Even in those early days I used to cut out shells from the limestone strata of the region with whatever tools were at hand, but they were admired chiefly as examples of the wonderful power of running water to carve rocks into the semblance of shells. Or if one of the more observant remarked that these shells looked very much as if they had been alive once, the only theory that would account for their presence and yet sustain the belief that the world was only six thousand years old, was that the Almighty, who created the rocks, could easily, at the same time, have created the ancient plants and animals as fossils, just as they were found.
I remember a rich find I made in the garret of an uncle in Ames, New York,—a cradle filled with fossil shells and crystals of quartz. They had been collected by my uncle’s brother, who, fortunately, as my uncle said, had died early, before bringing disgrace upon the family by wasting his time wandering over the hills and gathering stones. All the large specimens he had collected had been thrown away, and the smaller ones in the old cradle had long been forgotten. I was welcome to all my uncle’s buggy could carry when he took me home, and I can never forget the joy of going over that material again and again, selecting the specimens that appealed most to my sense of the beautiful and the wonderful. I labeled them all “From Uncle James,” and it greatly astonished a dear aunt of mine, to whom I gave them some years later when we moved West, to find in the collection a lot of baculites, labeled “Worms from Uncle James.”
When I was ten years old, I met with an accident from which I have never completely recovered. I remember the wild chase I was making after an older boy, over the hay-mows and piles of shocked grain in my father’s barn. On the floor below, an old-fashioned thresher, one of the first of its kind, was making an ear-splitting noise, while outside the two horses, hitched to an inclined plane, climbed incessantly, but never reached the top.
The boy climbed a shock of oats on the scaffold in the peak of the barn, and “Charley-boy,” as my mother called me, following him, slipped through a hole in the top of the ladder which had been covered by the settling oats, and fell twenty feet to the floor below. The older boy climbed swiftly down and carried me home insensible to my mother.
Our family physician thought that only a sprain was the result, and bandaged the injured limb; but, as a matter of fact, the fibula of the left leg had been dislocated, so that there was much suffering and a little crippled boy going about among the hills on crutches.
The leg never grew quite strong again, and some years later gave me a good deal of trouble. In 1872 I was in charge of a ranch in Kansas, and during November of that year a great sleet storm covered the whole central part of the state. In order to water my cattle, which were scattered over a range of several thousand acres on Elm Creek, I was obliged to follow around small bands of them to their accustomed watering-places and cut the ice for them. The water that splashed over my clothing froze solid, and the result was that inflammatory rheumatism settled in the lame leg. I sat in a leathern chair all winter close to a boxwood stove, tended by my dear mother, who never left me day or night.
When the inflammation subsided, the knee joint had become ankylosed, and in order to avoid going on crutches all my life, I lay in the hospital at Fort Riley for three months, all alone in a great ward, and had the limb straightened by a special machine. So skilfully did the army surgeon do this work that I threw away crutches and cane, and, although the leg has always been stiff, I have since walked thousands of miles among the fossiliferous beds in the desolate fields of the West.
In 1865, when I was fifteen years old, my father accepted the principalship of the Iowa Lutheran College at Albion, Marshall County, and the broken hill country of my boyhood days was replaced by the plains and water courses of the Middle West.
Two years later my twin brother and I emigrated to an older brother’s ranch in Ellsworth County, Kansas, two and a half miles south of Fort Harker, now known as Kanopolis. This post was at that time the terminus of the Kansas Division of the Union Pacific, and almost daily train-load after train-load of prairie schooners, drawn by oxen, burros, or mules, pulled out from it over the old Butterfield and Santa Fé trails, the one leading up the Smoky Hill, the other through the valley of the Arkansas to Denver and the Southwest.
In spring great herds of buffalo followed the tender grass northward, returning to the South in the fall; and one bright day my brother and I started out on our first buffalo hunt. Driving a team of Indian ponies hitched to a light spring wagon, we soon left the few settlements behind, and reached the level prairie to the southwest, near old Fort Zaro, a deserted one-company post on the Santa Fé Trail. At this time it had been appropriated by a cattleman who had a small herd grazing in the vicinity.