The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1879-07-17
BELLEVUE, La, THURSDAY, JULY II, 1879.
AN ANCIENT GRAVEYARD.

AN ANCIENT GRAVEYARD.
A Visit to the Wonderful Bad Lands"
OF Southwestern Dakota.
GChioago Tribune Correspondence
And now how wish l was "scien-
tiic," so l could tell you, with all the
force OF obscurely ponderous words,
just what we saw, and give you all the
details, commencing back about forty
millions of years ago, of how it came to
be so; but, my education having been
limited to what l was taught in little
country school-house in the hoop-pole
regions of Northwestern Ohio, l will
have to contine myself to common En-
glish. Standing on an eminence and
overlooking the strangely awful scene
fear-inspiring in contemplation of the
tremendous forces of fire, and flood,
and frost which at different epochs it
did not require scientific lore to know
must have plowed, annealed and pull
verized all there was or ever had been
OF material Nature around me - it
struck me that Prof Ovens compari-
son, used in describing the mauvises
terra of the Little Missouri, would as
aptly apply to the country along the
White River; for surely to the general
view the grotesque topography seemed
like "magnifcent cities of the dead,
where the labor and the genius of for
gotten nations have left behind them
multitude of the monuments of art and
skill" At every step objects of the
highest interest were disclosed. I'M
bedded in the debris were strewn in
profusion the organic remains of pro-
digious monsters of the infant world
lines of animated Nature, doubt
less, which could no more exist
now than we and the majority of the
other members of the present-day ami
NAL kingdom could have survived in the
dense, noxious atmosphere which they
must have breathed. We found mol
lusc fossils FIVE feet across, as perfect in
form as when, perchance, the volcanic
fires glared down upon their Shiny ma
tive beds from the peak of many lava
plowed mountain-side; tortoises, per-
fectly preserved, twenty feet in circum-
ference; and huge bones and tusks that
must have framed animals in compari-
son with which the elephants of this
day are of Liliputian proportions! The
broken section of one lizard formed
skeleton measured nineteen feet, and,
from the girth of the ribs of the part
saved from the crumbling effects of time,
. we judged that in its entirety it must
have been fully ninety feet in length
7 One long, alligator-shaped jaw measur.
ed seven feet And then we discovered
noted would be the more proper word
| loc vyod nf tn fo
long to find them-fossil fishes of al
kinds and descriptions, and spiral and
convoluted shell fossils, some four fee
!, in diameter, which probably protected
! their monstrous denizens from the vo
racious jaws of the gigantic crawling
reptiles that were coeval with them il
,, existence. But will spec
,, ulate no further, except t.
,, say that to me one fact seem
, clear: that the Bad Land formations ar
the result of succession of sediment
or precipitates at the bottom of an an
cient ocean, let the ante cedent and sue
:, ceeding physical convulsions and vicis
= situdes have been what they may; and
with this assumed fixed fact as my pred
! icate of speculation, please my ow
q lduCy-Uuu w AOb esoA ouO O1oO =
. receive it-with the notion that at tbs
); time-eons of ages ago, and so far bac
o that the mind is fairly appalled, in try
. o ing to grasp the infinite sweep of co!
- mical mutations-there were people
. continents where now the mighty ocear
= roll, and the places now occupied by tt
;e continents were then under old Nel
% % tunes undisputed sway. In the hant
~ of the Infinite Over-SOul this earth
;, ;, ours is q great harvest-feld, the see
>, time and harvest-time of which embra'
~ :, millions of years-mere short-stops
= the great calendar of eternity; an
~ ~ when one series of crops is divinely ga
~ nered, it rolls back into Chaos, to
70 70 again followed by earthquakes, volc
70 ~ noes, and moving mountains of ic
20 preparatory to the evolution of 9th
. and superior productions; and so I
7 Gas long as the years of Eternity roll
e Maybe my speculations have as mu
u = sense in them as the mans with
~ long title before his name and the ma
=, lettered tail after it; it is largely que!
work on both sides,