But early the next morning, Sternberg awoke with severe chills and fever, a recurrence of his malaria. Isaac was too jumpy about Indians to go back, Cookie and Little Wind too unreliable to go unsupervised. There was the question as to who would lead the expedition.
Johnson said, “I’ll lead it.”
It was the moment he had been waiting for. Summer on the plains had toughened him, but he had always been under the supervision of older and more experienced men. He longed for a chance to prove himself on his own, and this short trip seemed the perfect opportunity for independence, and a fitting conclusion to the summer’s adventures.
Toad felt the same way. He immediately said, “I’ll go, too.”
“You two shouldn’t make the trip alone,” Cope said. “I haven’t been able to find any extra hands. The soldiers are unavailable to us.”
“We won’t be alone. We’ll have Cookie and Little Wind.”
Cope frowned. He drummed his fingers nervously on his sketchbook.
“Please, Professor. It’s important that you repack the fossils. We will be fine. And the day is passing as we stand here discussing it.”
“All right,” Cope said finally. “This is against my better judgment, but all right.”
Delighted, Johnson and Toad left at seven that morning, with Cookie and Little Wind driving the wagon.
Cope organized the wooden boxes of fossils, repacking those not sufficiently safe to suffer the depredations of the steamboat’s stevedores. Isaac looked after Sternberg, who was delirious most of the time; he boiled him a tea made of the bark of willow branches, which he said helped with fevers. Morton assisted Cope.
Six or seven other passengers waited at Cow Island for the steamboat. Among them was a Mormon farmer named Travis and his young son. They had come to Montana to bring the gospel to the settlers, but had had little success, and were disgruntled.
“What you got in those crates there?” Travis asked.
Cope looked up. “Fossil bones.”
“What for?”
“I study them,” Cope said.
Travis laughed. “Why study bones when you can study living animals?”
“These are the bones of extinct animals.”
“That can’t be.”
“Why not?” Cope asked.
“Are you a God-fearing man?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Do you believe God is perfect?”
“Yes, I do.”
Travis laughed again. “Well then, you must agree there can be no extinct animals, because the good Lord in His perfection would never allow a line of His creatures to become extinct.”
“Why not?” Cope asked.
“I just told you.” Travis looked annoyed.
“You just told me your belief about how God goes about His business. But what if God attains His perfection by degrees, casting aside His past creations in order to create new ones?”
“Men may do that, because men are imperfect. God does not, because He is perfect. There was only one Creation. Do you think God made mistakes in His Creation?”
“He made man. Didn’t you just say man is imperfect?”
Travis glowered. “You’re one of those professors,” he said. “One of those educated fools who has departed from righteousness to blasphemy.”
Cope was in no mood for theological dispute. “Better an educated fool than an uneducated fool,” he snapped.
“You are doing the work of the Devil,” Travis said, and he kicked one of the fossil crates.
“Do that again,” Cope said, “and I’ll beat your brains out.”
Travis kicked another crate.
In a letter to his wife, Cope wrote:
I am dreadfully ashamed of what occurred next, and can offer no excuse save the effort I had expended in collecting these fossils, their priceless value, and my own fatigue after a summer in the heat and bugs and searing alkali of the Bad Lands. To be confronted by this stupid bigot was too much for me, and my patience abandoned me.
Morton described what happened directly:
Without preamble or warning, Cope fell upon this man Travis and pounded him into insensibility. It could not have taken more than a minute at most, for Professor Cope was of a pugilistic disposition. Between blows, he would say “How dare you touch my fossils! How dare you!” and at other times he would say scornfully “In the name of religion!” The fight ended when the soldiers pulled Cope off the poor Mormon gentleman, who had said nothing other than what a great many people in the world thought to be utter and indisputable truth.
This was certainly still so in 1876. Much earlier in the century, Thomas Jefferson had carefully concealed his own view that fossils represented extinct creatures. In Jefferson’s day, public espousal of belief in extinction was considered heresy. Attitudes had since changed in many places, but not everywhere. It was still controversial to espouse evolution in certain parts of the United States.
Soon after the fight ended, the steamboat, the Lizzie B., rounded the bend and whistled her imminent arrival. All eyes were on the boat, except for those of one soldier who glanced back across the plains and shouted, “Look there! Horses!”
And from across the plains, two riderless horses approached.
“My heart sank,” Cope wrote in his journal, “to imagine what this might mean.”
They quickly mounted up and rode out to meet them. As they came closer they saw Cookie, bent over, clutching the saddle, near death. A half dozen Indian arrows pierced his body; blood streamed freely from his wounds. The other horse belonged to Johnson: there was blood on the saddle, and arrows were stuck in the leather.
The army soldiers got Cookie off the horse and laid him on the ground. His lips were swollen and crusted dry; they gave him sips from the canteen until he could speak.
“What happened?” Cope said.
“Indians,” Cookie said. “Damn Indians. Nothing we could—”
And he coughed blood, fitfully, writhing with the effort, and died.
“We must return at once and search for survivors,” Cope said. “And our bones.”
Captain Lawson shook his head. He yanked one arrow from the saddle. “These’re Sioux arrows,” he said.
“So?”
The captain nodded toward the plains. “There won’t be anything to go back for, Professor. I’m sorry, but if you find your friends at all—which I doubt—they’ll be scalped and mutilated and left to rot on the plains.”
“There must be something we can do.”
“Bury this ’un and say a prayer for the others is about all,” Captain Lawson said.
The next morning, they mournfully loaded their fossils onto the steamboat and headed back down the Missouri. The nearest telegraph station was in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, which was nearly five hundred miles to the east, on the Missouri. When the Lizzie B. stopped there, Cope sent the following cable to Johnson’s family in Philadelphia:
I profoundly regret to inform you of the death of your son William and three other men yesterday, August 27, in the Bad Lands of the Judith Basin, Montana Territory, at the hands of hostile Sioux Indians. My sincere condolences.
Edward Drinker Cope, U.S. Paleontologist.
Part III
Dragon Teeth
On the Plains
From the journal of William Johnson:
Our enthusiasm was absolute, as we set out on the morning of August 27 to collect the remainder of the fossils. There were four in our party: Little Wind, the Crow scout, Toad and myself, riding a little behind, surveying the ground ahead with watchful eyes, and finally Cookie, the teamster, whipping and cursing his animals as he drove the wagon across the prairie. Our journey would take us twelve miles to the Bad Lands, and twelve miles back again. We rode quickly in order to get there and back to Cow Island by dark.
It was a clear, chill, beautiful morning. Feathery cirrus clouds streaked the blue dome of the sky. The Rocky Mountains directly before us gleamed with white snow, which now reached down
from the peaks to the deep crevices. The plains grass whispered in a gentle wind. Herds of pale antelope leapt across the distant horizon.
Toad and I imagined ourselves as pioneers, leading our little expedition into the wilderness, into excitement and dangers to be met bravely. For two Eastern college students of eighteen years, it was hugely exciting. We sat straight in our saddles; we scanned the horizon with narrowed eyes; we kept our hands on our pistol butts and our minds on the business at hand.
As the morning continued, we saw a tremendous amount of game—not only antelope, but elk and bison as well. It was far more game than we had seen in our previous weeks on the plain, and we commented on it to each other.
We had traveled no more than half the distance to the camp—perhaps six miles or so, out into the plains—when Cookie called for a halt. I refused. “No halts until we reach camp,” I said.
“You little bastards will halt if I say so,” Cookie said.
I turned and saw that Cookie was leveling a shotgun at our midsections. That gave him a deal of authority. We halted.
“What is the meaning of this?” I demanded, in a loud voice.
“Shut up, you little blanking blanking so-and-so,” Cookie said, climbing off the wagon. “Now get off your horses, boys.”
I looked at Little Wind, but he avoided our eyes.
“Come on, off of your horses!” Cookie snarled, so we dismounted.
“What do you mean by this outrage?” Toad said, blinking his eyes rapidly.
“End of the line, boys,” Cookie said, shaking his head. “This is where I get off.”
“Where you get off?”
“I can’t help it if you’re too stupid to see the noses on your faces. You seeing all the game today?”
“What about it?”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why you’re seeing so much game? It’s being driven north, that’s why. Look there.” He pointed to the south.
We looked. Streaky lines of smoke rose into the sky in the distance.
“That’s the Sioux camp, you damn fools. That’s Sitting Bull.” Cookie was taking our horses, mounting up.
I looked again. The fires—if that is what they were—were very far away. “But that must be at least a day away from here,” I protested. “We can make our camp, load up, and be back to Cow Island before they reach us.”
“You boys go right ahead,” Cookie said. He was mounted on Toad’s horse, and leading my own.
I looked at Little Wind, but he would not meet my eyes. He shook his head. “Bad day now. Many Sioux warriors in Sitting Bull camp. Kill all Crows. Kill all white men.”
“You heard the man,” Cookie said. “Me, I value my scalp. See you, boys. Come on, Little Wind.” And he started to ride off to the north. A moment later, Little Wind wheeled his horse around and rode off with him.
Toad and I stood by the wagon and watched them leave.
“They planned this,” Toad said. He shook his fist at them as they disappeared toward the horizon. “Bastards! Bastards!”
As for me, my good spirits evaporated. I suddenly realized our predicament—we were two boys alone on the vast and empty plains of the West. “What do we do now?”
Toad was still angry. “Cope paid them in advance, otherwise they would never dare to do this.”
“I know,” I said, “but what are we going to do now?”
Toad squinted at the lines of smoke to the south. “Do you really think those camps are a day away?”
“How would I know?” I cried. “I just said that so they wouldn’t leave.”
“Because the thing about Indians is,” Toad said, “that when they have a large camp, like Sitting Bull’s, they keep hunting and raiding parties out in front of the main camp.”
“How far out in front?” I asked.
“Sometimes one, two days.”
We both stared at the fires again. “I make it six fires, maybe seven,” Toad said. “So that can’t be the main camp. The main camp’d have hundreds of fires.”
I made up my own mind. I was not going to return to Cow Island without the fossils. I could not face the Professor. “We have to get the fossils,” I said.
“Right,” Toad said.
We climbed aboard the wagon and headed west. I had never driven a wagon before, but I made a tolerable job of it. Beside me, Toad whistled nervously. “Let’s sing a song,” he suggested.
“Let’s not,” I said. And so we drove in silence, with our hearts in our mouths.
They got lost.
Their own trail from the day before should have been easy enough to follow, but large stretches of the plains were as flat and featureless as any ocean, and they lost their way several times.
They expected to reach the plains camp before noon, but instead finally found the camp in late afternoon. They loaded the wagon with the remaining ten wooden crates of fossils, which weighed about a thousand pounds in all, plus some final supplies and Johnson’s photographic equipment. He was pleased they had come back, for among the fossils they now packed was of course the box with the X, containing the precious Brontosaurus teeth. “Couldn’t go home without these,” he said.
But by the time they were ready to head back, it was after four o’clock, and growing dark.
They were pretty sure they could never find their way to Cow Island in darkness. That meant they would have to spend the night on the plains—and in another day, the advancing Sioux might come upon them. They were debating just what to do when they heard the savage, bloodcurdling cries of Indians.
“Oh my God,” Toad said.
A dust cloud, stirred up by many riders, appeared on the eastern horizon. It was coming toward them.
They scrambled aboard the wagon. Toad broke out the rifles and loaded them.
“How much ammunition have we got?” Johnson asked.
“Not enough,” Toad said. His hands were shaking, dropping shells.
The whooping grew louder. They could see a single rider, hunched low in the saddle, pursued by a dozen others. But they heard no gunshots.
“Maybe they don’t have any guns,” Toad said hopefully. At that moment, the first arrow whistled past them. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Which way?” Johnson said.
“Any way! Away from them!”
Johnson whipped up the team, and the horses responded with unaccustomed enthusiasm. The wagon rumbled forward at frightening speed, bouncing and tossing over the prairie, the cargo creaking and sliding around in the bed. In the growing darkness, they headed west, away from the Missouri River, away from Cow Island, away from Cope, away from safety.
The Indians closed in on them. The solitary rider drew abreast of their wagon, and they saw it was Little Wind. He was soaked in sweat; his horse lathered. Little Wind came very close to the wagon and gracefully leapt aboard. He smacked his pony, and set it racing to the north.
Several Indians chased it, but the main party continued in pursuit of the wagon.
“Damn Sioux! Damn, damn Sioux!” Little Wind shouted, grabbing a rifle. More arrows streaked through the air. Little Wind and Toad fired at the pursuing Indians. Glancing over his shoulder, Johnson estimated there were a dozen warriors, perhaps more.
The riders came closer, and easily surrounded the wagon on three sides. Toad and Little Wind fired at them, and both hit one at virtually the same time, blasting him backwards off his horse. Another veered closer until Toad took careful aim and fired; the Sioux warrior clutched his eye, slumped forward, arms limp, then toppled sideways off his horse.
One Indian managed to climb aboard the wagon, as Little Wind had done. He was swinging his tomahawk over Johnson when Little Wind shot him in the mouth. In the same instant that the blade cut across Johnson’s upper lip, the warrior’s face burst red and he fell back, off the wagon, and was lost in the dust.
Johnson grabbed his bleeding face, but there was no time for horror; Little Wind turned to him. “Where you drive? Go south!”
“South is the badl
ands!” It was already quite dark; it would be suicide to enter the abrupt cliffs and gullies of the badlands at night.
“Go south!”
“We’ll die if we go south!”
“We die anyway! Go south!”
And then Johnson realized what he was being told. Their only hope, a slim hope, was to head where the Indians would not follow. He whipped the team, and the wagon plunged southward, toward the badlands.
A mile of open prairie stretched ahead of them, and the Indians again surrounded them on all sides, whooping and shouting. An arrow seared Johnson’s leg, pinning his trouser leg to the wooden wagon seat, but he felt no pain and drove on. It was darker and darker; their guns glowed brightly with each discharge. The Indians, recognizing their plan, pursued them with greater intensity.
Soon Johnson could make out the eroded dark line of the badlands at the edge of the prairie. The flat plains just seemed to drop away into black nothingness. They were approaching at frightful speed.
“Hold on, boys!” he shouted, and without reining his horses, the wagon plunged over the lip, into darkness.
Badlands
Silence, under a waning moon.
Water trickled over his face, onto his lips. He opened his eyes and saw Little Wind leaning close. Johnson raised his head.
The wagon sat upright. The horses snorted softly. They were at the base of dark cliffs, looming high.
Johnson felt a pinching in his leg. He tried to move.
“Stay,” Little Wind said. His voice was tight.
“Is something wro—”
“Stay,” he repeated. He put down his canteen and held out another. “Drink.”
Johnson sipped, sputtered, coughed. The whiskey burned his throat, and some splashed on the slash above his lip, making that burn, too.
“Drink more,” Little Wind said. He was cutting the cloth of Johnson’s trouser leg with a knife. Johnson started to look.
“No look,” Little Wind said, but it was too late.