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Dry Bones II: The Cowboy Who Found Them
Continuing on from the first post… After finally arriving at what has become known as the Folsom Site, there was some discussion about where the actual excavation had taken place, what the “lay of the land” might have looked like at the time of the bison kill and a few other theories connected with it. My friend and Seth gave their varied opinions. As ranch manager, Seth had been present at the last excavation in the 90s and added some insight about that. But if the podcasters expected anything that looked much different from the surrounding several thousand acres, they were disappointed. Remove the chain-link fence, and there is little to hold your interest.
We drove back to where the passengers could pick up their vehicle and follow us to the museum where Matt waited for us. There my friend and Matt sat down with the host of the podcast to record reflections of George McJunkin. The main subject of the podcast was to be the site itself but it is hard to ignore the interwoven story of the remarkable man who is responsible for its discovery. The second member of the podcast team and I retreated deeper in the museum to visit while the interview was conducted (but we were later asked to move even deeper since we had gotten loud enough to be heard in the background).
There is no better authority to consult on the subject than Matt Doherty. He is the self-appointed, faithful guardian of the legacy belonging to the man that his great-great-great-grandfather first hired to break horses in the 1870s. Matt is somewhat remarkable himself. Although that fateful night at the turn toward Branson, CO, robbed him of a great deal of his mobility and what then was considered his future, he has a strong outlook on his life. He lives across the “street” (or road) and a few yards west of the museum in what was the two-story Folsom Hotel which at one time housed several rooms as well as a café and was host to the Bucket of Blood Saloon a few feet to the rear. The hotel also served at times as the town jail since it had a room with no windows where the unsavory could be locked up without escape. It was here that Black Jack Ketchum was taken when first captured. The hotel was also home to George McJunkin during his last days.
Matt has taught himself to draw and paint, studies deeply in several subjects, and will tell you that if the accident had not occurred he would never have devoted himself to the “re-imaging” of the museum to better tell the varied history of this unique region or to help spread the story of McJunkin all the way to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Few people in this world are better at making chicken salad out of chicken [redacted] than Matt. He lives his life with both interest and purpose. It was Matt’s family which two generations back made it a mission to collect stories from both McJunkin and those who had known him so that a book of his life could be produced. There is a picture of McJunkin taken when he was advancing in age. His black face is framed with short, white hair and he is standing with a hand on a porch post. He is still straight and slim. The white-skinned toddler at his feet is Matt’s grandfather.
In 2019, George McJunkin was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Matt Doherty accepted the presentation and spoke in his behave.
McJunkin was Texas-born and a slave at birth. His father was a blacksmith who was allowed to hire-out as he could and so was able to purchase his freedom after a time. As soon as “Shoe-Boy” (as the father was called) had his own freedom, he began saving for his son’s as well. But the War Between the States was to be George’s ticket to freedom.
Approaching his teens, the young slave showed a great ability with horses while more and more of the white hands left for war, leaving work to be done at home. After the war and as Texas cattle headed north for Yankee markets in 1866, George saw the trail drives as not just somewhere that his skills were needed but an arena where he was accepted as an equal as long as he carried his own weight.
Texas cattle drives were hardly polite society. One had to have some hard bark on to fit in or to take the tests that determined if you did fit in. But when the depth of your character and skill could be properly measured, you were an equal. And few were more respected than a sure-enough horsebacker who could get all that any equine had but be as easy on him as possible while doing it. George McJunkin proved to be a cowboy’s cowboy.
George’s first introduction to the Dry Cimarron area probably came as a result of training a set of horses for Gideon Roberds to be trailed north and sold along the Santa Fe Trail. Roberds set up a headquarters east of Trinidad, Colorado. It was said that McJunkin taught Roberds’ two sons (Emmett and Coke) all he knew about breaking horses in exchange for lessons in reading and writing. Old-timers claimed that George told them when he came to that country, he rode to the top of the Capulin Crater (considered the best example of an extinct cinder cone volcano on the North American continent), looked south to the lava bed prairie and then north to the grasslands framing the rim rocks and mesas set off by the hint of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance and he decided he had found his “promised land.”
When he tried to get hired by Dr. Thomas Owen, he was pointed toward a gray mare as a test of his abilities. Although the horse had bucked off everyone who had tried her, George rode her to a standstill and “without laying a spur or whip on her.” He had a job. And a new home.
But it was more than riding that impressed Dr. Owen. George had an active mind and was already an avid reader, fluent in Spanish, and considered the best roper in the country.
Dr. Owen might have had extensive holding along the edge of Johnson Mesa but his main home and practice was in Trinidad, CO, where he had been the city’s first mayor. Before long the former slave boy became the most trusted employee that the former Confederate officer had. When Dr. Owen passed away suddenly in the 1890s, George was entrusted with managing his property and directing the upbringing of his two sons until they were deemed able to run their own affairs.
Among McJunkin’s prize possessions was a telescope given him by an army officer when the cowboy rescued him from ruffians set on robbing him. It was always carried on George’s saddle and its owner began a lifelong study of the stars.
Long before The Flood, stories of McJunkin’s abilities were common in the Hi-Lo country. There was the time he guided 20 cowboys and a cattle herd through a 10-day blizzard to safety. He was responsible for the information that set a posse on the Ketchum gang. As the proud owner of a sheepskin brush jacket in my youth, I was interested to learn that George might well have developed the first one.
After one cold winter ride in the high mesas, he visited with a local sheep raiser and traded for some skins with the wool still on. He then fashioned a coat out of it with the wool to the inside. He then took a deerskin to line the outside and protect the wool from the elements. The coat was long enough to cover the legs and split to the waist in the back so it could be ridden while in a saddle. George was a thinkin’ man!
In addition to a telescope, George had a transom. He was a self-taught surveyor whose skill and word were both trusted enough by all to settle property lines and establish fence lines.
There is much more that I can say about George McJunkin but hopefully you have a sense of the man who rode out to inspect conditions on the Crowfoot after The Flood. When he rode down the sloping south side of Wild Horse Arroyo, he noticed some bones exposed in the sediment of the straight-up north side of the Arroyo They were a little more than 10 feet below the topsoil so had to have been buried a long time. He stepped off to investigate and having once hunted buffalo professionally for a short time, knew bison bones when he saw them. But he also knew these were much larger than they were supposed to be. Among the subjects he routine read on were archeology and paleontology and he knew this had to be important.
In the years to come, George would write several museums and scientists to create interest in his finds. He did not just find bones but also some stone points. He was never able to create the interest that he was sure these items deserved in his lifetime.
As the 1920s approached, George had land of his own and a house outside of Folsom, toward the Capulin Crater, but his health was failing. In the later part of 1921, lighting struck his house and it burned along with almost all his earthly possessions, including several prized artifacts.
George moved into the Folsom Hotel but only lived a short time. In January of 1922, he died in the same building where Matt now lives.
It would be left to a friend of his from nearby Raton, Carl Schwachheim, to finally interest the Colorado Museum of Natural History in George’s find. The bones were identified as what they were but the stone points were not considered valid evidence because they had been removed from their original location. Paleontologists are only interested in bones. But an archaeological (they are interested in evidence of humans) excavation was done in 1926 and two different fluted stone points were found between bison antiquus ribs, changing the accepted history of the North American continent and establishing a whole new culture group for the period toward the end of the Ice Age, the Folsom people.
As we will see later, there can be several opinions and theories about the so-called Folsom Site and what can be gathered about it as well as the people who started it all with that bison kill. But I find little to argue about in regard to the cowboy whose life is a reminder that man should never be a victim of the conditions he finds himself in. The measure of a human is not the difficulties placed in his path but the way in which the quality of his character and mind is used. And in this case, how a curious nature made all those opinions and theories possible as well as left us with a clearer picture of our past, another thread leading backward to give us a deeper sense of what mankind has gone through to arrive in these times with so much gained – and so much to lose.
These stubby fingers are again complaining about too much keyboard time so I will give them a chance to recover and return to the mysteries that still remain for us to argue about concerning that site and those people. It has been suggested that Irish whiskey can do wonders for such fingers if ingested internally. I believe that’s worth a try!
Part III is here.
Published in General
In my Anthropology class in college, our professor was fond of the story of Aleš Hrdlička, who had developed the first theory of human colonization of North America. Hrdlička was adamant that the first humans didn’t arrive in North America until around 3,000 years ago, and as the curator of the physical anthropology department of the U.S.National Museum, his theory held great sway. Those who questioned his timeline were sidetracked until the Folsom points turned up embedded in ribs of a creature that had gone extinct thousands of years earlier.
Yes, but have too much, and your spelling degrades, as well as getting your thoughts down coherently.
lol- if you haven’t noticed those are my problems to begin with!
Well, maybe the whiskey will improve that, too, then.
Granted. I think he’d be in worse shape though if his accident had deprived him of the ability to wear a fine hat.
I have a buddy with the last name McJunkin, who grew up in Wyoming. Gotta see if this guy’s one of his forbears…
All very interesting. Would I be correct in assuming this is the museum?
After spending 2-3 weeks in Texas in a couple of months, we’re going to head to New Mexico to visit a sister and her family, and then go further west as we’ve done a couple of times before, probably to San Diego, and certainly as far as Boulder City NV to visit our youngest son.
We enjoy the drives out west (doing air travel only once) but this year I announced that I no longer care for driving day after day after day, and would prefer to stop at some places along the way for a couple of days where we could visit local stuff and I could get in a good bicycle ride or two. As for riding out of Folsom, it looks like there is no direction but uphill, but it wouldn’t have to be done that way, as that isn’t where we’d find a place to stay anyway. It will be the off-season for that museum, but it looks like there are other possibilities by appointment.
Do you think it would be worth making that kind of effort?
That would explain the Flood.
George was born on John Saunders McJunkin’s ranch in Midway, Texas and took his last name from that owner. George had no children but did have several siblings :)
lol – if you bike westward it will certainly be uphill!! The rest is dependent on the weather. The Capulin crater is also within about 7 miles and on the main highway between Clayton and Raton , and has a good vistor center there at the top. I always consider the drive over Johnson Mesa to Raton on the “back road” worth the time – if late winter weather lets you. I am sure getting to see the museum would not be a problem, I can make sure you get in there and probably get more local “color” than you can stand
He got back to me on Facebook and said there’s no known relation, but he learned all about George in high school.
Thank you for that offer. I may take you up on it. We’ll be finalizing our plans during the Christmas holidays, so we’ll be figuring it out soon.
I am curious, given the skill required to create a tip, and the intrinsic value of one, why they were left behind? Wouldn’t the hunters retrieve them when they butchered the animals? I could conjure up a few stories that might explain, but what are your thoughts on this?
Curious about this too.
It would be interesting to know if they are associated with butchered or unbutchered remains.
To begin with all of the points recovered are not in perfect shape and so might not have been the best ones to save. Some were. It is my understanding that the first ones were pretty good shape and found between the ribs. In other words, they were part of that which was discarded. I know that some of the carcasses did have the ribs taken and I would guess that the points were pulled from those but they didnt get all of the ones in the discarded ranks.
It appears from the evidence at this site that the people were not there for long and so took all the muscle meat they could left some of the rest – there were hind quarters left for example and some were stripped of meat and left. I can see them taking some rib ranks since when turning up they hold quite a bit of other butchered meat as well fit well on the hide to be dragged or packed.
There are other thoughts but those are just a few. They were getting as much work done as possible and moving out seemingly. They are sites in Wyo where quite a few such points are found but none with the fluting.
We pretty much stumbled upon Capulin on a drive to Colorado several years back. Aside from my newfound issue with heights and driving on mountain roads like that, it was a wonderful find.
It was good practice for Pikes Peak later in the trip.
A wonderful series. Your long silence had me worried, glad to see such a strong return.