The teeth of these animals were kept sharp by the sand that adhered to the roots on which they lived. Falling into the pits and valleys between the crests of enamel, it scoured away the dentine and cementum, and kept the great grinders ever sharp and ready for use. It is a distinguishing characteristic of these early mastodons that their tusks have a strip of enamel along the inside, while the modern elephants’ tusks have only a vestige of enamel at the extreme tip that is quickly worn off.
Another remarkable inhabitant of Kansas during the Loup Fork Period was the three-toed horse, an animal but little larger than the new-born colt of an ordinary farm horse, which evidently lived in herds, judging from the great quantity of loose teeth that we have found. Its toes were spreading, which enabled it to walk over bogs and mossy quagmires on the shores of lakes or rivers, and thus escape the fangs of bloodthirsty tigers by venturing farther out on the soft ground than they dared to follow.
In 1882, while employed by the Agassiz Museum, I found the famous Sternberg Quarry at Long Island on Prairie Dog Creek in Phillips County. I had been exploring for weeks the region at the head of the branches of Deer Creek, which spread out in the divide like a fan; but although once in a while, especially in the neighborhood of Bread Bowl Mound, I had found fragments of the bones of Loup Fork animals in the sod, I had not met with much success, as the rocks here disintegrate so easily and hold moisture so readily that the whole country is covered with grass. There are thirty-three streams in this county as a result of the immense amount of moisture which accumulates in these sandstone beds and is carried to the surface in springs.
One very hot day I started to cross the divide to Prairie Dog Creek. I had the wagon sheet stretched over the bows, the sides lifted to admit the breeze, and sleepy with the heat, I let the horses go on about as they pleased; not noticing, until the level rays of the sun warned me that it was time to camp, that I had gone farther east than I had intended. I had my camp outfit with me, however, and as I saw a bunch of trees in a ravine a mile from the creek I knew that there must be water there. So the three requisites, grass, wood, and water, were at hand.
After pitching the tent, and starting supper, I found to my delight a large exposure of hard siliceous rock, consisting of sand and chalk held firmly together by soluble sand, which proved to be the bottom ledge of a deposit of gray sandstone. I soon found above it a mastodon’s bones. My joy knew no bounds, however, when following the narrow draw up to its head, I found that it cut through a quarry of rhinoceros bones, which were sticking out of the sand on either side, while the narrow ditch at the bottom was filled with toe bones, complete or in fragments, and broken skulls and teeth without number. I have collected fossil vertebrates and plants since I was seventeen years old, but this is the greatest deposit of fossils that I have ever discovered.
I shall never forget how, carried away with enthusiasm, I took possession in the name of Science of the largest bone bed in Kansas. I did not stop to ask whether anyone else had any interest in the land, nor did I think it necessary. I had grown so used in my own case to putting aside every other consideration for the sake of the advancement of science that it did not occur to me that anyone else might take a different view. But one day, as I was working in the ravine, an old man, plowing corn, drove up to its eastern edge. When he made the turn, he chanced to look across and saw me, pick in hand, diligently uncovering the skull of a rhinoceros from the sandbank on the other side. He instantly shouted with all the strength of his lungs, “What are you doing?”
“Digging up antediluvian relics,” I shouted back. We both shouted as if we were a hundred yards apart.
“Well,” he called, “get out of there!”
“All right,” I answered in the same loud tones, and kept on working.
The old man, whose name I learned later was Mr. Overton, disappeared, and I heard no more of him until I went into Long Island for food, or grub as they say in the West, and was told that he had come in to a justice of the peace and asked for a warrant to arrest me for collecting these old bones. He never again came directly to me, either that year or the following, but people told me that he went around to all the justices in that part of the country, trying to get his warrant. Finally, however, they managed to convince him that I was not harming him, and was benefiting science.