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.