I spent the winter of 1876–77 with Professor Cope, first at Haddonfield, then at his new home on Pine Street, in Philadelphia.

At Haddonfield the commodious loft of a large, old-fashioned barn was fitted up as a workshop, and I had also a bed here. I boarded with a Mr. Geismar, Professor Cope’s preparator, but I had a standing invitation to eat dinner every Sunday with the Professor and his wife and daughter, a lovely child of twelve summers.

I shall never forget those Sunday dinners. The food was plain, but daintily cooked, and the Professor’s conversation was a feast in itself. He had a wonderful power of putting professional matters from his mind when he left his study, and coming out ready to enter into any kind of merrymaking. He used to sit with sparkling eyes, telling story after story, while we laughed at his sallies until we could laugh no more.

I never knew his wit to fail him. I remember being present at a meeting of the Academy of Science, in Philadelphia, at which he was up for re-election to the office of recording secretary, and was defeated. Among others, Professor William Moore Gabb made some remarks against him. Cope’s only defense was “Now, William, more gab!”

I attended also the dinners which he gave to his hosts of friends in the city, and the luncheons at which Mrs. Cope entertained the young men to whom the Professor gave lectures in his own home. He told his funniest anecdotes on these occasions, and used to call on me for my story of the old farmer who, while at work hoeing corn in a stump-field on the side of a hill, saw a hoop-snake at the top take its tail in its mouth and begin to roll down towards him. Springing behind a stump, he struck at it with his hoe handle, into which the sting at the end of the snake’s tail entered deeply. In less than an hour the handle had swelled up to the size of a man’s leg.

I believe that this story-telling of which he was so fond was for Cope a form of relaxation from his heavy work in the study, and that his ability to give himself up so thoroughly to it in his leisure hours was what enabled him to accomplish in his life an amount of work such as few men have ever accomplished. It would take a volume even to name the titles of all the products of his industrious brain. One of them alone, the great Volume III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata,” often called “Cope’s Bible,” has over a thousand pages of text, beside many fine plates. It was published by the Government, in 1884.

Before starting back to outfit another expedition to the Kansas Chalk, I secured the services of Mr. Russell T. Hill, an able young man who was working in the Academy under the Jesup Fund; and upon our arrival at Manhattan, I hired Mr. A. W. Brouse as teamster and cook.

About the last of March we started with a team of ponies and a light spring wagon upon our long and extremely tedious journey across the state of Kansas, to our headquarters at Buffalo Park. At Chapman Creek, a few miles from Junction City, we were stopped by high water. A raging torrent twenty feet deep filled the bed of the creek; neither man nor beast could have crossed it alive. We were, therefore, horrified to see a farmer, sitting on a seat on top of two sets of side-boards in a lumber wagon, come driving down into this fearful flood. I called to him to stop, and asked him what he was going to do.

“I must come over,” he shouted.

“Why,” I answered, “the water is twenty feet deep, and running like a mill race. You’ll be swept away.”

“But I have not had my mail for a week. I must come over,” he shouted back.

“Well,” said I, “you big fool, why don’t you go down to the railroad bridge, just below here, and walk over?”

“By Chimmeny,” he said, “I hadn’t thought of that!”

As we were now in the antelope country, we were rarely out of antelope meat. One morning we saw a buck antelope standing close to the railroad track, watching an incoming train. I remarked, as I urged the driver to hurry up his horses, that perhaps someone would shoot the animal from the train. And sure enough, as the train passed, a window flew up, and a man with a revolver shot the buck through the neck. It began to describe a circle, its feet planted together, and springing from the wagon, I cut its throat with a butcher knife, while the boys held its horns.

Another time, as we were traveling along over the prairie, we suddenly came upon a young antelope hidden securely in the center of a bunch of grass. We should not have seen him at all from the ground, but being above him on the wagon seat, we looked right down on him. The boys jumped out, and approaching the little chap carefully, were just spreading out their arms so as to be ready to grab him, when he sprang to his feet so quickly that their hands were thrown into the air, and darted off. The boys started after him at the top of their speed, but they might as well have tried to catch a streak of lightning.

One day we were camping at the spring on Hackberry, south of Buffalo, when a couple of men rode up to us. They said that they were cowmen, and that they had lost their outfit. I invited them into my tent, and after supper gave them the boys’ bed, the boys themselves climbing into the covered wagon.

Early in the morning one of the men wakened me and asked for a revolver. There was an antelope in camp, he said. I handed him a Smith and Wesson, and peeped out, to see a fine buck standing just at the end of the wagon tongue, looking over the tent and wagon. The stranger opened fire at three or four paces and emptied the revolver. Then throwing it down as of no account, he asked for a gun. I gave him a Sharp’s rifle and a cartridge belt. In the meanwhile the antelope had walked a few yards away and turned to look at us. The man fired several shots, and threw down the rifle also, and as the boys were by this time climbing out of the wagon, one with a Winchester, the other with a little Ballard, he borrowed from them first one firearm and then the other, and blazed away without once drawing blood. Finally the buck deliberately moved over the hill and out of sight, while the man swore that it had a charmed life. We thought otherwise, however, and the boys followed it; soon returning with it swinging from a gun, which they carried on their shoulders like a pole.

I recall another ludicrous incident connected with this expedition. We happened to be at Buffalo Station once when Professor Snow, the much-loved Kansas naturalist, and at one time the chancellor of the State University, was in town with a large party of students, on his annual insect hunt.

The old Chisholm cattle trail led through Buffalo, and one day the owner of a large herd of Texas cattle, who was passing through, noticed Professor Snow and his party out on the prairie with their nets in their hands, running about as if possessed. It happened to be the first time that he had ever seen insect collectors at work, and his curiosity was aroused.

“What are those men doing?” he asked Jim Thompson, the storekeeper.

“Catching bugs,” was the laconic reply.

“I don’t believe it,” said the cowman. “They are grown men.”

“All right,” said Jim, “you can find out for yourself if you want to.”

The man started off after the Professor, and I waited, with a good deal of curiosity, to hear his report of the conversation. On his return he was in a brown study. The Professor had taken him into his tent, and shown him hundreds of mounted insects, reeling off their names to him until his head whirled.

“Well, did I tell you the truth?” Jim asked.

“That man,” said the cowman, “is the smartest man I ever saw. He knows the names and surnames of all the bugs in this country.”

On the thirtieth of April we drove down to the Smoky, thirty miles south of Buffalo, and got caught in a quicksand, but managed to save both team and wagon. We camped at the mouth of a large ravine with plenty of grass in it.

All that night it blew a perfect gale. Did you, dear reader, ever try to sleep in a tent when the wind was high and the canvas flapped about you, waking the fear that at any moment the pegs might pull out or a seam part? Do you know what it is to lie, deafened by thunder and blinded by lightning, while the rain and sleet dash against the thin covering which is all that separates you from the fury of the storm? It is not a pleasant experience, and yet in all the years that I have gone camping, although I have expected time and again to find my tent torn to shreds over my head, my fears have never once been realized. Even in the most terrible storms my tent has stood securely, and I have escaped without serious inconvenience.

On this trip, however, we did have a disagreeable experience. A cold rain continued for four days, and the tent sprang a leak right over my bed. Moreover, the buffalo chips were so wet that we could not build a fire, and had to eat cold food and sleep in wet blankets.

Among the difficulties with which we had to contend on this expedition was a defective wagon wheel. One day, as we were driving along a slope, our lower wheel dished out, and dumped us, load and all, to the ground. Upon examination, we found that the maker had used a hub whose mortises were too large for the spokes. The latter had been held in place by wedges which had been painted over so that they should not be detected. The man who sold us the wagon had guaranteed it for a year, but unfortunately, he lived two hundred miles away. When the necessity arises, however, one can solve any problem somehow; so we took off the tire, put back the spokes and wedges, heated the tire in a fire of buffalo chips, and reset it. We tried to drive carefully after this and avoid sloping places, but it generally happened that when we least expected it, we would fall by the wayside. Most aggravating of all, when we did take the defective wheel back to the man who guaranteed it, he gave us another even more unreliable than the first. It is a mystery to me how manufacturers can play such miserable tricks on their customers.

We were much inconvenienced also by the illness of one of our horses. He often gave out on the open prairie, in one case, I remember, three miles from water. The only vessel we had in which to bring it to camp was a gallon jug, and it kept one person busy getting enough for our use. We were finally obliged to get another horse in place of the sick one; and our bad luck persisting, hit upon one which had evidently been trained to the wheel of a coach, for as soon as the last trace had been hitched, he was off like a shot. Fortunately, his mate could not run as fast, so that they simply went round in a circle, and the boys, watching their chance, caught hold of the wagon and got aboard.

This horse was continually giving us trouble. One day when we were about to cross Hackberry Creek I went ahead with my pick and struck the dry, cracked clay of the bed, to see whether it would hold. As I could not break through, I concluded that we could cross safely, and beckoned to Will Brouse to come on. Whereupon that miserable mustang, taking his bit between his teeth, came down the hill with the load at full speed, and, dashing onto the hardened clay, broke through into the thick mortar below.

The boys, jumping out, managed to get both horses unhitched before they went down, and quickly hitched them to the hind axle of the wagon, to save the load of fossils which we were hauling to the station. Then began a performance of that tantalizing trick which horses know so well how to play. Rowdy would make a rush forward, as if he intended to haul out the load in a hurry, but the moment he felt the collar press his neck, he would fall back against the wheel, while his mate went through the same performance. So they see-sawed up and down, until I could stand it no longer, as the wagon was slowly sinking. I took the lines, and putting all my will-power into the command “Get out of this!” I forced them to pull together and haul the wagon out to solid ground. Then when we unhitched them, they ran away and scattered singletrees, nuts, and bolts all over the prairie.

South of the river we found some fine examples of large Haploscapha shells, some of them a foot in diameter. The valves of this shell are shaped a little like a woman’s bonnet, and the name Conrad gave it, “Haploscapha grandis,” may be freely translated “The great hood.” (Fig. 17.)

We found many fish and saurians or mosasaurs also. Very different was our method of collecting them then from what it is now, for fossil hunting is as capable of improvement as any other form of human endeavor. Then we went over, in a few months, all the chalk in western Kansas, which lines the ravines on either side of the Smoky Hill and its branches for a hundred miles; now it takes us five years to get over the same ground. Then we dug up the bones with a butcher knife or pick, and packed in flour sacks with dry buffalo grass, which we pulled with our fingers. Some strange animals were created by Cope and Marsh in those early days, when they attempted to restore a creature from the few disconnected bones thus carelessly collected. Now we take up great slabs of the chalk, so that we can show the bones in situ, that is, in their original matrix, so that they may be the more easily fitted together in their natural relations with each other.

When, after much careful exploration, we find, sticking out of the edge of a canyon or wash, the bones of some “ancient mariner” of the old Cretaceous ocean, we first lay bare a floor above the bones by picking away the rock. Then I, usually stretched at full length on this floor, with a crooked awl and a brush, uncover the bones enough to be able to determine how they lie, often keeping up the tedious work for hours. When the position of each bone has been ascertained, my son George, who for years has been my chief assistant, and I cut trenches around the specimen, and, hewing down the outside rock two or three inches, make a frame of 2 × 4 lumber, cover the bones with oiled paper, and fill the frame with plaster. As the fossil rarely lies level, it is necessary to have the cover ready to nail on, a board at a time, while the plaster is being poured in. This results in a panel of even thickness, with every bone in or near its original position, or at least in the position in which it was buried.

After the plaster has hardened comes the difficult labor of digging the rock away from underneath. One has to lie on one’s left side and work with a light pick, using great care, so as to cut away the rock just enough to allow the frame to come down by its own weight. If force is used very likely the rock, with its enclosed fossil, will be torn from the frame, and the specimen ruined. Afterwards the rock is leveled off even with the frame, and the bottom nailed on. The case is then placed in a larger box with excelsior carefully packed around it.

The illustration (Fig. 18) shows a huge panel in process of being cut out. George and I spent two weeks of heavy labor upon another. Luckily, it was preserved in chalk hard enough to allow of its being lifted without breaking. The slab was about four inches thick, and weighed at least six hundred pounds, yet he and I handled it entirely alone, getting it boxed and into the wagon ourselves.

My old friend, Dr. S. W. Williston, who in the seventies was in charge of collecting parties for Professor Marsh, and is now a noted authority in paleontology and professor of that science in the University of Chicago, describes this specimen in his great work on North American plesiosaurs, a Field Columbian Museum publication. He says: “The specimen of Dolichorhynchops osborni, herewith described and illustrated [Fig. 20], was discovered by Mr. George Sternberg, in the summer of 1900, and skilfully collected by his father, the veteran collector of fossil vertebrates. The specimen was purchased of Mr. Sternberg in the following spring for the University of Kansas, where it has been mounted and now is. When received at the museum, the skeleton was almost wholly contained in a large slab of soft, yellow chalk, with all its bones disassociated, and more or less entangled together. The left ischium, lying by the side of the maxilla, was protruding from the surface, and part of it was lost. The bones of the tail and some of the smaller podial bones were removed a distance from the rest of the skeleton, and were collected separately by Mr. Sternberg. The head was lying partly upon its left side, and some of the bones of the right side had been macerated away. The maxilla indeed had disappeared.

“The task of removing and mounting the bones has required the labor of Mr. H. T. Martin the larger part of a year, and is as finally mounted, an example of great labor and skill on his part.... The skeleton, as mounted, is just ten feet in length. The neck in life must have been thick and heavy at the base. The trunk was broad; the abdominal region short between the girdles; the short tail was thick at its base. The species was named in honor of Professor H. F. Osborn, of Columbia University.”

In his introduction Dr. Williston speaks of the great scientific value of this specimen of the plesiosaurian family, of which he says: “Thirty-two species and fifteen genera have been described from the United States, and in not a single instance has there been even a considerable part of the skeleton made known.”

I am glad that the University of Kansas owns this splendid denizen of her ancient Cretaceous sea.

My collection in the Royal Museum of Munich is said by Dr. H. F. Osborn to be the finest prepared collection of Kansas Chalk and Texas Permian vertebrates in the world. A recent letter from my friend Dr. Broili, an assistant there, says that the collection contains over eighty-five distinct species of extinct vertebrates. Among these, there are eighteen species and seven genera new to science. Seven papers have been published describing this material, by J. C. Merriam, A. R. Crook, Charles R. Eastman, F. B. Loomis, F. Broili, L. Neumayer, and L. Strickler, respectively; and it has been illustrated by forty plates. The lamented German paleontologist, Dr. Carl von Zittel, under whom I served the Munich museum for several years, wrote me that I had erected here “an immemorial monument” to my name.

Here rests, far from its native shores, the most complete skeleton of the Cretaceous shark, Oxyrhina mantelli Agassiz, ever discovered in any formation. It formed the basis for the inaugural address delivered by Charles R. Eastman before the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.

I discovered this specimen while conducting an expedition for Dr. von Zittel. I was entirely alone, and camping on one of the ravines that score the southern slope of the Smoky Hill valley, south of Buffalo Park. I had already found a number of flattened disks, the centra of fish vertebræ, which Dr. Williston had assured me belonged to a species of shark, as he had found teeth associated with them. I was delighted, therefore, to find here a continuous string of them leading into a low knoll. I quickly shoveled away the loose chalk and cleaned up the floor, to find the whole column, nearly twenty in length; while the skull was represented by great plates of cartilaginous bone, containing some two hundred and fifty teeth from the roof and floor of the mouth. The larger teeth were over an inch long and covered with a shining, dark-colored enamel. They were as sharp and polished as in life, and lay in or near their natural positions.

This is the first time and, I believe, the only time that so complete a specimen of this ancient shark has been discovered. The column and other solid parts were composed of cartilaginous matter which usually decays so easily that it is rarely petrified. I suppose my specimen was old at the time of its death, and bony matter had been deposited in the cartilage. It is not very likely that such a specimen will ever be duplicated. Dr. Eastman’s study of this skeleton enabled him to make synonyms of many species which had been named from teeth alone.

Among the most valuable of my further discoveries in the Kansas chalk beds was that of two nearly complete skeletons of that great sea tortoise, Protostega gigas Cope. The type had already been described by Professor Cope from a number of disconnected bones which he found near Fort Wallace in 1871.

In 1903 I was so fortunate as to find a practically complete skeleton of Protostega gigas in normal condition, that is, with the bones all in or near their original positions. The late Dr. J. B. Hatcher, whose death in the very noonday of his glorious career as a fossil hunter cast a gloom over the world of paleontology, purchased this specimen from me for the Carnegie Museum. It has been described in the Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum by Dr. G. R. Wieland, the authority on extinct turtles, under the title “The Osteology of Protostega.” He says, on page 289: “The third of a century which elapsed since Cope’s discovery of Protostega gigas, has not sufficed to bring forth a complete restoration of any single individual of these great sea-turtles. How welcome then has been the discovery during the last two years by Mr. Charles Sternberg in the Niobrara Cretaceous of western Kansas, of the nearly complete specimens of Protostega gigas which permit the present description of the organization of the limbs, the most important of the parts yet undescribed as well as the very least likely to be recovered in complete form.” (Fig. 21.)

This rare fossil was briefly mentioned by Professor Osborn also in Science as a “complete skeleton of Protostega which lay on its dorsal surface with fore limbs stretched out at right angles to the median line of the carapace, measuring six feet between the ungual phalanges.”

A second specimen, which I discovered and sold directly to Dr. W. J. Holland, the director of the Carnegie Museum, is thus described by Dr. Wieland on page 282 of the Memoirs, under the heading “Specimen No. 1421, Carnegie Museum Catalogue of Vertebrates”:

“This fine fossil is from the Niobrara Cretaceous of Hackberry Creek.” (I should like to correct this mistake. It was found about three miles northwest of Monument Rocks in a ravine that empties into the Smoky, east of where Elkader once stood.) “The ex situ portions of the original skeleton, which had weathered out and are secured in more or less complete condition, include the left humerus, radius, ulna, etc. The in situ portion consists of the right anterior part of the skeleton, and was secured on a single slab of matrix, in which it still remains intact, as shown in the accompanying drawing by Mr. Prentice, including the lower jaw in oblique inferior view, the skull, the T-shaped nuchal (plate) and two marginals. It will be seen what exceedingly satisfactory information is furnished by the present specimen as compared with all other examples of Protostega hitherto found. Specimen 1420 [my first specimen] is more complete than any other at present discovered. As originally embedded in its matrix of chalk, nearly every element was present in an exactly or approximately natural position. Unfortunately, the collector of this surprisingly complete fossil, in an attempt to remove and separate the bones from their original matrix of chalk, mismarked some of them, and also made it impossible to either replace more than a few of the marginal elements, or to determine the outlines of any of the plastral elements. Such work is difficult enough in well-equipped laboratories. However, none of the bones of the limbs are broken, and Mr. Sternberg redeemed himself by discovering and securing in such excellent condition No. 1421, as just related.”

I learn from one of the Museum’s staff that this specimen is to be mounted this summer of 1908, and placed on exhibition. As long as the Carnegie Museum stands, this splendid example of the great sea-tortoise will be admired by lovers of nature. In shape it is very like the present-day turtle of the Mediterranean. Its huge front paddles, with a span of ten feet, were armed with horrid claws. The hind ones were stretched out parallel with the body and used as sculls by this “boatman of the Cretaceous.”

An account of my work in the Kansas Chalk would not be complete without some mention of my discovery, in several small localities, of the crinoid Uintacrinus socialis Grinell. According to Mr. Frank Springer, our noted American authority on this subject, only seven localities were known in 1901; he did not know of my discoveries. I can bear witness with him, though, to the rarity of this species. During the fifteen years in which I have gone over the chalk exposures again and again, I can remember only three localities of these fossils, the Martin locality, another three miles to the east of it, and a third on Butte Creek near Elkader. The first has yielded the finest specimens among those which were described by Mr. Springer in his magnificent treatise on Uintacrinus, published by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

Last year, however, my son George found two splendid specimens about fifty feet apart, further east than they had been discovered before. The locality is south of Quinter, in the southern part of Gove County, thirty-seven miles east of the Martin locality. These two colonies each contained about forty calices. As usual, they are flattened out on the under side of a calcareous slab about a quarter of an inch thick and beveled off as thin as paper at the margins. One slab was sent to the Senckenberg Museum in Germany, while Mr. Springer secured the other.

The calyx, or as we have called it, “the head,” has ten long arms, some of them about thirty inches long.^[1]

These beautiful globular animals were stemless, and evidently lived in swarms, as single specimens are never found. According to Mr. Springer, when death overtook one of these swarms, it fell to the bottom, where the first individuals were buried in the soft mud and preserved, while the others, not being so protected, disintegrated. The limy plates of the calices and those of the arms, which were thus mingled together above the perfect specimens, became compressed into a hard slab, in the bottom of which the perfect specimens are firmly impressed.

Great numbers of these creatures have been discovered in the English chalk, but they consist only of the disintegrated plates.