After pitching the tent, and starting supper, I found to my delight a large exposure of hard siliceous rock, consisting of sand and chalk held firmly together by soluble sand, which proved to be the bottom ledge of a deposit of gray sandstone. I soon found above it a mastodon’s bones. My joy knew no bounds, however, when following the narrow draw up to its head, I found that it cut through a quarry of rhinoceros bones, which were sticking out of the sand on either side, while the narrow ditch at the bottom was filled with toe bones, complete or in fragments, and broken skulls and teeth without number. I have collected fossil vertebrates and plants since I was seventeen years old, but this is the greatest deposit of fossils that I have ever discovered.
I shall never forget how, carried away with enthusiasm, I took possession in the name of Science of the largest bone bed in Kansas. I did not stop to ask whether anyone else had any interest in the land, nor did I think it necessary. I had grown so used in my own case to putting aside every other consideration for the sake of the advancement of science that it did not occur to me that anyone else might take a different view. But one day, as I was working in the ravine, an old man, plowing corn, drove up to its eastern edge. When he made the turn, he chanced to look across and saw me, pick in hand, diligently uncovering the skull of a rhinoceros from the sandbank on the other side. He instantly shouted with all the strength of his lungs, “What are you doing?”
“Digging up antediluvian relics,” I shouted back. We both shouted as if we were a hundred yards apart.
“All right,” I answered in the same loud tones, and kept on working.
The old man, whose name I learned later was Mr. Overton, disappeared, and I heard no more of him until I went into Long Island for food, or grub as they say in the West, and was told that he had come in to a justice of the peace and asked for a warrant to arrest me for collecting these old bones. He never again came directly to me, either that year or the following, but people told me that he went around to all the justices in that part of the country, trying to get his warrant. Finally, however, they managed to convince him that I was not harming him, and was benefiting science.