134 Life of a Fossil Hunter 



Wortman secured in 1894 from this quarry for the 

 American Museum. A vast collection from the 

 same spot is stored in the National Museum in its 

 original packages, with which I filled a car in 1884. 

 I saw there a whole case filled with the skulls of 

 the rhinoceros Teleoceras fossiger, which I secured 

 in great numbers at Long Island. 



It is strange to think that the foundation on which 

 these beds of fresh-water deposits lie unconformably 

 is the great Cretaceous sea bottom, whose tilted and 

 uplifted strata tower two thousand feet above the 

 carboniferous rocks in eastern Kansas. The Re- 

 publican, Smoky Hill, and Kansas rivers have 

 carved their way through all these strata, so that by 

 following down these streams, one can get cross 

 sections of the country. 



I have often asked men who were sure that there 

 must be coal beneath the surface, why, instead of 

 hiring a man to dig a hole for them, they did not 

 hitch up their buggies and follow the valley of the 

 Smoky Hill, beginning at the Colorado line. The 

 first stratum exposed is of course the recent, with its 

 sandy loam; in it, here and there, a crumbling buf- 

 falo skull or an eroded implement. Then comes the 

 Pleistocene deposit, consisting of clay, sand, and 

 fragments of rock mingled together. From this 

 formation I secured over two hundred teeth of the 

 great Columbian Mammoth. Next come beds of 



