Soon a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and the burning sage-brush was filling the air with that indescribable odor from which one is never free while in the desert. We had traveled through great droves of wild geese along the lake, and as they were so tame that they simply stepped out of our way like barnyard geese, we did not think it worth while to waste ammunition on them. So I set three traps, common steel traps such as are used for catching coons, and strewed oats around them. The next morning I found a brant in one, a magpie in another, and the house cat in the third. We let the cat and the magpie go, and breakfasted on the brant. Our usual fare was bacon, bread, and coffee, and sometimes dried apples. I worked for years in Oregon with no other food, except an occasional deer or mountain sheep.
The next day, trusting entirely to Mr. Duncan’s guidance, we pushed on without a trail, winding in and out among the hillocks with no landmarks but the mountains in the west. At sunset, we came out into the open on the shore of a small alkaline lake. “Fossil Lake,” I named it at once, and it goes by that name to this day. This pond, as we should call it in old New York, covered only a few acres then, and is now entirely dried up.
“There,” shouted Mr. Duncan, as he pointed with his whip to the lake shore, “there is the boneyard.”
I instantly requested him to help George get supper and pitch the tent, and seizing my collecting bag, rushed down to the shore. The clay bottom of the ancient lake had been dried out, and now formed the shore of the remaining water. This old lake bed had once extended over a much larger area, but it had been partially buried beneath large piles of drifting sand. Scattered through the loose sand and on the clay bed were great numbers of the bones and teeth of reptiles, birds, and mammals, indiscriminately mingled. I had come upon a boneyard indeed.
I was down on the sand at once, picking up bones and teeth and putting them in piles. No two bones seemed to belong together, and the skulls and arches had been crushed beneath the feet of animals, probably cattle and deer, which had come down to drink at the lake. What pleased me, however, was the fact that scattered among these remains of an earlier day, were arrow-heads and spear-points of polished obsidian, or volcanic glass. I was too much excited then to notice that I did not find a single bone or tooth in its original position in the clay matrix, but that all were loose, detached, and scattered, and that the implements were lying about in the same way.
As Mr. Duncan was to return to the post-office at Silver Lake the next morning, I gathered a cigar-boxful of loose teeth, arrow-heads, and spear-points, and packed them to send off to Professor Cope. And that night, by a sage-brush fire, I wrote the letter which he saw fit to publish in the American Naturalist, a magazine of which he was the editor, under a title of his own, “Pliocene Man,” and signed “E. D. Cope.”
For weeks I sifted through my fingers the fine sand of that lake shore, picking out bone after bone. The only specimen which I found undisturbed in the clay matrix was part of the skull of a hairy mammoth, or Elephas primigenius.
Dr. Shufeldt is the author of a valuable memoir on the fossil birds of this region,—“The Fossil Avi-Fauna of the Equus Beds of the Oregon Desert,” published by the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. He worked over the collection made by the late Professor Condon of the Oregon State University, the collection which Professor Cope made a few years after mine, and mine.
In these three collections, he finds five species of grebes, and nine of gulls, of which two species are new to science, Professor Condon being the discoverer of one, while I found the other. Of cormorants, there are two species, one discovered by Cope. One species, quite common among the fossil remains, is now extinct. There is a new swan also, described by Professor Cope, who writes of it: “This swan was discovered by ex-Governor Whitaker of Oregon [who discovered the Fossil Lake locality] in the Pliocene formations of the state. The same bird was afterwards procured by my assistant, Charles H. Sternberg.” Altogether there are nineteen species of Anseres, i. e., geese, ducks, swans, etc., of which two are new.
One of my discoveries was a flamingo, which was dedicated to Professor Cope under the title Phœnicopterus copei. Dr. Shufeldt says: “It is a fact of no little interest that a flamingo inhabited the lakes of the Silver Lake region of Oregon during the Pliocene Epoch.” The collections include a heron and a couple of coots also. Among the fowl are four grouse, discovered by Cope, and an entirely new genus and species which I had the honor of finding. Of eagles, there are two species. There are also a great horned owl, a blackbird, and a raven.