The Life of a Fossil Hunter

by Charles H. Sternberg

I could tell of a hundred narrow escapes from death. One day I was standing on a couple of oblong concretions, about a foot in length, with a chasm, fifty feet deep and three or four feet wide, immediately in front of me. After I had searched carefully the surface of all the rocks in sight, I started to jump over to a narrow ledge on the other side of the gorge. Suddenly both concretions flew from under my feet, and I was plunging head downward into the gorge when by a violent struggle in mid-air I managed to throw my elbows on the ledge; and I hung there until I could find a foothold and pull myself out onto solid rock.

Another time I was climbing a steep slope which was capped by a perpendicular ledge. I thought, however, that I could climb over it to the top of a ridge that ran back into the hills, where I could find a way down. For understand, we could never go back the way we had come, as we could not relax our muscles sufficiently to enable us to find with the tips of our toes the niches by which we had climbed up. So we had to be sure that we could get to the top and find a way down from there. On this occasion I was so busy searching the face of the rock for fossils that I worked for hours, climbing up niche after niche, without noticing very much where I was going, until chancing to look upward, I discovered that an escarpment of the top ledge leaned over the slope that I was scaling, rendering it impossible for me to reach the top. I fully expected that I should have to cut out a place to sit in and wait until the boys missed me and looked for me. They could then reach the top of the ledge by some other way, and lower a rope to me. But I was delighted to find at last a perpendicular seam in the rocky ledge, which proved wide enough to admit my body. So I climbed to the top as a man climbs a narrow well, with my back braced against one side and my feet planted against the other.

But such experiences as these, instead of making us timid, only spurred us on to more dangerous attempts. To show how reckless we became, I remember that once Bill found a skull in a perpendicular cliff of solidified volcanic mud, the termination of a ridge that ran far back into the hills. The skull was located about twenty feet up the face of the cliff, and too far below the surface of the ridge to be reached from above; so that there was no way to get at it but by scaling the cliff. I cut niches on one side, and Bill on the other, and we climbed up until we could reach the specimen with our picks, clinging to a niche with one hand and wielding the pick with the other. I worked with my right hand and Bill with his left.

The rock was very hard, and it took a long while to hew out the specimen. While we were at work, we heard a mountain sheep bleating for her young. By reaching up we could get our hands over the edge of the cliff, and pull ourselves up so that we could just peek over. Sure enough, the sheep was coming down the ridge toward us in great excitement, rending the air with calls for her lamb. I began to imitate the bleat of her offspring, and she increased her speed toward us with every sign of relief.

“What if she should butt us off?” I said to Bill, and the position we were in, clinging to the face of the rock with our toes and fingers, made the idea so inexpressibly funny that he began to laugh, louder and louder the more I tried to hush him up. When I had led the sheep up to within ten feet of us, she concluded that we were not her lost lamb, and turning like a flash, started on a run for the mountains a mile away. Out of a side canyon came the lamb, and fell in behind its mother; and we could see the dirt flying out behind them until they appeared to be about the size of a rabbit and a ground squirrel.

One day Bill and I were out together in the beds, and when we got back to dinner, Jake did not show up. We were not much concerned about him, as we concluded that he had found a specimen and was digging it out; but when we came in at night and there was still no Jake, we made up our minds that he had either fallen and killed himself or that he was lying in some gulch with a broken limb. In great anxiety we started out into the Bad Lands to find him.

It was a dangerous enough expedition in the daytime, but doubly so at night, and we risked our lives many times; but we did not give up until we had made the desolate region ring with our calls. At last, about midnight, with fear and sorrow in our heart, we returned to camp. By the moonlight I saw what appeared to be a human form in Jake’s bed. I rushed to it and threw off the blankets, and there, sleeping peacefully, lay Jake. We had a great mind to take him out into the Bad Lands and pitch him off into a canyon. It seems that he had been to the mountains, three miles away, where a small exposure of the John Day beds could be seen from camp; and when he returned and we were not in, he had not worried about us, but had eaten his supper and gone to bed, while we were making ourselves hoarse shouting for him. This incident illustrates a peculiarity of youth—its thoughtlessness as to the anxiety which it may be causing its elders.

Among the fossil remains which we secured in these John Day beds, were the limbs of a huge Elotherium humerosum, so named by Cope on account of the great process on the humerus. We found the specimen in Haystack Valley, lying on its side, with its toes sticking out of the face of a slope. There were thousands of feet of volcanic rock above it. Following in with pick and shovel, we cleaned up the floor, to find, when we reached the center of the humeri and femora, that they had been cut through as smoothly as if it had been done with a diamond saw. I knew, of course, that there had been a fault here, and that the earth in slipping down had severed the bones. The question that interested me was which side had gone down and how far. If the side toward the open valley, then the rest of the skeleton must have been destroyed by the wash, as the slope above the bones lay at an angle of 45 degrees to the floor on which they lay. If, on the other hand, the mountain side had gone down, and the slip had not been too great, I should be able to find the rest of the bones. Inspired by this hope, we put in several days of hard work, and were delighted to find the severed bones three feet below the original level.

What a shaking and trembling of the earth’s crust there must have been, when miles of the mountain mass slipped down three feet toward the center of the earth! No wonder that when a similar fault occurred at San Francisco, the puny works of man fell in ruins. The bones of this Elotherium are now on exhibition in the American Museum, which purchased the Cope collection, including the material that I secured through eight seasons in the field in charge of his expedition.

I had found in the Cottonwood beds that lie on top of the John Day Miocene the cannon-bone, or long cylindrical foot bone, of a large camel. As I closely studied this bone, which is composed of opposite halves, separated by a thin septum of bone in the center, with a medullary canal on each side, the conviction came to me that the two halves had once been distinct, like the metacarpals and metatarsals of the pig. With this idea in mind, I was constantly looking for a camel in the older beds, and I cannot express my delight when one day, as I was exploring the John Day beds, I came across a skeleton which had been weathered out and lay in bold relief on the face of a slope. I knew before I picked up the cannon-bone that my belief was verified, and when I took up the two bones separately, the fact was proved beyond a doubt that in this ancestor of the living form the metacarpals of the fore foot and the metatarsals of the hind foot were respectively distinct. As the species represented by this specimen was new to science, Professor Cope named it in my honor Paratylopus sternbergi. A skull of this species was afterwards found by Dr. Wortman, and both specimens are now on exhibition in the American Museum.