Year: 1877

n UcOlOBlc6l dThvoy8rOs


Letter to the Louisville Courier j ournal.I


Big Bone Lick is in Boone County, KY.
and two miles in the interior from tn,
village of Warsaw, aboat-landing on thu
Ohio River, and is perfectly level plo


of ground, encircled by number Of


hills of from three to five hundred feet
high, the imprisoned space containing
some ten acres of a once marshy and
quicksand earth, that swallowed thous
ands of animals that ventured into this
valley of death to drink the salt water
The wax-like clay has Theoretically
sealed them from the warning elements
without till their bones are there found
of perfect flint with opalized and
agatized teeth of thousands of years
naturalization. The house-bed is from
ten to twelve feet beneath the surface,
where vast quantities of bones of all the
animals that inhabited the country are
to be found, with buffalo's heads and
horns we'll preserved. In my excavations
we often came to piles of what I thought
were the collections of fyellow, soft sand f;
but, seeing the old diggers rubbing it be-
tween their hands till warm, and smell
ing it with grin and leer of the eye
that said to me you are green, I found it
to be decayed flesh, that still had the
odor, as dogs around the pit would smell
and scratch into it. In the bottom of
this basin (for large earthen basin it is)
there bubble up great many salt
sulphur springs, and, flowing of gently y
over level surface, make deposit of
purely white and glittering sulphur, so
odorous that the whole atmosphere of the
valley is saturated with it. The earth
in this basin, once swimming in water,
was SO much like bowl of jelly that a
man could stand and shake an acre
around him, and yet in places annually
getting more solid by deposits. I shook
more than twenty feet around me, and in
these places you cannot dig without
pump to relieve you of the percolating
water. The earth has been 80 long
saturated with salt and sulphur that it
is beautifully streaked with blue and
yellow, cuts smooth like cheese, and
when dry bears a glittering polish, and !
think it would make fine pottery or
queensware, and this I name not only as
thing unknown elsewhere, but that it
may lead to investigation and prove
valuable.


l dug upon these grounds for thirty
days with ten men, and brought off seven
barrels of bones, number of buffalo
heads and both mammoth and mastodon
molars, but found no very large bones
or tusks-but had nine feet of fourteen
foot trunk given me by Mr.. McGloughlan,
proprietor.--and left upon the ground a
CARLOAD of bones of various animals.
The bone-bed is from ten to twelve feet
beneath the present surface of the
grOund--I say present, because the valley,
having recently sunk, is annually inun-
dated, till there is deposit of several
feet over the original earth.


The first white man who ever saw this
place was James Douglass, of Missouri,
in 1773, who reported the bones to be SO
thick upon the ground that he could
walk upon them-teeth of ten pounds
weight, tusks eleven feet long. thigh
bones five and ribs ten, which he used for
tent poles, all being sound and firm and
Mr.. Thomas Rich, who was born in sight
of the licks, sixty. eight years ago, (and
who was one Of my hands,) told me that
when a boy he often passed over creeks
and bitches on bridges made of these huge
bones. The first shipments made of these
remains was by DIR. GOferth, who in 1908
loaded fatboat with them, and sent
them by an English agent to England,
where they are now to be seen in the
British Museum. The news having
spread of the great wonder, President
Thomas Jefferson, then President of the
American Philosophical Society, had a
collection made in the year 1906, a
portion of which he donated to the
French naturalist Cuvier, and in 1919 a
third collection was made by the Western
Museum Society, and the fourth collec-
tion was made by Mr.. Finnell and sold to
Mr.. Graves for $4,000, which he took
North and sold for $4,000. In the year
1888 Thomas Rich, as above named, who
dug for me, was foreman in excavating
for an agent of New York, and exhumed
gigantic skeleton, twenty-five feet long
and eleven feet high, with tusks twelve
feet long, all of which are now in the
Kentucky department OF the British
Museum, in Loudon.


Old persons who have lived fifty and
sixty years in the neighborhood say that
the whole valley was once denuded OF
vegetation, and from a distance looked
like frozen pond of water, and portions
of it yet remain 60, the surface for rods
around being naked, smooth and shin.
ing as the face of a mirror, and, like a
gum elastic bag or football blown up,
will sink under the foot and tremble
around, and yet neither break through
nor soil your Notwithstanding, indeed, to
a stranger, yet perfectly safe to travel
over.


In regard to the steady sinking of the
valley, geology has discovered parts oI
our globe where large tracts of land are
imperceptibly sinking and others as
slowly rising from unknown causes; but
in the present case l will suggest the
cause to be the melting down Of the
foundation of the valley that must be
composed of salt and sulphur, which, by
afording the perpetual flow of numerous
springs, must as certainly waste away al
that any part taken from the whole
leaves the whole less.