Fig. 25.—Fossil Rhinoceros, Teleoceras fossiger.
From Sternberg’s quarry at Long Island, Phillips Co., Kansas. Collected by Wortman; mounted in the American Museum of Natural History. (After Osborn.)
That year, 1884, in which I explored the quarry at Long Island, was a memorable one, not only because we secured a large carload of rhinoceros bones, but also because we had with us Mr. J. B. Hatcher, who afterwards helped to build up three great museums of vertebrate paleontology,—the museums of Yale and Princeton and the Carnegie Museum. With the last he was connected at the time of his death in 1904, just twenty years after he made his first collection of vertebrate fossils with me. A bright, earnest student, he gave promise of a future even then by his perfect understanding of the work in hand and the thoughtful care which he devoted to it. I have always been glad that I had the honor of being his first teacher in the practical work of collecting, although he soon graduated from my department, and requested me to let him take one side of the ravine while I worked the other. He employed Mr. Overton’s son with a plow and scraper, and got out a magnificent collection with no further instructions from me.
That same year Professor Marsh came to my quarry and leased it from the owner, and I never saw it again until 1905, when I came into my own once more, and in addition to the splendid mastodon, mentioned earlier in this chapter, found the material for two perfect mounts of the rhinoceros. One is to be mounted at Munich, the other at Bonn.
With Professor Osborn’s consent, I give a photograph of the fine specimen (Fig. [25]) which Dr. Wortman secured in 1894 from this quarry for the American Museum. A vast collection from the same spot is stored in the National Museum in its original packages, with which I filled a car in 1884. I saw there a whole case filled with the skulls of the rhinoceros Teleoceras fossiger, which I secured in great numbers at Long Island.
It is strange to think that the foundation on which these beds of fresh-water deposits lie unconformably is the great Cretaceous sea bottom, whose tilted and uplifted strata tower two thousand feet above the carboniferous rocks in eastern Kansas. The Republican, Smoky Hill, and Kansas rivers have carved their way through all these strata, so that by following down these streams, one can get cross sections of the country.
I have often asked men who were sure that there must be coal beneath the surface, why, instead of hiring a man to dig a hole for them, they did not hitch up their buggies and follow the valley of the Smoky Hill, beginning at the Colorado line. The first stratum exposed is of course the recent, with its sandy loam; in it, here and there, a crumbling buffalo skull or an eroded implement. Then comes the Pleistocene deposit, consisting of clay, sand, and fragments of rock mingled together. From this formation I secured over two hundred teeth of the great Columbian Mammoth. Next come beds of black shale with giant septaria, the Fort Pierre Group of the Cretaceous, whose upper beds we explored in Montana in 1876 for dinosaurs. In this formation, in Kansas, I found a new species of Clidastes. The specimens are now in the Kansas University collection, and the species has been named by Dr. Williston Clidastes westi, in honor of the Kansas University collector, the late Judge E. P. West.
We have not gone far down the river below the forks, before this formation, which at McAllister topped the hills, passes under the river. Then reddish and blue chalks occupy the country for some miles, and in turn disappear to give place to yellowish and blue chalks, which finally make way for the blue and almost white chalks that run under the river near the mouth of Hackberry Creek in eastern Gove County.
At White Rock in Trego County the hard white limestone, in fortification blocks, is piled ninety feet high. Further down appears the post limestone of the Fort Benton Group, with its characteristic Inoceramus shells; while in central Kansas, brown and white sandstone and brilliantly colored clays occupy the whole region for sixty miles, giving place at last to the hard limestones and the friable shales and sandstones of the Upper Carboniferous. No coal, except very shallow veins in the Upper Carboniferous and the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous, has even been found in this big ditch, which, less than a quarter of a mile wide at the head of the Smoky Hill branch at Wallace, broadens out to a width of several miles at the mouth of the Kansas River.
It is impossible to compute the vast amount of mineral matter which has been cut out from these Kansas plains and carried by the river into the Mississippi and on to the Gulf. Since the first narrow trench cut its way through the hardened ooze of the Cretaceous ocean bed, all the flood-plains of the Missouri and the Mississippi below Kansas City have been enriched by the material that once covered these valleys of Kansas, and the delta below New Orleans has been partly built up by it.
It may interest my readers and give them a glimpse into the daily routine of a fossil hunter’s life, if I quote one or two notes from a diary which I kept during my work in these Loup Fork beds.