Expedition to John Day River 187 



terested me was which side had gone down and how 

 far. If the side toward the open valley, then the 

 rest of the skeleton must have been destroyed by the 

 wash, as the slope above the bones lay at an angle of 

 45 degrees to the floor on which they lay. If, on the 

 other hand, the mountain side had gone down, and 

 the slip had not been too great, I should be able to 

 find the rest of the bones. Inspired by this hope, 

 we put in several days of hard work, and were de- 

 lighted to find the severed bones three feet below 

 the original level. 



What a shaking and trembling of the earth's crust 

 there must have been, when miles of the mountain 

 mass slipped down three feet toward the center of 

 the earth ! No wonder that when a similar fault oc- 

 curred at San Francisco, the puny works of man 

 fell in ruins. The bones of this Elotherium are 

 now on exhibition in the American Museum, which 

 purchased the Cope collection, including the material 

 that I secured through eight seasons in the field in 

 charge of his expedition. 



I had found in the Cottonwood beds that lie on 

 top of the John Day Miocene the cannon-bone, or 

 long cylindrical foot bone, of a large camel. As I 

 closely studied this bone, which is composed of op- 

 posite halves, separated by a thin septum of bone in 

 the center, with a medullary canal on each side, the 

 conviction came to me that the two halves had once 



