until I got into Idaho, was through very familiar country, which we 

 had travelled, by rail, on horseback and even on foot, in 1877 and '78. 

 One morning, as I awoke in my berth and pulled up the window shade, 

 I recognized a peculiar little butte in the valley of the Bear River of 

 Idaho, which I had last seen just after the famous and bloody Battle of 

 Ham's Fork, the dangers of which I happily escaped. 



My objective was Baker City, Ore., where I had arranged to meet 

 L. S. Davis, a well known collector, who had worked for Marsh and 

 Cope. He was one of the self-trained scientific workers of whom the 

 old West was full, and was very like Sam Smith in many respects. The 

 success of the expedition was very largely due to Davis whose knowl- 

 edge of the country and of the fossil beds was very exact. He had lately 

 built a sawmill and said that he could not give us more than a fort- 

 night's time. In consequence of this, we bought no horse for him and 

 he rode each man's horse in turn, the owner riding on the wagon that 

 day. Fortunately, when the field work began, he could not leave it and 

 stayed with us throughout the season and even prolonged it by making 

 a trip to Crooked River for us after we had gone home. 



While the series of letters that I wrote to my wife from the field in 

 1889 has been preserved intact, there is little in them of general interest. 

 The John Day beds, which have not been found outside of Oregon, 

 are, for the most part, buried under the immense flows of the Columbia 

 River lava fields, one of the greatest of such basaltic areas in the world. 

 It is only where the rivers, especially the John Day itself, which has 

 given its name to the formation, have cut canyons through the lava, 

 that the underlying beds have been exposed in long, narrow bands. In 

 a few places, the river canyons have been widened out into basins of 

 two or three miles in diameter and then the soft strata of the John Day 

 have been weathered into bad lands. The country was much more set- 

 tled than in the regions where we had formerly worked and it was 

 difficult to find pasture for the horses. Our permanent camp was in 

 "the Cove," a basin some two miles or more in width, in a beautiful 

 pine grove and with abundance of water and grass. From this camp we 

 sent out small parties to the spots where Davis knew that fossils were 

 to be found. 



To a very large extent, the country had been "sheeped oflf," in the 

 expressive Western phrase. That is to say, the sheep had completely de- 

 stroyed the grass, leaving great areas of trampled dust, in which no 

 living thing grew. We came to have the same contemptuous loathing 

 for a sheep that the cattleman had; for in that semiarid region, the 



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