90 . KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



was an open place, circular in form, filled with soft mud. The edges 

 were composed of jieat moss. After penetrating this we passed 

 through compact yellow clay, and twelve feet below was a bed of 

 gravel, in which the bones were entombed. As the mouth of the spring 

 was only two feet higher that the creek, we could only drain our 

 spring to that depth. Every morning the water was up to this level, 

 and we had to spend the greater part of the day in bailing out the 

 mud and water ; the little excavating we could accomplish added to 

 our labors the next day, as we had more water to bail out. We 

 worked for weeks in this way, and at last were rewarded, not with 

 bones of the mammoth, as we hoped, but a number of skulls of the 

 American bison, or butfalo. As they represented larger animals than 

 the buffalo of the plains with which I was familiar, I supposed them 

 to be extinct forms. Prof. E. D. Cope, however, assured me they be- 

 longed to the common living species. In one of these skulls I found 

 an arrow-point of flint roughly worked. To my mind this was an im- 

 portant discovery, as the elephant bones were in this same bed of 

 gravel, and I saw on the discarded dumps of the farmer fossil-hunters 

 not only discarded elephant bones, but those of this same buffalo as 

 well. So my discovery proved that man, the bufl^alo and the hairy 

 elephant were contemporary in Washington. At what time is a 

 harder problem to solve, but I saw remarkable evidence that it was 

 long ago this gravel-bed was laid down, for I found in Oregon, under 

 about 2000 feet of lava, this or a similar deposit of gravel, with the 

 bones of the same variety of buffalo I found on Pine creek, in Wash- 

 ington. This discovery did not appeal very strongly to the imagina- 

 tion of Professor Cope, and I have never known whether he published a 

 record of it or not. Possibly the great age of the buffalo on our conti- 

 nent was new to science ; the fact that man and the great northern 

 elephant existed at the same time was well known years before. Es- 

 pecially do the records of the icy barriers of the region towards the 

 north pole bear incontestible evidence of this fact. Man was so 

 familiar with this huge animal that he carved his likeness on its 

 ivory. 



I think this discovery is worthy of note, as it extends the southern 

 range of man himself into the United States. When in 1894 I dis- 

 covered the large deposit of teeth and bones of the mammoth in Lane 

 county, remembering my experience in Washington, I searched care- 

 fully for human bones or implements associated with them, but with- 

 out success. I would like to have been able to extend man's journeys 

 from Washington into Kansas. Very likely the man whose skull was 

 found at Lansing often saw droves of these great elephants. 



I will now pass on to "Pliocene man." An article under this 



