At the age of seventeen, therefore, I made up my mind what part I should play in life, and determined that whatever it might cost me in privation, danger, and solitude, I would make it my business to collect facts from the crust of the earth; that thus men might learn more of “the introduction and succession of life on our earth.”
My father was unable to see the practical side of the work. He told me that if I had been a rich man’s son, it would doubtless be an enjoyable way of passing my time, but as I should have to earn a living, I ought to turn to some other business. I say here, however, lest I forget it, that, although my struggle for a livelihood has been hard, often, indeed, bitter, I have always been financially better off as a collector than when I have wasted, speaking from the point of view of science, some of the most precious days of my life attempting to make money by farming or in some other business, so that I might live at home and avoid the hardships and exposures of camp life.
With collecting-bag over my shoulder and pick in hand, I wandered over the hills of Ellsworth County. If I chanced upon a locality rich in fossil leaves, thrilled with a joy that knows no comparison, I walked on air as I carried my trophies home; while if night overtook me with an empty bag, I could scarcely drag my weary limbs along.
Among the rich localities that I discovered was one which I called “Sassafras Hollow,” because of the countless sassafras leaves I quarried there. It is situated about a mile southeast of the schoolhouse on Thompson Creek, in the Hudson brothers’ neighborhood, and lies at the head of a narrow ravine in a ledge of sandstone, with a spring beneath. Here too, the noted paleobotanist, Dr. Leo Lesquereux, collected fossils in 1872, securing among other specimens a large, beautiful leaf which he named in my honor “Protophyllum sternbergii.”
I have a vivid recollection of the discovery of another locality. One night I dreamed that I was on the river, where the Smoky Hill cuts into its northern bank, three miles southeast of Fort Harker. A perpendicular face in the colored clay impinges on the stream, and just below this cliff is the mouth of a shallow ravine that heads in the prairie half a mile above.
In my dream, I walked up this ravine and was at once attracted by a large cone-shaped hill, separated from a knoll to the south by a lateral ravine. On either slope were many chunks of rock, which the frost had loosened from the ledges above. The spaces left vacant in these rocks by the decayed leaves had accumulated moisture, and this moisture, when it froze, had had enough expansive power to split the rock apart and display the impressions of the leaves.
Other masses of rock had broken in such a way that the spaces once filled by the midribs and stems of the leaves admitted grass roots; and their rootlets, seeking the tiny channels left by the ribs and veins of the leaves, had, with the power of growing plants, opened the doors of these prisoners, shut up in the heart of the rock for millions of years.
I went to the place and found everything just as it had been in my dream.
Two of the largest leaves known to the Dakota Group were taken from this place. One, a great three-lobed leaf, the stem passing through an ear-like projection at its base, Dr. Lesquereux called Aspidophyllum trilobatum; the other, equally large,—over a foot in diameter,—and three-lobed too, but indented with large teeth, he called Sassafras dissectum (Fig. [4]).
I believe I am the only fossil hunter who has collected from this locality. Probably my eyes saw the specimens while I was chasing an antelope or stray cow and too much occupied with the work in hand to take note of them consciously, until they were revealed to me by the dream, the only one in my experience that ever came true. I tell this story to show how deeply I was interested in these fossils.