Show A trl trip p into the uinta basin utah IV 2 0 T r T 1 BY EARL DOUGLASS the big campfire is blazing and we are all gathered around it we have just eaten our first meal cooked out in the open our keen appetites the novelty of eating out of doors and the genial hearty companionship made it a most enjoyable feast the desert shrubs which we have collected aro are full of oil and when a new supply is placed on the fire it burns blue and green and white and red and purple and violet it lightens up the sculpture of the nearby near by hills and they with their fantastic shadows make the scene appear more weird than in the day time it is a very fitting and appropriate prop setting for the story which we are about to hear and it will undoubtedly increase the halo of romance which hovers about this region excuse me professor but may 1 I ask just one question before the story begins certainly we are glad to have you ask questions for we wish to know what you are interested in where are the famous veins of gilsonite and the oil that we hear so much about after we move camp it will be only an hour or two before we will see veins of of gilsonite ilg and we will have an opportunity of examining a good many of them after that it is only about twelve or fifteen miles to the nearest outcrop of oil I 1 know that you who are interested in oil and the hydrocarbons are anxiously expectant but we wish you to approach this most interesting problem of their origin and distribution in i an intelligent manner and as far as pos sible ble understand both the practical and theoretical sides of the question the narration to which you are now to listen may seem interesting only as a fairy tale but YOU will find more and more that it is intimately ti related to what you are now most desiring to know and if you do not grasp the lesson it will be best for you not to invest avest any money in propositions which you do not understand all over this mountain region aher ever r I 1 have been thousands tens of thousands ands and hundreds of thousands of dollars have ve been spent with the supposed 11 nida obtain illg purpose wealth from the the t earth but in only greater T number lumber ot of cases cyses there te remain holes s in tho the rocks rock ground piles pa ot of dirt and KS and decaying mining plants that have ever art III inake earned 1 per cent of their cost yet I 1 tho the not 1101 be h assertion that mining need fa fannin proportionately more hazardous than anvill you tion please make a fuller conj yes at the conle to roper proper time if it alo YOU without special explanation but jensen utah giogi geologist ei ogi at for the carnegie our experienced fossil hunter is now ready to tell his story and many are anxiously waiting mr fossile hunter you now have the ground there is no floor starts at the beginning the beginning of my story is far away and it seems long ago though it is a thing of this morning compared with the larger story to which it leads us the scene is far different from this there are no mountains the soil is rich and dark and is watered by abundant rains in the summer when the sky is clear the green of the earth meets with the blue of the sky in every direction the winters are cold but in the spring the warm breezes blow from the south the snow vanishes the streams are swollen the ice goes out the birds come from the south and the frogs sing in the the general life of the people except for the tragedies such as death and disappointed love and hopes is simple and uneventful the children go along the flowery lanes to school when the birds are singing the world is strange beautiful mysterious and full of interest but the lessons in school are simple as is the program of life obtain knowledge which is found in books do your duty here and accept the simple formula for salvation hereafter fleas head under microscope amid such scenes and there are many similar cases there lived lived a boy for some reason he must think beneath the surface things out of the ordinary made an impression on his mind which time would deepen once he was plowing for a neighbor they had a boys microscope 4 r 7 1 v id 7 aa imagined scene in later tertiary miocene times in the rocky mountain region marshes and ponds where green tints begin to show and then day by day spread to the uplands the trees too in the wet places have first a cloudlike cloud like sheen of tender foliage and then the dark clouds of the forests change to various tints of yellow and red and green life is full in earth and air and is bursting everywhere into superabundance of vitality the earth seems endowed with perpetual or ever recurring youth the fresh mornings of spring do not appear to be far from the first morn when the earth came fresh from the creator it hardly seems that it could have been made several thousand years ago except for our cares our ailments and our heartaches all seems fresh as the first dawn of existence we irresistibly wish to be out in this great ocean of life and when we are there we almost forget our troubles even the graves of our buried joys and of our loved ones are green again and we feel that they are all alive somewhere perhaps not far away which cost perhaps a dollar and a half the lady showed him a head of a flea and some other things through it alas the head of a little flea turned the head of a boy and that hoy boy was destined to become a man with the microscope and the fleas head still impressed upon his mind when alone or at work lie he thought and dreamed of a microscope he worked and planned and tried to save money to buy one after years he managed by borrowing about half the money to purchase a four dollar doliar microscope the world was transformed everywhere was life unseen before and undreamed of beautiful fascinating wonderful more so than the lessons in the school books and it seemed that there was something in the outside world different from the usual conceptions of the Cre creator many a time he had hunted or fished all day and had gone home without a duck or a pickerel but armed with some small bottles or pill boxes he need never return without beau ticul and astounding objects which when examined under the wonderful glass made made game indeed to nourish the growing mind first introduction to geology i once lie he went with his father to get some rock from a limestone quarry four or five miles from home by the river in which that az d feo lie he used to love to wade and swim and fish the soil and boulders had been removed from a considerable area exposing the rock which the men were prying up and breaking into blocks the owner of the quarry a kindhearted kind hearted man who was interested in ill something besides the mere rocks them ocean containing vague and undefined forms of life and surrounded by the clouds and mists of an unknown past it was strange wonderful fascinating he did not know until later that these curious things in the rocks were impressions of shells of giant mollusks and that like the chambered nautilus its shell during life grew larger to accommodate its growing body the older empty portions of the shell serving as float to buoy the animal up in the water this animals shell unlike that of the pearly nautilus grew straight forward instead of coiling around itself so it was given the name or straight horn this was the giant animal of the times and ages ago it ceased to exist but like the chani chambered nautilus of holmes it left its outgrown shell by lifes sea the boy grew to manhood struggling for an education teaching school and working his way through college but the allure ments of class standings diplomas and paying positions never absorbed his interest in the forms and manifestations of mysterious life as revealed by the microscope or its history as recorded in the rocks he read geology in the books and so far as he was able in nature also he learned that the debris of soil and boulders which the 4 quarryman had removed from the old horizontally zon tally lying limestone rocks which en 7 the giant mollusk of the ancient ordovician sea the supposed flowers are animals attached to bottom by stems selves showed the boy and his father some peculiar long slabs which were lying in the limestone these slabs could be lifted out of the rock on their rounded undersides were rings or cross bands and they left corresponding trough like depressions in the rock they were often several feet in length and six inches or more in width the quarryman said that they were remains of animals that had lived in the ancient sea in which the lime stones were formed this appealed to tho the imagination of the boy and he caught a glimpse of a world about which the day school and sunday school books gave little information though after hundreds of years of controversy many pious people had come to the belief that the days of creation were long periods of geological time the boy saw dimly a gleam of an old closed the shells of though brought from the north by glaciers no one knows how long ago were in point of time like the dust and sand which recent storms have blown over babylon and ninevah lands in geological paradise at last he had an opportunity to go to one of the western states where the upturning of the rocks new and old in mountain folds and its slow wearing down by the action of the elements had brought the secrets of the depths to light fortunately he alighted at once in a geological paradise of course he had learned in the books the names of the principal geological periods and you must learn them too to help you I 1 will give you tables so that you can study them and understand them more clearly now you get the onion th the of the earth that is that the rocks are 4 the continuous concentric layers boff 0 t onion none of the formations everaelt ev ever erelt efte over more than a fraction of the earth T rocks of the outer portion of the earth i composed principally of sediments wk vas have been deposited in seas lakes mar maraland within the areas of the flood plains pan I 1 in c rivers the higher dry areas have cont conk buted the material by the disintegration 11 t the rocks and winds and running wate wak have carried it to the places of dep osite you can understand this b by y looking at I 1 conditions on the earth today where now land was once sea and there were gre gm lakes where there are now deserts D land in places is gaining on the sea andt others the sea is invading and conquers conque rb the land in some places the land is ralf rais and in some sinking what causes this no one knows As we do not knot inov fc original condition of the earth or the COB con ilion or conditions of the interior at fr present time we have but theories buix can see that all rock formations must beff stricter strict ed to portions of the earth nov NOO 6 principal geological periods are with the oldest Archa ean Ca brjan brian ordovician silurian devonian cr ci coniferous boni ferous triassic jurassic Coman chea cretaceous tertiary adal and 1 cent in this geologists paradise whid mentioned all the great geological 10 were represented except po possibly shibly the theor 0 dired which in minnesota was overlain by glacial drift and perhaps perhaps silurian often in the absence of in a rock its age cannot be determined A glimpse of things to come in an hour or two one could walk 6 the upturned edges of the rocks cronly from rocks ks which depreo gockian to recent roe the accumulations of many million illions 3 years st shell of giant mollusk in horn of the old ordovician seas limestone of geol what is the supposed length leal ical time loof we do not know yet we only 0 it that from the standpoint of our lives been geology is s dl extremely long to but bu t great progress in some direction but bu great progress in some directions thel the same position as the geologists 1000 are estimates all the way from years before we get through with our trip I 1 think you will begin to see why we are sure that time has been long to continue our story this boy a man now lived in this interesting geological region for a time it was in the madison valley near the three forks of the lilis missouri river in montana he began searching the high sandy and clayey badland bluffs of the madison here he f found ENT in AGE OF CENOZ H mammals W A 1 AGE OF mesozoic R T AGE OF PERMIAN COAL PLANTS DEVONIAN AGE OF PALEOZOIC f SILURIAN FISHES 4 ordovician AGE OF CAMBRIAN Y TO traced OF 5 AZOIC NO 5 7 W t r TI 6 general geological section chart and bones of extinct three toed horses camels rhinoceros mastodons etc 1 I know that camels or ous ever lived in america 0 yes it is the native home of the horse rhinoceros and camel they migrated to the old world and afterward died out here he went to other valleys and found remains of fossil mammals from various geological levels but they all belonged to the upper part of the tertiary the oligocene and miocene look at your charts the tertiary is not marked here but it is the same as the cenozoic it must have been interesting to find these things 11 0 yes but how much more interesting when sil it was found that nearly all the fossils were new to science they had never been found before now we have been wandering a little but we have to go all over the earth to get geology and I 1 will soon show you where we are at geologically |