Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/136

 the interest of the same trade, Mr. Moody, of the Dalles, afterward Governor Moody of Oregon, was building a small steamer on Pend d'Oreille Lake, and on his way home encountered these well diggers of the Touchet wagon road. They had dug through gravel to the depth of eighty-six feet without striking water, but Mr. Moody found them examining some fossil bones they had just found at this great depth. They, thinking they were human remains, turned to him for an explanation of the mystery and he promised to carry some of the bones to The Dalles, where he told them he had a friend who studied such things. One of these fragments was found by the writer to be a remarkably well preserved specimen of a fragment of a radius of a horse quite as large as the corresponding bone of a good sized dray horse of today. Careful inquiry brought out the information that the region from the Touchet to the Palouse was nearly level, and the whole eighty-six feet of digging was through river wash. Here, therefore, was proof that when this horse lived, a lake thirty miles across and eighty-six feet deep stretched from the Touchet to the Snake, a depression that was slowly filled up to the present level by the river flow of the region. The same winter, the writer published these facts by a lecture in Portland, and the discovery was published in the Portland Oregonion. This Touchet horse, found in 1866, was so far as is known to the writer, the first fossil horse discovered in the Pacific Northwest.