The chalk beds which were the field of my labors once composed the floor of the old Cretaceous ocean, and consist almost entirely of the remains of microscopic organisms, which must have fairly swarmed in the water. They were discovered by the late Dr. Bunn, of Lawrence, while a student in the laboratories of the Kansas State University, after Dana and others had said there was no chalk in America.
When the animals that inhabited this ocean died or were killed, their carcasses, buoyed up by the gases that formed after death, floated about on the surface of the water, losing a limb here, a head there, a trunk or tail somewhere else. These detached fragments, sinking to the bottom, were covered by the soft ooze of the ocean floor, and remained there as fossils, while the sedimentary rock was being lifted three thousand feet above sea level.
My explorations began on Hackberry Creek, where I went over every inch of the exposed chalk, from the creek’s mouth to its head, in Logan County. Then I searched the river and the ravines that cut into its drainage area along the flanks of the divides.
Perhaps a description of a typical day’s experience in one of the long ravines that gash the southern slope of the country may be of interest to my readers.
Human beings, in order to accomplish any result of moment, must be reasonably comfortable, that is, they must not be over-hungry or thirsty or sleepy. If they are, their minds will dwell upon their discomforts, and they will accomplish little, as the hungry boy, who keeps turning his head in the direction of the sun and wondering whether it is not almost dinner-time, is not likely to hoe much corn. My first step, therefore, must be to find water and pitch a camp.
But often I have no idea where water is to be found, and must give as much care to the search as if I were looking for fossils. So while the driver follows me with the wagon, I hunt for water and fossils at the same time.
Both sides of my ravine are bordered with cream-colored, or yellow, chalk, with blue below. Sometimes for hundreds of feet the rock is entirely denuded and cut into lateral ravines, ridges, and mounds, or beautifully sculptured into tower and obelisk. Sometimes it takes on the semblance of a ruined city, with walls of tottering masonry, and only a near approach can convince the eye that this is only another example of that mimicry in which nature so frequently indulges.
The chalk beds are entirely bare of vegetation, with the exception of a desert shrub that “finds a foothold in the rifted rock” and sends its roots down every crevice. This shrub is one of the fossil hunter’s worst enemies. Sending its roots down the clefts in the rock, it searches out the fossil bones that have been preserved there, and feasts upon them until they have been entirely consumed, thus thriving at the expense of God’s buried dead. More fine fossil vertebrates have been destroyed by this plant than by the denudation of the rock, or the vandal hand of man, although both of the latter have been powerful factors in the destruction of fossils. In those days, however, there were no curiosity hunters to dig up the precious relics, so that they were more abundant than they are now.
All this time I am wandering along the canyon in search of water. Sometimes I come upon gorges only two feet wide and fifty feet deep; sometimes for five miles or more the sides of the ravine will be only a few feet high.