On the fifth of May, after passing through Canyon City, we started for the John Day Basin. It snowed nearly all day. On the road we met a man who told us of a rich fossil leaf locality, on the Van Horn ranch; and after a sixteen-mile drive we found the place and secured some very fine specimens. The leaf impressions were found in a soft, shaly clay-stone, and were very abundant, representing well-preserved Tertiary flora. That night we feasted on a large salmon trout which I caught in an irrigation ditch.
On the sixth (I am following my notebook) we worked all day. I collected two hundred specimens, and Mr. Wortman eighty-five. They were all very fine, and represented the oak, the maple, and other species. I secured some fish vertebræ also. This is another case in which I lost credit for early discoveries. I was told by Professor Cope, a few years before his death, that these specimens had never been examined.
In this same locality there is a bed of rock so light that it floats. I threw a large mass of it at some object in the water, and was amazed to see it float off down the stream. It was the first time that I had ever seen a rock lighter than water.
On the seventh of May, after a journey of fifteen days from Walla Walla, we reached Dayville, a mile below the crossing of the South Fork of the John Day River. One of the first men I met was a certain Bill Day, whom I soon after hired as assistant. He had for years been making collections of the fossil vertebrates here, usually sending them to Professor Marsh. I was able to secure a large and fine collection from him and another mountain man, a Mr. Warfield, who had also spent much time collecting fossils. Both men had been employed by Professor Marsh during his expedition in this region, and were very careful workmen.
We camped on Cottonwood Creek and prepared to pack into the Basin, or Cove as it has been called. For a hundred and fifty miles of its course, the John Day flows east, skirting the Blue Mountains, but here at Cottonwood or Dayville, it has turned north and cut a great canyon, four thousand feet deep, through the heart of the mountains, the so-called Grande Coulée, since known as the Picture Gorge. At the foot of this canyon, the mountains swing away from the river in a great horseshoe bend, closing in upon it again several miles below. This amphitheater, three miles wide and thirteen long, is a scene of surprising beauty. The brilliantly colored clays and volcanic ash-beds of the Miocene of the John Day horizon paint the landscape with green and yellow and orange and other glowing shades, while in the background, towering upward for two thousand feet, rise rows upon rows of mighty basaltic columns, eight-sided prisms, each row standing a little back of the one just below, and the last crowned with evergreen forests of pine and fir and spruce. But no pen can picture the glorious panorama.
Ever since Cretaceous times, when a quiet inland sea laid down the thousand feet of Kansas chalk, here in the John Day region vulcanism has held sway; almost until to-day. Indeed I have often seen the summit of old Mount Hood wreathed with menacing clouds of smoke, as if she were preparing to pour forth again her floods of molten lava and devastate the region.
When volcanic action first began, great masses of ashes must have been thrown out over the country, settling in the lakes and covering the remains of animals which had been accumulating there for ages. Then floods of lava, one after another, poured out over the forests, until they lay buried beneath two thousand feet of volcanic rock. Where did this immense mass of molten rock come from, and how? A dike crosses the Basin, and for fifteen miles the basaltic columns lie along its edges like cordwood; so we know that some of the lava at least was squeezed up out of the earth’s crust through narrow cracks.
I remember once, as I was standing with Uncle Johnnie Kirk, the hermit of the Cove, in front of his cabin, he pointed to the basaltic cliffs that towered above us, and observed gravely, “All vegetable matter.” He had found at the base remains of the forests which the lava had engulfed, and had concluded that the whole mass represented similar remains.
Before moving the outfit into the fossil beds I took my pony and started off to spy out the land. Following a horse trail that led up the gentle slope west of the canyon represented in Dr. Merriam’s picture of the Mascall Beds I reached a tableland, which proved to be the divide between Cottonwood and Birch creeks. Here I found that the trail leading down to the mouth of Birch Creek was very steep—one could have greased one’s boots and slid the whole distance of several hundred feet. I was afraid to ride down and led my pony, but I soon learned that an Oregon pony has long, well-developed legs and can climb up and down better than I could myself.
When I reached the river at the mouth of the Grande Coulée, I found to my dismay that all the rich-looking green and brown fossil beds were on the other side, where the amphitheater which I have mentioned is cut out of the flank of the mountains. As a boy I had learned to swim dog-fashion, and as the river was not over thirty or forty feet wide, and I was determined, after coming so far, to find some fossils and a good camping ground, I decided to strip, jump out as far as I could, and paddle the rest of the way across.