And they did indeed make discoveries. While they dug the hillside, Cope was kept busy on the ground below, sketching, making notes, and classifying. He insisted that the students be meticulous in recording which bones were found in proximity to which others. Shovel and pickax were used to loosen the stone, but they gave way to the smaller tools, which appeared simple enough: hammer, chisel, pick, and brush. Despite the students’ earnestness, there was first a great deal of technique to be learned; they had to learn to choose among the three weights of wide-head hammer, four widths of rock chisel (imported from Germany, explained Cope, for the quality of the cold steel), two sizes of steel points to pick at the stone, and a variety of stiff brushes for whisking away dirt and dust and gravel.
“We’ve come too far not to do this the correct way,” Cope said. “The fossils don’t always give themselves up easily, too.”
One did not just bang a fossilized bone out of the rock, he explained to them. One studied the position of the fossil, tapped the stone with a chisel when necessary, hammered vigorously only rarely. To find the subtle demarcation between bone and stone, it was necessary to see color difference.
“Sometimes it helps just to spit on it,” Cope said. “The moisture heightens the contrast.”
“I’m going to die of thirst pretty quickly,” muttered George Morton.
“And don’t just look at what you are doing,” Cope instructed. “Listen, too. Listen to the sound of the chisel hitting the stone. The higher the note, the harder the stone.”
He also demonstrated the right position to extract the fossils, depending upon the slope of the rock. They worked on their bellies, on their knees, squatting, and sometimes while standing. When the rock face was especially sharp, they hammered in a spike and secured themselves with ropes. They were to understand how the angle of the sun revealed not just the face of the stone but also its fissures and unexpected depths.
Johnson found himself recalling how challenging it had been for him to learn to take photographs; extracting fossils from the grasp of stone without damaging them was far more difficult.
Cope showed them how to position their tools next to the hand that would use those tools and to work as efficiently as possible, for in a day each student would switch from hammer and chisel to pick to brush and back again in all combinations hundreds of times. Left-handers kept their chisels to their right, brushes to their left.
“The work is more tiring than you expect,” he told them.
And, indeed, it was.
“My fingers hurt, my wrists hurt, my shoulders hurt, and also my knees and feet,” said George Morton after the first few days.
“Better you than me,” Cookie said.
As the bones came down to the camp, Cope laid them on a dark wool blanket for contrast, staring at them until he saw how they related to each other. In late July, he announced a new duck-billed Hadrosaurus; a week later, a flying reptile. And then in August they found a Titanosaurus, and finally the teeth of a Champsosaurus. “We are finding wonderful dinosaurs!” exulted Cope. “Wonderful, marvelous dinosaurs!”
The work was exhausting, backbreaking, sometimes dangerous. For one thing, the scale of the landscape was, as in the rest of the West, deceptive. What appeared to be a small cliff exposure turned out, on climbing, to be five or six hundred feet high. Scrambling up these sheer crumbling faces, working halfway up the hill, maintaining balance on the incline, was fatiguing in the extreme. It was a strange world: often, working on these huge rocky faces, they were so far apart they could hardly see each other, but because the land was so quiet and the curving cliffs acted like giant funnels, they could hold clear conversations no louder than a whisper, even within the constant sound of the reverberating pings and soft clicks of hammers striking chisel and chisel striking stone.
At other times, the broader silence and desolation became oppressive. Especially after the Crow moved on, they were uncomfortably aware of the silence.
And Sternberg had been right: in the end, the worst thing about the badlands was the dust. Harshly alkaline, it billowed up with every stab of pick and shovel; it burned the eyes, stung the nose, caked the mouth, caused coughing spasms; it burned in open cuts; it covered clothes and chafed at elbows and armpits and backs of knees; it gritted in sleeping bags; it dusted food, sour and bitter, and flavored coffee; stirred by the wind, it became a constant force, a signature of this harsh and forbidding place.
Their hands, which they needed in order to do everything, especially dig fossils, were soon scraped and calloused, the dust burning in any cracks. Cope insisted they thoroughly wash their hands at the end of the day and dispensed a small dollop of yellowish emollient to rub into their palms and fingers.
“Smells bad,” Johnson said. “What is it?”
“Clarified bear fat.”
But the dust was everywhere. Nothing they tried worked. Bandanas and facecloths did not help, since they could not protect the eyes. Cookie built a tent to try to keep the dust off the food he was preparing, but it burned down on the second day. They complained to each other for a while, and then after the second week, they no longer mentioned it. It was like a conspiracy of silence. They would no longer talk about the dust.
Once dug out, the fragile bones had to be lowered down with ropes in a difficult, painstaking process. One slip, and the fossils would break free of the ropes and tumble down the hillside, crashing to the ground, smashed beyond value.
At such times, Cope turned waspish, reminding them that the fossils had “lain for millions of years in perfect peace and remarkable preservation, waiting for you to drop them like idiots! Idiots!”
These hot speeches led them to anxiously await some slip by Cope himself, but it never happened. Sternberg finally said that “except for his temper, the professor is perfect, and it seems best to recognize it.”
But the rock was fragile, and breaks in the fossils did occur, even with the most careful handling. Most frustrating of all was a break days or weeks after the fossil was lowered to the ground.
It was Sternberg who first proposed a solution.
When they set out from Fort Benton, they had brought with them several hundred pounds of rice. As the days went on, it became clear that they would never eat all the rice (“at least not the way Stinky cooks it,” Isaac grumbled). Rather than leave it behind, Sternberg boiled the rice to a gelatinous paste, which he poured over the fossils. This novel preservative technique left the fossils looking like snowy blocks—or, as he put it, “gigantic cookies.”
But whatever they called it, the paste provided a protective covering. They had no further breaks.
Around the Fire
Each evening, when the sunlight was fading and the light was soft, making the sculptured terrain look less stark, Cope reviewed with them the finds of the day, and spoke of the lost world in which these giant animals roamed.
“Cope could speak like an orator when he chose to,” noted Sternberg, “and of an evening, the dead gray rocks became dense green jungle, the trickling streams vast vegetation-choked lakes, the clear sky turned close with hot rainclouds, and indeed the entire barren landscape before our eyes was transformed into an ancient swamp. It was mysterious, when he spoke that way. We felt goose-bumps and a chill on the spine.”
In part, that chill came from the lingering tinge of heresy. Unlike Marsh, Cope was not an open Darwinian, but he appeared to believe in evolution, and certainly in great antiquity. Morton was going to be a preacher, like his father. He asked Cope, “as a man of science,” how old the world was.
Cope said he had no idea, in the mild way he had when he was concealing something. It was the opposite side of his snapping temper, this almost lazy indifference, this tranquil, calm voice. This mildness overcame Cope whenever the discussion moved into areas that might be considered religious. A devout Quaker (despite his pugilistic temperament), he found it difficult to tread on the religious feelings of others.
Was the world, Morton asked, six thousand
years old, as Bishop Ussher had said?
A great many serious and informed people still believed this date, despite Darwin and the fuss that the new scientists who called themselves “geologists” were making. After all, the trouble with what the scientists said was that they were always saying something different. This year one idea, next year something else. Scientific opinion was ever changing, like the fashions of women’s dress, while the firm and fixed date 4004 BC invited the attention of those seeking greater verity.
No, Cope said, he did not think the world was so recent.
How old, then? asked Morton. Six thousand years? Ten thousand years?
No, Cope said, still tranquil.
Then how much older?
A thousand thousand times as old, said Cope, his voice still dreamy.
“Surely you’re joking!” Morton exclaimed. “Four billion years? That is patently absurd.”
“I know of no one who was there at the time,” Cope said mildly.
“But what about the age of the sun?” Morton said, with a smug look.
In 1871, Lord Kelvin, the most eminent physicist of his day, posed a serious objection to Darwin’s theory. It had not been answered by Darwin, or anyone else, in subsequent years.
Whatever else one might think of evolutionary theory, it obviously implied a substantial period of time—at least several hundred thousand years—to carry out its effects on earth. At the time of Darwin’s publication, the oldest estimates of the age of the earth were around ten thousand years. Darwin himself believed the earth would have to be at least three hundred thousand years old to allow enough time for evolution. The earthly evidence, from the new study of geology, was confusing and contradictory, but it seemed at least conceivable that the earth might be several hundred thousand years old.
Lord Kelvin took a different approach to the question. He asked how long the sun had been burning. At this time, the mass of the sun was well established; it was obviously burning with the same processes of combustion as were found on earth; therefore one could estimate the time it would take to consume the mass of the sun in a great fire. Kelvin’s answer was that the sun would burn up entirely within twenty thousand years.
The fact that Lord Kelvin was a devoutly religious man and therefore opposed to evolution could not be thought to have biased his thinking. He had investigated the problem from the impersonal vantage point of mathematics and physics. And he had concluded, irrefutably, that there was simply not enough time for evolutionary processes to take place.
Corroborating evidence derived from the warmth of the earth. From mine shafts and other drilling, it was known that the earth’s temperature increased one degree for every thousand feet of depth. This implied that the core of the earth was still quite hot. But if the earth had really formed hundreds of thousands of years ago, it would have long since become cool. That was a clear implication of the second law of thermodynamics, and there was no disputing it.
There was only one escape from these physical dilemmas, and Cope echoed Darwin in suggesting it. “Perhaps,” he said, “we do not know everything about the energy sources of the sun and the earth.”
“You mean there may be a new form of energy, as yet unknown to science?” Morton asked. “The physicists say that it is impossible, that the rules governing the universe are fully understood by them.”
“Perhaps the physicists are wrong,” Cope said.
“Certainly someone is wrong.”
“That is true,” Cope said evenly.
If he was open-minded when listening to Morton’s beliefs, he was equally so with Little Wind, the Snake scout.
Early in the bone digging, Little Wind became agitated and objected to their excavations. He said they would all be killed.
“Who will kill us?” Sternberg inquired.
“The Great Spirit, with lightning.”
“Why?” Sternberg asked.
“Because we disturb the burial ground.”
Little Wind explained that these were the bones of giant snakes that had inhabited the earth in ages past, before the Great Spirit had hunted them down and killed them all with bolts of lightning so that man could live on the plains.
The Great Spirit would not want the serpent bones disturbed, and would not look kindly on their adventures.
Sternberg, who did not like Little Wind anyway, duly reported it to Cope.
“He may be right,” Cope said.
“It’s nothing but savage superstition,” Sternberg snorted.
“Superstition? Which part do you mean?”
“All of it,” Sternberg said. “The very idea.”
Cope said, “The Indians think these fossils are the bones of serpents, which is to say reptiles. We think they were reptiles, too. They think these creatures were gigantic. So do we. They think these gigantic reptiles lived in the distant past. So do we. They think the Great Spirit killed them. We say we don’t know why they disappeared—but since we offer no explanation of our own, how can we be sure theirs is superstition?”
Sternberg walked away, shaking his head.
Bad Water
Cope chose his campsites for convenience to fossils, and no other reason. One difficulty with their first site was lack of water. Nearby Bear Creek was so badly polluted they did not draw water from there after the first night, when they all experienced dysentery and cramps. And the water elsewhere in the badlands was, in Sternberg’s words, “like a dense solution of Epsom salts.”
So they drew all their water from springs. Little Wind knew several, the nearest a two-mile ride from camp. Since Johnson was fussiest about the water, which he used for his photographic processes, it became his job to ride to and from the spring each day, and fetch the water.
Someone always accompanied him on these excursions. They had seen no trouble with the Crows, and the Sioux were still presumed to be far south, but these were Indian hunting grounds, and they never knew when they might meet small parties of hostile Indians. Solitary riders were always at risk.
Nevertheless, for Johnson it was the most exhilarating part of the day. To ride out under the great dome of blue sky, with the plains stretching in all directions around him, was an experience that approached the mystical.
Usually, Little Wind rode with him. Little Wind liked to get out of camp, too, but for different reasons. As the days passed and more bones were unearthed, he became increasingly fearful of the retribution of the Great Spirit, or, as he sometimes called it, the Everywhere Spirit—the spirit that existed in all things in the world, and was found everywhere.
They would usually arrive at the spring, located in flat prairie, around three in the afternoon, as the sun was cooling and the light turning yellow. They filled their water bags and slung them onto the horses, and paused to drink directly from the stream, and then rode back.
One day as they reached the spring, Little Wind gestured for Johnson to stay some distance away while he dismounted and inspected the ground around the spring closely.
“What is it?” Johnson said.
Little Wind was moving quickly all around the spring, his nose inches from the ground. Occasionally he picked up a clod of prairie sod, smelled it, and dropped it again.
This behavior always filled Johnson with a mixture of amazement and irritation—amazement that an Indian could read the land as he read a book, and irritation because he could not learn to do it himself, and he suspected that Little Wind, knowing this, added a theatrical touch to his procedures.
“What is it?” Johnson asked again, annoyed.
“Horses,” Little Wind said. “Two horses, two men. This morning.”
“Indians?” The word came out more nervously than he had intended.
Little Wind shook his head. “Horses have shoes. Men have boots.”
They had seen no white men for nearly a month, except their own party. There was little reason for white men to be here.
Johnson frowned. “Trappers?”
“What trappers?” Little W
ind gestured to the flat expanse of the plains in all directions. “Nothing to trap.”
“Buffalo hunters?” There was still a trade in buffalo hides, which were fashioned into robes for sale in the cities.
Little Wind shook his head. “Buffalo men don’t hunt on Sioux land.”
That was true, Johnson thought. To invade the Sioux lands looking for gold was one thing, but buffalo hunters would never take the risk.
“Then who are they?”
“Same men.”
“What same men?”
“Same men at Dog Creek.”
Johnson dismounted. “The same men whose camp you found, back at Dog Creek? How do you know that?”
Little Wind pointed in the mud. “This one boot crack heel. Same heel. Same man.”
“I’ll be damned,” Johnson said. “We’re being followed.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “let’s get the water and tell Cope. Maybe he’ll want to do something.”
“No use water here.” Little Wind pointed to the horses, which were standing quietly by the spring.
“I don’t get it,” Johnson said.
“Horses no drink,” Little Wind said.
The horses always drank as soon as they reached the spring. That was the first thing they did, let the horses drink before they filled their water bags.
But Little Wind was right: today the horses were not drinking.
“I’ll be,” Johnson said.
“Water not so good,” Little Wind said. He bent close to the water and sniffed. Suddenly he plunged his arm up to his shoulder into the spring, and pulled out great clumps of a pale green grass. He reached in again, pulled out more. With each clump he removed, the spring flowed more freely.
He named the weed for Johnson, and explained that it would cause sickness if men drank it. Little Wind was speaking quickly, and Johnson did not understand it all, except that apparently it caused fevers and vomiting and men acted crazy, if they didn’t die.
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