Exploring the Edges of Texas

14. Death in the Redbeds

ChaPTEr 14 Death in the redbeds The summer temperatures approximate those of hell. Almost all the animals bite or sting. Water is scarce and usually unpleasant . . . but the people of the region are among the finest, and the fossil reptiles to be found there are the world’s best. Alfred Sherwood Romer, “Fossil Collecting in the Texas Redbeds” on a hoT augusT Day, months after our trip to New Haven and our winter visit to Spanish Fort, Isabel and I return to the Red River Valley to continue our journey along the edge of Texas. U.S. Highway 82 takes us through Nocona, Ringgold, and Henrietta, where we pick up U.S. 287 to Wichita Falls. According to A Historical Atlas ofTexas, we have just passed from a region of the state where rainfall is “usually adequate” into one where it is “critical.”1 Before us stretches the southern Great Plains–the epic outdoor stage upon which so much of the history of the American West unfolded. We are on the trail of an obscure player in that drama who made a startling scientific discovery. In 1876, Jacob Boll unearthed a fossil skull that opened the door to a time long past, when this part of Texas was a steaming tropical swamp.2 A few miles west of Electra, we turn north on FM 1763, a two-lane blacktop that parallels the Pease River. There was no road at all when Jacob Boll came this way in the waning days of the cattle drives. You still see a few pet longhorns from time to time, but the open range has been replaced by a checkerboard of dry-land farms where cotton, peanuts, and Eryops in a Permian swamp ChaPTEr 14 { 192 } grain sorghum grow in soil the color of pulverized clay pots. Up ahead, two half-grown coyote pups gambol across the road followed by their haggard mama. The weatherman predicts a high today between 106 degrees and 110 degrees. Dust devils spin like dervishes in the shimmering heat. J The U.S. Cavalry was still fighting Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne warriors on theTexas plains in the decade following the Civil War. It was an unlikely time and a dangerous place to find a university-trained Swiss naturalist hunting for rocks, bugs, and fossils. Jacob Boll regularly sent large collections of such things to his friend and mentor Louis Agassiz, founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1870, Boll shipped a spectacular collection of Texas insects to the museum–fifteen thousand specimens representing sixteen hundred species . He picked up most of the moths and butterflies as chrysalises or raised them from caterpillars, feeding them until they metamorphosed into adults.3 He did significant field research for the U.S. Entomological Commission,and when theTexas governor and the legislature considered establishing a state geological survey, Jacob Boll was their choice to head it up.4 He was a small man with full beard and grayish-blue eyes, who often wore a feathered Swiss alpenhut and long yellow linen duster. Biographer Samuel Geiser pictures him returning from a long walk in the country: “Over his shoulder hangs a naturalist’s tin collecting box. In one hand is gathered an insect net and a looped stick for collecting snakes and lizards, while in the other hand he carries a turtle by the leg.”5 Boll was a curiosity to his Dallas neighbors. But had he been a military man, he would have been awarded a Medal of Honor for the important work he did under dangerous circumstances. Death in the redbeds { 193 } In 1877 Boll met a man who sent him on his most hazardous field trip to date. Edward Drinker Cope came to Dallas on a recruiting trip. Locked in fierce competition with fellow paleontologist Othniel C.Marsh to describe new species of prehistoric animals, Cope needed a collector to explore northwesternTexas. He was willing to pay three hundred dollars a month plus expenses. In addition he would provide a span of mules, double harness, and wagon.6 Boll took the job and gave his new employer some bones he had collected along Onion Creek, near present-day Archer City. In a letter to his wife, Cope reported meeting a “German” naturalist in Dallas who had given him some “very fine objects.” “In fact,” he wrote, “I learned of wonderful things from him...