This formation, resting unconformably on the upper carboniferous rocks, belongs to the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous Period. The sedimentary rocks were laid down during the Cretaceous Period, the closing period of the “Age of Reptiles,” in a great ocean, whose shore line enters Kansas at the mouth of Cow Creek on the Arkansas River, and extending in a northwesterly direction in the vicinity of Beatrice, Nebraska, touches Iowa, and passes on to Greenland.
I was carried away at this time by the thoughts that had been surging through the hearts of men since Darwin bade them turn to nature for the answers to their problems concerning the plants and animals of this earth.
How often in imagination I have rolled back the years and pictured central Kansas, now raised two thousand feet above sea level, as a group of islands scattered about in a semi-tropical sea! There are no frosts and few insect pests to mar the foliage of the great forests that grow along its shores, and the ripe leaves fall gently into the sand, to be covered up by the incoming tide and to form impressions and counterparts of themselves as perfect as if a Divine hand had stamped them in yielding wax.
Go back with me, dear reader, and see the treeless plains of to-day covered with forests. Here rises the stately column of a redwood; there a magnolia opens its fragrant blossoms; and yonder stands a fig tree. There is no human hand to gather its luscious fruit, but we can imagine that the Creator walked among the trees in the cool of the evening, inhaling the incense wafted to Him as a thank-offering for their being. All His works magnify Him. The cinnamon sends forth its perfume beside the sassafras; linden and birch, sweet gum and persimmon, wild cherry and poplar mingle with each other. The five-lobed sarsaparilla vine encircles the tree-trunks, and in the shade grows a pretty fern. Many other beautiful plant forms grace the landscape, but the glorious picture is only for him who gathers the remains of these forests, and by the power of his imagination puts life into them; for it is some five million years, according to the great Dana of my childhood days, since the trees of this Kansas forest lifted their mighty trunks to the sun.
Fig. 1.—Rocks of Laramie Beds on South Schneider Creek, Converse County, Wyoming.
Fig. 2.—Weathered Rocks and Laramie Beds near South Schneider Creek.
Fig. 3.—Mushroom-like concretion known as Pulpit Rock.
Elm Creek, Kansas, near Sternberg’s ranch. (From Trans. Kan. Acad. Sci.)