5
"The Touchet Horse"
By Dr. Thomas Condon
Dr. Thomas Condon was born in Ireland in 1822. Though always interested in geology, he received a theological training in New York where he had moved in early life. He came to Oregon as a home missionary in 1852. After 10 years of life in Western Oregon he moved with his family to The Dalles, collecting his first fossils in the John Day valley and spending his vacations in that rich fossil region. He was without scientific books and had no way of getting them. He succeeded in interesting Clarence King, leader of a Government geological survey in Oregon, and King in turn interested other eastern scientists. In 1870 he sent his first boxes of specimens to the Smithsonian Institution. In 1871 he took Professor Marsh and a party from Yale through his fossil fields. Scientific books found their way to his library in exchange for his information and materials, and he became a contributor to the geological literature of the country. In 1873 he joined the faculty of Pacific University at Forest Grove and in 1876 was appointed professor of geology and natural history in the University of Oregon at Eugene, where he died in February, 1907. Among his important finds was that of the little three-toed fossil horse, "the first discovery of the fossil horse contributed by the geology of the globe." He was the author of The Two Islands and What Came of Them, which has now become a rare and expensive book.
While the finest fossils of the modern type of horse have been taken from the Equus Beds in the Silver Lake region, a still more interesting discovery was the finding of the Touchet Horse ten years earlier. In the spring of 1866, a new mining interest in Eastern Oregon, Washington and Idaho resulted in an extensive demand for miners' supplies along the line of Pend d'Oreille Lake. The merchants of Walla Walla, in an effort to secure resulting trade, opened a road from Walla Walla to Palouse Landing on Snake River. The distance along this road from the crossing of the Touchet to Palouse, was thirty miles without water. To remedy this need, the road company dug for water fifteen miles beyond the crossing of the Touchet. During the same spring, and in
