I hired the son of the hotel keeper, a Mr. Hamman, put my baggage in his wagon, and started on the journey north to my headquarters at Seymour, which we reached eight days later. Here I got off the track again, for although everyone in town knew Professor Cummins, no one could tell where he had found his fossils. “Over in the brakes,” was all the information anyone could give. Finally a man named Turner asked me to come over to his cattle range on the middle fork of the Wichita, as the country was cut up into canyons and ridges and denuded, so that I should be likely to find fossils. He knew of some mastodon bones in the vicinity, he said. So I went with him.

At one place the road led us across the narrows, where there is scarcely room for a wagon road between the brakes of the Brazos and the Big Wichita. Looking south, shallow ravines led to the valley of the Brazos, while to the north were deep gulches and mounds capped with white ledges of gypsum with red beds of clay below. I had reached at last the red beds of Texas.

An interesting phenomenon is to be observed here—the bed of the Big Wichita is one hundred and seventy-five feet lower than that of the Brazos. North of the Brazos, along a line that extends through Baylor County, the country has been lifted up and disturbed by pressure from below, while south of that line, the only disturbance in the strata has been due to erosion. Everywhere in the red beds of the Wichita valley are signs of an elevation of the earth’s crust, and for miles down the stream one comes upon miniature mountains with the strata turned up at all angles. The river valley occupies a fault.

Very beautiful indeed was the view when we got in sight of the brakes of the Big Wichita. As far as the eye could see stretched miniature Bad Lands, with rounded knobs, deep canyons, bluffs, and ravines. The prevailing color of the strata was Indian red, but beds of white gypsum and of greenish sandstone relieved the sameness. Sometimes seams of gypsum filled cracks in the strata, forming dikes a few inches in thickness.

Between the hills grew patches of grass, a welcome sight to our horses, for we had passed through a country devoid of vegetation. The fall before, the army worm had eaten the ground clean of everything that was eatable. We pitched our camp near a ditch that had been cut through the sediment which overspread the flood-plain.

The day after pitching camp, I heard George Hamman calling me, and crossing the bridge, saw him beckoning me to follow him. He gathered his pockets full of cobblestones as he went along, and when he reached the edge of the ditch a little way below the crossing, he began to throw the stones at something. I ran up to him, and heard the rattle of snakes, but could not see any until, resting my hand on his shoulder, I lifted myself on my toes and saw, on the other side of the ditch, a cave with a broad floor. Lying singly or knotted together in gorgon spheres, with heads sticking out in all directions, were hundreds of large rattlesnakes, which had come out of the cracks in the earth to bask in the sun on this sheltered floor. They had become terribly irritated by the blows of the stones which Hamman was hurling at them, and were rattling in chorus and striking out in all directions, biting themselves and each other. Suddenly one rattled in the high grass at our very feet, and looking down, we saw a big fellow making ready to strike. As quick as a flash Hamman threw himself over backward, knocking me down, and the instant he touched the ground, turned a complete somerset. While I lay there, overcome with laughter, he turned two more, and finding himself on the road, started for camp on a run. I was too hysterical with laughter to help myself, and lay there, while the snake continued to sound its rattle and dart out its forked tongue, swinging its head back and forth above its coiled body. When George saw my predicament, he was brave enough to come back and pull me out of reach of his lordship’s fangs. Then we were mean enough to kill him. He measured five feet in length.

Fig. 32.—Skeleton of Fin-backed Lizard, Naosaurus claviger.
Collected by Charles Sternberg in the Permian Beds of the Big Wichita Valley, Baylor Co., Texas, in the winter of 1896. By permission of Prof. H. F. Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History.
(Photo. by Anderson)

Fig. 33.—Fin-backed Lizard, Naosaurus claviger.
Restoration by Osborn and Knight. (From model in American Museum of Natural History.)