I do not remember when I first began collecting fossils, but I have always loved nature.

Fifteen years of my early life were spent in Otsego County, New York, at dear old Hartwick Seminary, where my father, the Rev. Dr. Levi Sternberg, was principal for fourteen years, and my grandfather, Dr. George B. Miller, a much-loved, devout man, professor of theology for thirty-five. The lovely valley of the Susquehanna, in which it stands, lies five miles below Cooperstown, the birthplace of the Walter Scott of America, James Fenimore Cooper, and my boyhood was spent among scenes which he has made famous. Often my companions and I have gone picnicking on Otsego Lake, shouting to call up the echo, and spreading our tablecloth on shore beneath the very tree from which the catamount was once about to spring upon terrified Elizabeth Temple.

My greatest pleasure in those early days and best, was to live with a darling cousin in the woods. There among the majestic trees,—maples, hickories, pines, and hemlocks,—we used to build sylvan retreats, weaving willow twigs in and out among the poles which I cut for supports; and there, to those great trees, I delivered my boy orations. We delighted also to visit and explore Moss Pond, a body of water on top of the hills across the river, surrounded entirely by sponge moss. We could “teeter” across the moss to a log that gave us support, and catch blind bullheads, or eat our lunch in the cool, dense hemlock woods that surrounded the water, where the heavy branches, intertwined like mighty arms, shut away the light, so that even at midday the sun could barely pierce their shadows.

How I loved flowers! I carried to my mother the first crocus bloom that showed its head above the melting snow, the trailing arbutus, and the tender foliage of the wintergreen. Later in the season I gathered for her the yellow cowslip and fragrant water-lily; and when autumn frosts had tinged the leaves with crimson and gold I filled her arms with a glorious wealth of color.

Even in those early days I used to cut out shells from the limestone strata of the region with whatever tools were at hand, but they were admired chiefly as examples of the wonderful power of running water to carve rocks into the semblance of shells. Or if one of the more observant remarked that these shells looked very much as if they had been alive once, the only theory that would account for their presence and yet sustain the belief that the world was only six thousand years old, was that the Almighty, who created the rocks, could easily, at the same time, have created the ancient plants and animals as fossils, just as they were found.

I remember a rich find I made in the garret of an uncle in Ames, New York,—a cradle filled with fossil shells and crystals of quartz. They had been collected by my uncle’s brother, who, fortunately, as my uncle said, had died early, before bringing disgrace upon the family by wasting his time wandering over the hills and gathering stones. All the large specimens he had collected had been thrown away, and the smaller ones in the old cradle had long been forgotten. I was welcome to all my uncle’s buggy could carry when he took me home, and I can never forget the joy of going over that material again and again, selecting the specimens that appealed most to my sense of the beautiful and the wonderful. I labeled them all “From Uncle James,” and it greatly astonished a dear aunt of mine, to whom I gave them some years later when we moved West, to find in the collection a lot of baculites, labeled “Worms from Uncle James.”

When I was ten years old, I met with an accident from which I have never completely recovered. I remember the wild chase I was making after an older boy, over the hay-mows and piles of shocked grain in my father’s barn. On the floor below, an old-fashioned thresher, one of the first of its kind, was making an ear-splitting noise, while outside the two horses, hitched to an inclined plane, climbed incessantly, but never reached the top.

The boy climbed a shock of oats on the scaffold in the peak of the barn, and “Charley-boy,” as my mother called me, following him, slipped through a hole in the top of the ladder which had been covered by the settling oats, and fell twenty feet to the floor below. The older boy climbed swiftly down and carried me home insensible to my mother.

Our family physician thought that only a sprain was the result, and bandaged the injured limb; but, as a matter of fact, the fibula of the left leg had been dislocated, so that there was much suffering and a little crippled boy going about among the hills on crutches.

The leg never grew quite strong again, and some years later gave me a good deal of trouble. In 1872 I was in charge of a ranch in Kansas, and during November of that year a great sleet storm covered the whole central part of the state. In order to water my cattle, which were scattered over a range of several thousand acres on Elm Creek, I was obliged to follow around small bands of them to their accustomed watering-places and cut the ice for them. The water that splashed over my clothing froze solid, and the result was that inflammatory rheumatism settled in the lame leg. I sat in a leathern chair all winter close to a boxwood stove, tended by my dear mother, who never left me day or night.

When the inflammation subsided, the knee joint had become ankylosed, and in order to avoid going on crutches all my life, I lay in the hospital at Fort Riley for three months, all alone in a great ward, and had the limb straightened by a special machine. So skilfully did the army surgeon do this work that I threw away crutches and cane, and, although the leg has always been stiff, I have since walked thousands of miles among the fossiliferous beds in the desolate fields of the West.

In 1865, when I was fifteen years old, my father accepted the principalship of the Iowa Lutheran College at Albion, Marshall County, and the broken hill country of my boyhood days was replaced by the plains and water courses of the Middle West.

Two years later my twin brother and I emigrated to an older brother’s ranch in Ellsworth County, Kansas, two and a half miles south of Fort Harker, now known as Kanopolis. This post was at that time the terminus of the Kansas Division of the Union Pacific, and almost daily train-load after train-load of prairie schooners, drawn by oxen, burros, or mules, pulled out from it over the old Butterfield and Santa Fé trails, the one leading up the Smoky Hill, the other through the valley of the Arkansas to Denver and the Southwest.

In spring great herds of buffalo followed the tender grass northward, returning to the South in the fall; and one bright day my brother and I started out on our first buffalo hunt. Driving a team of Indian ponies hitched to a light spring wagon, we soon left the few settlements behind, and reached the level prairie to the southwest, near old Fort Zaro, a deserted one-company post on the Santa Fé Trail. At this time it had been appropriated by a cattleman who had a small herd grazing in the vicinity.

When within a few miles of this post, we saw a large herd of buffalo lying down a mile away. It was no easy matter to crawl toward them over the plain, pushing myself along without raising my body above the short grass, but after strenuous efforts I got within shooting distance without disturbing them, and was resting for a shot, when the rancher rode through the herd and sent them all off at a lope. Much angered and almost tempted to turn my gun on the man, I returned to the wagon, and we drove on across country that had been cropped as if by a great herd of sheep by the thousands of buffalo that had passed that way on their journey south.

Anxious to find picketing-ground and water, we reached the Arkansas River, where in a swale covered with grass and willows were paths cut by the buffalo. I lay down in one of these, and bringing my gun to my shoulder, was just drawing bead, when a large animal rushed across my line of vision at right angles to the trail. I pulled the trigger, and down went the brown mass in a heap on the ground.

Swinging my gun above my head, I rushed forward shouting, “I’ve killed a buffalo!”—to find that I had shot a Texas cow. Terrified at the thought of its owner’s anger, we rushed back to the wagon, and, whipping up the ponies, sped away as if the furies were after us. But cooler second thoughts led us to the conclusion that the cow had come north with the buffalo, and was as much our prey as the buffalo themselves.

Just before sunset we reached a part of the country through which the buffalo had not passed, where a rich carpet of grass, covering all the plain, offered plenty of food for our tired ponies. Here we were delighted to find, standing in a ravine, an old bull buffalo, which had been driven out of the herd to die. Concealing ourselves behind the carcass of a cow, we opened fire upon him from our Spencer carbines, and continued to riddle his poor old body with leaden slugs until his struggles ceased. Even then, when he had lain down to rise no more, we crawled up behind him and threw stones at him, to make sure that he was dead. We found his flesh too tough for food; but it was an exciting event to us two boys to kill this massive beast, in earlier days perhaps the leader of the herd.

In this connection I might tell of a chase I had several years later, while living on a ranch in eastern Ellsworth County. I saw a huge buffalo bull come loping along from the hills, headed for a section of land that was inclosed by a wire fence. On the other side of this section there was a piece of timber-land, and fearing that if he got into the dense timber I should lose him, I rode after him at the top of my speed.

When his lowered head struck the wire fence it flew up like a spring gate and immediately closed down behind him. In order to follow, I had either to cut the wire or go out of my way to a gate half a mile to the south. I decided on the latter course, and applied quirt and spur to my horse, but upon reaching the gate, discovered my escaping quarry already halfway across the section. I got just near enough to put a bullet into his rump as he passed through the fence on the other side, and disappeared in the dense woods beyond.

In my excitement I shouted to my pony, and, dismounting and standing on the wire to hold it down, yelled at him to come across. But a sudden fit of obstinacy had seized him, and he would not come. I had to let the fence up while I thrashed him, and then as soon as I got it under my feet again, he pulled back as before. We repeated this performance until I was exhausted and gave up the struggle.

But upon casting a look of despair in the direction of the vanished buffalo, I was both astonished and ashamed to see him standing under an elm tree not ten feet away, covered up all except his eyes by a great wild grapevine, and gazing in mute astonishment at the struggle between Nimrod and his pony. I have always regretted that I took advantage of the confidence he placed in me, for as soon as I could control my jumping nerves, I shot the noble beast behind the shoulder, and he fell.

I saw my last herd of buffalo in Scott County, Kansas, in 1877. Antelope, however, continued to be abundant as late as 1884, and only two years ago I saw a couple of them among some cattle near Monument Rocks, in Gove County.

In camp, during those early days, we were rarely out of antelope meat, and even now my mouth waters at the thought of the delicious tenderloin, soaked first in salt water to season it and remove the blood, then covered with cracker dust, and fried in a skillet of boiling lard. In those days a hind quarter could be hung up under the wagon in the hottest part of summer, and not spoil. The wind hermetically sealed it, and there were no blow-flies then. The early settlers of a new country bring with them, and protect, their enemies, and destroy their friends, the skunks, badgers, wildcats, and coyotes, as well as hawks, eagles, and snakes, because they kill a chicken or two as a change from their usual diet of prairie dogs and rabbits.

In those pioneer days the Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and other Indian tribes made constant inroads upon the venturesome settler who, following the advice of Horace Greeley, had come West to grow up with the country.

I remember when old Santante, a chief of the Kiowas, came to the post in a government ambulance, which he had captured on one of his raids. In time of peace, the Indians belong to the Interior Department of the government, so that all the officer in command at the fort could do was to extend the old chief the courtesy of the army and care of himself and team. Once, at the old stone sutler’s store, I heard him remark, after he had filled himself well with whisky, “All the property on the Smoky Hill is mine. I want it, and then I want hair.”

He got both the following year.

In July, 1867, owing to the fear of an Indian outrage, General A. J. Smith gave us at the ranch a guard of ten colored soldiers under a colored sergeant, and all the settlers gathered in the stockade, a structure about twenty feet long and fourteen wide, built by setting a row of cottonwood logs in a trench and roofing them over with split logs, brush, and earth. During the height of the excitement, the women and children slept on one side of the building in a long bed on the floor, and the men on the other side.

The night of the third of July was so sultry that I concluded to sleep outside on a hay-covered shed. At the first streak of dawn I was awakened by the report of a Winchester, and, springing up, heard the sergeant call to his men, who were scattered in rifle pits around the building, to fall in line.

As soon as he had them lined up, he ordered them to fire across the river in the direction of some cottonwoods, to which a band of Indians had retreated. The whites came forward with guns in their hands and offered to join in the fight, but the sergeant commanded: “Let the citizens keep in the rear.” This, indeed, they were very willing to do when the order was given, “Fire at will!” and the soldiers began sending leaden balls whizzing through the air in every conceivable arc, but never in a straight line, toward the enemy, who were supposed to be lying on the ground.

As soon as it was light my brother and I explored the river and found a place where seven braves, in their moccasined feet, had run across a wet sandbar in the direction of the cottonwoods, as the sergeant had said. Their pony trails could be easily seen in the high, wet grass.

The party in the stockade were not reassured to hear the tramp of a large body of horsemen, especially as the soldiers had fired away all their ammunition; but the welcome clank of sabers and jingle of spurs laid their fears to rest, and soon a couple of troops of cavalry, with an officer in command, rode up through the gloom.

After the sergeant had been severely reprimanded for wasting his ammunition, the scout Wild Bill was ordered to explore the country for Indian signs. But, although the tracks could not have been plainer, his report was so reassuring that the whole command returned to the Fort.

Some hours later I spied this famous scout at the sutler’s store, his chair tilted back against the stone wall, his two ivory-mounted revolvers dangling at his belt, the target of all eyes among the garrison loafers. As I came up this gallant called out, “Well, Sternberg, your boys were pretty well frightened this morning by some buffalo that came down to water.”

“Buffalo!” I said; “that trail was made by our old cows two weeks ago.”

Later the general in command told me that they had prepared for a big hop at the Fort on the night of the fourth, and that Bill did not report the Indian tracks because he did not want to be sent off on a long scout just then.

In the unsettled state of the country at this time there were other dangers to be guarded against beside that of Indians, as I learned to my cost.

As a boy of seventeen, it was my duty on the ranch to haul milk, butter, eggs, and vegetables to Fort Harker for sale. I cared for my pony myself, and in order to get the milk and other food to the Fort in time for the soldiers’ five-o’clock breakfast, I had to go without my own. One day I had a number of bills to collect from the officers, but as I was unusually tired, and the officers were not out of bed when I called, I put the bills in my inside pocket and started home.

As was my custom, after leaving the garrison I lay down on the wagon-seat and went to sleep, letting my faithful horse carry me home of his own accord. I have no recollection of what happened afterwards, but when I reached the ranch my brothers found me sitting up in the wagon moaning and swinging my arms, with the blood flowing from a slung-shot wound in my forehead. I had been struck down in my sleep and robbed of all the money I had on my person, as it happened only about five dollars.

Providentially our nearest neighbor, D. B. Long, was a retired hospital steward, and the post surgeon, Dr. B. F. Fryer, who was sent for immediately, was just ready to drive to town with his team of fleet little black ponies. He reached the ranch in an incredibly short time, and, although respiration had ceased, those two faithful men kept up artificial respiration for hours. My oldest brother, Dr. Sternberg, for years Surgeon-General of the Army, was also sent for, and I found him lying on a mattress by my side when I regained consciousness two weeks later.

I might tell also of the ruffians who at one time held Ellsworth City in a grip of iron, and how, until they killed each other off or moved further west with the railroad, the dead-cart used to pass down the street every morning to pick up the bodies of those who had been killed in the saloons the night before, and thrown out on the pavement to be hauled away.

But, although I should like to recall more of the incidents connected with the opening up of a new country, time presses, and I must pass on to an account of my work as a fossil hunter.

I had not been long in this part of the country before I found that the neighboring hills, topped with red sandstone, contained, in isolated places, from a few feet to a mile in diameter and scattered through a wide expanse of country, the impressions of leaves like those of our existing forests.

The rocks consisted of red, white, and brown sandstone, with interlaid beds of variously-colored clays; while here and there, scattered through the formation, were vast concretions of very hard flint-like sandstone, often standing on softer rocks that had been weathered away into columns, the whole giving the effect of giant mushrooms, as seen in the cuts (Figs. 1–3).

This formation, resting unconformably on the upper carboniferous rocks, belongs to the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous Period. The sedimentary rocks were laid down during the Cretaceous Period, the closing period of the “Age of Reptiles,” in a great ocean, whose shore line enters Kansas at the mouth of Cow Creek on the Arkansas River, and extending in a northwesterly direction in the vicinity of Beatrice, Nebraska, touches Iowa, and passes on to Greenland.

I was carried away at this time by the thoughts that had been surging through the hearts of men since Darwin bade them turn to nature for the answers to their problems concerning the plants and animals of this earth.

How often in imagination I have rolled back the years and pictured central Kansas, now raised two thousand feet above sea level, as a group of islands scattered about in a semi-tropical sea! There are no frosts and few insect pests to mar the foliage of the great forests that grow along its shores, and the ripe leaves fall gently into the sand, to be covered up by the incoming tide and to form impressions and counterparts of themselves as perfect as if a Divine hand had stamped them in yielding wax.

Go back with me, dear reader, and see the treeless plains of to-day covered with forests. Here rises the stately column of a redwood; there a magnolia opens its fragrant blossoms; and yonder stands a fig tree. There is no human hand to gather its luscious fruit, but we can imagine that the Creator walked among the trees in the cool of the evening, inhaling the incense wafted to Him as a thank-offering for their being. All His works magnify Him. The cinnamon sends forth its perfume beside the sassafras; linden and birch, sweet gum and persimmon, wild cherry and poplar mingle with each other. The five-lobed sarsaparilla vine encircles the tree-trunks, and in the shade grows a pretty fern. Many other beautiful plant forms grace the landscape, but the glorious picture is only for him who gathers the remains of these forests, and by the power of his imagination puts life into them; for it is some five million years, according to the great Dana of my childhood days, since the trees of this Kansas forest lifted their mighty trunks to the sun.

At the age of seventeen, therefore, I made up my mind what part I should play in life, and determined that whatever it might cost me in privation, danger, and solitude, I would make it my business to collect facts from the crust of the earth; that thus men might learn more of “the introduction and succession of life on our earth.”

My father was unable to see the practical side of the work. He told me that if I had been a rich man’s son, it would doubtless be an enjoyable way of passing my time, but as I should have to earn a living, I ought to turn to some other business. I say here, however, lest I forget it, that, although my struggle for a livelihood has been hard, often, indeed, bitter, I have always been financially better off as a collector than when I have wasted, speaking from the point of view of science, some of the most precious days of my life attempting to make money by farming or in some other business, so that I might live at home and avoid the hardships and exposures of camp life.

With collecting-bag over my shoulder and pick in hand, I wandered over the hills of Ellsworth County. If I chanced upon a locality rich in fossil leaves, thrilled with a joy that knows no comparison, I walked on air as I carried my trophies home; while if night overtook me with an empty bag, I could scarcely drag my weary limbs along.

Among the rich localities that I discovered was one which I called “Sassafras Hollow,” because of the countless sassafras leaves I quarried there. It is situated about a mile southeast of the schoolhouse on Thompson Creek, in the Hudson brothers’ neighborhood, and lies at the head of a narrow ravine in a ledge of sandstone, with a spring beneath. Here too, the noted paleobotanist, Dr. Leo Lesquereux, collected fossils in 1872, securing among other specimens a large, beautiful leaf which he named in my honor “Protophyllum sternbergii.”

I have a vivid recollection of the discovery of another locality. One night I dreamed that I was on the river, where the Smoky Hill cuts into its northern bank, three miles southeast of Fort Harker. A perpendicular face in the colored clay impinges on the stream, and just below this cliff is the mouth of a shallow ravine that heads in the prairie half a mile above.

In my dream, I walked up this ravine and was at once attracted by a large cone-shaped hill, separated from a knoll to the south by a lateral ravine. On either slope were many chunks of rock, which the frost had loosened from the ledges above. The spaces left vacant in these rocks by the decayed leaves had accumulated moisture, and this moisture, when it froze, had had enough expansive power to split the rock apart and display the impressions of the leaves.

Other masses of rock had broken in such a way that the spaces once filled by the midribs and stems of the leaves admitted grass roots; and their rootlets, seeking the tiny channels left by the ribs and veins of the leaves, had, with the power of growing plants, opened the doors of these prisoners, shut up in the heart of the rock for millions of years.

I went to the place and found everything just as it had been in my dream.

Two of the largest leaves known to the Dakota Group were taken from this place. One, a great three-lobed leaf, the stem passing through an ear-like projection at its base, Dr. Lesquereux called Aspidophyllum trilobatum; the other, equally large,—over a foot in diameter,—and three-lobed too, but indented with large teeth, he called Sassafras dissectum (Fig. 4).

I believe I am the only fossil hunter who has collected from this locality. Probably my eyes saw the specimens while I was chasing an antelope or stray cow and too much occupied with the work in hand to take note of them consciously, until they were revealed to me by the dream, the only one in my experience that ever came true. I tell this story to show how deeply I was interested in these fossils.

My first collection, or rather the cream of it, was sent to Professor Spencer F. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution. The following is the letter which I received from him:

Dear Sir:—We are duly in receipt of your letter of May 28th, announcing the transmission of the fossil plants collected by your brother and yourself, and shall look forward with much interest to their arrival. As soon as possible after they reach us, we shall submit them to competent scientific investigation, and report to you the result.

There was no money in fossils at that early day, but I prized more highly than money the promise in the letter that my specimens would be studied by competent authority, and that I should receive credit for my discoveries.

The specimens were sent to Dr. John Strong Newberry, professor in Columbia University and State Geologist of Ohio. He did not find opportunity at that time to publish the results, but long years afterwards, in 1898, I received from Dr. Arthur Hollick a copy of “Later Flora of North America,” a posthumous work of Dr. Newberry’s. Turning instantly to the magnificent plates, I recognized some of my early specimens, the first I ever collected that were of value to science.

Although, owing to the long delay in publication, I lost credit for them, and the duplicates which I had given to a friend had been used by Lesquereux to illustrate some new species accredited to that friend instead of to their rightful discoverer, Dr. Newberry kindly acknowledged my work on p. 133 of his book, where he says: “The leaf figured on Plate X and that represented on Plate XI were included in a collection made by Charles H. Sternberg, and Lesquereux has done only justice to him by attaching his name to the finest species contained in the large collection of fossil plants he made there,” that is, at Sassafras Hollow.

In 1872, just before Lesquereux’s great work, “The Cretaceous Flora,” appeared, I learned that the famous botanist was a guest of Lieutenant Benteen, the commander of Fort Harker. Fortunately, I had retained rough sketches of the first specimens I had sent to the Smithsonian Institution. So with these I started for the Post, where I found a reception in progress in honor of the noted guest.

I was introduced to the venerable botanist by his own son, who spoke to him in French, as he was almost deaf. When I displayed my sketches, he took me to one side, and in a corner of the room I told him the story of my discoveries. His eyes shone when he examined the drawings. “This is a new species,” he said, “and this, and this. Here is one described and illustrated from poorer material.”

I do not remember how long we talked. I only know that the golden moments sped by all too rapidly; and from that hour until his death in 1889 we were in constant correspondence.

After this all my collections were sent to him for description. Over four hundred species of plants like those of our existing forests along the Mexican Gulf, some beautiful vines, a few ferns, and even the fruit of a fig, and a magnolia flower petal, the only petal so far found in the coarse sandstone of the Dakota Group, have rewarded my earnest efforts. The fragrance of this lovely flower seems wafted down to us through the myriads of ages since it bloomed.

Dr. Arthur Hollick, in his paper, “A Fossil Petal and a Fruit from the Cretaceous (Dakota Group) of Kansas,” in Contributions from the New York Botanical Garden, No. 31, says, on page 102: “Included in a collection of fossil-plant remains from the Cretaceous (Dakota Group) of Kansas, recently obtained by the New York Botanical Garden from Charles H. Sternberg of Lawrence, Kansas, are two exceedingly interesting specimens,—one representing a large petal, the other a fleshy fruit. Petals are exceedingly rare, and I am not acquainted with any published figure of anything of the kind which can compare with ours in regard to either size or satisfactory condition of preservation.”

Of the fig, the Doctor remarks: “The fruit is plainly that of a fig, and, although some twenty-three species of Ficus have been described from the Dakota Group, they were based upon leaf impressions. This fossil has every appearance of many dried herbarium specimens, and it is evident that it must have possessed considerable consistency in order to retain its original shape, as it has done to a certain extent, under the pressure to which it must have been subjected.”

In 1888 I sent over three thousand leaf impressions from the Dakota sandstone to Dr. Lesquereux, and he selected from them over three hundred and fifty typical specimens, many of them new, for the National Museum. Hundreds of others, identified by him, were afterwards purchased by R. D. Lacoe, of Pittston, Pa., and presented to the Museum.

So feeble had the great botanist become in these last years of his life, that friends passed before his failing eyes the trays containing these great collections.

In my estimation, America can show no life more unselfishly devoted to science than that of Lesquereux, probably the most scholarly and conscientious botanist of his day. He once wrote me that he received a salary of five dollars a day from the U. S. Geological Survey, and out of this he had to pay his artist. He labored with unfailing enthusiasm to complete his monumental work, “The Flora of the Dakota Group,” but by the irony of fate, he never saw his beloved book in print. It was published by the Government five years after his death, under the able editorship of Dr. F. H. Knowlton.

He passed away at the age of eighty-three.

“Born in the heart of Switzerland’s mountain grandeur,” he once said, “my associations have been almost all of a scientific nature. I have lived with nature,—the rocks, the trees, the flowers. They know me, I know them. Everything else is dead to me.”

It was my good fortune to be in constant correspondence with Lesquereux, and his letters, which I need not say I prize highly, have done more, perhaps, than any other thing to fix my determination that, come what might, I would be a fossil hunter and add my quota to human knowledge. The letter here reproduced has been as a lodestar to lead me on past all discouragements in the path which as a boy of seventeen I set out to follow. May it shed light upon the life of some other straggler!

In 1897, not having the means to go into the vertebrate fields of western Kansas, I spent three months in the Dakota Group, although I knew that I had already supplied most of the museums of the world with examples of its flora, and that there was little interest in or demand for the leaves.

I secured over three thousand leaves, however, and paid first-class freight on them to my home at Lawrence. Then I hauled them out to my little twenty-acre farm, four miles southeast of town, and pitched my 9 × 9 wall-tent for a workshop, flooring it and putting up a stove. There I worked from November to May, standing on my feet on an average of fourteen hours a day, with my face to the opening of the tent for light, and my back to the stove. At night I worked over a coal-oil lamp.

With a chisel-edged hammer weighing two ounces, I trimmed off the rough stone from the margin of the nodules, as illustrated in the woodcuts by Christian Weber of New York (Fig. 5, c, d, e, and f), a labor of love on his part, for which I am deeply grateful. I smoothed down the rock with emery-stone also, and with a No. 1 needle pried away the stone from the petioles, leaving the impression as if it were the leaf itself standing up in bold relief, thus bringing out all its beauty. One of my neighbors, after examining the prepared specimens, remarked, “You must have taken a long time to carve those things. Why, they look just like leaves!”

When no more loving labor could be bestowed on them without risk of injuring the specimens, I laid them away in trays, to be numbered and identified. I knew that some authorities demanded the specimens in payment for the labor of identification, and as I had to make a living out of my work, this would never do for me. So after Lesquereux’s death I undertook the work of identification myself, although I confess it hurt my conscience, as I had never had the training of a botanical authority. I was greatly relieved, therefore, when, after selling two hundred and fifty specimens to the New York Botanical Gardens, I asked Dr. Arthur Hollick whether my identifications were correct, to receive the answer that upon a casual examination he could find no reason to make any changes in my names. I was certainly much encouraged by such words from this eminent authority in fossil botany.

To return to my great collection from the Dakota Group, I spent nine months of incessant labor upon it, and my readers may be surprised to learn that I was delighted when Professor Macbride, of the University of Iowa, purchased it for the munificent sum of three hundred and fifty dollars, the price I put upon it. My delight was even greater when I received the following letter, which is now and was then more highly prized than the check which it enclosed.

The boxes are all safely here. We have at present no place for the display of the specimens, but have opened the first three cases and are delighted with the beauty of the material. I hope next year to have a case for fossil plants, when I shall certainly make a display of these beautiful leaves, and quote you as collector. I should think the National Museum would give you employment all the time.

I trust you may have a pleasant and profitable summer, and if in future I can in any way serve you, kindly advise me.

This small sum enabled me to go with my son George into the chalk of Kansas, where we discovered the splendid specimen of a mosasaur, now in the museum of Iowa University. But for the timely assistance given me when I most needed help, it is doubtful whether Iowa would have secured this treasure. My months of patient labor on the leaves had convinced the authorities that my work on the mosasaur would be faithfully done.

Before closing this account of my work in the Dakota Group, I should like to say a few words about the manner in which the nodules are formed around leaf impressions, a subject of which I have made a careful study during years of exploration. The illustrations (Fig. 5, a and b) show the nodules before they are opened, and the open specimens before they have been trimmed, as in the other cuts.

The mother rock, or matrix, as it is called, from which these concretions come, is quite soft and easily disintegrates into yellowish sand under the influences of the weather. Through this yellowish sandstone are scattered countless leaf impressions and their counterparts, but on account of the softness of the matrix it is impossible to work out any leaves from the inside of the rock masses, and we should lose them altogether were it not for the following natural process:

Falling from the trees that grew along the shore of the Cretaceous Ocean, these leaves were covered with sand by the incoming tide. Some, falling stem first, were turned over into a U-shape; others are found lying flat, and others again at various angles. The sand, accumulating through the years, finally became consolidated, and, being in course of time exposed to the air, began to “weather.” In the meantime the iron coloring matter of the vegetation had been dissolved out by the water and distributed through the rock mass. As the rock weathers away, the leaf impressions are hardened by the iron that has been dissolved out of the sandy mass by water holding acids in solution.

As the soft rock about them continues to wear away, the nodules begin to appear above the surface, at first only as bumps slightly elevated above the surrounding rock, but in time as complete concretions, with the form of the leaves imprisoned within, which are left standing on pedestals no thicker than a lead pencil.

Then the first storm of rain or hail breaks them from their moorings; they become independent, are reduced in size, and constantly hardened, so that often a nodule is almost pure iron ore a fraction of an inch in thickness.

So the process goes on and will continue until all the leaves within the parent rock have been protected by an iron envelope; and it is this natural process alone which can save these beautiful impressions from falling to pieces when the sand is freed from the rock by disintegration.

The locality from which I collected these specimens I have named the Betulites locality, on account of the abundance of birch leaves of many varieties which have been found there. It was discovered by the late Judge E. P. West, collector for the University of Kansas, and Professor Lesquereux honored him by calling one species Betulites westii. He made a wonderful collection of Dakota leaves for the University, many of them new to science. The locality is about a mile in length and tops the highest hills in Ellsworth County.

I have no record of the thousands of fossil leaves I have collected from the sandstone of central Kansas. I have never kept a single specimen for myself, although I love them dearly, and it has often been hard to give them up. But the object of my life has been to advance human knowledge, and that could not be accomplished if I kept my best specimens to gratify myself. They had to go, and they went, often for less than they cost me in labor and expense, into the hands of those who could give authoritative knowledge of them to the world, and preserve them in great museums for the benefit of all.

One thing I have demanded as my right, in my opinion an inalienable right, although I am sorry to say that there are those who have denied it to me,—I demand that my name appear as collector on all the material which I have gathered from the rocks of the earth.

I might have sold to showmen or dealers; in fact I have the assurance of one of the largest dealers in America that I made a great mistake in selling directly to museums instead of through him. If I had done as he advised, the thousands of fossils I have collected would have cost the museums fifty per cent. more than they have, and my work would have been measured by the money these dealers would have been pleased to allow me, and I should never have been known as one of those who have devoted their lives to the advancement of paleontology.