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.

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.

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!