CHAPTER X
IN THE RED BEDS OF TEXAS FOR THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF MUNICH, 1901
Warned by my experiences in the red beds of Texas without a team of my own, when I made a contract to conduct an expedition there under the direction of Dr. von Zittel of the Paleontological Museum of Munich, I resolved to ship my own horses and outfit to the field. I gave them into the charge of my son George, who was rapidly becoming a most valuable assistant, and saw him put them aboard a freight car and get in himself. The next time I saw him was at Rush Springs in the Indian Territory, on top of a freight car, skilled in all the lore of a brakeman.
We reached the old camp at Willow Springs on the thirtieth of June, 1901. The heat had already set in, promising the hottest season that I had ever experienced in the valley of the Big Wichita. It grew more and more intense as the months passed, the mercury often rising to 113 in the shade. All the water dried up in both the natural and the artificial tanks, and the short buffalo grass in the pastures curled up and blew away. We were camped in Wagoner’s great pasture, twenty-five miles wide by fifty long, and I saw cattle die of thirst and starvation. Some had become so hungry that they had eaten the prickly pear, spines and all, and their mouths were full of putrefying sores where the spines had worked out.
The ground was hot, and the air like the breath of a furnace; and we had to haul all the water we used in camp from six to twenty miles. To add to our troubles, one of our horses, Baby, almost cut off her foot in a wire fence while striking at the flies, which, during the day, never ceased to torture man and beast. Even at night the horned cattle were not free from them, for they clustered around the base of the horns, fifteen or twenty deep, like hives of swarming bees, for rest.
The country was indeed a desert and deserted. All the people who had settled this valley on Coffee Creek or other streams, had gone never to return; the cowman had bought up all the homesteads. The schoolhouse in which I had so often attended worship had been moved from its foundations, and the houses that had once echoed to the merry cries of children, stood empty and desolate.
How can I describe the hot winds, carrying on their wings clouds of dust, which were so common that year and the next? I once went to Godwin Creek, south of Seymour, passing on the way a hundred-acre field of corn. It belonged to an old man, who had cultivated it until it was perfectly clean, and the long rows of living green were beautiful to see. When I passed it again on my way back, a hot wind was blowing, so hot that I had to shield my face and eyes to keep them from burning. The beautiful field, upon which the old man had looked with so many hopes of a rich harvest, had been scorched and seared as if by a blast of fire.
So the weeks lengthened into months, and the merciless sky still refused us rain. At our camp on Coffee Creek the heat was so terrible that we could not keep eggs, butter, or milk, or many other edibles necessary to comfort and health. The result was that my stomach soon got out of order, and a severe attack of biliousness set in, attended by an incessant longing for a drink of cold, pure water. I thought by day and dreamed by night of the well on my farm at home, with the clear water dripping from the bucket; for our only drink, except coffee, was the warm, foul-tasting water which had been brought in a barrel from twenty miles away and had soon become stale. Even that was always giving out at inconvenient times. Whenever we came to a new fossil locality, and the hope was strong within me that now we would make a rich find, George was sure to say, “Papa, we’re out of water,” and we had to make the long journey through the awful heat over the dust-laden roads to the well at Seymour, twenty miles away. When we reached it at last, how we buried our faces in the bucket and the cool water!
