EARLIER EXPLORATIONS. 9 



In 1850 the Upper ^ris.soiiri country was visited by Mr. T. A. Cul- 

 bertson under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution. lie collected 

 some vertebrate fossils from the ^^'llite liiver bad lauds and ascended 

 the Missouri above Fort Union, and tli()u;:;h he notes the character of the 

 country, his report shows that he made no collections and no valuable 

 observations on the geology of these very interesting formations. 



Dr. Evans again, in 1853, passed through this region en route to Ore- 

 gon Territory, where he was ordered by the government to make a geo- 

 logical survey. He made here another valuable collection of vertebrate 

 fossils from the Bad Lands and of Cretaceous fossils from the now well- 

 known Sage Creek region. Dr. Leidy made a study of the vertebrate re- 

 mains, publishing the results in the Journal of the Philadelphia Academy 

 of Natural Sciences, while Drs. Evans and Shumard described the mollus- 

 can fossils in the Proceedings of the Saint Louis Academy of Sciences. 



In the same year, 1853, the region was visited for the first time by 

 Mr. Meek and Dr. Hayden, to whom so much is due for their study of the 

 geology of the Northwest, and they have continued to the present time* 

 among the most voluminous contributors to the geology and paleontology 

 of the far West. These gentlemen visited the country under the auspices 

 of Prof. James Hall, of Albany, the veteran American paleontologist, for 

 the purpose of making a collection of the Cretaceous and Tertiary fossils 

 of the Bad Land region. The vertebrate remains collected were examined 

 by Dr. Leidy, and the invertebrate forms of the Cretaceous, studied by 

 Professor Hall and Mr. Meek, furnished the subject of a memoir published 

 by the Boston Academy of Science.f In this memoir was a section pre- 

 pared by Mr. Meek, showing for the first time the order of succession of 

 the difierent beds of the Cretaceous in the Upper Missouri Region. The 

 interesting observations of Meek and Hayden on the geology of the coun- 

 try from Fort Pierre to Council Bluffs were presented also by Professor 

 Hall in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, at Providence in 1865. 



In 1854 Dr. Hayden, for the most part alone and unaided, again 



* Mr. Newton's MS. was prepared before the lamented death of Mr. Meek, which occurre<l Decem- 

 ber 22, 187G.— Ed. 



t Proceedings, 1854. 



