406 FLORA OF THE LARAMIE GROUP. 



HISTORICAL REVIEW OF OPINION. 



The history of the Laramie group, as now understood, is a long one, 

 and the literature is scattered through a series of reports in a manner 

 very perplexing to any one who desires to gain a comprehensive knowl- 

 edge of it. From the circumstance that at nearly all places where it 

 has been recognized it consists to a greater or less extent of deposits of 

 lignite or coal, this condition was for a time inseparably associated 

 with it to such an extent that there was a disposition to regard all the 

 lignitic deposits of the West as belonging to the same geologic forma- 

 tion ; but when this had been disproved by the discovery of extensive 

 beds of coal in the middle Cretaceous, the reaction agaiust this view 

 carried many too far, and resulted in the quite general belief that the 

 lignite beds of the Upper Missouri River were of widely different age 

 from those of Colorado and Wyoming. Even Mr. King, who correlated 

 all the beds along the 40th parallel, and first gave them the name of 

 "Laramie group," still denied the identity of the Fort Union beds with 

 them, and as late as 1S78 regarded these as Miocene and the equivalent 

 of those of the White River. It is remarkable that he should have ex- 

 pressed such an opinion in so prominent a place as his final report (Re- 

 port of the Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, Vol. I, p. 353), 

 while admitting that he had not personally examined this region. 



The northern portion of the extensive area now embraced under the 

 name Laramie group was the first to attract attention. It was nat- 

 ural that the earliest transcontinental voyages should follow the largest 

 water-ways, and notwithstanding the extremely slow' development of 

 the Upper Missouri River region we find that its exploration was begun 

 in the first decade of the century by parties provided with appliances 

 for scientific ob.servation and has been continued at intervals ever 

 since. Leaving the merely geographical aspects out of the account, we 

 find that the coal beds attracted the attention of Lewis and Clarke in 

 1803 and of every subsequent expedition down to the epoch of true 

 geologic investigation, which dates from the commencement of the 

 protracted researches of Messrs. Meek and Hayden in the year 1854, 

 the earliest i)ubIications of which are contained in Volume VIII of the 

 Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences,' 1856. The inves- 

 tigations of Harris and Audubon in 1844' added scarcely anything 

 to the knowledge of the geological age of these regions. As much 

 might be said of the explorations of Fremont, who observed the lignite 

 beds of Wyoming in 1842, and of the expedition of General Emory 

 who noted those of Eastern New Mexico in 1848. But the large col- 

 lections brought by Hayden from Nebraska and the Upper Missouri and 

 Yellowstone regions in 1854 furnished the data for profitable scientific in- 



' Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, Vol. II, 1845, pp. 

 335-240. 



