Cowboy’s discovery helped rewrite history
More than 100 years ago, finding bones of Folsom Man with now-extinct bison pushed back timeline of humans in North America
IFOLSOM f you travel to Folsom, about 40 miles east of Raton, don’t expect to find cafes, stores, gas stations or many people.
There is a post office with an Eisenhower-era phone booth out front, but no phone. In the last few years, the population has dwindled from about 80 souls to about 50. In some ways, it’s a place that could be easily missed — or easily forgotten.
But an inquisitive black cowboy and a flood more than 100 years ago gave Folsom a footprint in time that belies its physical presence.
In 1908, George McJunkin discovered some large, white bones that were exposed in a ravine by a devastating flood that killed 17 people, in what was then a thriving farm town of 1,000. Although it was not known until after his death, McJunkin’s find of ancient bison bones later resonated throughout the archaeological world when the bones, and later spear points, showed that ancient man had roamed the area 5,000 years earlier than previously believed and killed the bison there.
Thus, the Folsom Man was discovered.
Just down from the post office, the Folsom Museum, housed in a former 1896 mercantile store, tells the story of McJunkin’s find and the pioneer, farming history of the area. The little museum receives about 2,000 visitors a year and has plans to renovate. For the more curious, tours of the McJunkin discovery site are scheduled this month and in August.
The story starts in August 1908, when telephone operator Sarah “Sally” Rooke got a warning that intense rains near the headwaters of the dry Cimarron River west of town would be sending a wall of water toward the town. Rooke warned as many as she could by phone until the flash flood struck. Cited as a hero, Rooke was found dead a few days later. Telephone operators around the country contributed to honor her with a memorial.
The next month, according to a 1974 article in The American West magazine, McJunkin was riding along Wild Horse Arroyo and “noticed some white objects that had been exposed” after the flood had washed away 10 feet of the arroyo’s sides below ground level.
“[He] climbed down … and, using a pair of barbed-wire clippers, dug out one of the white things that proved to be a bone — one of many,” according to the magazine.
McJunkin, who knew these weren’t cattle bones, was a former buffalo hunter, expert bronc rider, a crack shot and played the fiddle and guitar. He recovered the bones and took them home to rest above his fireplace for years. The extinct bison were 50 percent larger than their modern counterparts and stood 12 to 15 feet tall at the shoulder.
Years later, after McJunkin had mentioned his discovery to a blacksmith, in 1922, a group of amateur Raton archaeologists — including a striking iron worker, a bank employee, a Lebanese bricklayer, a Roman Catholic priest and a student taxidermist — visited the site and collected a bag of bones, American West reported.
At about the same time, Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins from the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) theorized that humans had occupied North America thousands of years earlier than was commonly believed. But where was the proof ? The Raton excavators wrote to Figgins and took the bones to Denver in March 1926. Figgins began excavating at Folsom that May. In August 1927, a Figgins crew “found a projectile point embedded between the ribs of an extinct species of bison,” according to excerpts from the book Folsom, New Archaeological Investigations of a Classic Paleoindian Bison Kill, by Southern Methodist University archaeologist David Meltzer.
Figgins sent word of his discoveries to major museums, and archaeology had an astounding new theory.
Several of the Folsom points and the bison bones are displayed at the Denver museum.
Meltzer excavated the Folsom site from 1997-99 and analyzed materials recovered from the site during the 1920s. “The Folsom discovery in 1927 triumphantly resolved a dispute over human antiquity in the Americas that reached back to the mid-nineteenth century,” states the book’s excerpts.
David Eck, trust land archaeologist with the New Mexico State Land Office, said a handful of Paleoindian sites had been found previously, but the evidence was disturbed.
“Folks were believing people had not been around that long [in North America], and with this discovery we pushed back [that date] to 10,000 years ago,” Eck said in a telephone interview. Radiocarbon dating of the bison bones put the time of ancient man’s presence in the area to 10,500 years ago, so the initial estimate was off by only 500 years, he said.
Eck said the Folsom Man and Folsom point discovery is significant “primarily in the fact it’s the first place where all the experts of the time could agree that people and now-extinct animals once coexisted.”
Eck, who has led tours of the Folsom site for over 10 years, will again conduct tours this summer.
In his book First Peoples in a New World, Meltzer wrote Paleoindian hunters possibly stampeded the ancient bison, much larger than today’s animals, into the steep, narrowing arroyo for the kill or killed them as they attempted to escape.
“By all measures this was a successful hunt. A cow-calf herd of 32 bison were killed in the fall when the animals were at their peak body fat,” Meltzer wrote. “With a complement of flake tools and a quartzite skinning knife, the hunters dismembered the bison and packed the meaty parts for transport.”
There are plenty of unknowns about what happened 10,000 years ago, Meltzer wrote in the Folsom book: What else occurred at the site other than the bison kill? Where did the hunters come from and where were they headed? How long did they linger at the site? How did they use the terrain to minimize hunting risks?
McJunkin, who was born a slave in Texas in 1851, never lived to see the significance of the bones he pried from the arroyo. He never married or had children and died at the Folsom Hotel in 1922.