ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
14-5 
The home of the tyrant dinosaur and triceratops 
By William T, Hornaday 
Y EARS ago,, I often wondered how small 
and puny men find the skeletons of gigantic 
but deeply buried fossil animals; and now 
I know how one came to the light of Today. 
Once upon a time, in company with Mr. 
L'aton A. Huffman, the great wild-west photo¬ 
grapher of Montana,: I blundered into a western 
wonderland, and participated in the discovery 
of a new land of dinosaurs. We were headed, 
in that glorious October of 1904, for a land of 
mystery vaguely known as “the Hell Creek 
country”; but half way there from Miles City 
northward, at the ruins of the old L U-bar 
ranch, James McNaney, our guide, was pre¬ 
cipitately called back to his home by illness in 
his family. The rest of us journeyed on north¬ 
ward, to and beyond Jerdon (then a place of 
four cabins only), missed our Cramer ranch 
goal, and finally achieved a state of being lost. 
Finally, as our teams pulled northward we 
topped a divide, and toward the north a great 
panorama of picturesque bad-lands burst upon 
us with a resounding crash. As soon as we had 
recovered from the shock, we decided that no 
matter where Hell Creek was, or was not, that 
was good enough mule deer country for us, and 
in it we would seek our fortunes. My chief 
object was to find out precisely what the mule 
deer of that region were feeding upon at that 
season. 
We drove forward on a dim wagon trail, de¬ 
termined to follow it until it ran into the 
ground; and at last it did so, at an artistic 
and picturesque Swiss-ehaiet log cabin. It was 
the house of a hermit wolf-hunter, named Max 
Sieber, and after Mr. Huffman succeeded in 
convincing him that we were not cattle men, 
and were not seeking to locate a rival cattle 
ranch, old Max took us to his heart, which was 
very much to the benefit of the parties of the 
second part. 
His cabin almost overhung the upper water- 
hole of Hell Creek! Opposite, from the bank 
of the creek was an isolated conical butte, 
which contained a great secret. 
We pitched our comfortable Sibley tent in a 
beautiful bend of the dry stream, about two 
hundred yards below Sieber’s cabin. The spot 
was charming. There was aromatic sage-brush 
planting around our tent, behind us a cut bank 
of nice, clean sandstone, and a niche with a 
live horned owl for a saint in it. In front of 
us was a thin fringe of yellow-leafed cotton¬ 
wood trees winding along up to that conical 
butte. 
With a mind filled with memories of the old 
buffalo days, Mr. Huffman quickly discovered 
a number of fossil buffalo trails cut into the 
earth, coming down from the grass-covered 
mesa on the east, and converging on the water- 
hole. They claimed the first of the 8x10 plates, 
for auld lang syne. 
From a place on the edge of the mesa, half 
a mile northwest of the ranch house, there was 
a magnificent panoramic view of the bad-lands 
of Hell Creek and Snow Creek. For our own 
convenience we began to call it Panorama Point, 
and the pictures that Mr. Huffman made there, 
looking towards the Missouri River, only twelve 
miles away, already have gone down in history. 
As our sample picture shows, the level mesa 
that once extended twenty miles to the bluffs 
north of the Missouri, built on what once was 
the bed of a lake or a sea, has been hacked 
and gouged by our old friend Erosion into a 
grand labyrinth of canyons, ravines and dee}) 
coulees, on which abound and abut a maze of 
benches, bluffs and cathedral walls. The build¬ 
ing material is either smooth sandstone, or 
hard-pan, or “flinty concretion.” The color of 
it is Naples-yellow gray, and the ornaments are 
a very little common sage-brush, narrow-leafed 
mugwort and white sage. 
The depth of that carved up mesa, from its 
hurricane deck down to the water level of the 
Missouri, I do not know. I dare not guess at 
it, because the descent is so irregular and de¬ 
ceptive. It may be 600 feet, and I really think 
it is. Certainly, the valley is as deep as the 
Washington Monument is high, and that is 555 
feet in the clear. 
On the mesa eastward of Sieber’s cabin there 
rises a very nice collection of buttes—“sugar- 
loaf,’’ “haystack,” “saddle-backs,” and so on. 
They surround a level and barren central plaza 
of a square mile or so, which presently we pro¬ 
ceeded to cross in our quest for mule deer and 
bob-cats. Out in the exposed center of that 
bare plain, we came upon a large rounded ob¬ 
ject not down in the program, which gave us 
pause. It was the hopelessly weatherworn and 
shapeless remains of what once had been a large 
