And I felt amply repaid for my sufferings when the next winter I laid out the skeleton on the platform of St. George’s Hall, in Philadelphia, where the Professor spoke for an hour to a spellbound audience, unfolding to them the wonders of the creatures that lived when this old world was young. At the close, which came suddenly, as was usually the case in Cope’s speeches, before the people had had time to come back from the misty past, he turned to where I was sitting on a step, and beckoned me to him. When I got within reach, he turned me around to the audience and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you Mr. Sternberg, the man who found this beautiful example of the fauna of the Cretaceous.”
He was much pleased with the hearty applause that greeted me.
This incident illustrates one of the characteristics of Cope which endeared him to all his collectors. He did not think that the money he paid them paid for the dangers and privations they endured, far from their friends and the comforts of civilization. On the contrary, he gave them credit in all his publications for their discoveries of species new to science. And this is the one essential thing to the collector—at least the true collector who values his labor as something that cannot be measured by money. All work done for science has a value above that of money. Lesquereux might have made money if he had remained a watchmaker, and Cope would have won a fortune as a ship-owner if he had entered his father’s office, but both men realized that there is work which offers higher rewards than riches; they gave their lives to science, and they will never be forgotten.
But we are far afield; let us return to the plains and canyons of the Kansas chalk beds.
I recall many trying experiences during that memorable first season. Often we got into barren ground and walked over miles and miles of blistering chalk with nothing to show for our trouble. In one locality the remains might be very abundant, while in another, perhaps just as promising in appearance, thousands of acres would be entirely barren. But we had to go over it all before we could be sure that there was nothing to repay our toil.
Once after two weeks of fruitless effort, we drove into a deep canyon, cut into the upper or reddish chalks near Monument Rocks, which are so much richer in fossils than the yellow or whitish beds farther east.
I had barely pitched the tent and got among the beds when I discovered not only that I was the first collector to visit the canyon but that it was rich in fossil remains. I found two specimens of Platecarpus, a species of Kansas mosasaur, in a low knoll, separated by but three feet of chalk.
At the same time one of those uncomfortable cold rains set in, and I was not much encouraged when Will told me that we had no food left. There was plenty of corn for the ponies, but no coffee, flour, bacon, or canned goods, not even an antelope; and we were forty miles from our base of supplies. I would not leave, however, without my load of fossils, as I feared that during my absence my rivals would come upon this Eldorado and clean it out. So the cook was told to parch a kettleful of corn, and we made our meals on that. In fact, we filled our pockets with it and lived on it for three days, eating most of the time to keep ourselves sufficiently nourished.
We had always depended for fuel upon the buffalo chips which even then were strewn about everywhere, but fortunately we found here an old dead cottonwood tree, a rare thing in that region, where even the willows on the river banks are short and stunted. But for this wood we should have suffered.
We remained there until we had loaded our wagon with eight hundred pounds of fossil vertebrates.