FINDING A HUMAN SKELETON. 11$ 



of us was a considerable "bad land" area, not unlike, in general appear- 

 ance, those of the Oligocene deposits of Nebraska and Dakota, and quite 

 similar to that shown in Fig. 12. It was of great importance that we 

 should explore these, at least sufficiently to determine what fossils 

 they contained and to what formation they belonged. Reconnoitering 

 for a moment, we discovered a large hole of water in a basin at the top 

 of a landslide a few hundred feet below us. Since this seemed as prac- 

 ticable a route as any by which to descend to the valley, with some little 

 difficulty we succeeded in getting our miserable two-wheeled cart down 

 the steep incline to the water, where, after caring for our horses and 

 refreshing ourselves with a hearty meal, we set out to spend the remainder 

 of the afternoon in exploring the bad land area mentioned above. Hardly 

 had we reached the first exposure when I picked up a beautiful little jaw, 

 with black, shining teeth, of Abderites crassiramus, a small extinct her- 

 bivorous marsupial. Notwithstanding this fortunate discovery, the local- 

 ity proved not especially favorable for collecting vertebrate fossils. We 

 obtained enough, however, to show that the beds for the most part, at 

 least, belonged to the Santa Cruzian formation, from which we had 

 already made such extensive collections along the coast at Killik Aike 

 and between Cape Fairweather and Coy Inlet During the course of my 

 wanderings throughout the afternoon, in the bottom of a deep and ex- 

 ceedingly narrow bad-land gulch, I came upon the remains of a human 

 skeleton. From the condition of the teeth and the epiphyses of the limb 

 bones I should judge it to have belonged to an individual perhaps nine- 

 teen or twenty years of age. The weathered and decomposed condition 

 of the bones bore unmistakable evidence as to the great length of time 

 they had lain in their present position, while the ghastly hole in the side 

 of the cranium spoke only too plainly of the terrible tragedy which had 

 taken place in this lonely and unfrequented spot The skull was carefully 

 removed and is now among the ethnologic materials in the United States 

 National Museum at Washington. The bones of the trunk and limbs 

 were in such an advanced state of disintegration as to render their pres- 

 ervation difficult, if not impossible. They were, therefore, left to com- 

 plete the process of decay in their original resting place. 



On January seventeenth we descended the slope to the valley of the river 

 Sheuen or Chalia, stopping for a few hours at the base of the bluff to ex- 

 amine some marine deposits, which we had observed underlying the Santa 



