THE HIGH PLAINS: that is the
country that stretches west from
the cultivated prairie to the
foothills of the Rockies, — a broad level
plain covered mostly with buffalo
grass and other short grasses, suited for
cattle raising and generally used that
way, although every here and there one
finds an optimistic "nester" or "Kin-
caider" who has fenced in a homestead
and is trying to make a living from it.
This plain stretches from South
Dakota to Texas, but the highest and
the most typical portion of it lies east
of Denver in eastern Colorado and
western Kansas. Many rivers traverse
it from west to east, running in broad,
shallow, flat-bottomed valleys, flanked
usually by a line of scarped cliffs, cut
in the soft rocks that underlie the
plains. These escarpments are carved
by wind and weather into strange,
irregular, and often fantastic outlines,
and broaden out here and there into a
maze of gullies and canons most
appropriately called mauvaises terres —
bad lands — by the early explorers and
settlers, for they are bare of vegetation,
difficult to traverse whether on horse
or on foot. Their maze of winding,
waterless gullies form a trap for the
inexperienced, either man or animal.
There is little or no feed to attract the
cattleman or sheep-herder, no chance
of finding valuable mineral deposits to
lure the prospector to these bad lands.
There is just one valuable crop to be
obtained there — fossils. They are the
happy hunting grounds for the "bone-
digger."
In the early days of the West, the
"breaks" and bad lands served as a
refuge and lurking ground for hostile
Indians, and later for cattle rustlers
and bandits. Today they are peace-
able enough, where still wild and un-
settled; their picturesque beauty and
fantastic marvels of sculptured rock
and cliff make them a place of pilgrim-
age for visitors. Many of the more
remarkable and historic buttes and,
canons, landmarks on the early trails,
have been set aside and protected as
national monuments or state or local
parks, and are visited by thousands of
tourists.
The earhest fossils from the Plains
were brought in by fur traders from St.
Louis, who penetrated as far as the big
bad lands of the Cheyenne River, and
brought back fossil teeth and bones and
battered skulls as evidence of their
story of the great cemetery of strange
beasts. These were studied and
described by Joseph Leidy in 1847-55.
Then came the preliminary reconnois-
sances for the transcontinental rail-
ways, and larger parties, usually pro-
tected by military escorts, traveled and
mapped the various routes and re-
ported upon their topography, geology,
and economic possibilities, and inciden-
tally made a more or less systematic
search for fossils. This opened up a
most promising new field for scientific
discoveiy, and two able young scien-
tists. Cope of Philadelphia and Marsh
of New Haven, devoted their energy
and resources to its exploration with a
success that drew the attention of the
whole scientific world, and inspired a
large school of American palseontolo-
440
< g
< o
I— I 03
5 M 03
O M
Ml
E-l IB
o >,
o: o
O C3 g
W CO 'S
iJ -< -i3
02 (M O
0? m
EARLY DA YS OF FOSSIL HUNTING IN THE HIGH PLAINS 451
gists. The sharp personal rivahy
between these two men, while it had
some unpleasant features, served to
spur both to their utmost effort and
hastened the development of method
and technique in collecting as well as
the publication of results.
The building of the transcontinental
railroads made the western bad lands
accessible for small collecting parties.
Indians had ceased to be a danger, and
a group of expert fossil hunters, among
whom Hatcher, Wortman, and Stern-
berg were leaders, developed the rather
simple technique of collecting and
practical handling of a field party to fit
the conditions of the western field.
The necessary equipment could be
purchased at any considerable trading
center. A team and wagon, a couple
of saddle horses, tents, camp stove, etc.,
were the chief necessary equipment;
each man's personal baggage and
bedding roll were usually brought from
home. The latter consisted of camping
blankets and ''tarp," — -a canvas sheet
6X16 feet of heavy duck, which, when
properly folded, protected against
anything short of a flood. A newcomer
often brought a sleeping bag instead of
the regular tarp. With provisions for
the party and a few bags of oats for the
horses, the outfit would pull out for the
bad lands, and camp at some point
where water and grass were at hand.
Sometimes this was near a ranch house
or homestead, more often not, for the
important point was to get as far into
the bad lands as practicable.
The day's work consisted in "look-
ing out " as much as one could cover of
the rock formation exposed in canons
and gullies, prowling over the weath-
ered slopes, and climbing along the
steeper cliffs, watching always for the
peculiar colors and forms of weathered
bone fragments, following up every
trail of fragments to its source, and
prospecting cautiously with a light
pick or digging chisel to see what, if
anything, is left in the rock. Such a
prospect came often as a blessed relief
after hours of climbing and scrambling
had reduced one to a state of stagger-
ing weariness. If it was a valuable
find, it might mean some hours or days
of work to prospect and collect. More
often, of course, it was a minor find, a
jaw or a few bones, and still more fre-
quently nothing worth while would be
there. Even at that it was an excuse
for a little rest, and one could go on
hopefully, praying for better luck next
time. Toward sunset one must get
back to camp, tired and discouraged
by an unsuccessful day, or compara-
tively fresh and cheerful with a new
discovery to report. Perhaps it might
be a complete skull or a skeleton of
some rare or imperfectly known fossil;
perhaps some species altogether new to
science, — in any case a prize that paid
for much weariness and many dis-
appointments. Then supper, a pipe,
and to bed, and the same routine re-
peated the next day and the next,
until all the bad lands within practical
reach of the camp — five miles on foot,
ten with the help of saddle horses —
have been prospected, and another
camping site must be found. There the
same order of work is repeated, and so
on until the season closes or the bad
lands area has all been "looked out."
By the end of the season a very con-
siderable collection has accumulated,
and one realizes with some surprise
that what seemed desperately poor
pickings has after all yielded an im-
portant collection.
Of the technique of collecting and
preparing fossils, I need say nothing
here; that has been fully explained in
other numbers of Natural History.
Bone Cabin Quarry, Wyoming, with camp in background. In the group of workers
are Messrs. Lull, Granger, Schneider, and Kaisen
Camp at Hell Basin, Washakie bad lands, Wyoming
Wasatch l^ad lands near Otto. Wyoming. — This Coryphodon skull had entirely weathered
out into small fragments. The earth was swept up and carried seven miles to a stream,
washed and sieved, and then pieced together in the Museum, forming a complete skull and
jaws. The two men are Messrs. Riggs and Brown
^;jaJ
Hypohi-ppus skeleton in rock (Miocene-Lower Pliocene). Davis ranch near Grover,
Colorado
453
454
NATURAL HISTORY
Stratigraphic studies and exact records
of geological level were developed in the
nineties, and added a new and fascinat-
ing interest to the work, as one could
actually trace in the succession of strata
the progressive evolution of the differ-
ent races, verifying in specimen after
specimen the primitive characters of
those from the lower layers, the pro-
gressive character of those from the
upper layers, and the intermediate
conditions in specimens from the middle
beds. No one carries a more solid
conviction of the truth of evolution
than the field palaeontologist. He has
seen it with his own eyes, and it is
quite useless for learned pundits of the
pulpit or the laboratory to tell him
that evolution is only a hypothesis, or
that palaeontology does not prove
anything about it. He knows better;
he has seen it himself ineffaceably in-
scribed in the records of the past.
The coming of the automobile has
revolutionized the fossil-hunting busi-
ness. For one thing, it has greatly
widened the range of practical field
work. The old conditions limited it to
a radius of five or ten miles from water
and feed. A ''dry camp" supplied at
intervals with food and water might
carry the exploration a stage further,
but throughout the West, especially
between the Rockies and the Sierras,
there were enormous areas of bad-land
exposures that it was not practicable
to prospect adequately for lack of
water or feed. With the automobile
there is probably no promising exposure
so distant but that it can be, and will
be prospected for fossils. Moreover,
the range of a daj'^'s collecting with an
automobile is so greatly increased,
that most areas in the Plains can be
prospected from some near-by settle-
ment, and it hardly pays even to camp
out. The old days of the open range
have passed; much of the country
is fenced up and a good part of it home-
steaded, and the residents no longer
welcome strangers with the old un-
questioning cordial greeting. The bad
lands of the Plains, the old hunting
grounds of the bone-digger, are not
exhausted of their fossils. They never
will be, for storms and weathering
expose an ever renewed supply. But
some of the joys of discovery have
passed; the new fossils are apt to be
like those previously known. And the
collecting methods are a bit more
prosaic. The old delightful camping
routine, with its pioneer equipment
and unhindered freedom of exploration,
has shifted and changed to automobile
travel in the deserts and platea'is of
the Great Basin and intermontane
states, a field for discovery which will
take many years to cover. The high
plains, too, will always be a great
fossil field, but the romance of their
discovery and exploration by the
early fossil hunters belongs to the
past.
Early Fossil Hunting in the Rocky Mountains
By RICHARD SWANN LULL
Professor of PaliEontology, Yale University; Director, Peabody Museum
IT was in 1868 that the pioneer
among American palaeontologists,
Othniel Charles Marsh, made his
first trip to the Rocky Mountains for
fossils, a trip that was to stimulate a
life-long interest in these relics of the
past, one ultimate result of which was
the amassing of the great collections at
Yale. Of all the material Marsh
assembled, none made a greater appeal,
both to himself and the pubHc imagina-
tion, than did the horses among
mammals and the dinosaurs among
reptiles, representatives of which he
found on this initial trip. The Peabody
Museum still treasures the original
horse specimen, Protohi'p'pus parvulus,
which Professor Marsh found in west-
ern Nebraska, but the identity of the
dinosaur bone which he discovered has
been lost sight of in the passage of
time. The year 1870 saw the inaugura-
tion of the first formal expedition from
Yale, followed by others in the succeed-
ing years until 1873, after which the
work was conducted in another way.
The personnel of these early expedi-
tions was made up of Yale men, seniors
or recent graduates, who paid their
own way, giving their services for the
sake of the thrill of big-game hunting,
both living and extinct, and the ad-
venture of exploration in unknown
fields. Marsh had keen insight in his
choice of men, for, while few of the
members of his parties became pro-
fessional palaeontologists, they, almost
without exception, had worthy careers
in other walks of life, two, at least,
becoming members of the Yale Cor-
poration and several becoming mem-
bers of her faculties.
On the material side these expedi-
tions were remarkably successful, espe-
cially when one remembers that the
vicissitudes encountered were not en-
tirely those of the physical environ-
ment. Tons of specimens were brought
in, collected from a virgin field and
revealing at almost every turn dis-
coveries new to science; species, genera,
and new orders of creatures, the very
existence of which had been beyond
imagination. One only wishes that the
methods of collecting had been more
refined, but the present technique had
not yet been developed, and the
extreme value of the specimens com-
pensates for shortcomings of original
attainment.
After 1873 the student expeditions
ceased, although they had done yeo-
man service in Kansas, Nebraska, and
Wyoming, and from Colorado to
Oregon. This was due in part to in-
creasing Indian difficulties and in part,
we imagine, to Professor Marsh's
desire to collect more intensively in
certain regions or horizons, as he was
beginning to amass material for his
projected monographs on dinosaurs,
horses, titanotheres, Odontornithes,
and others. To this end he had paid
collectors, some of whom had served
the earHer expeditions as cook, horse
wrangler, or guide, and not only knew
the country but had of necessity
learned something of the rather crude
technique of that day.
Other young men who were regularly
connected with the Museum were also
sent into the field, and some of these,
notably S. W. WilHston and J. B.
Hatcher, were not only highly produc-
456
456
NATURAL HISTORY
tive of material for the Yale Museum,
but became, subsequently, men of out-
standing rank among palseontological
workers. Williston's name is found
attached to numerous specimens, prin-
cipally from the Niobrara Cretaceous,
Geological Survey, July 1, 1882. From
that time on until Marsh's death in
1899 Government assistance was gen-
erally available. Material was there-
fore collected and paid for jointly by
Marsh and the United States and, after
Midday meal. — Expedition of 1870
toothed birds, pterodactyls, and marine
saurians, while we always think of
Hatcher in connection with the Cera-
topsia skulls, of which upward of two
score were collected largely by himself
and Peterson, now of the Carnegie
Museum. With Professor Beecher
they also gathered the large amount
of Lance mammal material seen in the
Museum at Yale and the National
Museum. Hatcher spent portions of
the years from 1886 to 1888 in the
field, during which he collected 105
nearly complete titanothere skulls
and much associated material.
It must be remembered that this
collecting was financed largely by
Professor Marsh himself up to the time
of his appointment as Vertebrate
Palaeontologist to the United States
the professor's death, was divided
between the Peabody and the National
museums, constituting the so-called
Marsh Collection of each institution^
for in 1896 the entire share of the Yale
professor was deeded to Yale University
to be cherished forever.
Upon the coming of the present in-
cumbent of the Chair of Palaeontology
twenty years ago, there was a vast and
important collection at Yale, second
only in extent to that of the American
Museum and containing items which
are unique and priceless in their im-
portance to science, the fruition of a
third of a century of intensive work..
There were and are certain important
gaps in the series to be filled. Hence it
seemed wise to revive the field work,
and four expeditions were undertaken
EARLY FOSSIL HUNTING LV THE h'OCKY MOUNTAINS 457
Collecting fossils in the Rocky Mountains, 1871
from 1908 to 1915, when the coming of
the war made such matters relatively
unimportant. The passing of the old
Museum building in 1917 and the lean
years which followed up to the dedica-
tion of the new edifice were perhaps
reasons sufficient for non-activity in
the field.
The old-time expeditions were staged
in the real West, at a time when lack
of means of transportation and the
presence of Indian menace, together
with the very intimate contact every
fossil hunter must have with his
physical surroundings — with fatigue,
heat and cold, hunger and thirst —
made the search for the prehistoric a
real adventure suited to red-blooded
men. Big game was then abundant,
but this good was offset by days of
labor through rolling sandhills, with
infrequent streams, often alkaline,
little vegetation, and the menace of
occasional prairie fire and Indian
attack, in spite of which material by
the ton was collected with unflagging
zeal.
One of Williston's letters to Marsh
(June 1, 1876) tells how the party
narrowly escaped death from water
while in Kansas. "The Smoky Hill
rose nearly twenty feet in about as
many minutes, catching us asleep at
half past two in the morning and drown-
ing one of our horses. We swam and
waded ashore as we jumped from our
beds, but succeeded in saving most of
our camp outfit which drifted ashore."
This is merely one of the vicissitudes
of these romantic days, most of which
are unrecorded except in the memories
of a dwindhng group of men.
458
NATURAL HISTORY
Personnel of the 1872 Expedition — Marsh standing in center
Williston tells us much about the
early dinosaur collecting — how Profes-
sor Arthur Lakes discovered in March,
1877, near Morrison, Colorado, the
dinosaur which was to be the type
Atlantosaurus immanis, now preserved
at Yale.
Arthur Lakes carried on explorations
with William Reed and independently
for some years, and a number of im-
portant specimens in the Peabody
Museum collection bear his name. He
also made sketches in water color of the
various locahties and the old-time
methods of exhumation, several of
which, bearing the date of 1879, are
now hanging in the palseontological
laboratory at Yale. The value of these
is at once evident, for in the days
before the omnipresent kodak, when the
"wet plate" process of photography
limited its use in the field, sketching
was the only method of recording pic-
torially such events as these.
The year 1877 was highly productive
of discovery, for Lakes was followed by
O. W. Lucas, who found material near
Garden City, Colorado, which he in
turn reported to Cope. This was the
Camarasaurus supremus type now in
the American Museum of Natural His-
tory. While a veteran collector, David
Baldwin, who had previously worked in
New Mexico, found the unique and
still somewhat problematical Hallopus
specimen at Canyon City.
Como Bluff in central Wyoming,
which became amazingly productive,
was also discovered as a dinosaur
locality in 1877. This time the collec-
tor was William, commonly known as
"Bill," Reed, formerly a professional
game hunter, who supplied certain of
the construction camps of the Union
Pacific Railroad with meat, as did the
more renowned Buffalo Bill. Upon
the announcement of this discovery,
WilHston was sent out and shortly
EARLY FOSSIL HUNTING IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 459
opened Quarr}^ No. 1 of a long series of
excavations along the face of the
eroded anticline which forms the
bluffs. Among the most important of
Reed's finds was the famous type of
Brontosaurus excelsus, shortly to be
mounted in the Great Hall of the new
Peabod}^ Museum, a specimen known
the world over but, except for the pelvis
and hind limbs, never articulated.
After some fifty j^ears it will come into
its own!
Professor Mudge, of the University
of Kansas, together with Messrs.
Felch and Williston, opened the quarry
which contained the type of Diplodocus.
As Williston says, ''it consisted of hind
leg, pelvis, and much of the tail, lying
in very orderly arrangement in the
sandstone near the edge of the quarry/'
but the bones were broken into innu-
merable pieces and "most of them went
into the dump." This is of course
greatly to be deplored, but two cir-
cumstances conspired to produce the
result. The technique of today had
not been invented which makes the
sa^dng of much poorer material than
this a matter of relative ease. The
other factor was the apparent need of
haste, as the collectors were urged to
get their material to New Haven with
the utmost dispatch, such was the
rivalry of the already opposing palse-
ontological camps.
These collectors, led largely by Reed,
worked the year round, defjdng alike
the summer heat and the winter cold,
the thermometer once falling 38°
below zero with high winds and snow.
Every possible dsij saw them actually
in the quarries or prospecting for more,
while utterly impossible weather only
shifted their activities to other work,
such as the s^^arch of "pay dirt" for
tiny mammal and other remains. Nor
were the summer's days entirely un-
eventful, for once they were visited by
swarms of siredons (salamanders) which,
as Lakes says, "so insinuated them-
selves under every box and bed that
although we threw out and killed dozens,
it became useless to stop the horde
. . . that waddled leisurely into the
tents, as if they had a perfect right to
them. . . . What with the noise of the
creatures . . . and the baying of
wild geese on the lake, the gnawing of
mice at our furniture, and the roar of
the thunder, the voices of the night
were not conducive to slumber."
Another amazing locaHty, the fa-
mous Bone Cabin Quarry, hes at the
head of a draw, tributary to the Little
Medicine Bow River and not many
miles west of Como Bluff. Here a
Mexican sheep-herder had built the
foundations of his hut of weathered-out
dinosaur bones, the centra of verte-
bra^ and pieces of vast Hmb bones. It
was in 1898 that Walter Granger saw
and reaHzed the significance of this
remarkable building and began,
together with Doctor Wortman, the
excavation of this world-famous
quarry. Hither the following year
came Doctor Matthew, and the author
of this paper joined Mr. Granger's
party in the work of excavation, — his
initiation into the science of palfpon-
tology. The dinosaur layer at Bone
Cabin is part of the same deposit as
that at Como Bluff, the apparent dis-
continuity being the result of tremen-
dous folding and subsequent erosion,
two factors which bring to light material
which otherwise would be buried far
beneath the surface of the earth.
At Como approximately complete
skeletons may be had, while at Bone
Cabin there are members rather than
skeletons, tails, limbs, necks, the result
of burial of disintegrating carcasses in
some ancient backwater or river bar.
460
NATURAL HISTORY
The Expedition of 1873 in the Bridger Beds
The product of a number of years of
labor has been remarkable, represent-
ing at least seventy-three dinosaurs
large and small. Osborn estimates the
grand total, counting those eroded
away, as at least a hundred. The
principal reason for discontinuing the
work was not that the quarry had
ceased to yield, but that the bone-
bearing strata were dipping too deep
below the surface for economy of labor.
Sheep Creek, not very far from Bone
Cabin, produced the splendid Diplodo-
cus specimen of the Carnegie Museum,
found by Doctor Wortman in 1899.
Jacob Wortman, himself a research
man of distinction, collected originally
for Professor Cope and later for the
American Museum and the Carnegie
Museum of Pittsburgh. It is to him, I
beheve, that we owe the perfection
of our modern methods of collection
with the plaster and burlap bandages
and splints, the apphcation of a well-
known surgical method by one who
was himself a physician, and which not
only makes possible the securing of
relatively imperfect material, but adds
greatly to the ease of subsequent re-
storation.
But not all of the old-time collecting
was of dinosaurs, and the recognition
of some of the Tertiary deposits,
notably the Oligocene of the Big Bad
Lands of South Dakota, is worth the
telling. It was in 1874, when the
threat of Indian uprising made it un-
wise to continue the student expedi-
tions, that Professor Marsh went west
alone, relying on the frontiersmen, his
former guides, for aid. The story is
that an Indian brought in a tooth in his
EARLY FOSSIL HUNTING IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 461
tobacco pouch which he sakl was that
of a "big horse struck by lightning."
This Marsh recognized and named the
Brontothcrium, or thunder beast, a
name apparent!}' suggested by the
Intlian's remark.
Marsh was extiemely anxious to
penetrate into the new locality, but
the Indians resented the coming of
the white men into the Black Hills
which were sacred to their forefathers.
They could not appreciate a "bone
hunt" and naturally imputed another
motive, that of the search for gold, to