The Life of a Fossil Hunter

by Charles H. Sternberg

Fig. 28.—Fossil-bearing Cliffs. (After Merriam.) Middle John Day exposure.

When all was ready, we were taken across the river in Mr. Mascall’s boat, swimming our horses. Then the packs were adjusted, and the wearisome climb up the face of the mountains began. It usually took us half a day to reach the summit. Then we climbed down steep slopes and over spurs of the hills, until we reached Uncle Johnnie Kirk’s hospitable cabin, a 12 × 14 structure of rough logs with a shake roof. He kept bachelor’s hall and lived all alone, except when some cowman or fossil hunter came along. We pitched our tent near his house.

Not far away there was a tract of bad lands, called the Cone, the largest in the John Day Basin, covering, I should judge, a section of land. It was cut into the usual fantastic forms, peaks, ridges, and battlements, and slender spires sometimes a hundred feet high, and as thickly clustered as those of some old Gothic cathedral. Their summits were crowned with hard concretions, which protected their almost perpendicular sides from destruction by the elements.

The drainage canals spread out through this territory like the ribs of a fan, converging at the entrance, and woe to the man who chanced to be caught in one of them during a rain, for the steep slopes shot the water down into them with such amazing rapidity that before he could turn around he would be engulfed in fathoms of water. We always climbed up to some high point the minute we heard the rain strike the rocks above us, and waited until the storm was over and the water had run out. A ditch containing twenty feet, sometimes, of water would dry up as soon as it stopped raining, so steep was the slope of its bed.

I was continually impressed in this region by the power of running water. Not only is this manifested in the mighty canyons which have been carved out during the course of ages from the solid rock, but I stood transfixed with astonishment once, at the mouth of the little creek in front of Uncle Johnnie’s cabin, on finding it dammed by a mass of basaltic rock, weighing at least twenty tons, which had been brought from its native hills, three miles away, by a flood of water, and left stranded here. All the side canyons that empty into the John Day River have dumped their loads of boulders there, in some places damming the stream or creating a series of rapids.

I soon found that all the ground in the fossil beds which was easy to get at had been gone over. Here and there we would run across a pile of broken bones and a hole from which a skull had been taken. When I asked Bill what he had meant by leaving the bones of the skeleton behind, he answered, “We were only looking for heads, though we sometimes saved knucks and jints.” This accounts for the scarcity of skeletons among the first collections made. I saw to it that my party should care for every bone discovered.

I realized then, that if we were to make our expedition a success, we should have to climb where no one before us had dared to go. It was a serious matter to scale those almost perpendicular heights; one took one’s life in one’s hand in attempting it. They were, of course, entirely bare of vegetation, and where the slope was not too steep, they were covered with angular fragments of rock which rolled from under one’s feet and were likely to send one flying into the gorge below. But I laid the situation before my two men, explaining to them that unless they were willing to face the danger, we should have to give up the expedition, as we had explored the safe ground without results; and they courageously agreed to follow where I led.

So every morning we started out for a day of perilous enterprise, each with a collecting bag over his shoulder and a well-made pick in hand. The latter was used not only for digging out fossils, but was absolutely indispensable as an aid in climbing, and as an anchor in case we began to slip. We were never sure when we left camp in the morning that we should all meet there at night, since a single misstep on those cliffs would mean death or worse than death on the pitiless rocks below; but every day we gained confidence and grew more skilful in the use of our picks.

Far above the pick-marks of the fossil hunters who had preceded us, far above the signs of the mountain sheep that inhabited these wilds, we made our way, cutting niches for our feet as high above us as we could reach, and drawing ourselves up with bodies pressed to the rock. At each niche we rested, and scanned the face of the cliff for the point of a tooth or the end of a bone, or for one of those concretions, among the thousands that everywhere topped the pinnacles or projected from the rocky slopes, whose skull-shaped form revealed the treasure that was hidden away within. When a fossil was found we first cut out of the face of the cliff a place large enough to stand upon, and then carved out the specimen.