About the first of July, 1877, I received orders to go north to the Loup Fork River in Nebraska to search for vertebrate fossils in beds of the Upper Miocene, called by Hayden the Loup Fork Group. I happened to meet, however, an old line hunter, Abernathy by name, who had brought into Buffalo his last load of buffalo hides, and he told me that a little above his cabin, on the middle branch of Sappa Creek in Decatur County, there was the skull of a mastodon, sticking out of the solid rock.

As a visit to his house would not take me far out of my way, I followed his lead; and thanks to the observation of this old hunter, who was scalped in front of his door the next year by a band of hostile Kiowas, I had the privilege of discovering the rich fossil beds of the Loup Fork Group in northwestern Kansas, and found enough to do without crossing into Nebraska.

The whole country north of Buffalo was without human habitation until we reached the old man’s cabin. On our way there, as we were driving one sultry day down the long slope to the south branch of the Soloman, we chanced to look behind us, and as high as the eye could reach, the air was as black as midnight with flying dust, dry grass, and buffalo chips. Experience had taught us what all this meant. Will Brouse laid the whip to the ponies, but they did not need it. They, too, had taken fright, and tore down the hill at breakneck speed. On reaching the valley, we came upon a perpendicular bluff, over twenty feet high, impinging on the level flat, and Will swung the horses under its protecting shelter. We sprang out, and while one of us unhitched and tied the horses, the rest caught hold of the wagon and held it down. In an instant all was dark, while the rush of a mighty wind swept over us with a terrible roar and passed on, leaving a calm in its wake. As we followed its trail along the river, we found large trees twisted off at the stump or broken to pieces, their branches scattered like straws.

About sundown one evening, the old man pointed out, in a side draw of the middle fork of the Sappa, his mastodon. I sprang from the wagon, shouting, “It’s a monster turtle!” And so it proved to be, a great land turtle, over thirty inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, and fifteen inches high; Testudo orthopygia Cope called it. The back of the carapace was sticking out of a ledge of grey sandstone. We applied our picks, and soon had the specimen collected. (Fig. 22.)

Now began an extremely interesting search for this new fauna in Kansas. The rocks in this part of the state usually consist of gray sand cemented together with washed chalk and soluble silica. The foundation on which these beds were deposited is the Niobrara Group of the Cretaceous. The river beds were cut in this soft lime, and later on the wash of the land mingled the whiting with the sand and gravel which the streams brought down from the mountains. The tops of the hills are capped with this conglomerate gray sandstone in ledges many feet in thickness, and as the materials composing it easily disintegrate, great masses of it lie at the bases of the cliffs, resembling old mortar. I called them mortar beds, and the stratigraphers have adopted the name. Indeed, they are mortar beds not only in name, from a fancied resemblance to mortar, but in fact, as all the early settlers can testify. It was no trouble for them to find beds so soft that the material could easily be dug out, and when mixed with water and spread with trowels over the inside walls of a sod house, it made a very comfortable home. When it comes to comfort, the settlers of the short-grass country have gained nothing by building frame instead of sod houses. The early settler’s sod house was cool in summer and warm in winter, and those who live in more modern houses in order to keep up with the times will even now speak with regret of the change.

Not only did I secure a number of specimens of these great turtles, so abundant at this time, but also large quantities of the remains of a rhinoceros. Cope thought it hornless, and named it Aphelops megalodus, but since then Hatcher has found that the male bore a loose horn on the end of the nasal bones.

I also got specimens of the great inferior tusked mastodon, Trilophodon campester Cope. This remarkably primitive mastodon had a lower jaw that projected beyond the molar teeth for two feet in a straight line, with a socket on either side, containing two powerful tusks that terminated in chisel points. One specimen, which I discovered in 1882 for the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, had a jaw four feet long, including the tusks, which extended eighteen inches beyond the end of the jaw.

A set of jaws was brought me by my son last fall. It belongs to a new form of this gigantic pachyderm, which, during the Loup Fork times, inhabited northwestern Kansas and a vast territory west and northwest as far as the John Day basin in eastern Oregon. A remarkable peculiarity of this specimen is that the symphysis is greatly elongated and curves downward thirteen inches below the level of the alveolus, which bears the great molar teeth. This individual was an old animal, as he had shed his first dentition and all the premolars and molars of the second except the very last, those which we call wisdom teeth. Even these are well worn; so the days of the mastodon’s life must have been numbered even if he had escaped his enemy, the great saber-toothed tiger, which preyed on him and the other herbivorous animals of the day.

The length of these remarkable jaws is four feet and one inch. The height at the condyle, where they connect with the skull, is thirteen and a half inches; length of molar, nine and a quarter inches; height of crown, two and one-half inches; distance between the two molars, four inches. The sockets for the great inferior tusks are two feet long and six inches in diameter, and the huge recurved tusks themselves must have been over four feet long. Only a sight of these peculiar jaws, with tusks above and below, can give the reader an idea of the formidable appearance of this early mastodon. By the large size and downward curvature of the lower tusks, this mastodon suggests the great Dinotherium of the Lower Pliocene of Europe. I regret for America’s sake, but I am glad for the sake of the world, that these jaws of the largest mammal ever found in Kansas will find their last resting-place in the great British Museum, where many of my finest discoveries have gone.

Another splendid set of lower jaws I found in 1905 in the Sternberg Quarry, of which I shall speak later, for the Royal Museum of Munich, Bavaria. Part of the symphysis was broken off, as were also the inferior tusks. The length of the jaw as preserved is two feet, six inches and a half, and the height of the condyle, fourteen inches. In the center of the grinding surface, the height is nine and a half inches. The length of the molar is about seven and a half inches, and the width three and a half. This is Professor Cope’s Trilophodon.

We found near this mastodon many chisel-like tusks that had fallen out of their respective jaws and lay scattered with the other bones. By comparing this specimen with the new species, it will be noticed that there is quite a difference in size, though evidently they were about the same age, as in both cases all the teeth have been discarded except the last molars.

The teeth of these animals were kept sharp by the sand that adhered to the roots on which they lived. Falling into the pits and valleys between the crests of enamel, it scoured away the dentine and cementum, and kept the great grinders ever sharp and ready for use. It is a distinguishing characteristic of these early mastodons that their tusks have a strip of enamel along the inside, while the modern elephants’ tusks have only a vestige of enamel at the extreme tip that is quickly worn off.

Another remarkable inhabitant of Kansas during the Loup Fork Period was the three-toed horse, an animal but little larger than the new-born colt of an ordinary farm horse, which evidently lived in herds, judging from the great quantity of loose teeth that we have found. Its toes were spreading, which enabled it to walk over bogs and mossy quagmires on the shores of lakes or rivers, and thus escape the fangs of bloodthirsty tigers by venturing farther out on the soft ground than they dared to follow.

In 1882, while employed by the Agassiz Museum, I found the famous Sternberg Quarry at Long Island on Prairie Dog Creek in Phillips County. I had been exploring for weeks the region at the head of the branches of Deer Creek, which spread out in the divide like a fan; but although once in a while, especially in the neighborhood of Bread Bowl Mound, I had found fragments of the bones of Loup Fork animals in the sod, I had not met with much success, as the rocks here disintegrate so easily and hold moisture so readily that the whole country is covered with grass. There are thirty-three streams in this county as a result of the immense amount of moisture which accumulates in these sandstone beds and is carried to the surface in springs.

One very hot day I started to cross the divide to Prairie Dog Creek. I had the wagon sheet stretched over the bows, the sides lifted to admit the breeze, and sleepy with the heat, I let the horses go on about as they pleased; not noticing, until the level rays of the sun warned me that it was time to camp, that I had gone farther east than I had intended. I had my camp outfit with me, however, and as I saw a bunch of trees in a ravine a mile from the creek I knew that there must be water there. So the three requisites, grass, wood, and water, were at hand.

After pitching the tent, and starting supper, I found to my delight a large exposure of hard siliceous rock, consisting of sand and chalk held firmly together by soluble sand, which proved to be the bottom ledge of a deposit of gray sandstone. I soon found above it a mastodon’s bones. My joy knew no bounds, however, when following the narrow draw up to its head, I found that it cut through a quarry of rhinoceros bones, which were sticking out of the sand on either side, while the narrow ditch at the bottom was filled with toe bones, complete or in fragments, and broken skulls and teeth without number. I have collected fossil vertebrates and plants since I was seventeen years old, but this is the greatest deposit of fossils that I have ever discovered.

I shall never forget how, carried away with enthusiasm, I took possession in the name of Science of the largest bone bed in Kansas. I did not stop to ask whether anyone else had any interest in the land, nor did I think it necessary. I had grown so used in my own case to putting aside every other consideration for the sake of the advancement of science that it did not occur to me that anyone else might take a different view. But one day, as I was working in the ravine, an old man, plowing corn, drove up to its eastern edge. When he made the turn, he chanced to look across and saw me, pick in hand, diligently uncovering the skull of a rhinoceros from the sandbank on the other side. He instantly shouted with all the strength of his lungs, “What are you doing?”

“Digging up antediluvian relics,” I shouted back. We both shouted as if we were a hundred yards apart.

“Well,” he called, “get out of there!”

“All right,” I answered in the same loud tones, and kept on working.

The old man, whose name I learned later was Mr. Overton, disappeared, and I heard no more of him until I went into Long Island for food, or grub as they say in the West, and was told that he had come in to a justice of the peace and asked for a warrant to arrest me for collecting these old bones. He never again came directly to me, either that year or the following, but people told me that he went around to all the justices in that part of the country, trying to get his warrant. Finally, however, they managed to convince him that I was not harming him, and was benefiting science.

Two years later, in 1884, I was employed by the late Professor Marsh to explore this same fossil bed. The bones which I was after now were covered by fourteen feet of moulding sand and a four-foot ledge of hard rock, the heavier bones lying on the sandstone, the lighter ones mingled with the sand above. This sand and rock had to be removed by pick and scraper, which meant that there was a large amount of heavy labor before us. Therefore, having more means at my command than I had had before, I drove up to Mr. Overton’s door and offered him forty dollars a month to work for us with his team during the whole summer, with the understanding that I was to have all the fossils found. This offer he gladly accepted, and I found him a very careful worker. Not only did he do the rough work well, but when we got a floor laid bare above the bones, he proved to be a most careful collector. My other assistant on this expedition was a Mr. Will Russ, who afterwards became a skilful dentist.

Our method of work was first to cut down and remove the sand and rock for a space twenty feet wide and perhaps a hundred long, using a plow and scraper. Then we cleaned up our floor and uncovered the bones with oyster knives and other tools which we had made to suit our purpose. One, I remember, was a hoe straightened out at the shank and cut off at the corners to make a diamond-shaped tool. With this we could work under the high bank, and take out specimens which we could not reach otherwise. Trowels and diggers of various patterns were used also.

The bones which we were collecting lay scattered along both sides of the ravine for a quarter of a mile, often in pockets or pot-holes in the gray sandstone. Of this there are two layers, about fourteen feet apart, the interspace being filled with beds of fine moulding sand, with some whiting from the underlying chalk, which constituted the land surface when these fresh-water beds were deposited. There are also beds of sand that have been washed clean by the currents of the flood-plain of some ancient river, for the exposed section shows all the different deposits of an overflowed valley. Above the washed sand is a stratum of sand and clay, indicating that here was a quiet place where the muddy backwater deposited its load. This layer, upon exposure, cracks in all directions, like the mud at the bottom of a puddle after the water has evaporated.

It has always been a problem to account for the number of the animals represented here, and for the fact that the bones are so scattered. All parts of the skeletons are mingled in the greatest confusion, with no two bones in a natural position. One is, of course, forced, after an observation of this country, to agree with Drs. Matthew and Hatcher that these bones were deposited in the flood-plain of a running stream and not in great lakes, as was believed by older geologists. But the only supposition upon which I can account for the intermingling of all the bones of the skeletons on the bottom sandstone layer is that the fine sand through which the bones were distributed, becoming saturated with water, was converted into a quicksand, in which the bones sank until they reached the impenetrable layer below; the heavier bones of course being at the bottom.

What caused the death of the countless individuals in the Sternberg Quarry, is a question not easily answered. The authorities quoted above believe that during the Upper Miocene Period, there were many water-courses separated, by slightly elevated divides and broad flood-plains, with possibly here and there small lakes, where the dense vegetation had clogged some sluggish stream. But during a rainy season of unusual duration, the whole region for many miles must have been converted into a series of lakes; and all the animals in the vicinity, after having gathered at the highest points they could find to escape death, must have been finally overwhelmed by some great flood that covered every inch of ground. Then after maceration took place, the bones might have been scattered by other floods.

A theory of my own, equally plausible, is that the animals were buried beneath a sandstorm, which tore loose the fine sand of the flood-plain, and scattered it in suffocating volumes over the frightened multitudes which had herded together in search of safety or courage.

This land, now three thousand feet above sea level, was only a few feet above when these rhinoceroses moved over it in countless herds. Everywhere were swamps filled with sponge moss, and tropical streams, whose wealth of vegetation formed thick jungles along their banks. On firmer ground, great areas were covered with a dense growth of rushes, through which the paths of these animals were the only trails; while higher up still, the soft damp soil gave a foothold to forests, through which the great mastodons sounded their trumpet calls, as they roamed about, tearing up trees with their powerful trunks and feasting upon the rich, juicy roots.

That year, 1884, in which I explored the quarry at Long Island, was a memorable one, not only because we secured a large carload of rhinoceros bones, but also because we had with us Mr. J. B. Hatcher, who afterwards helped to build up three great museums of vertebrate paleontology,—the museums of Yale and Princeton and the Carnegie Museum. With the last he was connected at the time of his death in 1904, just twenty years after he made his first collection of vertebrate fossils with me. A bright, earnest student, he gave promise of a future even then by his perfect understanding of the work in hand and the thoughtful care which he devoted to it. I have always been glad that I had the honor of being his first teacher in the practical work of collecting, although he soon graduated from my department, and requested me to let him take one side of the ravine while I worked the other. He employed Mr. Overton’s son with a plow and scraper, and got out a magnificent collection with no further instructions from me.

That same year Professor Marsh came to my quarry and leased it from the owner, and I never saw it again until 1905, when I came into my own once more, and in addition to the splendid mastodon, mentioned earlier in this chapter, found the material for two perfect mounts of the rhinoceros. One is to be mounted at Munich, the other at Bonn.

With Professor Osborn’s consent, I give a photograph of the fine specimen (Fig. 25) which Dr. Wortman secured in 1894 from this quarry for the American Museum. A vast collection from the same spot is stored in the National Museum in its original packages, with which I filled a car in 1884. I saw there a whole case filled with the skulls of the rhinoceros Teleoceras fossiger, which I secured in great numbers at Long Island.

It is strange to think that the foundation on which these beds of fresh-water deposits lie unconformably is the great Cretaceous sea bottom, whose tilted and uplifted strata tower two thousand feet above the carboniferous rocks in eastern Kansas. The Republican, Smoky Hill, and Kansas rivers have carved their way through all these strata, so that by following down these streams, one can get cross sections of the country.

I have often asked men who were sure that there must be coal beneath the surface, why, instead of hiring a man to dig a hole for them, they did not hitch up their buggies and follow the valley of the Smoky Hill, beginning at the Colorado line. The first stratum exposed is of course the recent, with its sandy loam; in it, here and there, a crumbling buffalo skull or an eroded implement. Then comes the Pleistocene deposit, consisting of clay, sand, and fragments of rock mingled together. From this formation I secured over two hundred teeth of the great Columbian Mammoth. Next come beds of black shale with giant septaria, the Fort Pierre Group of the Cretaceous, whose upper beds we explored in Montana in 1876 for dinosaurs. In this formation, in Kansas, I found a new species of Clidastes. The specimens are now in the Kansas University collection, and the species has been named by Dr. Williston Clidastes westi, in honor of the Kansas University collector, the late Judge E. P. West.

We have not gone far down the river below the forks, before this formation, which at McAllister topped the hills, passes under the river. Then reddish and blue chalks occupy the country for some miles, and in turn disappear to give place to yellowish and blue chalks, which finally make way for the blue and almost white chalks that run under the river near the mouth of Hackberry Creek in eastern Gove County.

At White Rock in Trego County the hard white limestone, in fortification blocks, is piled ninety feet high. Further down appears the post limestone of the Fort Benton Group, with its characteristic Inoceramus shells; while in central Kansas, brown and white sandstone and brilliantly colored clays occupy the whole region for sixty miles, giving place at last to the hard limestones and the friable shales and sandstones of the Upper Carboniferous. No coal, except very shallow veins in the Upper Carboniferous and the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous, has even been found in this big ditch, which, less than a quarter of a mile wide at the head of the Smoky Hill branch at Wallace, broadens out to a width of several miles at the mouth of the Kansas River.

It is impossible to compute the vast amount of mineral matter which has been cut out from these Kansas plains and carried by the river into the Mississippi and on to the Gulf. Since the first narrow trench cut its way through the hardened ooze of the Cretaceous ocean bed, all the flood-plains of the Missouri and the Mississippi below Kansas City have been enriched by the material that once covered these valleys of Kansas, and the delta below New Orleans has been partly built up by it.

It may interest my readers and give them a glimpse into the daily routine of a fossil hunter’s life, if I quote one or two notes from a diary which I kept during my work in these Loup Fork beds.

“Friday, July 11.—This is to record the most successful day since we have been in the field. We have collected three sets of under-jaws, three skulls. It has been extremely hot. We have put in eight hours of hard work.”

“Saturday, July 12.—To-day I got out and packed our three skulls and three lower jaws. They were within the space of a square yard. We got some very fine bones, and best of all, a perfect front foot in position, a perfect humerus, a perfect femur, except proximal articulation, the premaxilla of a cat with a huge canine (saber-toothed tiger). We got great quantities of the bones of the feet, an axis, and one other vertebræ in good state of preservation, a fine scapula, etc. This afternoon has been the hottest day of the season, but this evening the wind changed to the north, and it is quite cool. I got in addition to the specimens mentioned a maxilla of a saber-toothed tiger. The enormous young canine was two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide.”

I might go on and quote indefinitely, but the story would be about the same. I recall, however, one or two incidents connected with my work in this field, which may be amusing or interesting to my readers.

Once in 1882, while collecting for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University, I met an old gentleman and his dear old wife, the hair of both showing upon it the snows of many winters, sitting on a board laid across a dry-goods box to which two wagon wheels had been attached. A team of ponies harnessed with rope instead of leather, with lines of the same material, completed the outfit. The old man and his wife sat up very straight and dignified and demanded of me what I was doing in that part of the country.

“Oh,” I answered, “I’m looking for rhinoceros bones in the loose sand of the hills here.”

“Well,” the old man said, “I am interested in these old bones myself. I don’t claim to be a scholar; in fact, I am quite illiterate, but I think when this earth was in a molten state, these old hippopotamuses wallowed around in the mud and got congealed in the rocks.”

The following incident I did not find quite so amusing. One day I discovered turtle shells sticking out on either side of a narrow gulch which cut through a large deposit of sand. In digging out those already in sight, I found many more; collecting in all some twenty fine specimens, but all quite small. Following down the gorge, I discovered that it opened out, on Beaver Creek in Rawlins County, into a great amphitheater several acres in extent and almost denuded of vegetation; an ideal place for fossil hunting, as the elements had been digging out and removing the sand for ages. And sure enough, I soon stumbled upon the complete shell and skeleton, four feet in diameter, of a specimen of Cope’s Testudo orthopygia; but it nearly broke my heart to find that while the specimen had weathered out in a perfect condition, some vandal—for I shall ever maintain that the wanton destruction of life that now is or of the remains of life that once was, is wicked,—some man had chopped it all to pieces with a mattock.

Passing on in a not very pleasant frame of mind, I came upon another individual of huge proportions, which had suffered the same fate, and then upon another; all that this rich-looking ground afforded had been utterly ruined.

Angry at the thought that any man should commit such sacrilege,—for to me these footsteps of the Creator in the sands of time are sacred,—and bitterly disappointed, since I knew that I should very likely never again come upon such huge specimens of the reptilian life of that age, I walked into camp blinded by hot tears, and failed to notice a stranger who was sitting there on a box.

“Some infernal vandal has been up this ravine,” I shouted to Will, “and dug up with a mattock three of the finest turtles I ever saw.”

As if he had been shot, the man jumped from the box and exclaimed in accents of heartfelt contrition, “It was me. I was out here digging roots to build a fire with, and ran across them. I didn’t know they had any value, and I wanted to see what was inside of them and dug into them.”

His surprise and dismay were so comical that the murder vanished from my heart, and overwrought as I was, I broke out into a fit of uncontrollable laughter which used me up for the rest of the day.

Another time I had a rather unusual experience. My assistant, a Mr. Wright, and I were digging out rhinoceros bones on Sappa Creek. We had noticed a house on the other side of the creek, although dense timber cut off most of its surroundings, and happening to look toward it once, we saw a girl of about sixteen years rush out from the timber and begin to climb the steep hill toward us. I never saw anyone run so fast up so steep a hill. Her strength failed her, however, when she got to us, and it was some time before she could tell her story. It seems that her mother had gone out to milk, and as the ground was slippery from a rain of the night before, she had fallen and dislocated one of the bones in the palm of her hand.

All the men were away and had taken all the horses, and it was seventeen miles to the nearest doctor. The girl, knowing that we were digging up bones, had concluded that we could set them, and had come to us for help. Although I had never attempted anything of the kind before, I could not resist the poor child’s appeal and went to the house. The mother lay moaning on her bed, and would answer nothing when I asked whether I should try to set her hand. But as the girl was very desirous that I should make the attempt, I decided to do so. So while Mr. Wright held the arm, I put splints and a roller bandage under the hand, which was laid on a table, and then forcibly pushed the bone back into its natural position. After which I bandaged the hand tightly. I left directions with the girl to hang a can of water with a small hole in it over the hand, so that the water might drip on it and by evaporation cool it and prevent inflammation. My instructions were carried out by the brave girl, and her mother’s hand was soon as well as ever.

In these last chapters I have often wandered far afield, for it would have taken too long to relate all the events of my various expeditions in consecutive order. Hoping that my readers will pardon the digressions, I return to the expedition of 1877.

Russell Hill proved a most efficient assistant, and it has always grieved me that he should in later years have given up work in the fossil fields for the practice of medicine. Will Brouse, too, was an enthusiastic worker; he was not satisfied to be relegated to the pots and kettles and horses, and not only did his duty as our teamster and cook, but soon accomplished almost, if not quite as much in the field as any one of us. I never had a more congenial party in all the years of my field work.

But one day in August I received a bulky letter from Professor Cope. “Turn over all the outfit to Mr. Hill,” he wrote, “and go at once to a new field discovered in the desert of eastern Oregon. Go to Fort Klamath, Oregon, and from there to Silver Lake, to a man by the name of Duncan, the postmaster. He will guide you to the fossil bed in the heart of the sage-brush desert. You will likely find human implements mingled with extinct animals. You are to go secretly; tell no one where you are going. Have your mail sent by a circuitous route, so you cannot be traced.”

I received the Professor’s order with excitement and great joy; but in spite of his injunction to start at once and without communicating my intention to anyone, I could not bring myself to leave for the Pacific Coast, to be gone for an indefinite time, without bidding good-by to my father and mother, and I concluded that even if someone should find out where I was going and try to follow me I could easily give him the slip and get to the field first.

Buffalo, the nearest railway station, was seventy-five miles away, a two days’ journey, with our big load of fossils. So I mounted my riding pony and made the long trip the next day, reaching the station at sunset, tired and sore. My pony, however, endowed with the enduring power characteristic of a good Indian pony, was still fresh enough to shy at a rattlesnake in the road, and as I happened to be sitting sideways in the saddle, throw me to the ground within a few feet of the snake.

That night I went to my home in Ellsworth County, bade my dear ones good-by for an indefinite length of time, and was back at Buffalo again at midnight of the following day. My boys met me at the station with my roll of blankets, tools, and baggage, and away I went to “fresh fields and pastures new.”