Next morning, while Dr. Hunt and Dr. Gainman rode over to No Wood Draw, with Antoine as guide, to view the skeleton of the Hyrachyus and discuss the best means of removing it and shipping the block to New York, Perry started out alone for Haystack Butte. His ride with Round-up Dick and Antoine had given him a good idea of the country, and, on the way from the station to Blue Goose Gully, Antoine had pointed out to him its geology. Still he was surprised, when, less than an hour after leaving camp, he found himself on a well-beaten trail. Half feeling that the trail might lead in his direction, since it passed close to Haystack Butte, he followed it for a little distance. The skeleton of a horse, half buried in the soil, and, a quarter of a mile further on, the skull of an ox, made him wonder. Then, suddenly, the lad remembered a diagram in one of his old scientific books at home, showing a section of Haystack Mountain and the surrounding country, and on the diagram a winding road with the old thrilling name:
“The Overland Trail!”
Unconsciously, Perry checked his pony and looked to the westward. “The Overland Trail!” Over that trail how many emigrant trains had passed! On the long prairie stretches how many bands of hostile Indians had been fought; over the Bad Lands in which he was riding, how many emigrants had died, the men gaunt and footsore, the women weak and starved. “The Overland Trail!” No three words in all the language tell a grimmer story of American History, no three words hold more gallantry or more adventure.
It was with a jerk that Perry pulled himself back to reality again and turned to the left from the old trail, towards the low slopes of that butte which is dignified by the name of Haystack Mountain. It took a sharp eye to distinguish between the two levels of rock, of which the distinguishing characters had been explained to Perry by Antoine, but the boy read his way correctly. Rounding one of the small erosion buttes he reached the point where one of the parties from the camp was engaged in uncovering an Eobasileus or Loxolophodon skeleton that had been discovered a week or two before.
Perry called to remembrance the rhyme his uncle had told him quoting the scornful remarks of the Loxolophodon to the aspiring Eohippus, and he smiled. He tethered his pony, and boy-like, clambered to the very top of Haystack Butte, beneath the cap of which the Eobasileus skeleton had been found. He spent the day happily roaming around the country, learning the lie of the rocks from the clues that had been given him by Antoine.
Next day, with his uncle, the boy started north for the Grey Bull River country to review the Lower Eocene Beds. Perry thought he knew his geology fairly well, but he had not the slightest idea that there could be as much excitement in a mere ride through that country with some one who was as expert as the professor. The finding of each new rock was like the finding of a new wild animal, and Perry aptly described the ride as “gunning for strata!”
The trip through the Puerco and Torrejon regions of New Mexico was also a delight to the boy, but as their researches took them further and further down the rock levels and they grew nearer and nearer to the level where the giant reptiles could be found, all the great wonder revived, and at night, in his tent, Perry dreamed again and again that he was on the back of the unicorn, speeding through that Jurassic world of giant dinosaurs. At last, the New Mexico strata sufficiently studied, the two took the train back for Wyoming once more. They picked up their ponies at the nearest station to the reptile beds and a little later stopped at an abandoned sod cabin that had been used by the Museum expedition several years before when taking out specimens from the Bone Cabin quarry.
“There, Perry,” said the professor, pointing to the ruins of a small building on a hillock at the end of the valley not far from the sod cabin, “is the most marvelous fossil spot in the world. It is famous to every scientist and will be famous forever.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.