“Yes, I’ve seen him,” was the answer.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the stranger, and I felt so cheap that I would have sold out for nothing. But this was Mr. Button’s chance to show what sort of a man he was, and when I apologized for the freedom with which we had made ourselves at home in his house and used his goods, he told me that we had done exactly right, and that he would have felt hurt if we had acted otherwise.
He became a true friend and helper, and his log cabin proved a valuable place of shelter for my party during some of the cold October nights. If these lines should ever reach his eyes, they carry to him my cordial thanks for his hospitality.
CHAPTER VII
EXPEDITION TO THE JOHN DAY RIVER IN 1878
During the winter 1877–’78 I camped on Pine Creek, Washington, exploring the swamps in the neighborhood and fighting against water to secure specimens. We had dug a large shaft down to the bed of gravel, twelve feet below the surface, in which bones were to be found, but every morning we found that the hole had filled with mud and water over night, and we had to spend hours bailing it out. When we finally got it clear again, we had little time or strength left for securing fossils. This performance had to be repeated day after day, and of course the farther we excavated, the more water there was to be bailed out. I don’t think that we were dry a single day that winter. But luckily the water was warm, and we did not suffer from colds.
On the twenty-third of April I started with a team and wagon from Fort Walla Walla, accompanied by my two assistants, Joe Huff and “Jake” Wortman, the latter at that time an intelligent young man from Oregon, who had been introduced to me the winter before by my brother, Surgeon George M. Sternberg, at that time post surgeon of Fort Walla Walla. During the past six months Wortman had been my guest at my camp on Pine Creek. Afterwards he became known to science as Dr. J. L. Wortman.
We skirted the Blue Mountains in a southwesterly direction, traveling through the beautiful wheat-fields of that fertile region; and striking south at Cayuse Station on the Umatilla Reserve, we climbed the long slopes of the mountains and plunged down into the Grande Rounde, once the bed of an ancient lake, but now a lovely valley nestling among the hills. From this point we drove south to Baker City, and leaving behind us the jagged peaks of the Powder River Mountains, struck the John Day River at Canyon City.
On the second of May we camped on the other side of the mountains in a large meadow. The boys went hunting and got a deer. On the third, our road led us again through rugged mountains, covered in places with ice, and we had to cut footholds for our horses, as they were smooth-shod. We passed through a large mining gulch, where men were at work placer-digging for gold. The whole surface of the country had been dug over, and was disfigured with holes and ditches and heaps of earth.