of our friends, we pushed on with uncommon speed to Cheyenne and 

 the Union Pacific Railroad. Some delay was occasioned there by wind- 

 ing up our affairs, paying bills, selling our horses and the like, and 

 thence we scattered to our several destinations. 



On a previous page, I remarked that the decision to undertake the 

 expedition of '82 brought me to a parting of the ways, because, thence- 

 forward, it made my line of research almost entirely palaeontological. 

 The successive expeditions supplied me with new and valuable mate- 

 rial, which called for description and pubUcation. In 1882 and '83, 

 Osborn and I published a series of papers, some individual, others of 

 joint authorship, dealing with the more important discoveries of 1878 

 and the fossils collected in 1882 formed the subject of memoirs pub- 

 lished seven years later. The work of cleaning the specimens and free- 

 ing them from the enclosing rock in which they were found and 

 mounting them for exhibition took a great deal of time. This work was 

 admirably done by Dr. F. C. Hill, but, as he had no assistance of any 

 kind, progress was inevitably slow and therefore the work of publica- 

 tion was always some years behind the field work of collecting the 

 fossils. 



In the autumn, shortly after our return home, I wrote a brief report 

 of the expedition's work and accomplishment, addressed to Dr. Guyot, 

 as director of the museum. In that document, after expressing our 

 thanks to the various functionaries, military and civil, and to private 

 persons who had given us valuable assistance, I paid a tribute to the 

 students, who had worked steadily and successfully in spite of hard- 

 ships and dangers. The report was printed as a small pamphlet and 

 quite widely distributed. In England, it gained us only ridicule; one of 

 the weeklies, I think it was Nature, spoke sneeringly of our having 

 experienced "just enough hardship to make them feel like real ex- 

 plorers." This was to miss the point entirely; we did not feel like 

 explorers of any sort, real or sham, for the country had been well known 

 for more than a century. Ours was a collecting, not an exploring ex- 

 pedition and there was not a word in the report that justified the slur. 

 Besides, I have always been curious to learn how the critic knew the 

 exact amount and degree of hardship that we had undergone. In the 

 winter of 1 890-1 891, some of our camping grounds were the scene of 

 fierce fighting between the Indians and the troops, especially the 7th 

 and 9th Regiments of Cavalry, a pretty plain demonstration of what 

 we had narrowly escaped. 



