I have often asked men who were sure that there must be coal beneath the surface, why, instead of hiring a man to dig a hole for them, they did not hitch up their buggies and follow the valley of the Smoky Hill, beginning at the Colorado line. The first stratum exposed is of course the recent, with its sandy loam; in it, here and there, a crumbling buffalo skull or an eroded implement. Then comes the Pleistocene deposit, consisting of clay, sand, and fragments of rock mingled together. From this formation I secured over two hundred teeth of the great Columbian Mammoth. Next come beds of black shale with giant septaria, the Fort Pierre Group of the Cretaceous, whose upper beds we explored in Montana in 1876 for dinosaurs. In this formation, in Kansas, I found a new species of _Clidastes_. The specimens are now in the Kansas University collection, and the species has been named by Dr. Williston _Clidastes westi_, in honor of the Kansas University collector, the late Judge E. P. West.
We have not gone far down the river below the forks, before this formation, which at McAllister topped the hills, passes under the river. Then reddish and blue chalks occupy the country for some miles, and in turn disappear to give place to yellowish and blue chalks, which finally make way for the blue and almost white chalks that run under the river near the mouth of Hackberry Creek in eastern Gove County.
At White Rock in Trego County the hard white limestone, in fortification blocks, is piled ninety feet high. Further down appears the post limestone of the Fort Benton Group, with its characteristic _Inoceramus_ shells; while in central Kansas, brown and white sandstone and brilliantly colored clays occupy the whole region for sixty miles, giving place at last to the hard limestones and the friable shales and sandstones of the Upper Carboniferous. No coal, except very shallow veins in the Upper Carboniferous and the Dakota Group of the Cretaceous, has even been found in this big ditch, which, less than a quarter of a mile wide at the head of the Smoky Hill branch at Wallace, broadens out to a width of several miles at the mouth of the Kansas River.
It is impossible to compute the vast amount of mineral matter which has been cut out from these Kansas plains and carried by the river into the Mississippi and on to the Gulf. Since the first narrow trench cut its way through the hardened ooze of the Cretaceous ocean bed, all the flood-plains of the Missouri and the Mississippi below Kansas City have been enriched by the material that once covered these valleys of Kansas, and the delta below New Orleans has been partly built up by it.