Charles M. Sternberg went ahead of my expedition to Milk River Station in southern Alberta, exploring on horseback a great stretch of country along the Milk River divide, and east seventy miles, or more, where the great gorge of Milk River cuts a gash five hundred feet into the Belly River Series. Levi and his assistant Gustav Lindblad, also went ahead, and secured our team and outfit from near Drumheller, Alberta, and made the long journey by wagon, so when I reached Milk River Station, I found both boys waiting for me. From Charlie’s report I became convinced that we had come into barren ground. I also found that the so-called Belly River Series of Dawson, who likened it to “an island in sea of drift” was not on Canadian soil, but in the Black Foot Agency Reserve in Montana, where Mr. Gilmore, of the National Museum had discovered new trachodonts, and horned dinosaurs. As I had no authority to visit and collect in this rich field I was obliged to give it up. I was so near, and yet owing to red tape, so far, from a field I had come to explore; expecting to find it on as Mr. Dawson believed, Canadian soil. I have since learned from Mr. Brown, the Associate Curator of Reptiles in the American Museum, and the man I consider the greatest collector of extinct reptiles, that these exposures belong to the Edmonton Series of which we have such splendid exposures on the Red Deer River, in Alberta. This fact has greatly lessened the disappointment. However, as misfortune never comes alone, a thorough exploration of the exposures of Milk River, Alberta, revealed the fact that they too, were quite barren of vertebrae fossils. On the afternoon of the eighth of June, 1915, with all my party together, we drove down to Verdegris coulee, twelve miles east of Milk River Station. It is a comparatively wide valley, rather barren of vegetation. There is a large lake named in honor of the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines, Mr. R. G. McConnell, a short distance above camp, on the coulee. There are rather extensive exposures, along the slopes that lead up from the valley to the prairie a hundred feet above. The lower reaches are purple, yellowish, and reddish clays, and sand into which one sinks while walking. Above is yellowish sandstone that stands out in bold escarpments in places, it is washed into steep slopes. In this coulee I found some fine leaf impressions—Platanus, Poplar, and a splendid palm, shaped like a date palm. The fine palmetto palms, I found above the Lance Beds in Wyoming, were fan-shaped. These, however, have long, lance-shaped leaflets from a common central stem. I described it to Dr. F. H. Knowlton, of the U. S. Geological Survey last winter, and he has never seen anything like it. It is evidently new to science. From a letter received lately I have learned our suppositions were correct. This is the first Palm of this kind seen by men of science from the Cretaceous Age.

At the mouth of Verdegris Coulee, Charlie photographed some remarkable fine rock forms carved out by nature. The photograph showing the urn-shaped mass, was formed by a sand blast operated by the winds, that whirled around the mass that had been separated from the main rock in the recession of cliffs. The top layer being harder than the rest, it was corroded more slowly than the lower and softer layers, producing the wonderful urn. The sand and wind polishing and planing away the rock, as effectually as if had been a broom stick under the action of a lath. I think this one of the most beautiful designs of nature I have ever seen. The second picture Charlie thinks resembles an “Egyptian Sphinx.”

On the 12th of June we reached our camp in the valley of Milk River. In the very center of the exposures, some three miles above where it crosses the International Line, and flows towards the Upper Missouri, in Montana. On the 15th my notes record that I had gone over the entire series of rocks from top to bottom, finding only a few isolated crumbling bones of dinosaurs, of the Belly River Age. The first two hundred feet (speaking approximately, as I had no instruments of precision), of the exposures are chiefly clay, with oyster shells scattered through them; also on top, quite a layer of oyster shells in a yellowish sandstone, filled with iron. Just above are two persistent layers of coal, or very black bituminous shales. One vein, I concluded, must have been between two and three feet thick. There are places where this vein has been worked by farmers, evidently, from the prairie above. As the coal is seventy miles from the railway at Medicine Hat, it is not likely anyone will be found to work it extensively. Above the coal are heavy strata of yellowish or grey clays, with intervening beds of greyish and yellowish sands. On the summit of the badlands are huge concretions, weighing many tons, each lying in yellow sand. In this sand, too, I found the best prospect for fossil bones I have seen in the region. I found a perfect femur of a trachodont running under one of these heavy concretions. Owing to the fact that where there were no concretions, the sand disintegrates so easily, grass and other plants always take possession and cover the sand. So if there are any skeletons here on Milk River they are covered up.

Above the coal veins for about three hundred feet there are beds composed largely of mussels and univalves, showing that great piles of them were heaped in drifts along the ancient shore.

We could have secured tons of these shells, that to all appearances might have died yesterday. Many had the original shell with its pearly lustrous layer attached to the inner cast of mud that filled the shells. Usually, however, when a shell was disturbed it fell off and left the cast in my hands. I learned many things about this great exposure. All the various rocks show they have been laid down under water. I can imagine a great flood plain along the cretaceous ocean at first, just below the surface of the water, that must have been brackish at first for so many oyster shells to accumulate. There were no great reed and rush covered plains where the horned dinosaurs could feed; no bayous or lakes bordered with dense jungles of vegetation, where countless swimming duck-bills enjoyed the luxurious feeding places, but a shallow waste of waters, where oysters secured a precarious foothold. Then the scene changed. The land was raised sufficiently so a rank vegetation of sponge-moss and other forms covered all the rising land until a vast bed of vegetable matter had accumulated, when it went below the sea and was covered with ocean mud and eventually compressed into coal. Then again the land was lifted above high tide, fresh water for many years spread out in shallow sheets over the region in which there was sufficient moss and other vegetation to provide food for the univalves or gastropods, and a multitude of mussels plowed through the muddy sand.

We had so much rain that we were not only delayed, but feared we would never be able to pull our load of baggage out on the prairie. The road we used to get into the valley, made by farmers, was impassible when wet. I became very much discouraged, as there is no harder work for a fossil hunter than to walk day after day over barren ground. Professor Cope once sent me in on a hypothetical fossil hunt. He had decided in his own mind in Philadelphia, that above the Permian beds of Texas there was a new horizon that would yield new extinct animals, he wanted to be the fortunate discoverer of the new fauna. I had, however, explored this region years before, for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I knew it was barren. Owing, however, to his insistence, I yielded my judgment to his, to my cost, and spent a month of useless effort, heart breaking indeed. That was the last time he ever attempted to give me instructions from Philadelphia when I was in the field.

On the 25th of June, after exploring the Milk river country, and finding it barren, we camped on our way back to the rich Red Deer River beds at a point fifteen miles south of Medicine Hat. We had just pitched out tent when a violent wind storm as bad as the winds of Kansas, struck us, accompanied with rain. We escaped serious trouble, but a little town west of Medicine Hat was badly wrecked, where the wind developed into a genuine cyclone that tore down houses and scattered chimneys and loose boards over the prairie. Thanking God for our escape we passed north next day. At Medicine Hat I went ahead by train and left the boys to follow with the wagon. From Brooks I went over to Steveville. On reaching the river, however, I found it was at full flood and covered with driftwood, logs and hewn timber. The ferryman, Mr. Shaw, came over for me in a row boat, and I had so much confidence in him as a river man that I trusted myself to his keeping. His skill with the oar brought me safely over the raging Red Deer River. He avoided all the logs and other driftwood, and landed me in safely on the northern shore. Even then I found the river had backed water up the creek between the ferry and Steveville, and I had to walk a long ways to get above the backwater. After quite a journey I reached the hospitable hotel of Steve Hall. It was a full week before the boys reached me and we got once more into camp. They were delayed by the high water.