The Life of a Fossil Hunter

by Charles H. Sternberg

We saluted, and he asked me whether we had seen his pack train. When I answered no, he asked me if we knew where he could find some bacon, as he and his staff, as well as the troops behind them, had been living for three days on fresh beef without any salt. I told him of a smokehouse across the bridge, and he sent his scout to examine it. The man returned shortly with the report that not only was the smokehouse full of bacon, but that the table in the dwelling house was set for a meal, with cold coffee in the cups, bread, cold bacon, and potatoes, all ready to eat. The people had evidently just sat down to dinner when someone had rushed in with the news that the Indians were coming, and they had all thrown back their chairs and fled for their lives.

While the General and his staff sat down to a hearty meal, Leander and I continued to follow the trail. At one place, where a farmer made cheese, we found that a number of large cheeses had been taken out into the road and rolled along for some distance with a stick. We followed up the trail which they had made in the deep dust, and put one of them on our pack. We went into one of the houses on the road, and found that the Indians had broken up all the furniture, including the sewing-machine, etc. In the front room they had poured out a barrel of molasses, spread over it several sacks of flour, and stuck a little woolly dog in the mixture. The poor little fellow was dead. A little farther on, a sheepman’s house had been burned, and near by two thousand sheep had been mutilated and thrown into piles to die. The herders were found scalped a few days later. At one farmhouse a fine brood mare had been killed because she could not keep up with the herd.

Some days later, on the twenty-ninth of July, I believe, there was a total eclipse of the sun. The heavens were like brass, and there was a peculiar condition of the atmosphere such as I have never experienced before or since. A report was spread abroad that the Indians had returned and burned all the farmhouses along the river. I was at the time with Leander Davis, and we rode up to Perkins ranch, where a lot of men had congregated and were taking turns standing guard for fear of the Indians. When we rode up they were standing about, uncertain as to what it all meant. The dogs had gone under the stoop and the chickens to roost. The air was motionless, and an unusual stillness was over everything. The men welcomed us in hushed voices.

I sprang from my horse and asked Perkins whether he had any pieces of broken glass. He said that there were plenty under the west window, and I went and got a supply, followed by all the men, who were greatly relieved by my explanation of the phenomenon. We got a candle and blackened the pieces of glass, and watched the progress of the eclipse through them.

It had a more disquieting effect upon the hostile Indians. It seems that the soldiers had cut them off from crossing the Columbia by capturing all the small boats and patrolling the river night and day; so that with Howard’s troops on the trail behind them, troops from Walla Walla on their flanks, and the river in front, they were in a bad way. Moreover, the French brothers and the governor of Oregon had offered a reward of two thousand dollars for Egan’s head.

The Umatilla Indians were accused of pretending to help the whites in the daytime, and really helping the Snakes at night. So the commander sent out a party of soldiers to capture the squaws and little children of Homely and the other chiefs and hold them as hostages for the good behavior of their braves. When the latter asked the commander to release their families, the answer was given that if they would capture Egan and deliver him up to the authorities, they would not only get back their wives and children, but would receive the two-thousand-dollar reward. Otherwise their families would still be held as hostages.

It appeared that Egan had an appointment with Homely at a certain hour. As he rode out from his camp, with a brave behind him, Homely, similarly attended, went out to meet him. When they met between the two camps, they turned at right angles and rode toward the point agreed upon for the powwow. But as they were riding thus, side by side, Homely, with a word to his brave, suddenly raised his rifle and shot Egan, while his brave shot the attending Snake. They then immediately severed the heads of the dead men, and riding back with them to the whites, claimed the reward. About the same time, the eclipse came on, and the poor Snakes, deprived of their leader, thought that the world was coming to an end, and leaving their great herd of stolen horses, fled in small bands toward the Malheur Reservation, and were all eventually captured.

The war thus ended, as soon as I could get things in shape and my party together, I returned to the Cove, got my outfit and fossils, and moved over into Haystack Valley. I remained there all winter, and the next season secured another large collection. Many of the specimens in it are described by Professor Cope in Vol. III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata.” On p. xxvi and the two following pages of the preface, he pays his collectors a high compliment, which I give myself the pleasure of repeating here in his own words: “The same year [’77] I employed Charles H. Sternberg to conduct an exploration of the Cretaceous and Tertiary formations of Kansas. After a successful search, I sent Mr. Sternberg to Oregon. The Tertiary formations explored in 1878 were the John Day and Loup Fork of Oregon. The John Day formation was chiefly examined on the John Day River and the Loup Fork beds at various points in the same region. These yielded about fifty species, many of them represented in an admirable state of preservation.”

After mentioning the work of his other explorers, he goes on to say: “Mr. Sternberg’s expedition of 1878 was interrupted by the Bannock war, and both himself and Mr. Wortman were compelled to leave their camp and outfit in the field and fly to a place of safety on their horses. It is evident that an enthusiastic devotion to science has actuated these explorers of our western wilderness, financial considerations having been but a secondary inducement. And I wish to remark that the courage and disregard of physical comfort displayed by the gentlemen above referred to are qualities of which their country may be proud, and are worthy of the highest commendation and of imitation in every field.”

Before leaving this interesting field, I wish to show my readers Cope’s figure of the great saber-toothed tiger, Pogonodon platycopis (Fig. [31]), which was secured in 1879 by Leander Davis. I do not remember who first discovered the specimen, but for weeks each of us collectors, Wortman, Davis, and I, tried to devise some means of securing it The skull topped a pinnacle, perhaps thirty or forty feet high, and tapering like the spire of a church. At the top it was only a foot in diameter. We knew that it would not be strong enough to support the weight of a ladder, and it was too steep to scale. Moreover, if we blew it up with powder, the skull, whose rows of teeth seemed to grin at us defiantly, would be shattered to bits.