CHAPTER X. 



THE LARAMIE QUESTION. 



It will be recalled that Hayden, in his annual report for 1872, 

 referred to the fact that (luring- his explorations of the Tertiary forma- 

 tions along- the upper Missouri River in 1854-55 he made large collec- 

 tions of shells and plants, many of which were quite new to science. 

 During the succeeding years up to the autumn of 1860 these explorations 

 were extended and large additions made to the collections, which were 

 described from time to time in the current literature. 



The shells were all of extinct species of fresh-water origin and, while 

 they did not appear to be positively characteristic of any age, were 

 regarded by Meek as more nearly resembling Tertiary types than 

 any other. The fossil plants were mostly of extinct species and 

 regarded by Newberry as also of Tertiary age, probably Miocene. 



From evidence of this kind, accumulated during the various expe- 

 ditions, Hayden had announced the conviction that these Lignitic 

 strata, as he called them, which had been found to occupy such vast 

 areas in the upper Missouri Valley — extending far southward, with 

 very little interruption, to New Mexico, and westward into the interior 

 of the continent were probably all portions of one great group, inter- 

 rupted here and there by mountain chains or concealed by more modern 

 deposits, and from the identity of their fossil flora, all of Tertiary age. 



He then went on to state that his studies of the lower coal beds at 

 Rear River City, Wyoming, and Coalville, Utah, in 1868, had con- 

 vinced him that these particular beds were of Cretaceous age, but 

 admitting this, he felt, would be to admit the Cretaceous age of all 

 the coal beds of the Northwest, and in so doing to ignore the evidence 

 of the fossil flora altogether. The facts then at hand, he thought, 

 seemed rather to point to the conclusion that the deposition of all the 

 Lignitic strata began during the latter portion of the Cretaceous 

 period and continued on into Tertiary time without any marked physi- 

 cal break, so that many of the Cretaceous types, especially of the 

 vertebrata, may have lingered on through the transition period, even 

 into the Tertiary epoch. Inasmuch as this statement contains the first 

 satisfactory recognition of the full importance of what later became 

 known as the Laramie question, and inasmuch, further, as the dis- 



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