I shall as soon as I possibly can got to Washington and make application for permission to conclude our work in that region without interference on the part of people who would like to rob us, if they could, of the results of our expenditures of labor and money.  Meanwhile I hereby instruct you at once to remove to your own land and to your own house, which I presume is not a national mounment.  Remove the boxes, which have been packed and which contain fossils and pile them on you own land get them off the ground at once and go on with the work.  I do not think there will be much difficulty in obtaining permission to finish what we have undertaken unless some of the ignorant people in that region, filled with a foolish idea as to the excessive importance of things there found should undertake surreptitiously ot raise difficulties.  The hole we have made in other places where there are fossiles contained in it as a national monument strikes me as one of the most absurd  proceededings imaginable.  There are ten thousand other places in the mountains of the West where there are fossils sticking out of the rock which the rustics, who live on the land, are unable to distinguish from ordinary pebbles,and which are just as well worthy of being consevrated as national maonuments as is this spot.



The trouble with the whole matter is that there has been too much talk about the whole thing, and about our business, and a horribly exaggerated frame of mind has been thereby induced on the part of the ignorant rural population in that part of the world as well as in the minds of ignorant officaldom generally.  Whatever value is attached to the spot is due to the fact that Mr. Carnegie's money