After this dreamy colloquy I woke up from my little rest, and the shadows of the prehistoric pachyderms vanished, but the thousands of bones were still protruding from the walls of the deep ravine.
"The waters stood upon the mountains;
At Thy rebuke they fled;
He uncovereth deep things out of darkness,
And bringeth out to light the shadow of death."
I picked up a massive femur, and put it upon my shoulder to show to the boys as a trophy, but it soon became too heavy, and I dropped it behind me, perhaps to be moved along a little further toward the Platte River by the next spring flood. In time it doubtless found another resting place in those soft river sands, possibly to be exhumed in some future geological period, to lead the finder into some wild chain of reasoning concerning its history. I reached the train, which was camped six miles west, and told my story to the boys, and after supper fell asleep.
The year after the discovery of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, it was my pleasure personally to furnish Professor Powell with a careful description of the location of these remarkable deposits of fossils in Scott's Bluffs, which he and others investigated later. At that time I believe no investigation of those fossil beds had been made by scholars qualified to classify them.
Amid all the intricacies of the ravines that run down the bluff sides, it would be difficult to indicate any locations there with exactness, but certain landmarks make this one to which I now refer comparatively easy to describe. A professor and students from one of our universities made later investigations of this particular deposit on information given as to its nature. The recent marvelous agricultural development of this country as the result of an irrigating ditch cut near these bluffs is a revelation to those who first saw it as a barren area, a part of what was well named the Bad Lands. These once barren clay lands near the foot of Scott's Bluffs are now, strange to relate, highly productive. If any one of the young ranchers now engaged in the development of that country would care to follow the ravine crossed by the bridge over the old trail and with a ladder would ascend a few cliffs that will be encountered as he proceeds along the ravine, and then climb up until he reaches the high precipice, he will find the old cedar log still lying across the chasm and resting on the tree top, for no one would have made the effort to remove it, and nothing decays in that pure air.
[CHAPTER XIV]
The Peace Pipe at Laramie
Leaving the fossil beds, a six-mile tramp was made to a point beyond Fort Mitchell, where the train was reached. The course lay across a dry clay land which, though in appearance hopelessly sterile, was dotted with small clumps of sage brush, that ubiquitous bush which grows almost everywhere in those western alkaline soils both on the plains and on the mountain slopes. Useless as that gnarly, stubby, stunted shrub may seem to be, it has been the salvation of thousands of travelers for whom it furnished the exclusive fuel along hundreds of miles of their pilgrimage. The scant foliage of this species of Artemisia has a color, taste, and odor similar to that of the ordinary sage, and all of these qualities especially the flavor, were imparted in some degree to the sage hens, which fed in numbers upon the plant.
At Fort Mitchell there was stationed a company of soldiers to impress upon the Indians the idea that the strong military arm of the U. S. Government extended over the West. As we learned later, three score soldiers were but a feeble menace to the thousands of dissatisfied warriors, who were then roaming over the plains, awaiting some assurance from our authorities that the last of their ancient hunting grounds would not be invaded and traversed by the whites.