Read Ebook: The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Sternberg Charles H Charles Hazelius Osborn Henry Fairfield Author Of Introduction Etc

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I remember when old Santante, a chief of the Kiowas, came to the post in a government ambulance, which he had captured on one of his raids. In time of peace, the Indians belong to the Interior Department of the government, so that all the officer in command at the fort could do was to extend the old chief the courtesy of the army and care of himself and team. Once, at the old stone sutler's store, I heard him remark, after he had filled himself well with whisky, "All the property on the Smoky Hill is mine. I want it, and then I want hair."

He got both the following year.

In July, 1867, owing to the fear of an Indian outrage, General A. J. Smith gave us at the ranch a guard of ten colored soldiers under a colored sergeant, and all the settlers gathered in the stockade, a structure about twenty feet long and fourteen wide, built by setting a row of cottonwood logs in a trench and roofing them over with split logs, brush, and earth. During the height of the excitement, the women and children slept on one side of the building in a long bed on the floor, and the men on the other side.

The night of the third of July was so sultry that I concluded to sleep outside on a hay-covered shed. At the first streak of dawn I was awakened by the report of a Winchester, and, springing up, heard the sergeant call to his men, who were scattered in rifle pits around the building, to fall in line.

As soon as he had them lined up, he ordered them to fire across the river in the direction of some cottonwoods, to which a band of Indians had retreated. The whites came forward with guns in their hands and offered to join in the fight, but the sergeant commanded: "Let the citizens keep in the rear." This, indeed, they were very willing to do when the order was given, "Fire at will!" and the soldiers began sending leaden balls whizzing through the air in every conceivable arc, but never in a straight line, toward the enemy, who were supposed to be lying on the ground.

As soon as it was light my brother and I explored the river and found a place where seven braves, in their moccasined feet, had run across a wet sandbar in the direction of the cottonwoods, as the sergeant had said. Their pony trails could be easily seen in the high, wet grass.

The party in the stockade were not reassured to hear the tramp of a large body of horsemen, especially as the soldiers had fired away all their ammunition; but the welcome clank of sabers and jingle of spurs laid their fears to rest, and soon a couple of troops of cavalry, with an officer in command, rode up through the gloom.

After the sergeant had been severely reprimanded for wasting his ammunition, the scout Wild Bill was ordered to explore the country for Indian signs. But, although the tracks could not have been plainer, his report was so reassuring that the whole command returned to the Fort.

Some hours later I spied this famous scout at the sutler's store, his chair tilted back against the stone wall, his two ivory-mounted revolvers dangling at his belt, the target of all eyes among the garrison loafers. As I came up this gallant called out, "Well, Sternberg, your boys were pretty well frightened this morning by some buffalo that came down to water."

"Buffalo!" I said; "that trail was made by our old cows two weeks ago."

Later the general in command told me that they had prepared for a big hop at the Fort on the night of the fourth, and that Bill did not report the Indian tracks because he did not want to be sent off on a long scout just then.

In the unsettled state of the country at this time there were other dangers to be guarded against beside that of Indians, as I learned to my cost.

As a boy of seventeen, it was my duty on the ranch to haul milk, butter, eggs, and vegetables to Fort Harker for sale. I cared for my pony myself, and in order to get the milk and other food to the Fort in time for the soldiers' five-o'clock breakfast, I had to go without my own. One day I had a number of bills to collect from the officers, but as I was unusually tired, and the officers were not out of bed when I called, I put the bills in my inside pocket and started home.

As was my custom, after leaving the garrison I lay down on the wagon-seat and went to sleep, letting my faithful horse carry me home of his own accord. I have no recollection of what happened afterwards, but when I reached the ranch my brothers found me sitting up in the wagon moaning and swinging my arms, with the blood flowing from a slung-shot wound in my forehead. I had been struck down in my sleep and robbed of all the money I had on my person, as it happened only about five dollars.

Providentially our nearest neighbor, D. B. Long, was a retired hospital steward, and the post surgeon, Dr. B. F. Fryer, who was sent for immediately, was just ready to drive to town with his team of fleet little black ponies. He reached the ranch in an incredibly short time, and, although respiration had ceased, those two faithful men kept up artificial respiration for hours. My oldest brother, Dr. Sternberg, for years Surgeon-General of the Army, was also sent for, and I found him lying on a mattress by my side when I regained consciousness two weeks later.

I might tell also of the ruffians who at one time held Ellsworth City in a grip of iron, and how, until they killed each other off or moved further west with the railroad, the dead-cart used to pass down the street every morning to pick up the bodies of those who had been killed in the saloons the night before, and thrown out on the pavement to be hauled away.

But, although I should like to recall more of the incidents connected with the opening up of a new country, time presses, and I must pass on to an account of my work as a fossil hunter.

I had not been long in this part of the country before I found that the neighboring hills, topped with red sandstone, contained, in isolated places, from a few feet to a mile in diameter and scattered through a wide expanse of country, the impressions of leaves like those of our existing forests.

The rocks consisted of red, white, and brown sandstone, with interlaid beds of variously-colored clays; while here and there, scattered through the formation, were vast concretions of very hard flint-like sandstone, often standing on softer rocks that had been weathered away into columns, the whole giving the effect of giant mushrooms, as seen in the cuts .

This formation, resting unconformably on the upper carboniferous rocks, belongs to the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous Period. The sedimentary rocks were laid down during the Cretaceous Period, the closing period of the "Age of Reptiles," in a great ocean, whose shore line enters Kansas at the mouth of Cow Creek on the Arkansas River, and extending in a northwesterly direction in the vicinity of Beatrice, Nebraska, touches Iowa, and passes on to Greenland.

I was carried away at this time by the thoughts that had been surging through the hearts of men since Darwin bade them turn to nature for the answers to their problems concerning the plants and animals of this earth.

How often in imagination I have rolled back the years and pictured central Kansas, now raised two thousand feet above sea level, as a group of islands scattered about in a semi-tropical sea! There are no frosts and few insect pests to mar the foliage of the great forests that grow along its shores, and the ripe leaves fall gently into the sand, to be covered up by the incoming tide and to form impressions and counterparts of themselves as perfect as if a Divine hand had stamped them in yielding wax.

Go back with me, dear reader, and see the treeless plains of to-day covered with forests. Here rises the stately column of a redwood; there a magnolia opens its fragrant blossoms; and yonder stands a fig tree. There is no human hand to gather its luscious fruit, but we can imagine that the Creator walked among the trees in the cool of the evening, inhaling the incense wafted to Him as a thank-offering for their being. All His works magnify Him. The cinnamon sends forth its perfume beside the sassafras; linden and birch, sweet gum and persimmon, wild cherry and poplar mingle with each other. The five-lobed sarsaparilla vine encircles the tree-trunks, and in the shade grows a pretty fern. Many other beautiful plant forms grace the landscape, but the glorious picture is only for him who gathers the remains of these forests, and by the power of his imagination puts life into them; for it is some five million years, according to the great Dana of my childhood days, since the trees of this Kansas forest lifted their mighty trunks to the sun.

At the age of seventeen, therefore, I made up my mind what part I should play in life, and determined that whatever it might cost me in privation, danger, and solitude, I would make it my business to collect facts from the crust of the earth; that thus men might learn more of "the introduction and succession of life on our earth."

My father was unable to see the practical side of the work. He told me that if I had been a rich man's son, it would doubtless be an enjoyable way of passing my time, but as I should have to earn a living, I ought to turn to some other business. I say here, however, lest I forget it, that, although my struggle for a livelihood has been hard, often, indeed, bitter, I have always been financially better off as a collector than when I have wasted, speaking from the point of view of science, some of the most precious days of my life attempting to make money by farming or in some other business, so that I might live at home and avoid the hardships and exposures of camp life.

With collecting-bag over my shoulder and pick in hand, I wandered over the hills of Ellsworth County. If I chanced upon a locality rich in fossil leaves, thrilled with a joy that knows no comparison, I walked on air as I carried my trophies home; while if night overtook me with an empty bag, I could scarcely drag my weary limbs along.

I have a vivid recollection of the discovery of another locality. One night I dreamed that I was on the river, where the Smoky Hill cuts into its northern bank, three miles southeast of Fort Harker. A perpendicular face in the colored clay impinges on the stream, and just below this cliff is the mouth of a shallow ravine that heads in the prairie half a mile above.

In my dream, I walked up this ravine and was at once attracted by a large cone-shaped hill, separated from a knoll to the south by a lateral ravine. On either slope were many chunks of rock, which the frost had loosened from the ledges above. The spaces left vacant in these rocks by the decayed leaves had accumulated moisture, and this moisture, when it froze, had had enough expansive power to split the rock apart and display the impressions of the leaves.

Other masses of rock had broken in such a way that the spaces once filled by the midribs and stems of the leaves admitted grass roots; and their rootlets, seeking the tiny channels left by the ribs and veins of the leaves, had, with the power of growing plants, opened the doors of these prisoners, shut up in the heart of the rock for millions of years.

I went to the place and found everything just as it had been in my dream.

I believe I am the only fossil hunter who has collected from this locality. Probably my eyes saw the specimens while I was chasing an antelope or stray cow and too much occupied with the work in hand to take note of them consciously, until they were revealed to me by the dream, the only one in my experience that ever came true. I tell this story to show how deeply I was interested in these fossils.

My first collection, or rather the cream of it, was sent to Professor Spencer F. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution. The following is the letter which I received from him:

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION,

Washington, June 8, 1870.

Dear Sir:--We are duly in receipt of your letter of May 28th, announcing the transmission of the fossil plants collected by your brother and yourself, and shall look forward with much interest to their arrival. As soon as possible after they reach us, we shall submit them to competent scientific investigation, and report to you the result.

Very respectfully yours, etc., SPENCER F. BAIRD, Assistant Secretary in Charge.

There was no money in fossils at that early day, but I prized more highly than money the promise in the letter that my specimens would be studied by competent authority, and that I should receive credit for my discoveries.

The specimens were sent to Dr. John Strong Newberry, professor in Columbia University and State Geologist of Ohio. He did not find opportunity at that time to publish the results, but long years afterwards, in 1898, I received from Dr. Arthur Hollick a copy of "Later Flora of North America," a posthumous work of Dr. Newberry's. Turning instantly to the magnificent plates, I recognized some of my early specimens, the first I ever collected that were of value to science.

In 1872, just before Lesquereux's great work, "The Cretaceous Flora," appeared, I learned that the famous botanist was a guest of Lieutenant Benteen, the commander of Fort Harker. Fortunately, I had retained rough sketches of the first specimens I had sent to the Smithsonian Institution. So with these I started for the Post, where I found a reception in progress in honor of the noted guest.

I was introduced to the venerable botanist by his own son, who spoke to him in French, as he was almost deaf. When I displayed my sketches, he took me to one side, and in a corner of the room I told him the story of my discoveries. His eyes shone when he examined the drawings. "This is a new species," he said, "and this, and this. Here is one described and illustrated from poorer material."

I do not remember how long we talked. I only know that the golden moments sped by all too rapidly; and from that hour until his death in 1889 we were in constant correspondence.

After this all my collections were sent to him for description. Over four hundred species of plants like those of our existing forests along the Mexican Gulf, some beautiful vines, a few ferns, and even the fruit of a fig, and a magnolia flower petal, the only petal so far found in the coarse sandstone of the Dakota Group, have rewarded my earnest efforts. The fragrance of this lovely flower seems wafted down to us through the myriads of ages since it bloomed.

Dr. Arthur Hollick, in his paper, "A Fossil Petal and a Fruit from the Cretaceous of Kansas," in Contributions from the New York Botanical Garden, No. 31, says, on page 102: "Included in a collection of fossil-plant remains from the Cretaceous of Kansas, recently obtained by the New York Botanical Garden from Charles H. Sternberg of Lawrence, Kansas, are two exceedingly interesting specimens,--one representing a large petal, the other a fleshy fruit. Petals are exceedingly rare, and I am not acquainted with any published figure of anything of the kind which can compare with ours in regard to either size or satisfactory condition of preservation."

In 1888 I sent over three thousand leaf impressions from the Dakota sandstone to Dr. Lesquereux, and he selected from them over three hundred and fifty typical specimens, many of them new, for the National Museum. Hundreds of others, identified by him, were afterwards purchased by R. D. Lacoe, of Pittston, Pa., and presented to the Museum.

So feeble had the great botanist become in these last years of his life, that friends passed before his failing eyes the trays containing these great collections.

In my estimation, America can show no life more unselfishly devoted to science than that of Lesquereux, probably the most scholarly and conscientious botanist of his day. He once wrote me that he received a salary of five dollars a day from the U. S. Geological Survey, and out of this he had to pay his artist. He labored with unfailing enthusiasm to complete his monumental work, "The Flora of the Dakota Group," but by the irony of fate, he never saw his beloved book in print. It was published by the Government five years after his death, under the able editorship of Dr. F. H. Knowlton.

He passed away at the age of eighty-three.

"Born in the heart of Switzerland's mountain grandeur," he once said, "my associations have been almost all of a scientific nature. I have lived with nature,--the rocks, the trees, the flowers. They know me, I know them. Everything else is dead to me."

Columbus O 14th April 75

Mr Ch. Sternberg Fort Harker My dearest

I much approve of your purpose of studying medicine. Your taste for natural history will help you much and encourage you. But allow me still to say to you as a friend would do that you can not expect to become useful to others and to yourself in science except by hard work, pursued with patience and a final purpose. Science is a high mountain. To go up to its top or at least high enough to gain free atmosphere and wide horizon necessitates hard climbing, through brushes, thickets, rocks, etc. Then when from the beginning look around for commodious and soft paths merely enter the gloom of the woods at the base. They are seen from nobody and see nothing but undistinct forms and because there horizon is thus liberated to darkness they think there is nothing else and nothing more to learn from high above toward the top of the mountain. Moreover there is not a true hard step as Science or in life which does not give its reward in one way or another. While we have not a single moment of lazziness of unmerited comfortable rest, which does not bring us some kind of disappointment and has sent of be fraid by a little more trouble and word.

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