All about us stretched the interminable labyrinths of the Bad Lands. Above us lay twelve hundred feet of denuded rock, which Cope at that time believed to belong to several formations. The rock consists of great beds of black shale, which disintegrates on the surface into a fine, black dust. The lower levels contain many beds of lignite, which makes a good soft coal, and burns readily. We found beds four feet thick along the canyons. All one had to do was to drive up to the face of the cliff and load a wagon in a few minutes.
As soon as the first streak of daylight appeared, we breakfasted and were off, our picks tied to our saddles, our collecting-bags dangling from the pommels, and a lunch of cold bacon and hardtack in our saddle-bags.
I usually rode beside the Professor, my mount a treacherous black mustang, who was ever on the watch to regain his liberty. A curb bit that almost tore his mouth to pieces was my only means of restraining him. My right ear being totally deaf, I usually rode at the Professor’s right, when the trail would admit of our traveling abreast. He was not always in a talkative mood, but when he began to speak of the wonderful animals of this earth, those of long ago and those of to-day, so absorbed did he become in his subject that he talked on as if to himself, looking straight ahead and rarely turning toward me, while I listened entranced.
Not so that wicked black mustang of mine. Suddenly his front feet would leave the ground, and he would stand up at full length on his hind legs. Then feeling the gouging of the Spanish bit, he would drop and run ahead to the Professor’s left side. When the Professor, happening to look up, found the place where I had been vacant, he would exclaim in surprise, “Why, I thought you were on my right, and here you are on my left!”
The pony repeated this trick whenever I became so deeply interested in the Professor’s talk as to loosen my hold on the reins.
On the very top of the Bad Lands were the Judith River beds, now known, through the researches of the late Professor J. B. Hatcher, to belong to the Fort Pierre Group of the Upper Cretaceous. Here tablelands and level prairies offered plenty of grass for our ponies; so we climbed to these heights, picketed our horses, and went into the gorges in search of fossils. It was necessary to give the loose shale the most careful examination, as only a streak of dust a little different in color from the uniform black around it, indicated where the bones were buried.
As a result of the loose composition of this friable black shale and the overlying rocks of sandstone, the Missouri has lowered its bed twelve hundred feet below the level of the prairies, and the whole country is cut up by a perfect labyrinth of canyons and lateral ravines into a dreary landscape of utter barrenness.
At night the view from above of these intricate passages was appalling. The black material of which the rocks are composed did not permit a single ray of light to penetrate the depths below, and the ebony-like darkness seemed dense enough to cut.
Long ridges, terminating in perpendicular cliffs, whose bases impinge upon the river a thousand feet below, extend back into the country for miles. Often they are cut by lateral ravines into peaks and pinnacles, obelisks and towers, and other fantastic forms. These ridges are so narrow that we could hardly walk along them, and their sides drop at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was only the disintegrated shale on the surface, into which our feet sank at every step, that gave us a foothold and kept us from shooting with frightful velocity into the gorges below.
One day the Professor asked me to climb to a point near the summit of a lofty ridge, crowned by two massive ledges of sandstone, four feet thick, which projected over the steep slope like the window sills of some Titanic building. These ledges, one above the other and separated by sixty feet of shale, had been swept clean for about three feet, so that I found an easy pathway for my feet, when after laborious climbing I reached the lower ledge. From my lofty perch I had a bird’s-eye view of mile upon mile of the wonderful Bad Lands, a scene of desolation such as no pen can picture.