272 Life of a Fossil Hunter 



feet of these fresh-water beds, are laid down in a 

 basin surrounded, on all sides, by the marine, Fort 

 Pierre, and Fox Hills Cretaceous. 



Buck Creek on the south, Cheyenne River on 

 north and east, and a line through the mouth of 

 Lightning Creek would roughly give the area of the 

 Laramie Beds we explored. They cover about a 

 thousand square miles. Here in a country given up 

 entirely to cattle and sheep ranges with but little of 

 the country fenced, meeting no one but now and 

 then a lonely sheep herder, my tribe of fossil hun- 

 ters entered with bounding hope that we might find 

 some of these famous dinosaurs. 



Here is the border land between the Age of Rep- 

 tiles and of Mammals, where mammals first appear 

 as small marsupials. We secured several teeth of 

 these early mammals. Day after day hoping 

 against hope we struggled bravely on. Every night 

 the boys gave answer to my anxious inquiry, What 

 have you found? Nothing. Often we ran out of 

 palatable food, as we were 65 miles from our base, 

 and did not always realize how our appetites would 

 be sharpened by our miles of tramping over the 

 rough hills and ravines. One day in August, Levi 

 and I started in our one-horse buggy to a camp we 

 had made near the cedar hills on Schneider Creek. 

 r As we passed a small exposure which I had not gone 

 over, I left him to drive and went over the beds of 



