The Life of a Fossil Hunter

by Charles H. Sternberg

The broken condition in which I found the skeleton prevented me from realizing then how complete and valuable it was; but as I look now at the fine photograph of the mounted specimen,—the only mounted specimen of the Naosaurus in the world (Fig. [32]), I can see that this expedition was indeed a success, in spite of the discouragement which I went through at the time.

After the discovery of the Naosaurus, I was obliged to spend weeks of work without results, growing more and more disheartened because I myself was fully persuaded that the search was useless. Professor Cope was convinced that there was a fossil-bearing stratum between the Permian and Triassic, which would yield an entirely new fauna, and he had reasoned out that this ideal bed must be located northwest of the productive bed already known, in the very region, in fact, which I had gone over with such care for the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard in 1882, and found barren. I, therefore, protested as strongly as I could against making the trip; but he insisted, and his more powerful will won the day. So I was forced to spend a month of extremely trying labor at the head of Crooked Creek and in the other creek valleys, northwest of the productive beds.

Here were thousands of acres of denuded bluffs of red clay, cut into fantastic shapes, often resembling old fashioned straw bee-hives or crumbling towers and battlements. As far as the eye could reach, they spread out along the divide in ever-varying shapes. The beds disintegrated easily into red mud. There were no concretions, although the rock was full of concentric rings, from the sixteenth of an inch to an inch in diameter, consisting of a round white spot with a red rim. The narrow dikes which cross the thick deposits of clay are filled with fibrous gypsum. Underneath the clay lie strata of red and white sandstone and compact concretionary rock, all barren.

But the discouragement which attended my unsuccessful search was only one of the trials with which I had to contend that winter. In the first place, the weather was against me. It snowed or rained continually, so that the ground was never dry, and I took up ten or fifteen pounds of red mud on each foot as I walked. I came down with a severe attack of grippe, too; and to make matters worse, my teamster, who was also my cook, took a particular dislike to my stove, which had been manufactured under my own supervision and had always proved satisfactory with other men, and insisted upon doing all his cooking in a trench outside the tent, so that I lost the heat which I might have had but for his obstinacy.

Every morning I climbed out of bed with aching bones, and started on my long tramp. At first I would hardly be able to drag myself along, but gradually, as I warmed to the work, I would move faster, until usually I got so far away from camp that I should not have been able to return for dinner without taking more time than I could afford, and so went without that meal. After working as long as I could see, I would return to my uncomfortable camp, to go through the same performance on the following day. I had suffered from fever and ague in the fossil fields of Kansas, and had supposed that it would be impossible to suffer more, but I found the grippe even more relentless than the ague.

To add to my worries, the people at my post office had taken in a family with a malignant form of sore eyes, and although I supplied them with curatives, they would get careless. The peevish old man whom I had employed gave me a great deal of trouble too, at one time threatening to leave me alone in the brakes. In general, my experiences with hired men have taught me the advisability of owning my own outfit, whenever it is possible. A hired man knows how helpless one is in the fossil fields without transportation, and takes advantage of the power which that helplessness gives him; or he looks at things from the hired man’s point of view, and if he can better his wages by leaving his employer, thinks that he has a perfect right to do so, even if he has made a contract to remain.

After working for weeks in accordance with Cope’s instructions, although it was as useless as carrying bricks from one side of a yard to the other and back again, I returned, worn and discouraged, to the beds which produced at least a few fossils. I determined, moreover, to give up the field at the end of my contract, and go home, and wrote a despondent letter to Cope, asking to be relieved when the contract expired, as I needed rest. It was then that I received the letter which I publish here in facsimile, a letter which I shall always cherish, not only because it shows the very best side of Cope’s character, but because it makes me feel that he realized that my life work could not be measured by money. It gave me at the time the kind of encouragement which I needed more than any other, and on receipt of it, although I was just ready to give up from exhaustion and homesickness, I decided to remain another month in those barren fields. Cope promised that he would never again send me into a field against my own judgment; and by having my own way again, I was so fortunate as to add many new specimens to the collection.

For I was rewarded, as I have always in my life been rewarded, for my many days of fruitless toil, by the discovery of a long stretch of beds whose brilliant metallic color, the result of a large amount of iron accumulated by a dank and luxurious vegetation, testified that they had once formed the mud at the bottom of a bayou. This old swamp proved to have been the habitat of countless salamanders, and thanks to this discovery I accomplished more during the last month of my stay in Texas than during all the rest of the time put together, leaving out of account, of course, the fin-backed lizard.