EXPEDITIONS IN THE TEXAS PERMIAN FOR PROFESSOR COPE, 1895, 1897
In the summer of 1895, sixteen years after my last expedition for
Professor Cope, I was employed by him to make further explorations in
the brakes of the Big Wichita. My assistant and cook was a farmer, Frank
Galyean by name, who lived on Coffee Creek on the Vernon road,
twenty-five miles north of Seymour. I camped a mile above his house on
the west branch of the creek at Willow Springs, a favorite camping
ground, as it was one of the few places in which water was always to be
found. To the west rose Table Mountain, a hill several hundred feet
high, and mountains of the same height extended in a southwesterly
direction to Indian Creek, about four miles from camp.
I worked for several weeks on Indian Creek and Coffee Creek with very
poor returns, but on the nineteenth of September, Mr. Galyean, who was
of a sanguine temperament, announced that he had discovered the complete
skeleton of a huge beast. So, filled with high ropes, I followed his
lead along the rough face of the mountains, until at last, when we were
completely exhausted by the ruggedness of the way, he pointed out a pile
of the weathered and broken bones of a species so common that they were
not worth picking up.
Dropping in a moment from my hill of expectancy into a slough of
despond, I turned homeward, Mr. Galyean, who was as disappointed as I
was, leading the way to a short cut through a gap in the mountains. As
he got on the trail, which had been made by animals on their way to the
spring, he stooped and picked up something, remarking, “Why, here’s a
bone!” I took it, and was astonished to find it a complete skull,
covered with a hard siliceous matrix from a heavy bed of Indian red
clay, which was completely covered with concretions. I had never
carefully explored this horizon, as I had taken it for granted that it
was barren. And I suppose that other collectors had imagined the same,
for although it was within a mile of Willow Springs, where Boll and
Cummins and other collectors had camped through a series of years, I was
the first to discover this deposit of extinct animals.
We followed the trail over a slight rise into an amphitheater a couple
of acres in extent, and then over a higher rise into another, a little
larger, carved out of the mountain side and entirely denuded of soil.
These two amphitheaters proved to be the richest fossil beds I ever
discovered in the Permian of Texas. I quote the following entry from my
notebook regarding this discovery: “After finding the perfect skull
discovered by Galyean, we at once got into the richest ground I have
ever seen in these beds. I got a perfect skull, and Galyean another. We
have worked too low, it seems. This rich bone bed is on top of the beds
I have been working, at the heads of the ravines that cut into the face
of the mountains. The concretions in which the bones are preserved are
in red clay, and are of greenish and other colors.”
In my excitement over this rich find, I forgot my disgust with Galyean
for leading me on a wild-goose chase, forgot how tired I was, forgot my
dinner, forgot everything, and set to work at once collecting skulls and
bones. I remember that I filled my collecting bag with seventy-five
pounds of skulls, from less than an inch to over eight inches in length,
and all new to me and to science. This load I started to carry down the
steep trail to camp, a mile away. The good-natured Galyean, when he saw
me tottering under the load, offered to relieve me of my burden, but I
answered with such vehemence that no one should touch it, that I would
break my back first, that it was more precious than its weight in gold,
that he gave it up and fled down the mountains to camp, so that he might
at least have a warm meal waiting for me when I arrived.
How can any man who has not had the experience himself, realize the
glory of my triumphal march down that rugged trail? Not Nebuchadnezzar,
when his chariot headed the army that was carrying away the treasures of
the Lord’s house from Jerusalem, with the king of Judah, blinded and
bound in shackles of brass, in his train, could have known a prouder joy
than I did now over this discovery of a new region, in the very heart of
the old, which promised so rich a harvest of rare fossil remains. This
is an instance of an experience which has been very common in my
life—when I have been most completely hopeless and discouraged, I have
made my greatest discoveries.
Of the remarkable batrachians and lizards which twelve million years ago
peopled the estuaries and bayous of the Permian ocean shores, I found,
during that three months’ expedition, forty-five complete or nearly
complete skulls, many of them with more or less perfect parts of the
skeletons attached, and forty-seven fragmentary skulls, ranging in size
from less than half an inch to two feet in length; the whole collection
containing one hundred and eighty-three specimens of the extinct life of
the Texan Permian. The American Museum, which secured this splendid
material, was unable to describe and publish it then, while the results
of my famous expedition to these beds in 1901 for the Royal Museum of
Munich were at once described by Dr. Broili. Consequently the American
Museum lost much of the glory which attaches to the description of new
material. However, the Permian collection in the American Museum is now
being worked out with results of great importance to science.
Encouraged by my success on this expedition, I set out with high hopes
on January twentieth of the following year to continue my work for
Professor Cope in these beds. On reaching my headquarters at Seymour, I
succeeded in hiring an old man with a team and wagon, and on the
twenty-fifth of January, I made my first camp on Bushy Creek, ten miles
north of Seymour.
Three days later I found what I believed promised to be a fine specimen
of the ladder-spined reptile, _Naosaurus_, called fin-backed by Cope. A
number of perfect spines were exposed, presenting the possibility of
securing a complete specimen. I worked very carefully over this
skeleton, hoping to take it out whole and in good shape. It lay in red
and white sandstone, which easily disintegrated on the surface into
shale-like flakes. The spines and transverse projections, which
terminate in rounded knobs, were all broken _in situ_, and were also
flexed and tilted with the strata, so that great care was necessary in
following them. They were about three inches apart. I numbered the
spines 1, 2, 3, etc., not with reference to their natural position, but
to the order in which I came to them. A good many of the rounded ends of
the lateral spines were missing, having been washed down the slope. I
hoped to find them later.
As I studied these remarkable spines, many of them, near the center of
the body, three feet high, with the lateral spines alternating or
opposite, I instinctively called the creature the ladder-spined reptile;
and I cannot see how Professor Cope could have imagined that these
spines had any resemblance to the mast and yard-arms of a vessel, and
that there was a thin membrane stretched between them which caught the
breeze and acted as a sail. Later discoveries show it to be a land
animal. Professor Osborn’s magnificent restoration of the _Naosaurus_ is
shown. (Fig. 33.)
As I have said, it was a long and trying task to take up the skeleton,
as it was in thousands of fragments. If I had dug them up as one would
dig potatoes, no one would ever have had the patience to put them
together again. So I took up each spine in sections, wrapping say fifty
fragments together, and numbering them No. 1, spine 1, package 1, etc.;
so that when the whole collection came to be put together, the sections
could be mended separately first and then joined to one another.
The broken condition in which I found the skeleton prevented me from
realizing then how complete and valuable it was; but as I look now at
the fine photograph of the mounted specimen,—the only mounted specimen
of the _Naosaurus_ in the world (Fig. 32), I can see that this
expedition was indeed a success, in spite of the discouragement which I
went through at the time.
After the discovery of the _Naosaurus_, I was obliged to spend weeks of
work without results, growing more and more disheartened because I
myself was fully persuaded that the search was useless. Professor Cope
was convinced that there was a fossil-bearing stratum between the
Permian and Triassic, which would yield an entirely new fauna, and he
had reasoned out that this ideal bed must be located northwest of the
productive bed already known, in the very region, in fact, which I had
gone over with such care for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of
Harvard in 1882, and found barren. I, therefore, protested as strongly
as I could against making the trip; but he insisted, and his more
powerful will won the day. So I was forced to spend a month of extremely
trying labor at the head of Crooked Creek and in the other creek
valleys, northwest of the productive beds.
Here were thousands of acres of denuded bluffs of red clay, cut into
fantastic shapes, often resembling old fashioned straw bee-hives or
crumbling towers and battlements. As far as the eye could reach, they
spread out along the divide in ever-varying shapes. The beds
disintegrated easily into red mud. There were no concretions, although
the rock was full of concentric rings, from the sixteenth of an inch to
an inch in diameter, consisting of a round white spot with a red rim.
The narrow dikes which cross the thick deposits of clay are filled with
fibrous gypsum. Underneath the clay lie strata of red and white
sandstone and compact concretionary rock, all barren.
But the discouragement which attended my unsuccessful search was only
one of the trials with which I had to contend that winter. In the first
place, the weather was against me. It snowed or rained continually, so
that the ground was never dry, and I took up ten or fifteen pounds of
red mud on each foot as I walked. I came down with a severe attack of
grippe, too; and to make matters worse, my teamster, who was also my
cook, took a particular dislike to my stove, which had been manufactured
under my own supervision and had always proved satisfactory with other
men, and insisted upon doing all his cooking in a trench outside the
tent, so that I lost the heat which I might have had but for his
obstinacy.
Every morning I climbed out of bed with aching bones, and started on my
long tramp. At first I would hardly be able to drag myself along, but
gradually, as I warmed to the work, I would move faster, until usually I
got so far away from camp that I should not have been able to return for
dinner without taking more time than I could afford, and so went without
that meal. After working as long as I could see, I would return to my
uncomfortable camp, to go through the same performance on the following
day. I had suffered from fever and ague in the fossil fields of Kansas,
and had supposed that it would be impossible to suffer more, but I found
the grippe even more relentless than the ague.
To add to my worries, the people at my post office had taken in a family
with a malignant form of sore eyes, and although I supplied them with
curatives, they would get careless. The peevish old man whom I had
employed gave me a great deal of trouble too, at one time threatening to
leave me alone in the brakes. In general, my experiences with hired men
have taught me the advisability of owning my own outfit, whenever it is
possible. A hired man knows how helpless one is in the fossil fields
without transportation, and takes advantage of the power which that
helplessness gives him; or he looks at things from the hired man’s point
of view, and if he can better his wages by leaving his employer, thinks
that he has a perfect right to do so, even if he has made a contract to
remain.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
After working for weeks in accordance with Cope’s instructions, although
it was as useless as carrying bricks from one side of a yard to the
other and back again, I returned, worn and discouraged, to the beds
which produced at least a few fossils. I determined, moreover, to give
up the field at the end of my contract, and go home, and wrote a
despondent letter to Cope, asking to be relieved when the contract
expired, as I needed rest. It was then that I received the letter which
I publish here in facsimile, a letter which I shall always cherish, not
only because it shows the very best side of Cope’s character, but
because it makes me feel that he realized that my life work could not be
measured by money. It gave me at the time the kind of encouragement
which I needed more than any other, and on receipt of it, although I was
just ready to give up from exhaustion and homesickness, I decided to
remain another month in those barren fields. Cope promised that he would
never again send me into a field against my own judgment; and by having
my own way again, I was so fortunate as to add many new specimens to the
collection.
For I was rewarded, as I have always in my life been rewarded, for my
many days of fruitless toil, by the discovery of a long stretch of beds
whose brilliant metallic color, the result of a large amount of iron
accumulated by a dank and luxurious vegetation, testified that they had
once formed the mud at the bottom of a bayou. This old swamp proved to
have been the habitat of countless salamanders, and thanks to this
discovery I accomplished more during the last month of my stay in Texas
than during all the rest of the time put together, leaving out of
account, of course, the fin-backed lizard.
I take pleasure in showing my readers a splendid skull (Fig. 34) after
Broili, both the palatine and superior exposures of one peculiar species
of these salamanders, to which Cope gave the name _Diplocaulus
magnicornis_. The eyes are far down on the face, but with a broad
expanse of sculptured bone behind, terminating in two long “horns,”
fourteen inches across from tip to tip, which are merely the greatly
prolonged corners of the back of the skull. There are three rows of
minute teeth in the roof of the mouth, and a couple of occipital
condyles. The vertebræ have a double row of spines down each side of the
median line, and the body is long and slender with weak limbs. The head
was the largest part of the creature. This species was the most common
of all those which I discovered in the Permian beds. Professor Cope used
to call the specimens “mud heads,” as they were almost always covered
with a thin coating of silicified mud, which was very difficult to
remove. In fact, nearly all the bones in this region were enclosed in a
hard red matrix.
[Illustration:
FIG. 34.—FOSSIL SKULL OF GIANT SALAMANDER, _Diplocaulus magnicornis_.
Collected by Charles Sternberg in 1901. (After Broili.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 35.—PROFESSOR HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN.
]
In the spring of 1897, I was again working in the Texas Permian for
Professor Cope. He was deeply interested in the ancient fauna of the
region, and I was sending him all the finer specimens by express, as I
had during the last two years. On the fifteenth of April, I was camping
on Indian Creek, having just completed a long and trying journey of
about a hundred miles, around the Little Wichita and back to the main
river at Indian Creek. During the trip we had encountered a terrible
windstorm, which had threatened to carry away our tent, but we had
weathered the gale and camped in the timber. I had gone to bed, but was
roused from my cot by the arrival of a livery-man, who had been hunting
for me all the day before. He handed me a message from Mrs. Cope,
announcing the death of her husband on the twelfth of April.
I had lost friends before, and had known what it was to bury my own
dead, even my firstborn son, but I had never sorrowed more deeply than I
did now over the news that in the very prime of life, in the noonday of
his glorious intellectual achievements, as he was bending all his
energies to the study and description of the wonderful fauna of the
Texas Permian, the greatest naturalist in America had passed away with
his work undone. Death is terrible always, but it seems especially so
when it strikes down men in the highest rank of intelligence, who are
adding every day to the world’s knowledge.
I was Cope’s assistant in the field for eight seasons, and while we did
not always agree, I consider the work which I did for him my most
valuable service to science. It has often been my good fortune to supply
him with some important link in the line of descent of vertebrate
life,—such as, for instance, the famous batrachian genera _Dissorophus_
and _Otocœlus_, reptiles with a carapace, indicating the line of descent
of turtles from batrachians, or the camel from the John Day beds, with
the metacarpals and metatarsals distinct,—and to furnish him with a
large number of other forms which, with the material secured by his
other collectors, helped him to acquire what Dr. Osborn has so
truthfully called “a masterly knowledge of each type.”
It is largely due to his efforts that the great science of paleontology,
which, within my remembrance, had but few votaries, is now considered
one of the most interesting studies of modern times. Well did he
prophesy, “After us there will be more demand for our wares”; how well
one can fully realize only when one remembers that the great American
Museum (whose department of paleontology under the able management of
Dr. Henry F. Osborn (Fig. 35) is now one of the glories of science),
that the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg and the Field Columbian in Chicago
and the Museums of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, besides many others
both here and in Europe have been largely built up since he wrote those
words. One thing is certain—as long as science lasts, and men love to
study the animals of the present and of the past, Cope’s name and work
will be remembered and revered.
I am glad to be able to show a good photograph of this lamented
naturalist (Fig. 15). Peace be to his ashes!