannocks, or Snakes, under their chosen
leader, Egan, had left the Malheur Agency, several hundred miles south,
and after stealing six thousand horses, mainly from the French brothers’
ranch, were now on their way north to join Homely, the chief of the
Umatillas, at Fox Prairie. General Howard, who was in hot pursuit, had
sent a courier ahead of his command to the settlers in the John Day
valley, advising them to gather at some central locality, build a
stockade, and take their women and children into it for protection from
the treacherous redskins. Everyone in the valley, except Mr. Mascall and
an old man who kept the mail station on Cottonwood Creek, a mile to the
south, had taken this advice and gone to Spanish Gulch, a mining town on
top of the mountains about ten miles southwest.
Near sundown Bill Day came in, having heard the news at the Indian camp.
He instantly insisted that we leave everything and go to Spanish Gulch.
It was foolish, he said, to risk our lives going back to warn Jake. On
the long trail up the mountain we should be in full sight of the South
Fork, down which the Indians were expected to come, and it would take us
half a day to climb those four thousand feet and hide ourselves in the
canyons on the other side. I refused, however, to be moved by his
arguments. I told him that I meant to go back, and that he was to go
with me. We could not leave Jake there in camp, entirely unconscious of
the fate that might be approaching him. He knew nothing of the proximity
of hostile Indians, and it was our duty to warn him.
“Well,” Bill said, “I am going to look out for number one. I have not
lost any Indians. If you have, go and hunt trouble. Let Jake look out
for himself.”
All my shells, perhaps three hundred, were empty, but I had plenty of
powder and lead, and the best long-range rifle I had ever owned, a heavy
Sharp’s weighing fourteen pounds, and shooting a hundred and twenty
grains of lead and seventy grains of powder. I set to work cleaning and
oiling it; and then spent the whole night in front of the fireplace,
melting lead, casting bullets, and loading shells. Bill also stayed
awake, and with his needle-gun kept guard at a porthole which commanded
a good view of the open ground around the house.
The next morning I started alone on my pony to follow the trail to the
Cove, where Jake, unconscious of danger, was at work in the fossil beds.
It seemed an interminable journey, and I thought that there was an
ambuscade behind every bush and pile of rocks that guarded the road.
But, greatly relieved, I got out of sight at last in the deep canyons on
the other side, and soon saw Jake’s pony near a fossil bed and found
Jake himself deeply interested in a splendid discovery he had made.
When I told him the news, he wanted to drop everything until the war was
over, and fly for safety to the stockade. But no; my tent, with many
fine fossils in it, was in an open valley in plain sight for miles, and
would quickly attract any marauding hostile, who might set fire to it
and destroy the work of months. I insisted, therefore, upon caching, the
Pacific coast term for hiding, everything. So we took down the tent, and
putting it, with the fossils and all the rest of the outfit, into a
secret place, we covered them with a big brush pile. Then I was ready to
fly as fast as our ponies could carry us.
When we reached the river, Bill was still with Mr. Mascall, and brought
over the boat. Then both men insisted that we go without further delay
to the Gulch, as we had risked our lives long enough. But there was a
large collection of valuable fossils in the log house behind Mr.
Mascall’s cabin, and as the specimens were wrapped in burlap, they would
be destroyed if the Indians burned down the house, which they would be
sure to do if they came. I had no boxes, but I had a quantity of new
lumber, which we had secured from a mill in the vicinity; so, refusing
to be moved, I took off my coat and went to work sawing up the lumber
and making boxes. The other men never let their guns leave their hands,
and kept guard all night, expecting every moment to hear the whoop of
the Indians.
By daylight I had every fossil neatly packed, each in a little box, and
then we all took hold, and carrying the boxes down to the first river
bottom, hid them under a great grapevine, which completely covered them.
After throwing dead leaves over our trail, I was satisfied that we had
done all that we could, and as we could not induce Mascall to abandon
his property, we left him and went over to the Gulch. We found nearly
all the settlers keeping house inside the stockade, which was built of
pine logs and covered enough ground to hold their teams, wagons, and
cattle, as well as themselves.
As I realized that it would be impossible for us to do any work in the
John Day beds, fearing every moment to be surprised by Indians, I
concluded that this would be a good time to go to the Dalles and try to
find out what had become of the collection of Fossil Lake material which
had been sent off the year before, and had been lost somewhere. I had a
receipt for the specimens from a Mr. French, who was, I supposed, the
agent for the Oregon Steam Navigation Company. His letterhead read
“Forwarding Agent for the O. S. N. Co.,” but I had repeatedly written to
the agent at the Dalles, and had received no answer, while Cope, from
his end of the line at Philadelphia, had sent tracers out over every
route he could think of, trying to locate the fossils.
A Mr. Wood, the owner of a large herd of horses, was driving the herd to
a point near the Dalles for protection from the Indians, and I joined
his party. But the several hundred horses raised such a volume of dust
that, after a few days of suffocation, I concluded that I might as well
lose my scalp as be choked to death, and leaving the herd, went on
alone. All along the way, men, women, and children were fleeing for
safety to the Dalles, and dozens of homes and ranches were being
deserted just at the time when the people should have been saving their
grain. I never in my life saw so much excitement and fear. As many white
men were fleeing for their lives as there were Indians on the warpath,
and every man of them was blaming General Howard for not having
exterminated the hostiles before they started.
I met the man who had hauled my Fossil Lake collection in to the Dalles,
and for the first time learned the truth about them. It seems that they
had never been shipped. Mr. French simply had a warehouse, and forwarded
goods by the Steam Navigation Company, and mine had been covered up in
the warehouse and entirely forgotten. I was in splendid spirits when I
knew that they were safe.
Having rescued this valuable material from the warehouse, I returned to
the Gulch without seeing an Indian, to find the people still in a state
of great excitement. General Howard had sent word that the men could put
themselves under the leadership of Colonel Bernard, each citizen
furnishing his own mount and arms, but receiving his rations from the
Government. I tried to raise a company of men to accept this offer, but
not a man cared to go. At last, heartily tired of staying in camp, I
asked for a volunteer to go with me to the John Day valley to find out
how Mr. Mascall and the old man at the stage station were getting on. No
one would go at first, but later Mr. Leander Davis, who was for many
years a fossil hunter for Professor Marsh, agreed to go with me; and
packing a horse with blankets and supplies, we started.
We were relieved to find both men well, and no sign of Indians.
Continuing our journey east, we crossed the south fork of the John Day,
and all doubts as to the movements of the Indians were removed. For a
wide trail, cut deeply into the dry soil by six thousand horses and the
three hundred Indians who were driving them north, led down the slope
and followed up the main fork on the Canyon City road.
As we sat on our horses, looking south along the heavy trail, we saw
some half-dozen horsemen coming toward us. We knew that they must have
seen us, and concluded to stay where we were until we could make them
out. Before long we saw the glitter of sabers and the flash of gold
buttons, and soon General Howard and his staff rode up at a gallop. I
recognized him by his brigadier general straps and by his empty sleeve.
He had lost an arm fighting to preserve the Union.
We saluted, and he asked me whether we had seen his pack train. When I
answered no, he asked me if we knew where he could find some bacon, as
he and his staff, as well as the troops behind them, had been living for
three days on fresh beef without any salt. I told him of a smokehouse
across the bridge, and he sent his scout to examine it. The man returned
shortly with the report that not only was the smokehouse full of bacon,
but that the table in the dwelling house was set for a meal, with cold
coffee in the cups, bread, cold bacon, and potatoes, all ready to eat.
The people had evidently just sat down to dinner when someone had rushed
in with the news that the Indians were coming, and they had all thrown
back their chairs and fled for their lives.
While the General and his staff sat down to a hearty meal, Leander and I
continued to follow the trail. At one place, where a farmer made cheese,
we found that a number of large cheeses had been taken out into the road
and rolled along for some distance with a stick. We followed up the
trail which they had made in the deep dust, and put one of them on our
pack. We went into one of the houses on the road, and found that the
Indians had broken up all the furniture, including the sewing-machine,
etc. In the front room they had poured out a barrel of molasses, spread
over it several sacks of flour, and stuck a little woolly dog in the
mixture. The poor little fellow was dead. A little farther on, a
sheepman’s house had been burned, and near by two thousand sheep had
been mutilated and thrown into piles to die. The herders were found
scalped a few days later. At one farmhouse a fine brood mare had been
killed because she could not keep up with the herd.
Some days later, on the twenty-ninth of July, I believe, there was a
total eclipse of the sun. The heavens were like brass, and there was a
peculiar condition of the atmosphere such as I have never experienced
before or since. A report was spread abroad that the Indians had
returned and burned all the farmhouses along the river. I was at the
time with Leander Davis, and we rode up to Perkins ranch, where a lot of
men had congregated and were taking turns standing guard for fear of the
Indians. When we rode up they were standing about, uncertain as to what
it all meant. The dogs had gone under the stoop and the chickens to
roost. The air was motionless, and an unusual stillness was over
everything. The men welcomed us in hushed voices.
I sprang from my horse and asked Perkins whether he had any pieces of
broken glass. He said that there were plenty under the west window, and
I went and got a supply, followed by all the men, who were greatly
relieved by my explanation of the phenomenon. We got a candle and
blackened the pieces of glass, and watched the progress of the eclipse
through them.
It had a more disquieting effect upon the hostile Indians. It seems that
the soldiers had cut them off from crossing the Columbia by capturing
all the small boats and patrolling the river night and day; so that with
Howard’s troops on the trail behind them, troops from Walla Walla on
their flanks, and the river in front, they were in a bad way. Moreover,
the French brothers and the governor of Oregon had offered a reward of
two thousand dollars for Egan’s head.
The Umatilla Indians were accused of pretending to help the whites in
the daytime, and really helping the Snakes at night. So the commander
sent out a party of soldiers to capture the squaws and little children
of Homely and the other chiefs and hold them as hostages for the good
behavior of their braves. When the latter asked the commander to release
their families, the answer was given that if they would capture Egan and
deliver him up to the authorities, they would not only get back their
wives and children, but would receive the two-thousand-dollar reward.
Otherwise their families would still be held as hostages.
It appeared that Egan had an appointment with Homely at a certain hour.
As he rode out from his camp, with a brave behind him, Homely, similarly
attended, went out to meet him. When they met between the two camps,
they turned at right angles and rode toward the point agreed upon for
the powwow. But as they were riding thus, side by side, Homely, with a
word to his brave, suddenly raised his rifle and shot Egan, while his
brave shot the attending Snake. They then immediately severed the heads
of the dead men, and riding back with them to the whites, claimed the
reward. About the same time, the eclipse came on, and the poor Snakes,
deprived of their leader, thought that the world was coming to an end,
and leaving their great herd of stolen horses, fled in small bands
toward the Malheur Reservation, and were all eventually captured.
The war thus ended, as soon as I could get things in shape and my party
together, I returned to the Cove, got my outfit and fossils, and moved
over into Haystack Valley. I remained there all winter, and the next
season secured another large collection. Many of the specimens in it are
described by Professor Cope in Vol. III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata.” On
p. xxvi and the two following pages of the preface, he pays his
collectors a high compliment, which I give myself the pleasure of
repeating here in his own words: “The same year [’77] I employed Charles
H. Sternberg to conduct an exploration of the Cretaceous and Tertiary
formations of Kansas. After a successful search, I sent Mr. Sternberg to
Oregon. The Tertiary formations explored in 1878 were the John Day and
Loup Fork of Oregon. The John Day formation was chiefly examined on the
John Day River and the Loup Fork beds at various points in the same
region. These yielded about fifty species, many of them represented in
an admirable state of preservation.”
After mentioning the work of his other explorers, he goes on to say:
“Mr. Sternberg’s expedition of 1878 was interrupted by the Bannock war,
and both himself and Mr. Wortman were compelled to leave their camp and
outfit in the field and fly to a place of safety on their horses. It is
evident that an enthusiastic devotion to science has actuated these
explorers of our western wilderness, financial considerations having
been but a secondary inducement. And I wish to remark that the courage
and disregard of physical comfort displayed by the gentlemen above
referred to are qualities of which their country may be proud, and are
worthy of the highest commendation and of imitation in every field.”
Before leaving this interesting field, I wish to show my readers Cope’s
figure of the great saber-toothed tiger, _Pogonodon platycopis_ (Fig.
31), which was secured in 1879 by Leander Davis. I do not remember who
first discovered the specimen, but for weeks each of us collectors,
Wortman, Davis, and I, tried to devise some means of securing it The
skull topped a pinnacle, perhaps thirty or forty feet high, and tapering
like the spire of a church. At the top it was only a foot in diameter.
We knew that it would not be strong enough to support the weight of a
ladder, and it was too steep to scale. Moreover, if we blew it up with
powder, the skull, whose rows of teeth seemed to grin at us defiantly,
would be shattered to bits.
[Illustration:
FIG. 29.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.)
Mascall Formation.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 30.—FOSSIL-BEARING CLIFFS. (After Merriam.)
Clarno Formation.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 31.—SKULL OF GREAT SABRE-TOOTHED TIGER, _Pogonodon platycopis_.
Discovered in John Day River, 1879, by Leander Davis. (After Coke.)
]
By whatever method it was secured, it represented a feat of the greatest
possible bravery, and Cope did only justice to Leander Davis in
publishing his understanding of the manner in which it was done. That
description is attached to the skull to-day, and thousands have read of
Davis’ heroic act in securing it for science. Professor Cope says that
he cut niches and climbed to the top of the spire. My remembrance,
however, is that he threw a rope around the spire and let it settle down
to where he thought the rock would be strong enough to support his
weight. He then climbed up hand over hand to the loop, stood erect,
picked up the skull, and without putting any pressure on the rock, got
back to his rope and down to safety below. He then secured the rope by
jerking off the top of the pinnacle.
It matters little how he got the skull, but I am ready to testify that
it was the bravest undertaking I ever saw accomplished in the John Day
beds; and as long as science lasts, this noble specimen of one of the
largest tigers that ever lived should be associated with the name of
Leander Davis. I am glad that the great dike across the Cove is named
after him also.
What is it that urges a man to risk his life in these precipitous fossil
beds? I can answer only for myself, but with me there were two motives,
the desire to add to human knowledge, which has been the great motive of
my life, and the hunting instinct, which is deeply planted in my heart.
Not the desire to destroy life, but to see it. The man whose love for
wild animals is most deeply developed is not he who ruthlessly takes
their lives, but he who follows them with the camera, studies them with
loving sympathy, and pictures them in their various haunts. It is thus
that I love creatures of other ages, and that I want to become
acquainted with them in their natural environments. They are never dead
to me; my imagination breathes life into “the valley of dry bones,” and
not only do the living forms of the animals stand before me, but the
countries which they inhabited rise for me through the mists of the
ages.
The mind fills with awe as it journeys back to those far-distant lands.
Stop, reader, and think! In this John Day region, ten thousand feet, or
nearly two miles, of sedimentary and volcanic rock lie above the
Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous, from which I dug last summer the
beautiful skull of a Kansas mosasaur, _Platecarpus coryphæus_, which
lies before me now, its glistening teeth as perfect as in the days when
they dripped with the blood of its victims. How many ages were those ten
thousand feet in building? How long has it taken the running water, with
its tools of sand and gravel, to carve out the Grande Coulée and the
river valley, and expose all the various formations, with their records
of the life of the past? And yet all this has taken place since my
mosasaur, which seems to watch me as I write, fought its last battle and
sank to rest beneath the waves of the Cretaceous sea.