That night, after another hard day, we halted at the head of a short and very steep ravine ending in an open valley between two ridges, whose lofty precipices abutted on the Missouri twelve hundred feet below.
This valley, Cope told us, was to be our camping ground for some time to come, as a steamboat snubbing-post was situated here. When I learned this, I threw out my roll of blankets and started it on its way to camp. It bounded down the ravine, leaping high in the air from boulder to boulder, and never stopped until it was caught in a bunch of the cactus that covered the level plain below.
Everything but the Professor’s trunk was unloaded, and the wagon pulled to the head of the gulch, where Isaac took charge of the tongue, and the Professor and I, each tying a picket rope to the hind axle and making a half-hitch to a convenient sapling, let the wagon slowly down the hill. When the rope was paid out, Isaac blocked the wheels with stones, and we advanced for another hitch, continuing in this way until we reached the bottom. The baggage was then packed down, and, after a space had been cleared of cactus, our tent was pitched. It was not until long after midnight that we sat down to cook our meal, and when we rolled into our blankets we slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.
Not only during this trip, but all through our stay in the Bad Lands, we were tormented by myriads of black gnats, which got under our hat rims and shirt sleeves, and produced sores that gave rise to pus and thick scabs. They got under the saddles and girths too, irritating the horses almost beyond endurance. We were forced, for lack of something better, to cover our faces and arms with bacon grease and to rub the skins of the horses under the collars and saddles with the same disagreeable substance.
Fossil bones always partake of the characteristics of the rock in which they are entombed, and here they were quite hard when we got in to where the rock was compact. The Professor found here the first specimen ever discovered in America of the wonderful horned dinosaurs; _Monoclonius_ he called the first species. I assisted him in digging out his specimen of _M. crassus_, a species distinguished by a small horn over each orbit, and a large one on the nasal bones; and I myself discovered two species new to science. One of these, an _M. sphenocerus_, was six or seven feet high at the hips, and, according to Cope, must have been twenty-five feet long, including the tail. It has a long compressed nasal horn, and two small horns over the eyes.
