IN THE RED BEDS OF TEXAS FOR THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF MUNICH, 1901
Warned by my experiences in the red beds of Texas without a team of my
own, when I made a contract to conduct an expedition there under the
direction of Dr. von Zittel of the Paleontological Museum of Munich, I
resolved to ship my own horses and outfit to the field. I gave them into
the charge of my son George, who was rapidly becoming a most valuable
assistant, and saw him put them aboard a freight car and get in himself.
The next time I saw him was at Rush Springs in the Indian Territory, on
top of a freight car, skilled in all the lore of a brakeman.
We reached the old camp at Willow Springs on the thirtieth of June,
1901. The heat had already set in, promising the hottest season that I
had ever experienced in the valley of the Big Wichita. It grew more and
more intense as the months passed, the mercury often rising to 113 in
the shade. All the water dried up in both the natural and the artificial
tanks, and the short buffalo grass in the pastures curled up and blew
away. We were camped in Wagoner’s great pasture, twenty-five miles wide
by fifty long, and I saw cattle die of thirst and starvation. Some had
become so hungry that they had eaten the prickly pear, spines and all,
and their mouths were full of putrefying sores where the spines had
worked out.
The ground was hot, and the air like the breath of a furnace; and we had
to haul all the water we used in camp from six to twenty miles. To add
to our troubles, one of our horses, Baby, almost cut off her foot in a
wire fence while striking at the flies, which, during the day, never
ceased to torture man and beast. Even at night the horned cattle were
not free from them, for they clustered around the base of the horns,
fifteen or twenty deep, like hives of swarming bees, for rest.
The country was indeed a desert and deserted. All the people who had
settled this valley on Coffee Creek or other streams, had gone never to
return; the cowman had bought up all the homesteads. The schoolhouse in
which I had so often attended worship had been moved from its
foundations, and the houses that had once echoed to the merry cries of
children, stood empty and desolate.
How can I describe the hot winds, carrying on their wings clouds of
dust, which were so common that year and the next? I once went to Godwin
Creek, south of Seymour, passing on the way a hundred-acre field of
corn. It belonged to an old man, who had cultivated it until it was
perfectly clean, and the long rows of living green were beautiful to
see. When I passed it again on my way back, a hot wind was blowing, so
hot that I had to shield my face and eyes to keep them from burning. The
beautiful field, upon which the old man had looked with so many hopes of
a rich harvest, had been scorched and seared as if by a blast of fire.
So the weeks lengthened into months, and the merciless sky still refused
us rain. At our camp on Coffee Creek the heat was so terrible that we
could not keep eggs, butter, or milk, or many other edibles necessary to
comfort and health. The result was that my stomach soon got out of
order, and a severe attack of biliousness set in, attended by an
incessant longing for a drink of cold, pure water. I thought by day and
dreamed by night of the well on my farm at home, with the clear water
dripping from the bucket; for our only drink, except coffee, was the
warm, foul-tasting water which had been brought in a barrel from twenty
miles away and had soon become stale. Even that was always giving out at
inconvenient times. Whenever we came to a new fossil locality, and the
hope was strong within me that now we would make a rich find, George was
sure to say, “Papa, we’re out of water,” and we had to make the long
journey through the awful heat over the dust-laden roads to the well at
Seymour, twenty miles away. When we reached it at last, how we buried
our faces in the bucket and the cool water!
[Illustration]
PALAEONTOLGISCHE
SAMMLUNG
DES STAATES
Alte Akademie.
München, den 23 December
190
Charles Sternberg Esquire.
Lawrence City Ka
My dear Sir,
Before receiving your last letter of the 6th Decemb. I had sent to
your address a cheque of 200$ as Salary for the last month of your
collecting in Texas. I take notice of your freight expenses (3$ 46c)
and shall sent this little sum by an other occasion.
The 5 boxes with your great collection as well as the express box
with the little skulls have been safely arrived. I have looked over
the results of your researches and think that the collection of this
year is better than any other made before in Texas. With few
exceptions we have nearly all the genera created by Prof Cope and
several of these in much better condition. Beside theire is
certainly a good number of very interesting and new material which
will give us bussiness for several years.
I am very glad that I can give you such a satisfactory report about
your hard work in the interest of our museum and I hope to remain
further in friendly relations with yourself.
With the best wishes for the coming year and the kindest regards
faithfully yours
Dr. Zittel
But I will not dwell on this side of the picture, because there is
another side. We were finding in wonderful abundance the material which
we had come to secure, and the hardships were forgotten in the joy of
success. In spite of the many obstacles with which we had to contend, we
secured the collection described in that great letter from Dr. von
Zittel which I publish here in facsimile and which I prize more than any
letter I ever received.
Before I accepted von Zittel’s offer that I should conduct an expedition
for him in the brakes of the Big Wichita, I wrote to him, telling him
how my work for science had had, from a material standpoint, no great
returns. My life, I said, had been a constant struggle to secure
sufficient funds to carry on the work, and the men who had bought my
material had for the most part felt that they were doing good service to
their museums by securing it at the lowest possible price, without
taking into consideration that even a fossil hunter has to live.
It was with pleasure indeed that I received the answer of this great
German, whose works on paleontology are used as text-books in our
universities. Dr. von Zittel wrote: “I am sorry that from your letter
you do not consider yourself in a position to work for the Munich Museum
in Texas this spring. I can readily understand that after your long
activity in scientific fields without material results you are somewhat
discouraged and embittered, and feel that your services in this
direction have not been sufficiently appreciated. For my part, I have
done my best to give you credit for the scientific side of your work,
and your collections from Kansas and Texas in the Munich Museum will
always be an everlasting memorial to the name of Charles Sternberg.”
Such a letter, from a man like von Zittel, put new life and courage into
my veins, as a similar letter from Professor Cope had once before, and
made me feel that a little suffering more or less mattered nothing when
measured with such enduring results. Cope is dead and von Zittel is
dead, so far as such men can die, but I have preserved their letters as
heirlooms for my children’s children; for they testify that “no matter
what the common herd may say about me,” I have accomplished the object
which I set before myself as a boy, and have done my humble part toward
building up the great science of paleontology. I shall perish, but my
fossils will last as long as the museums that have secured them.
But to return to the Texas Permian. I will follow my notebook for a
while, as that, perhaps, is the best way to give my readers an idea of
our life there.
On the eleventh of July 1 was in Seymour. I write: “A big dust storm
struck the town, and this evening a rain is falling. This is indeed a
great relief to me, as it will make the air cooler and give me water in
the brakes, so that I can visit localities I could not before. My wagon,
brought from Kansas, is a narrow-gauge one, and all the roads in Texas
are cut by broad-gauge wagons. This forces my team to pull with one set
of wheels in the rut and the other outside. Consequently the labor is
wearing them out, in connection with the awful heat. I am, therefore,
having new axles made, a long and tedious work, and I am resting out of
the heat. Jesse S. Williamson has told me to occupy the building owned
by himself and Will Minnich. It is a little cabin within a mile of the
bone bed near Willow Springs. It has a tank of water for the horses, and
is but a mile away from the schoolhouse, where a well has been dug. A
few bucketsful a day, enough for camp use, trickles into it.” This cabin
proved to be a great accommodation, especially as the owners had a stack
of sorghum, which was placed at my disposal and saved me the trouble of
hauling out hay.
As one of my spindles was broken, I had to send to Lawrence for another,
and it was not until the sixteenth that I got my wagon from the shop. I
then drove out to my old camp on Grey Creek in Mr. Craddock’s pasture.
Here, too, was the center of a field from which I had reaped a rich
harvest for Professor Cope.
On the seventeenth, my notebook states that I was in the field all day
and found fragments of skeletons and skulls, all broken to pieces and
mixed up together. I could not find the horizon from which these
specimens came. They were all piled together with concretions in a long,
narrow wash, while above there was a level denuded tract covered with
concretions. The only way in which I can account for the mixture of
fragmentary specimens is that a bone bed lay above the level stretch,
and in the disintegration of the deposit, the fragments were carried by
floods into the narrow gulch, until not a sign of the original bed was
left to mark its site.
I had sent a large collection from this same locality to Professor Cope,
and he had been much interested, but had also been extremely tantalized
by the fact that there were great numbers of fragmentary skulls, and
that although the fragments looked freshly broken, none of the pieces
could be united to form a perfect skull. I now found the same trouble
again. Possibly some of the missing fragments of the skulls in Cope’s
collection, now in the American Museum, may be in the lot sent to
Munich, and vice versa.
On the nineteenth, I found the nearly perfect skull of a new species,
and on the twentieth, another very fine skull near the locality from
which I had secured the many fragments a day or two before. It was a
skull of the great salamander, _Eryops megacephalus_ Cope. There were
six pairs of large teeth in the roof of the mouth, and a single row of
various sizes in the mandibles. Some of the points had been broken off
and were lost. The skull is over twenty inches long. All the bones are
beautifully sculptured on the external surface. A few years before I had
found a nearly complete skeleton of this creature, some twelve feet in
length, lying at right angles to the Chisholm Trail. It was preserved in
hard concretions, and had weathered out on the slope of a hill. The feet
of countless cattle, just starting out on their weary journey for Kansas
and the North, had worn away the solid siliceous envelope to the bones.
How the salamander tribe has degenerated since the days of these
powerful creatures! Supplied with both gills and lungs, they dominated
land and water, and increasing and multiplying in the tropical
atmosphere, filled the swamps and bayous of this region. To-day we pull
from some well or spring a weak creature called a mud puppy, and it is
hard to realize that its ancestors, twelve million years ago, were
strong and mighty, the monarchs of creation.
To return to Mr. Craddock’s pasture; on July twentieth my notes read: “I
am suffering from the heat, my tongue badly coated. However, I have got
some splendid material. If I succumb to the awful heat and die, my
discoveries will have done much toward enriching the collection at
Munich.”
On July twenty-first, I continue: “It is fearfully hot to-day, and I
cannot work the beds without great suffering. I found a little skull.”
The hot weather continued, and I went out to the cabin on Coffee Creek.
Pet, our four-year-old, got away, and when George took her from a herd
of horses, he found a big hole in her shoulder. “Both horses are failing
fast,” my notes read. “Have to send George in for feed. It is hard on
the team to have to haul a load this weather through dust knee-deep,
with no water fit to drink.”
On the twenty-sixth, I was left alone, and went a mile north to the bone
bed and began to dig into the face of a hard greenish layer of
clay-stone, near a place where I had found some fragments in former
years. I was delighted to find a pocket with two good skulls _in situ_,
and the next day George returned with his load, and I had some fresh
water, which soon, however, grew lukewarm. We found two more skulls in
the pocket referred to, one of which was the _Labidosaurus hamatus_
Cope, one of the earliest of reptiles. Another was that of a new genus
and species which I found later, when we went back to Grey Creek to get
a camp ready to receive Dr. Broili. He was to come directly from Munich
to my camp in the red beds.
On the first of August, as we were out of provisions, we went into town.
I rented a large room over a store building, and made tables and
unpacked specimens for Dr. Broili’s inspection. While I was working
there, a storm of grasshoppers struck the building, beating against it
like hailstones; and the next morning the ground was covered with them.
On the fifth, we drove out to our old camp on Grey Creek, and pitched
two tents with the fly stretched between. The walls were elevated, and
we were able to make a shade against the rays of the relentless sun. I
went a couple of miles north, over the table mountain above camp, and
found two extremely beautiful skulls of the long-horned amphibian,[2]
_Diplocaulus magnicornis_ Cope, a strange animal of which I have already
spoken. I found also a specimen of the gar-pike, that ancient fish which
has left its enameled scales in the rocks of many formations, whose
descendants are still living in our rivers.
Footnote 2:
See Fig. 34.
On the eighth of August, in spite of the debilitating heat, I started on
a long trip to the head of Brushy Creek, on horseback. I climbed Table
Mountain, which was, perhaps, three hundred feet above the camp, and
struck west along the divide between the two creeks. I frequently left
the horse tied to a fence, while I plunged down into the gorges on
either side. At last, about three miles northwest of camp, at the bend
of a branch of Brushy Creek, I noticed a denuded tract of the kind of
bed I have already described, to which an abundance of bog iron lent a
metallic luster; the very place to look for fossils.
The first thing I found was the perfect skull, six inches long, of a
batrachian (_Diplocaulus copei_ Broili); then, lying on the surface,
another beautiful skull (_Varanosaurus acutirostris_ Broili), with many
of the bones of the skeleton, from which the hard red matrix had been
washed off clean. The upper and lower jaws were locked together, and the
long row of glistening teeth shone in the fierce light. The eyes were
set far back, and the nose openings were near the front. It was so
different from anything I had ever seen before that I was sure it must
be new. Dr. Broili, in describing it, speaks of it as the most perfect
specimen ever found in these beds. Nearly all the other skulls I had
secured are compressed vertically, while this was compressed laterally.
I found in this bed hundreds of fragments of rock filled with the
glittering scales of fishes, as brilliant now as in the days when they
covered the bodies of these old fish. Here, also, I discovered a huge
specimen of the long-horned species (_Diplocaulus magnicornis?_), and
others much smaller, which proved to be the new _Diplocaulus copei_.
“This,” my notes say, “promises to be one of the finest localities I
have found, and pays for the days of search under trying conditions.”
When I reached camp, I found that George also had had a red-letter day,
and had found a bone bed of minute animals on some brakes of Grey Creek
under the roots of the grass in a washout. He brought in a skull, the
smallest I had ever collected, with a great many broken bones and teeth.
One specimen, which Dr. Broili named in my honor _Cardicephalus
sternbergi_, was not over half an inch long. I secured here six skulls
of the new _Diplocaulus copei_, also.
On Monday, the twelfth of August, Dr. Broili reached Seymour, and George
and I met him at the station. A tall, strong, fine-looking German, with
a full beard, he impressed me very favorably. The great difficulty was
that, owing to my deaf ear, it was very hard for me to understand his
broken English, and unfortunately I could not speak a word of German. I
judged that he had learned his English from an Englishman and not from
an American, as he used a peculiar brogue with which I was not familiar.
George learned to understand him better, and they became the best of
friends.
We went back to camp, where we had the pleasure of Dr. Broili’s company
for two weeks, during which I formed a friendship which I have always
deeply appreciated. He was delighted with my work and the material we
had secured, but, as he says in the introduction to his great work
describing my material, he could not stand the heat.
He describes part of my material in his splendid work on the Permian
Stegocephala and reptiles, published in Stuttgart, with one hundred and
twenty pages of text and thirteen fine plates. He says on p. 1: “The
excellent results of the expedition of Mr. Sternberg in the spring of
1901 to Texas, which brought many very valuable specimens of _Eryops_,
_Dimetredon_, and _Labidosaurus_ to the Paleontological Museum’s
collection, caused the conservator of the Royal Paleontological
Collection, Councillor von Zittel, to send out in the year of 1901 a
second expedition to the Permian beds of the same territory, he being
again successful in securing Mr. Charles Sternberg, the excellent
collector from Lawrence, Kansas. Already in June of the same year he was
in the midst of his sphere of activity in the Wichita Permian beds, near
the small town of Seymour, Baylor County, located on a branch of the
Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. On my arrival in the camp, through the
assistance of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Science, it was made
possible for me to take part in the collection from the beginning to the
end of August. I found already a very good collection of very rich
materials, which, besides parts of _Dimetredon_, _Labidosaurus_,
_Pariotichus_, and other Theromorphs, included an excellent collection
of different examples of _Diplocaulus_, of which some still possessed
the greater part of the vertebræ. During my stay in that territory, our
work principally consisted in making collections from our camp. We were
compelled, on account of scarcity of water from the great heat, to keep
near Seymour.”
[Illustration:
FIG. 36.—DR. KARL VON ZITTEL.
Born September 25, 1839. Died January 5, 1904.
(After Pampeckj.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 37.—SHELL OF _Toxochelys bauri_?
Discovered by Charles Sternberg in Gove Co., Kansas. (After Weiland.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 38.—NIOBRARA GROUP, CRETACEOUS CHALK WITH CAP ROCK OF LOUP FORK
TERTIARY, KNOWN AS CASTLE ROCK, GOVE CO., KANSAS. (Photo, by
McClung.)
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 39.—CHALK OF KANSAS, KNOWN AS THE COFFEE MILL. HELL CREEK.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 40.—BONES OF _Platecarpus coryphæus_.
As found by Charles Sternberg. Sent for mounting to Tübingen
University.
]
I am a patriot, and it would have pleased me to see all these splendid
examples of ancient life enrich our home museums; but Germany is my
fatherland, at least it was the fatherland of my fathers, and I am glad
to have been able to build up there the best collection of Kansas and
Texas forms in Europe.
One of the greatest prizes of the Munich Collection is a skeleton of
_Labidosaurus_, now mounted there and collected by myself.
_Labidosaurus_ is important because it belongs to a very ancient and
primitive group of reptiles, which, according to Prof. H. F. Osborn and
other authorities, were the ancestors of all the later forms of
reptiles.
After Dr. Broili left to return to Munich, I continued my work, camping
on east Coffee Creek. Here again our search was rewarded. I found
another bone bed of very small lizards, some of them, I think, not over
six inches long. The skulls ranged in size from less than half an inch
to an inch in length. Cope has given them the name _Lysorophus
tricarinatus_. Drs. Broili and Case in their valuable papers have shown
that this _Lysorophus_ is one of the most interesting genera of all this
wonderful fauna, since in the structure of the skull it is a veritable
“missing link” between the batrachia and reptilia.
The deposit in which I found the _Lysorophus_ was large, containing
thousands of bones and many fine skulls. I am convinced that these
creatures must have hibernated, as many of them were coiled in a circle
in an envelope of hardened mud, and appear to have lain down never to
wake again, each tiny reptile and its nest having been preserved through
all the ages since. The flesh, of course, decayed soon after death, but
by the process of petrification the bones have been replaced by stone.
Now I have always wanted to explain to a popular audience what this
process of petrification really is. The word petrification should be
dropped from our vocabulary, because it signifies an impossibility. I
remember, as a boy, translating from the Latin a sentence like this—“His
bones became stone,” that is, turned to stone, and one often hears the
expression petrified wood as meaning wood which has turned to stone; as
if there were a process in nature by which one substance could be turned
into another, as the philosopher’s stone would have changed iron to
gold. As a matter of fact, the process denoted by the word petrification
is a process of replacement, not of transmutation. After the death of
these ancient animals and the decay of their flesh, the water that
passed through the bones carried from the cells of which they were made
up the organic contents which decay, and left in their place deposits of
the silica or lime which it held in solution. The same process continued
when the lagoon bed was elevated above the water as solid rock. The
rain-water, seeping down through rock and fossil alike, left in the bone
cells the mineral matter it was carrying, until they were filled with
it. Then, in process of time, the cell walls are broken down and rebuilt
with silica or lime, and complete fossilization, or petrifaction as it
is called, takes place, as in the case of the fossil bones in the Texas
Permian. I found one specimen of the ladder-spined reptile in which the
bones had been entirely replaced by iron ore, and others made up of
silica.
How long does it take for the mineral matter to replace entirely the
original bones? Ages upon ages. I found on the plains of Kansas a quarry
of elephant bones, from which I took over two hundred teeth of the
Columbian mammoth, some of the larger ones weighing fourteen pounds
each. The broken bones were scattered by the ton through the matrix. I
had them analyzed by Dr. Bailey, the head of the chemical department of
Kansas State University, and he found only ten per cent. of silicified
matter in them; that is, they were only ten per cent. less rich in
phosphate of lime than Armour’s ground bone meal. This great elephant
lived about the time of the Ohio mastodon, whose bones have been found
in such a position as to indicate that they were buried when Niagara
Falls were six miles below their present site. So if we knew how long it
has taken the river to dig six miles of its big ditch, we could tell how
long it has taken to impregnate the bones of the mammoths in central
Kansas with ten per cent. of silica. How foolish, then, to speak of
completely petrified men, when man had probably not made his appearance
in America at the time of the mammoths.
The rocks of the Texas Permian, as I have already mentioned, are of red
clay filled with concretions of every conceivable form. I remember once
rounding a butte and seeing before me hundreds of cocoanuts, some whole
and others with the brownish shells broken, showing the white meat
within. Absent-mindedly, I sprang from my horse to feast upon them, to
find that they were concretions which had so closely imitated cocoanuts
in shape and color that even I, an experienced collector, had been
momentarily deceived. I knew, too, of a man who exhibited a collection
of large concretions as fossil Hubbard squashes, and I heard no one
doubting that they were all that their labels claimed.
There are two distinct formations in the Permian of this part of Texas
which give character to the surface of the country. They are as
different as if separated by hundreds of miles. I visited one locality
on Pony Creek, where the red beds lay on top of the gray beds
conformably. Looking to the west, a vast panorama, desolate and forlorn,
of crumbling and denuded bluffs, narrow valleys, and beetling crags,
spread out before me, with the usual red color dominant everywhere, its
monotony relieved only here and there by the green of some stunted
mesquite or patch of grass. To the east stretched the narrow valley of
Pony Creek, whose topography is the same as that which is so familiar to
the residents of eastern Kansas—a ledge of gray sandstone forming a
narrow escarpment on either side and following the trend of the hills
around the ravines, with grass coming down in gentle swells to meet it
or rising to it from the bottom lands below. The greatest thickness of
this sandstone, as I observed it, was at the head of a narrow gulch near
my camp in the creek bottom, eight miles north of Seymour. I made a
section there and sent samples of the rock to Munich.
I observed this rock under peculiar circumstances, and found that it
solved an interesting problem—that of the water supply of the red beds.
I discovered why the water that falls where these beds only are exposed
runs off soon after a shower, except when caught in natural or
artificial tanks, so that there are no wells or springs in the red beds,
while in the gray beds there are always springs and streams of running
water.
In the September of my 1901 expedition, the heaviest rain since May fell
in torrents for an hour and a half; water lay everywhere on the surface
of the ground. But soon after the rain stopped, it had all disappeared.
My son had discovered across the creek a locality which was rich in
fossil invertebrates, consisting chiefly of straight and coiled
nautilus-like shells; and shortly after the downpour I went over to set
to work collecting them, as Dr. Broili had told me that the Munich
Museum was anxious to secure such a collection. I had not been long at
work before George shouted to me that if I did not want to swim I would
better cross the creek again at once. I followed his advice so hastily
that I left my tools behind. Instantly, a raging, boiling flood of water
covered the rocks in the bed of the creek, over which I had just crossed
dry-shod, and rapidly rose to a height of eight feet, threatening to
submerge my camp.
Looking for a good place to work on my side of the creek, the west, I
found the gulch which I have referred to above. There was a level floor,
formed by the first stratum of the gray beds, extending about five
hundred yards to a ledge of red sandstone, eight feet thick. The floor
was covered with debris washed from the red beds. To my astonishment,
although the surface was dry, a flood of water was rushing out from
under the upper deposits and tumbling in a miniature waterfall over the
gray ledge, which was nearly five feet thick, into the ravine below.
The rock I found to be composed of four layers of sandstone. The upper
layer, eight inches thick, is composed of fine-grained sand, which seems
to have been ground to an impalpable powder by the beating of the waves.
It is very compact and heavy, and upon exposure, breaks into rectangular
blocks, so perfect in shape that they can be used for building purposes
without being touched by hammer or chisel. The second layer breaks into
large blocks of many tons’ weight. It is coarser grained than No. 1, and
is about twenty inches thick. It contains a few casts of invertebrate
fossils. No. 3 is twelve inches thick, and is of the same general
character as the other layers. It is literally packed with casts of
straight and coiled shells related to our living nautilus. They are
mingled in great confusion. I believe some of the coiled shells are a
foot in diameter. This stratum is not so compact as the others, and
seems to contain more lime. No. 4 is a very solid gray sandstone, eight
inches thick, its upper surface crossed at various angles by elevated
ridges of harder material.
From these observations, I am led to the conclusion that the pervious
nature of the red beds, which in the valley of the Wichita are about
three hundred feet thick, allows the water to sink rapidly down through
them until it reaches the impenetrable gray sandstone; from which it
runs off at whatever angle the rocks may be tilted.