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Saturday, June 17, 2017

Blackwater Draw in Portales NM

Blackwater Draw in Portales NM

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I wrote about the Llano Estacado, the Bosque Redondo, and the Pecos areas in two of my novels (The Apprenticeship of Nigel Blackthorn & A Message to Santa Fe). In a recent visit to the area, I found Ft. Sumner (what there was of it) closed and the Billy the Kid museum a disappointment. The unexpected highlight of my 2-day visit to Portales was the Blackwater Draw National Historic Landmark and, a few miles north of Portales, the Blackwater Draw Museum.
The area near here approaching the Llano Estacado’s western edge lacks the traditional cap-rock walls. The Llano’s edge has shifted and crumbled, leaving several cap-rock mesas along the plateau’s edge. (Pic above.) Driving east toward Clovis, NM, along US-60, there is little noticeable change in elevation until Melrose, where it becomes clear you crossed a ridge onto the Llano. Clovis, NM, the nearby “big city” had its name applied to the discovery of a Paleo-Indian hunting ground from 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The Clovis People
The importance of the Clovis people is their campsites’ left archaeological evidence of Paleo-Indian communities long before “conventional wisdom” believed ancestral people existed in the Western Hemisphere. The Clovis People were small, 5-feet-5 or less, weighing as much as 150 pounds, based on skeletal remains. A distinctive feature of the Clovis People was a 5- to 8-inch chert, or flint, spear-point used for hunting the extinct Columbian Mammoth, Giant Buffalo, and Giant Sloths.
An ancient riverbed, Blackwater Draw contains the fossils of thousand of extinct animals from the Paleo-age buried with various designs of Clovis points used to kill these giant species. The Clovis People were nomads and hunter-gathers. Archaeological evidence showed similar Paleo-Indian communities existed across North and Central America. All these communities adopted the Clovis spear-point design to hunt the giant animals of their period.

The Clovis Point.
The Clovis Point design is unique to the western hemisphere. All the points at the Museum are copyright protected, so I offer a drawing representative of an 8-inch Clovis Spear Point. They made a spear-point by knapping flint, or chert, to the desired shape. The top edges are serrated to improve it cutting or piercing ability. The butt-end is fluted to allow it to fit on a wood shaft. The edges around the butt are not serrated to prevent cutting the leather-thongs used to tie the two together. The Museum collection showed points ranging from 4-inches to over 10-inches. The Museum, several miles north of Portales on US 70, is well-worth the visit.

The Columbian Mammoth’s 13-foot height compares today’s African elephant. The Mammoth had shorter legs and a heavier body, weighing 10 tons compared to the African’s weight of 5-7 tons. The Museum shows drawings of a gang of hunters standing close to jab spears in the underbelly of the taller mammoth. The Historic Landmark area teaches visitors how to use an atlatl to throw a spear. None of the fiber products (spear shafts or throwing devices) survived the thousands of centuries since the Clovis People used them. Only the stone tools of the Clovis People survived. There is no way to know their hunting methods.

The Clovis people were nomads. They roamed freely, but in the search of food, not sightseeing. They traded with other communities, because we have evidence about where the flint, or chert, came from. The evidence shows they traded flint and knapping skills between communities.
Over a period of 50-100 years, the use of Clovis points spread across North America. Trade and sharing among the communities explains the wide spread use of the Clovis design.

DNA
DNA material collected from a burial site indicates 80% of native people in the Western Hemisphere are direct descendants of Clovis People -- that is today's Native Americans. The DNA indicates the Clovis People were descendants of people indigenous to Northwest Asia. Some believe this indicates they crossed the “land bridge” between the Alaskan-Russian straits to populate the Western Hemisphere. The confounded element is historians didn’t believe the “land bridge” existed in those days—so much for experts. ;-)

Archaeologists debated for years if the Clovis people were the “first” people in the Western Hemisphere, but Carbon Dating evidence from South America indicates Paleo-Indian communities in the south may be 2,000+ years older than in the north. Which raises the Question:
How did they arrive in South America? By canoe from the Pacific Islands?
Ah, the topic for another Post.

You may ask what does this story of the “First People” have to do with “the Old West”?
This post answers Custer’s Question: Where did all those Indians come from?

Thanks for reading my Blog, Traveling the West.
Frank Kelso

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Saturday, June 10, 2017

Mesa Verde.3

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MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK.3

I love visiting the great National Parks in this country (like you couldn’t tell?) While I respect the mission of the Park Service to protect and maintain these great treasures for future generation to visit, I abhor the “Political Correctness” that infects the Park Service.

Exploding the MYTH
One example of “PC” in the Park Service is perpetuating the MYTH that the Verde dwellers “disappeared mysteriously,” as though a spaceship came to take them away. I liked one docent’s private post, in which he claimed, as a Native American and a Puebloan, the Verde dwellers didn’t disappear—they moved away because the Mesa no longer met their needs. These Puebloans used their building skills to build the Puebloan communities in the canyons and valley of northern New Mexico and Arizona. This migration is typical for small groups who depend upon the surrounding area for their food and shelter. If the food source diminishes--they move. If the area is too cold, or prone to flood--they move. No spaceship involved.

Exploding another MYTH
The PC “snowflakes” in the US like to believe this country needs to get back to the land, like it was before the (evil) white man came to this country. There are posts about a “college professor" telling her students that before the (evil) “white man” came to America, the Native Americans lived in peace and harmony—the (evil) white man taught them war and scalping.
I admit, the original “domino theory” of not letting Vietnam fall to the ChiComs, actually came from a military historian who used the Iroquois Confederation as an example of tribal displacement causing a “domino effect.” The Iroquois Confederation drove smaller, less war-like tribes away to protect the Iroquois' natural resources (food supply), but this happened before the white man came. The coming of the white man exacerbated the problem of limited natural resources,

Exploding Another MYTH
Another element of the “snowflake culture” believes the Native American lived in perfect harmony with the land, acting as a good steward to protect and preserve. TOTAL BALONEY!

Mesa Verde is the perfect tool to demonstrate this fallacy. Even though the Park Service lists the types of bones found in trash dumps of succeeding periods, their “snowflake” mentality doesn’t allow them to connect the dots. At the bottom of the trash dump, they found elk and buffalo bones. In the era just before the Early Puebloan “magically disappeared,” the Park Service found only squirrel and groundhog (marmot) bones. The diminishing size of the animals is evidence the natives destroyed all mammal life in the Mesa’s ecosystem. The Early Puebloan's left the Mesa because of a food shortage.

Similar evidence exists about their agricultural deficits. They farmed the same area with the same crop, corn and beans, for 300 hundred years—these crops drained the soil of all nutrients. A few of the Early Puebloans migrated away to find areas with better natural resources, or they would have starved to death. These weren’t stupid people. Once Verde dwellers heard from the first people to move, they began to understand the Mesa could no longer support their large community. The Verde Dwellers moved, and having learned, they formed the numerous smaller Pueblo cultures that dot northern New Mexico and Arizona, rather one large community like they had on the Mesa.


These two examples demonstrate the Native Americans DID NOT live in “perfect harmony” with the land. My purpose is NOT to belittle the Native American, who has been treated badly by my government. My purpose is to expose the PC mentality in the Park Service that collects information on an ancient people, but refuses to connect the dots because it doesn’t fit their make-believe world of PC. Nature does what nature does. Man plans—God laughs.

Oh Darn. I can't get the pics to align with the text-- next time?

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