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