After supper, tired out with my unwonted exertions, I fell asleep. Whenever the fire sank down and the cold became severe, I roused myself and piled fresh fuel on the dying embers, and when they blazed up again, dropped off once more. Three days and three nights that norther lasted. I understood then why the people of the Southland speak of them as they do and dread their coming. I never once left my shelter until it cleared.
Poor Pat Whelan! He had lost his horses in the storm, and being sure that I would freeze to death if he could not get back to me, he had spent every hour of daylight looking for them. What he must have suffered in that awful gale, while I was safe and comfortable!
My readers would grow weary if I told the whole story of that winter’s search. There were so few results that I became thoroughly disheartened and anxious to give up the fight and go home, where my wife and dear baby were waiting for me. There was further cause for discouragement in the fact that Pat had only agreed to stay with me until spring plowing began, and the time for that was rapidly approaching. But I would not give up. So we worked on down the stream toward the Fort Sill cattle trail, traveling on an average twenty miles a day on foot, with the record “Nothing” in my notebook night after night.
But on the eleventh of February, after forty days of unceasing effort, I discovered below the forks of the Big Wichita a somewhat different horizon from that of the beds over which I had been working so persistently without success. Some of the beds in this region are composed of red clay, with small irregular concretions that are piled in heaps at the base of the hills and roll under one’s feet, rendering travel difficult In other strata are deposits of small nodules, held together by silica. These nodules are of various colors, and where held securely and ground down, make beautiful mosaics. Then there are beds of greenish sandstone, laid down in thin layers; and in these beds, for the first time since I came to Texas, I found the remains of a Permian vertebrate. My notes say: “Although it is not wise to shout before I am out of the woods, yet I feel very much encouraged, and I earnestly hope for the success I have worked for. I have evidently worked too high in the red beds to find fossils.”
On the second day in these beds, I found fragments of the great salamander Eryops, and on the twenty-second of February, I found the first specimen that I had ever seen of the long-spined reptile, Dimetredon. Of this last I got seventy-five pounds of bones and matrix, preserved in iron ore concretions. The teeth are long, recurved, and serrated. I knew little then about these most ancient of all the vertebrates that it has been my fortune to collect, but I shall have more to say about them later. The authorities now place the time when these animals lived twelve million years away. Indeed, “God is not slack as some men count slackness, one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
The only way in which we can realize the lapse of millions of years is by a study of the work which nature has accomplished in them, depositing vast strata, lifting them up into mountain ranges, and carving out in them flood-plains and mighty canyons. More interesting still is a study of the countless forms of life which, in ever-varying groups, have each in turn dominated sea and earth and air. First, as here in Texas, the batrachians reigned supreme, a race of creatures which were supplied with both gills and lungs, so that they could live both on land and in water. Then came the reptiles, and later still dawned the Age of Mammals, with man as the crowning work of the Creator’s hands.
I was now at last in the fossiliferous beds and secured some fine material. Unfortunately about this time Pat gave notice that he would soon be obliged to leave me. I should then have no team, and to work in these fossil beds without a means of transportation would be as useless as to attempt to dig up a forest with a hoe. I had, however, sent north for an assistant, a Mr. Wright, and after hunting for me a day and a half in the brakes of the Big Wichita, he finally arrived in camp.
On the sixth of March a violent norther struck us. We were better off for protection than we had been, however, as my tent had at last arrived from Kansas; and although only an A-tent, it kept out the storms of sleet and snow that fell for three days. During all that time the cattle remained without food in the dense woods. Such times as this, when we were confined to the close quarters of our tent and could accomplish nothing but keeping ourselves warm, are in my opinion the most uncomfortable which the fossil hunter is called upon to endure.
On the ninth of March, the sun rose bright and clear upon a scene of surprising beauty. Every tree, bush, and blade of grass on the red beds was covered with a milky white ice, whose silvery luster was set with innumerable sparkling gems. It was glorious at sunrise, but as the morning advanced, the snow and ice began to melt, leaving patches of red and white over the Bad Lands, and by noon had entirely disappeared. The hills rapidly dried, as the thick red water sought the drainage canals, and we were soon at work once more.
As a precaution against the very difficulty which I had encountered,—I mean the impossibility of keeping a man and team with me,—I had obtained from the Secretary of War, through the efforts of Professor Alexander Agassiz, a letter of introduction to the commanders of western posts, requesting them to assist me by every means in their power not inconsistent with the public service. With this letter from the Honorable Robert T. Lincoln, a son of our martyred President, I started out on the twelfth of March for Fort Sill, on a pony hired from a livery stable. I was assured that it was only sixty miles to the Fort, and that the pony could easily take me there in a day, but I soon found that he was just off grass, and weak and thin. I also discovered, after night had overtaken me, that I had been put on the wrong cattle trail. I reached a house in the evening, that of a school-teacher, who, because of his having had some education and possessing the ability to talk intelligently, was known in that region as “Windy” Turner, in distinction from “Bull” Turner, a cowman. I found him to be a gentleman.