WCP1415

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Written to Talbot March 2nd/[18]88¹

805 9th Street., Sioux City, Iowa

Jan[uary]. 25,1888.

Dr. Alfred R. Wallace:

Dear Sir:

Your letter and the photographs your sent were duly received. Accept my thanks for the photograph. I think it is a very good one. I was much interested in your account of your Western trip.

I delivered to Mr. Talbot² the message and the photograph your sent him, and I suppose you will hear from him some of these days. He is a wonderfully busy man. His animals are doing well this winter, although we have had some exceedingly cold and stormy weather. we had a "blizzard" two weeks ago, the severest that has been [2]³ known in this part of the country. Many persons caught out in the storm got lost in the blinding snow and perished.

Last fall a part of a remarkable skeleton was found on Mr. Talbot's farm. I will make a quotation in regard to it from a paper on "The Geology of Sioux City and its Vicinity"⁴ prepared by Mr. J.C.C. Haskins⁵ and read before the Sioux City Scientific Association.⁶ After speaking of animal remains found in the Niobrara group of rocks, Mr. Haskins goes on to say, "I have here tonight an imperfect skeleton found some two months since on Mr. Talbot's farm, which [3]⁷ I cannot identify but which certainly belongs to this period. I think it is a species underclassified as of yet, and unnamed. It was found in digging a cistern on the steep side hill above the stables. The excavation chanced to cut into the out cropping edge of a thick bed of Niobrara shale. The workmen destroyed the skull mainly before they were aware of its value. They gathered up some fragments and sent word to Mr. Talbot in whose company I went up the next day and completed the excavation assisted by one of the men. We were obliged to work mainly with jack knives, the matrix being tough plastic clay that [4]⁸ could not be worked with picks much better than a bed of pitch. Here are eighty-one of the vertebrae-a few of them are doubtless missing-here are fragments of the jaw and a few of the teeth and a heap of fragments crushed in such a manner as to suggest an awful conflict with some mightier monster in which this devourer was devoured."

The skeleton is that of an animal fifteen or twenty feet long. There are no ribs or small bones among the remains except some paddle bones; but the vertebrae show where ribs were attached. The animal doubtless belonged to the general class Pythonomorph. [5]⁹ Mr. and Mrs. Stone¹⁰ send their kind remembrances to you, and say they often see your name and think of you.

I shall try next summer to get the seeds that I failed to get for you last summer.

Mr. Talbot said that he was intending to send you some photographs of his farm, but that one of the negatives had been destroyed.

Yours very truly, | Bandusia Wakefield¹¹ [signature]