ON A TRIP TO THE JUDITH RIVER, MONTANA
Under orders from the Director of the Geological Survey of Canada,
Charlie and I left Brooks, Alberta, on an expedition to Montana,
for the purpose of studying the sequence of the rocks there, and to
compare them with those of Canada. Mr. D. B. Dowling, a Geologist
of the Survey, joined us at Coutts to do the stratigraphical work.
I cannot help, in this connection remarking, he was in addition to
his geological knowledge, the most genial companion I have ever been
associated with in camp, excepting, of course, that prince of good
fellows, the late Professor E. D. Cope of Philadelphia, with whom I
made the same trip in 1876. A complete story of that expedition is
recorded in “The Life of a Fossil Hunter.” At Coutts Mr. Dowling and
I went out to some rocks exposed south of town which appear to be the
true Eagle sandstone of Weed. A compact greyish and reddish sandstone
with strong lines of cross bedding. These lines are also lines of
cleavage. Above are some seventy feet of the Belly River Series, clays,
and fluted sandstones. On July 2nd we stopped at New Park Hotel, at
Great Falls, Montana. Not far from the depot; while here we took a
trolley ride out to the great smelter near the Falls of the Missouri,
three miles east. The works cover acres of ground and the smokestack is
said to be the largest in the world. The falls here were low and below
was a series of rapids. Whenever we chanced to catch a view of the
Missouri, on our trip east by the Great Northern we could see the river
for many miles, full of falls and rapids. At Benton I saw no sign of
old Fort Benton I visited with Professor Cope in 1876. We noticed along
the track the typical Fort Benton shales, dark colored below, yellowish
shales above, while unconformable masses of the ancient river bed
lined the faces of bluff and ridge or helped to fill the old ravines,
composed of unstratified yellowish clays, sand and gravel. The narrow
flood plain of the river is fringed with cottonwoods and poplars, with
birch and willow thickets, underbrush of wild roses, bull berries,
etc., with the ubiquitous sage brush everywhere. The Northern Pacific
passes through a rolling prairie north of the Bear Paw Mountains. In
1876 the only wagon road here was south of the mountains and it started
at Fort Benton the head of navigation, and ended at Cow Island, 120
miles east.
I noticed the farmers irrigating their gardens and alfalfa fields with
water drawn from the Missouri with buckets attached to overshot wheels,
on their turning the water was spilled into a trough connected with
the reservoir. It was carried from there, over the fields. We got off
the train at Big Springs, went to the Spokan Hotel, and registered
in the bar room, where they had the office at one end of the bar. I
thought that was going it some, excuse the slang, and that Montana
needed “Total Prohibition” pretty badly. The dining room opened off the
bar. At the livery stable we hired a team and democrat wagon for two
weeks for $50. In the afternoon we drove out in a buggy to the coal
mine eight miles southeast. Here the light yellowish sandstones with
harder parts were filled with thin circular concretions as flat as a
pancake. The vein of coal is about five feet thick at an angle of about
16 degrees. On either side are narrow beds of yellow sandstone dipping
in various directions, the strike being parallel with the Bear Paw
Mountains not far off to the south. Between the sandstone layers is a
dike of volcanic trap, black, and fine grained, pushed up through the
strata so it forms a hog back elevation above them. There are also beds
of light colored shales, with seams of iron-stone between.
On July 3rd, 1914, we drove to a flat near the site of a reservoir,
now dry, and stopped at a farmer’s. We had skirted the eastern limits
of the Bear Paw Mountains, passed through a rolling prairie, crossed
Eagle Creek, where a fine flow of water, full of little fishes, runs
over gravel and sand towards the Missouri river. As we journeyed south
we saw evidence of vulcanism in a narrow strip of naked rock that had
been shoved up in a wedge shaped mass through the grass of the prairie.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Top view of _Styracosaurus_ as prepared by
Charles H. Sternberg. Page 104.]
[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Charlie’s _Centrosaurus_ in the rock. Page
122.]
On the Fourth of July we reached the ferry below the mouth of the
Judith River and took dinner at the ranch called Judith P. O. The
company own their own store, bunk-house, cook-house and stables, and
have in a great crop of alfalfa. They also own the ferry, and owing to
high water, the approach from the north was cut out, and we had to get
our horses on board the best way we could, and then pull on the wagon
by man power. We were kindly entertained at Judith. In the afternoon we
drove up to Dog Creek, where Professor Cope made his famous expedition
in 1876. The effects of vulcanism are seen on every side. The views I
show, fully illustrate this phase in the earth’s crust. The picture
with the white sandstone tipped up to the left, represents the Eagle
Sandstone with the Claggett Shales to the right. These shales should
be on top of the Eagle Sandstone. They closely resemble the Pierre
shales, below the Edmonton beds in Alberta, and contain the same
baculites, ammonites and plesiosaurs, evidently. The foreground of the
picture, shows part of the narrow Dog Creek valley covered with grass
and sagebrush, with a few cottonwoods in a bend of the creek. On the
opposite, or east side of the creek, we found a trail leading up to the
divide over the Claggett shales. These, Professor Cope called Fort
Pierre.
On July 24, 1914, a paper of mine appeared in “Science,” in which I
undertook to show that the Dog Creek beds were equal to the Edmonton
Beds of Alberta. And those at Cow Island, should be correlated with
the Belly River Beds of Alberta, with the Pierre shales between. I
took Professor Cope’s view. He believed the Judith River Beds were
above the Pierre and Fox Hills Group of the Cretaceous and called them
“The Judith River Beds” or “Cretaceous No. 6.” After two seasons of
exploration of the Belly river series in Dead Lodge Canyon, of Red
Deer River Alberta, in connection with our study of the Dog Creek and
Cow Islands rocks I was obliged to accept the conclusions of Hatcher
and Stanton, in their fine work on “The Geology and Paleontology of
the Judith River Beds.” The whole series here, and on Red Deer are
without doubt Ft. Pierre. The Judith River and Belly River beds were
local elevations above the Pierre Ocean. We actually added to the mass
of evidence to this effect, by the discovery of sixty feet of Bear Paw
Shale on top of the Judith River beds at Taffy Creek, a branch of Dog
Creek to the east. We also learned how easy it was for Hayden and Cope
to make the mistakes they did in their hurried survey of the badlands.
I walked miles over both Bear Paw and Claggett shales, and found it
difficult to tell them apart. Vulcanism has often lifted the older
beds higher than the more recent ones. The what seemed to us true, the
ammonites, baculites and plesiosaurs, were the same in the two marine
beds, though separated by the fresh water Judith River series, which is
of the same age as the Belly river beds.
We walked up the steep slope to the divide between the breaks of The
Missouri river and Dog Creek, this divide is nearly 600 feet above the
river. Somewhat different from what my memory had told me of these
great canyons. I speak of them as being over a thousand feet deep in
“The Life of a Fossil Hunter.” In 1876 we had no barometer to take our
altitude and my notes were lost in a fire in 1881, it is natural for
the mind to exaggerate depth and height as well as level surfaces.
However, as we made this trip by moonlight, and through the solemn
silence, I was again overcome with awe when I gazed into the stupendous
gorges and at the beetling crags that overlooked them. Hour after hour
we passed slowly along the trail, often only the narrow ridge between
two great canyons, and a balky team might have backed us off into the
abyss filled with inky darkness. Only a journey under such conditions
and in such a region of utter barrenness, can give the reader an idea
of the emotions that overpowered me. We made camp about midnight, and
the only sign of human habitations we saw, (except a deserted sheep
ranch), were the fireworks thrown into the sky at Kendall, where the
people were celebrating. We made a camp later, on an eastern branch
of Dog Creek, called Taffy Creek. We made a thorough study of this
region near camp. During our trip up Dog Creek we had made extensive
collections of invertebrate fossils from all the different horizons,
securing also _Myledaphus_, and other sharks teeth from the lower Eagle
Creek sandstones which, with the Claggett shales, form the lower beds
of the Belly River Series of Alberta. On the south side of Taffy below
a large timbered hog back upheaval, I found a locality in the Judith
river bed that is possibly the type locality from which Cope and I
secured our collections on that memorable expedition of 1876, when we
found the first of the horned dinosaurs (except loose teeth). A “blow
out,” as they call it in the west, had exposed along a narrow slope
of sandstone, many bones and teeth of horned, plated, duck-billed,
carniverous dinosaurs, with the teeth of _Myledaphus_, and many broken
turtle shells, as well as bones of _Champsosaurus_, scales of ganoid
fishes. Exactly like the numberless bone-beds along Dead Dodge Canyon.
What delighted me most of all was discovering the nearly complete
pelvic girdle, including the footed ischia, proving that these bones
belonged to a crested dinosaur like the one we found on Red Deer river
and was called _Stephanosaurus_ by Lambe and _Corythosaurus_ by Brown.
You will notice that we have two names usually for these Belly River
species. I try to credit each student as best I may, leaving it with
future scientists to decide which name should be retained in American
Paleontology. The Edmonton bone-beds, are very different, resembling
flotsam along the line of high tide, and are all deposited in brackish
water. These beds like those in Dead Lodge Canyon, were laid down
in fresh water. There were very few turtle shells in the Edmonton,
here they strew every exposure. Everywhere in this region were two
persistent layers of coal on top of the Judith river followed by the
Bear Paw Shales. Above the upper vein of coal, is a layer of oyster
shells from a few inches to four feet thick. In the Bear Paw shales
south of camp a mile, Mr. Dowling with the aid of a sheep herder, found
a new mosasaur, belonging evidently to the genus _Clidastes_, as the
chevrons were anchylosed to the centra of the vertebrae, and the tail
was expanded into a fin. The mandibles with teeth, some fifteen feet
of the tail and many dorsal vertebrae were found. We also secured some
very beautiful ammonites and baculites and bones of the plesiosaur
_Cimoliasaurus_. But for the uplift, the stratigraphical record is
quite simple, the puzzling strata tipped in all directions were easily
identified under direction of the skilled observer Mr. Dowling. It
would be impossible for any one on the ground to doubt the sequence of
the rocks here, as laid down by Hatcher and Stanton.
We followed the trail Professor Cope first made, when we drove down
to Cow Island in 1876, camping at the same spring at Lone Tree for
noon. The tree itself is now dead. We camped near our old one on the
Missouri, forty miles below Dog Creek, though now we had a wagon road
down through the badlands. On the road down along the badlands we never
lost sight of the rocks and always found the Bear Paw shales on top of
the Judith River beds, proving that I had been mistaken again, and the
Cow Island beds were the same, as those on Dog creek, with no rocks
between. The only difference I could see between them was the sculptury
approached more closely at Cow Island, those of the beds in the Dead
Lodge Canyon.
Two things impressed me strongly, one was the fact of finding an
ischium with a footed extremity, closely associated with teeth similar
to those Dr. Hayden picked up in this region, and Leidy called
_Trachodon mirabilis_. We found four trachodonts in the Dead Lodge
Canyon the most common was the crested one with footed ischia. And
not a one of them belonged to the genus _Trachodon_. Neither have
any been described. There can be little doubt therefore that Leidy’s
_Trachodon mirabilis_ belongs to a dinosaur with either a crested
head or the high nosed _Gryposaurus_ of Lambe, or _Kritosaurus_ of
Brown. Is _Trachodon_ a crested dinosaur? The evidence seems to point
that way. Then what is _Trachodon annectens_ of Marsh and the family
name? As Leidy used a tooth that may have belonged to three or four
different genera, it seems the early names from such poor material,
rests on shaky foundations. If the paleontologists begin to name only
complete skeletons, or nearly complete ones there will be a shaking up
of old names and many will go into the discard like so much of human
knowledge. Marsh had but little better foundation for his _Ceratops_.
A couple of horn-cores, that might have belonged to any one of half a
dozen genera of horned dinosaurs.
We spent two weeks of most delightful exploration in the Judith river
country, and my mind was set at rest, in regard to the position the
beds occupy in the building up of our continent.
On our return, we thought at one time, we would not be able to recross
the Missouri river, a flood had washed away the approaches to the ferry
boat. However, as “necessity is the mother of invention,” we hauled
our luggage on board by means of a row boat and dragged our wagon
through the mud by man power, the ranchers helping us for the fun and
excitement there was in it. Later, another man swam across with our
team, and we were ready to go north to our old field in Dead Lodge
Canyon, Alberta. This field we reached in safety.
[Illustration: FIG. 36.--Putting irons on the _Centrosaurus_ Crest.
Page 83.]
[Illustration: FIG. 37.--George at work on C. H. Sternberg’s
_Centrosaurus_. Page 83.]