A HUNT FOR EXTINCT ANIMALS. 



dam has been built across the canon 

 above the village, making the long lake 

 which I have previously mentioned, and 

 a large electric power house, with wires 

 going to Butte and Helena, has been con- 

 structed on the west side of the river 

 opposite "The Ferry." 



The next morning I went early to the 

 bluff which I had passed the previous 

 evening, climbed up its steep front, and 

 was looking carefully along a perpen- 

 dicular bank when I suddenly became 

 aware of a long face imbedded in the 

 rock and looking out at me. A fossil- 

 hunter is as happy when he finds a good 

 skull as a hunter when he kills some rare 

 animal, but with the former the story is 

 not all in. There are still the questions : 

 Are there more skulls and skeletons to 

 be found? Is the animal some species 

 that has been described ; or is it one that 

 man has never seen before? Does it 

 reveal something about the past life of 

 the earth that no one has known? You 

 shall see in this story how the answers 

 to these questions are actually worked 

 out. 



I searched a part of the bluff and 

 saw, in several places, portions of skulls 

 and bones projecting from the soft rock. 

 I plainly saw that it would pay to come 

 to this place with team, wagon and camp 

 outfit, and I estimated that it would take 

 about two weeks to dig out the fossils. 



These beds were plainly of Miocene age, 

 but I found that the much older White 

 River deposits here contained fossils 

 also. 



From this place I rode to Helena, and 

 then to the North Boulder Valley, near 

 Cold Spring Postoffice, a distance of 

 about seventy-five miles, where I found 

 another place which contained bones of 

 Miocene Mammals. From here I went 

 southward to Pony, a little "long town in 

 a long valley" of the Jefferson range, 

 and then westward to the Lower Mad- 

 ison Valley, to get my team and camping 

 outfit which I had left there the previous 

 year. When I went to Logan to get a 

 man to assist me, Mr. Rowland, the mer- 

 chant there, said: "I've got just the man 

 you want for such a trip." So I en- 

 gaged him and an old friend who was 

 passionately fond of hunting specimens 

 and who wished to get a little outing. 



Before leaving the Madison Valley, we 

 dug out some fossil fish from gray shales 

 in the bluffs on the east side of the valley, 

 and the neck and skull of a large species 

 of camel which afterward proved to be 

 new to science. The bones were im- 

 bedded in a fine cream-colored sand 

 which was deeply covered with river- 

 gravel. In another place we found the 

 rock in a cliff covered with leaves that 

 had fallen from old trees by an old river 

 many thousands of centuries ago. In 



"THE OLDER WHITE RIVER BEDS NEAR CANON FERRY, 

 Where we found bones and teeth of ancient mice, dogs, rhinoceroses and little three-toed horses." 



