Book: A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming: The Journals of Barnum Brown and JP Sams

A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming: The Journals of Barnum Brown and JP Sams. University of Kansas Expedition of 1895, by Barnum Brown andJ.P. Sams, edited by Michael F. Kohl, Larry D. Martin and Paul Brinkman
High Plains Press, 2004
128 pages, plus 1895 milestones, endnotes, bibliography and index

Description
Professor Samuel Williston led a group of rugged young dinosaur hunters from the University of Kansas to barely-settled Wyoming. They were searching for Triceratops, the three-horned dinosaur, still new to science.

Professor Williston, at the prime of an illustrious career in paleontology, had a nnew new museum at the university he wanted to fill with bones and fossils. A Triceratops would make a perfect addition.

This expedition was a turning point for two of the young students-Barnum Brown and Elmer Riggs-who would go on to eminent bone hunting careers of their own. As Riggs later wrote, they chose "to follow the lure of paleontology [while] lying awake...among the sagebrush of Wyoming...enjoying the coolness of a desert night, and looking up into the starry canopy above."

Wyoming, still "a tough cowboy place", only five yeares a state, was just beginning as well. The Kansas Expedition, accustomed to more civilized surroundings, marveled at Hartville, "composed of one shack, a combination of post office and whiskey saloon"; Wheatland, "a small osis in the desert...being boomed by eastern capitalists"; Badger where a home/store/post office was "about the size of a Kansas henhouse"; and Lusk, where the minister was a woman whose husband was serving time in the penitentiary.

Here young Barnum Brown and University Regent James P Sams record in two seperate journals the colorful details of the expedition. Editors Michael Kohl, Larry D Martin, and Paul Brinkman have put the diaries in context with expansive footnotes.

Table of Contents
Introduction by Paul Brinkman, Larry D. Martin and Michael F. Kohl

Barnum Brown Journal:
Kansas State Geological Expedition, 1895

J.P. SAm's Journal:
Fossil Huntin in Wyoming

Maps:
Routes of the 1895 Kansas Expedition
Southeast Wyoming, 1892
Wyoming Sites of the 1895 Kansas Expedition
Milestones, 1895
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
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