I picked up a massive femur, and put it upon my shoulder to show to the boys as a trophy, but it soon became too heavy, and I dropped it behind me, perhaps to be moved along a little further toward the Platte River by the next spring flood. In time it doubtless found another resting place in those soft river sands, possibly to be exhumed in some future geological period, to lead the finder into some wild chain of reasoning concerning its history. I reached the train, which was camped six miles west, and told my story to the boys, and after supper fell asleep. The year after the discovery of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, it was my pleasure personally to furnish Professor Powell with a careful description of the location of these remarkable deposits of fossils in Scott's Bluffs, which he and others investigated later. At that time I believe no investigation of those fossil beds had been made by scholars qualified to classify them. Amid all the intricacies of the ravines that run down the bluff sides, it would be difficult to indicate any locations there with exactness, but certain landmarks make this one to which I now refer comparatively easy to describe. A professor and students from one of our universities made later investigations of this particular deposit on information given as to its nature. The recent marvelous agricultural development of this country as the result of an irrigating ditch cut near these bluffs is a revelation to those who first saw it as a barren area, a part of what was well named the Bad Lands. These once barren clay lands near the foot of Scott's Bluffs are now, strange to relate, highly productive. If any one of the young ranchers now engaged in the development of that country would care to follow the ravine crossed by the bridge over the old trail and with a ladder would ascend a few cliffs that will be encountered as he proceeds along the ravine, and then climb up until he reaches the high precipice, he will find the old cedar log still lying across the chasm and resting on the tree top, for no one would have made the effort to remove it, and nothing decays in that pure air. CHAPTER XIV THE PEACE PIPE AT LARAMIE