But I will not dwell on this side of the picture, because there is another side. We were finding in wonderful abundance the material which we had come to secure, and the hardships were forgotten in the joy of success. In spite of the many obstacles with which we had to contend, we secured the collection described in that great letter from Dr. von Zittel which I publish here in facsimile and which I prize more than any letter I ever received.
Before I accepted von Zittel’s offer that I should conduct an expedition for him in the brakes of the Big Wichita, I wrote to him, telling him how my work for science had had, from a material standpoint, no great returns. My life, I said, had been a constant struggle to secure sufficient funds to carry on the work, and the men who had bought my material had for the most part felt that they were doing good service to their museums by securing it at the lowest possible price, without taking into consideration that even a fossil hunter has to live.
It was with pleasure indeed that I received the answer of this great German, whose works on paleontology are used as text-books in our universities. Dr. von Zittel wrote: “I am sorry that from your letter you do not consider yourself in a position to work for the Munich Museum in Texas this spring. I can readily understand that after your long activity in scientific fields without material results you are somewhat discouraged and embittered, and feel that your services in this direction have not been sufficiently appreciated. For my part, I have done my best to give you credit for the scientific side of your work, and your collections from Kansas and Texas in the Munich Museum will always be an everlasting memorial to the name of Charles Sternberg.”
Such a letter, from a man like von Zittel, put new life and courage into my veins, as a similar letter from Professor Cope had once before, and made me feel that a little suffering more or less mattered nothing when measured with such enduring results. Cope is dead and von Zittel is dead, so far as such men can die, but I have preserved their letters as heirlooms for my children’s children; for they testify that “no matter what the common herd may say about me,” I have accomplished the object which I set before myself as a boy, and have done my humble part toward building up the great science of paleontology. I shall perish, but my fossils will last as long as the museums that have secured them.
But to return to the Texas Permian. I will follow my notebook for a while, as that, perhaps, is the best way to give my readers an idea of our life there.
On the eleventh of July 1 was in Seymour. I write: “A big dust storm struck the town, and this evening a rain is falling. This is indeed a great relief to me, as it will make the air cooler and give me water in the brakes, so that I can visit localities I could not before. My wagon, brought from Kansas, is a narrow-gauge one, and all the roads in Texas are cut by broad-gauge wagons. This forces my team to pull with one set of wheels in the rut and the other outside. Consequently the labor is wearing them out, in connection with the awful heat. I am, therefore, having new axles made, a long and tedious work, and I am resting out of the heat. Jesse S. Williamson has told me to occupy the building owned by himself and Will Minnich. It is a little cabin within a mile of the bone bed near Willow Springs. It has a tank of water for the horses, and is but a mile away from the schoolhouse, where a well has been dug. A few bucketsful a day, enough for camp use, trickles into it.” This cabin proved to be a great accommodation, especially as the owners had a stack of sorghum, which was placed at my disposal and saved me the trouble of hauling out hay.
As one of my spindles was broken, I had to send to Lawrence for another, and it was not until the sixteenth that I got my wagon from the shop. I then drove out to my old camp on Grey Creek in Mr. Craddock’s pasture. Here, too, was the center of a field from which I had reaped a rich harvest for Professor Cope.
On the seventeenth, my notebook states that I was in the field all day and found fragments of skeletons and skulls, all broken to pieces and mixed up together. I could not find the horizon from which these specimens came. They were all piled together with concretions in a long, narrow wash, while above there was a level denuded tract covered with concretions. The only way in which I can account for the mixture of fragmentary specimens is that a bone bed lay above the level stretch, and in the disintegration of the deposit, the fragments were carried by floods into the narrow gulch, until not a sign of the original bed was left to mark its site.
I had sent a large collection from this same locality to Professor Cope, and he had been much interested, but had also been extremely tantalized by the fact that there were great numbers of fragmentary skulls, and that although the fragments looked freshly broken, none of the pieces could be united to form a perfect skull. I now found the same trouble again. Possibly some of the missing fragments of the skulls in Cope’s collection, now in the American Museum, may be in the lot sent to Munich, and vice versa.
On the nineteenth, I found the nearly perfect skull of a new species, and on the twentieth, another very fine skull near the locality from which I had secured the many fragments a day or two before. It was a skull of the great salamander, Eryops megacephalus Cope. There were six pairs of large teeth in the roof of the mouth, and a single row of various sizes in the mandibles. Some of the points had been broken off and were lost. The skull is over twenty inches long. All the bones are beautifully sculptured on the external surface. A few years before I had found a nearly complete skeleton of this creature, some twelve feet in length, lying at right angles to the Chisholm Trail. It was preserved in hard concretions, and had weathered out on the slope of a hill. The feet of countless cattle, just starting out on their weary journey for Kansas and the North, had worn away the solid siliceous envelope to the bones.