John Day Fossil Beds Historic Resources Study

Chapter Seven:
PALEONTOLOGICAL EXPLORATION (continued) NOSHADE>

Scientific Expeditions in the Late Nineteenth Century

The interest of scientists, students, and scholars in the John Day region deepened during the latter part of the nineteenth century. 0. C. Marsh and Oscar Harger of Yale University mounted a second expedition to the fossil beds in the fall of 1873. Marsh thereafter arranged for local residents Leander S. Davis, Sam Snook, and William S. Day to continue collecting for him in the John Day country. Between 1873 and 1877, they forwarded him boxes of vertebrate remains from the fossil beds (Schuchert and LeVene 1940: 181). The results of Marsh's two expeditions to Oregon and work with the Condon collection led to an article "New Equine Mammals from the Tertiary" published in 1874 in the American Journal of Science. In it Marsh discussed five genera of horses. Three — Miohippus, Parahippus, and Merychippus — were specimens collected by Condon (Clark 1989: 256-257).

Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist for the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories, began fieldwork in the American West in 1872 in Wyoming. To expand his operations into Oregon he sent Charles H. Sternberg, who had labored on surveys in Kansas, to the upper John Day region in 1877. Cope's

In 1884 Cope published a massive, two-volume study, The Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the Far West, part of the Report of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories orchestrated by F. V. Hayden. The Cope report confirmed an extensive collection of specimens of what he termed "The John Day Fauna" of Oregon. The specimens that were analyzed (and sometimes illustrated) included dozens of species.

Many of the assessments supplied details on the source of the remains. Writing about Galecynus latidens, Cope noted: "The typical specimen described was obtained by Mr. J. L. Wortman in the cove of the John Day valley, Oregon, in the John Day Miocene formation. One of the mandibles was found by Mr. C. H. Sternberg" (Cope 1884[1]: 931). Cope's commentary was often vivid. Writing about the panther Nemravus gomphodus, he commented:

Nevertheless, this species did not probably, attack the large Merycochoeri of the Oregon herbivores, for their superior size and powerful tusks would generally enable them to resist an enemy of the size of this species. They were left for the two species of Pogonodon, who doubtless held the field in Oregon against all rivals" (Cope 1884[1]: 972).

Fig. 55. Canidae from the Jon Day epoch of Oregon (Cope 1884[2]: Pl, LXVIII).

Cope's handsomely illustrated volumes elevated the fossil beds of the John Day country to national status. Scientists in the United States, indeed in other countries, could now see the wide range and quality of fossils preserved in the deposits. Cope's illustrators dutifully captured the remains, showing details of dentition, skull structure, arm and leg bones, ribs and vertebrae, and other features. The vivid writing and cross-references to similar species in other locations and citations to scientific publications gave the Cope reports utility. Their publication by the Government Printing Office made them affordable and available to libraries and scholars.

Charles H. Sternberg, Cope's able associate, journeyed to the John Day Fossil Beds in the spring of 1878. Sternberg had camped during the winter of 1877-78 on Pine Creek in Washington Territory. In April he visited Fort Walla Walla where his brother, Dr. George M. Sternberg, was serving as post surgeon. From there Sternberg traveled by wagon to the John Day watershed with his two assistants, Joe Huff and Jacob Wortman. The men crossed from the Powder River country over the Blue Mountains to the John Day in the vicinity of Canyon City where, in May, 1878, they observed extensive placer mining still underway (Sternberg 1931: 170-171).

The party stopped first to collect fossil leaves on the Van Horn Ranch, about seven miles east of Dayville. "I collected two hundred specimens," wrote Sternberg, "and Mr. Wortman eighty-five. They were all very fine, and represented the oak, the maple, and other species. I secured some fish vertebrae also." In mid-May the men were at Dayville where they hired Bill Day and Mr. Warfield, local residents who had collected for Professor Marsh. The party arrived at Picture Gorge. Sternberg later wrote of Turtle Cove:

At the foot of this canyon, the mountains swing away from the river in a great horseshoe bend, closing in upon it again several miles below. The brilliantly colored clays and volcanic ash-beds of the Miocene of the John Day horizon paint the landscape with green and yellow and orange and other glowing shades, while the background, towering upward for two thousand feet, rise rows upon rows of mighty basaltic columns, eight-sided prisms, each row standing a little back of the one just below, and the last crowned with evergreen forests of pine and fir and spruce. But no pen can picture the glorious panorama" (Sternberg 1931: 173-174).

Sternberg and Wortman maintained an informal base of operations at the Mascall Ranch south of Picture Gorge — at the present south boundary of Sheep Rock Unit — making collecting forays of several weeks duration into Turtle Cove. Mascall allowed the scientists to make use of an extra log cabin behind his own for the storage of their supplies and specimens. Sternberg later remembered the generosity of the Mascall family that summer:

This Mr. Mascall had a wife and daughter, and when we came in from the fossil beds, after several weeks of camping out, it seemed almost like coming home to be able to put our feet under a table, eat off stone dishes, and drink our coffee out of a china cup, and to sleep on a feather bed instead of a hard mattress and roll of blankets.... Mascall was a good gardener, and always had fresh vegetables, a most enjoyable change from hot bread, bacon, and coffee. I shall not soon forget his hospitality (Sternberg 1931: 178-179).

Sternberg and Wortman reached the fossil beds in Turtle Cove by packing their gear over the top of Picture Gorge on an old horse trail, dropping down steep slopes to "Uncle Johnnie Kirk's hospitable cabin, a 12 x 14 structure of rough logs with a shake roof. He kept a bachelor's hall and lived all alone except when some cowman or fossil hunter came along. We pitched our tent near his house."

Sternberg's field strategy was to climb to the inaccessible heights, a "perilous enterprise" as he phrased it, to put his searching above the reach of previous fossil collectors. "I could tell of a hundred narrow escapes from death," he later recalled when assessing the perilous work. 'What is it that urges a man to risk his life in these precipitous fossil beds? I can only answer for myself," he later wrote, "but with me there were two motives, the desire to add to human knowledge, which has been the great motive of my life, and the hunting instinct, which is deeply planted in my heart" (Sternberg 1931:173-200).

The following year, Jacob L. Wortman had charge of Cope's exploring party in central Oregon which made "extensive and valuable collections of the fossils of the John Day . . ." (Cope 1884[1]: xxvi-xxvii). Wortman, subsequently professor of paleontology at Yale University, was the son of Jacob and Eliza Ann (Stumbo) Wortman, overland emigrants to Oregon in 1852. Wortman was a partner with his father and three brothers in Jacob Wortman & Sons, with mercantile stores in Junction City and Monroe, Oregon. With the dissolution of the firm in 1883, Jacob L. Wortman founded the First National Bank of McMinnville and his son, Henry, invested in Olds, Wortman, and King, a major retail store in Portland. Wortman committed his life to teaching, research, and writing (Anonymous 1903: 589-590).

Leander S. Davis, an experienced local collector, served as a guide for every major expedition to the John Day Fossil Beds into the early twentieth century. Davis accompanied Wortman and Sternberg in 1878-79. He guided Captain Charles Bendire, of the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Walla Walla, in the collection of fossil plants in 1880. Davis again collected in 1882 for the U.S. Geological Survey under the direction of Othneil Marsh (Shotwell 1967: 12).

William Berryman Scott of Princeton University made a large collection in the John Day region in 1889 with the help of Leander Davis. "The success of the expedition," recalled Scott, "was very largely due to Davis whose knowledge of the country and of the fossil beds was very exact." The Scott party camped at a pine grove in the "Cove" and from there made daily expeditions to seek fossils. The men found the country "sheeped off," virtually denuded of grass through overgrazing. Philip Ashton Rollins served as photographer. He had to cope with curtains of smoke pouring through the region from distant fires in the Cascade Range. Scott estimated that the work yielded a ton and a half of specimens. These were shipped to Princeton University and stored in the basement of Nassau Hall. The cleaning, mounting, and study of the collection was deferred and, before it could be done, pipe fitters installing a heating system in the building pillaged the boxes. Scott subsequently observed: "it is maddening to think of what was lost through the brutality of ignorance after all our trouble in gathering it" (Scott 1939: 173-177).

By the close of the nineteenth century, news of the John Day Fossil Beds had spread through the scientific community to far corners of the world. J. Arnold Shotwell, University of Oregon geologist at the Museum of Natural History, has commented: "By 1900 over 100 papers had been published on the geology and paleontology of the John Day Basin and nearly every major museum in the world had collections from there." Most of these studies focused upon the naming of new species or genera (Shotwell 1967: 12).