There Were Mastodons Under My Feet!

Red cream soda and chocolate ice cream AND fossils on the same day?!? This turned out to be a top-tier holiday!

Mastodon State Historic Site preserves the Kimmswick Bone Bed, an incompletely excavated paleontological site that contains both mastodon fossils and Clovis points, giving evidence that early humans hunted them here:

There was apparently a long history (starting in at least the 1800s!) of unscientific fossil digging at this site, and the lack of preservation was further exacerbated by the full lifespan of a rock quarry. If I understood the signage correctly, everything below the level of the bluff was excavated by the quarry--

--and if that is indeed true, then it makes me physically sick to think about, because what other countless wonders must have been hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing?

In the 1970s, the entire remaining site was almost hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing, when a state highway was being planned for that exact spot. Fortunately, a public campaign saved it and helped the Missouri Department of Natural Resources buy it, but you can see from this Google Earth screenshot how close it is to the bone bed:

The bottom right of the loop trail is an extension that goes through the former dig sites for the bone bed. It's SO close to two access roads and the highway! To the south, just off-screen, is Rock Creek, which is actually where the earliest mastodon bones were reported, having been seen weathering out of the bank. The scientist who excavated and prepared them turned them into a sideshow Voltron-esque super mastodon that he exhibited around the world and later sold to the British Natural History Museum... where it was disassembled and reassembled into a proper mastodon skeleton, lol.

The Mastodon State Historic Site Museum had so many mastodon fossils excavated from Kimmswick and the neighboring Barnhart site!

This tusk is a product of rescue paleontology conducted by volunteers on the site of a car dealership that was trying to expand. Here's a former volunteer's interesting take on that excavation:

I found a travel blogger's post about visiting this museum before the tusk was conserved, so you can see how it was previously mounted and its darker appearance.

Ugh, if I was trying to build ANYTHING, I do not care what, and I uncovered a fossil, I would stop what I was doing forever and instead spend the rest of my life grubbing in the dirt with all my brand-new fossils!

So many of my favorite things all in the same frame:

I feel like often, state park sites lose out on the best artifacts, so that the visitor centers for even the most amazing state sites are somewhat sparse. Not this place, though! Check out some of their very many Clovis points!

And then much later, we get to my favorite native peoples--the Mississippians!

This site is actually just a few miles and across the river from Cahokia, which makes me wonder what Mississippian settlements might have been right here, out in the Cahokian suburbs.

On top of the bluff, above the quarry site, there is apparently also a cool cave:

With even more cool stuff found inside it!

It doesn't seem like any of these sites have been excavated since the 1980s, which in some ways is a huge bummer because who wouldn't want more mastodon bones and Clovis points in the world? But I guess if nobody has a research question that can only be solved by excavating here, then it all might as well stay tucked safely away in its soil and caves!

Okay, one more picture of the tusk before we hike!

This shelter on the hiking trail is the historical marker for the Kimmswick Bone Bed--

--but the actual excavation sites are unmarked and fully grown over. Here's where they're supposed to be:

The hiking trail basically follows the edge of the Possible Distribution of Clovis Age Sediments from the northeast down and then west to about the near edge of the Concrete Foundation of Lime Kiln. So hiking back, basically everything to the right of the trail is assorted old dig sites, and everything to the left of the trail is potential Clovis evidence.

Sounds interesting, but it actually all looks like this, lol:

But hey, that just means that mastodons and Clovis points could be ANYWHERE. They were probably right there under our feet sometimes!

Here's me with definitely a mastodon skeleton with a Clovis point sticking into it right there under my feet:

Afterward, we did everyone's least favorite thing to do when they're hot and sweaty and grubby and tired--we got back in the car and drove for another five hours, sigh.

But at least we had plenty of Southern Missouri/Northern Arkansas wildlife to entertain us:

Only one of the several alarming bumper stickers is legible in this photo, but I assure you that they were all nasty.

Next up: an old fort and a new musical!

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Nobody Was Rude To Me At Ulysses S. Grant's House... This Time

A decade ago, when I blogged about visiting the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site with my kids, I claimed at the end that I had "mostly forgiven" the park ranger there who had 1) told my child that the answer to a specific question in her Junior Ranger book could have been found by watching the park film if only she'd paid attention, when in fact that information was NOT given in the park film and I knew it, and 2) informed me that in her experience leading field trips, homeschooled children were "less curious" than public and private schoolchildren.

Saying that I'd mostly forgiven her was a lie, obviously, because I still bitch about that ranger regularly. I have never forgotten nor forgiven a single person who has ever been rude to me or my kids on the subject of homeschooling (or any subject, frankly), and I will still, with the barest of excuses, tell you the entire story, quoted dialogue and all, of that time that a random dude sitting next to me at a wedding told me that he didn't approve of homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a random woman at a party told me she didn't believe in homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a relative, a few months after I had started homeschooling, asked me if my four-year-old had "regressed in her academics" since she'd "dropped out of preschool."

And it's not like I was sitting there monologuing about homeschooling any of those times, either, but if a random person making small talk asked me back in the day what I did for a living, that's literally what I did!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site Junior Ranger book, with the contentious question:

Here are screenshots from the two relevant scenes in the park film, in which the man in question is referred to solely as "William":

If you could zoom in on that document in the film you could see his name, because that's his manumission paper! You cannot see it in the film, however.

As you can see, I have never gotten over even the smallest slight or forgiven any person for even the slightest wrongdoing ever in my entire life.

Nor do I intend to start now, apparently, since when Mr. Craft Knife, our older kid, and I were getting out of the car for this most recent visit to the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, I announced that if any park ranger dared to say one negative thing about homeschooling to me, I was going to burn down Ulysses' house.

Mr. Craft Knife was all, "We're literally just three fully grown adults here. Nobody is going to talk to you about homeschooling!"

And luckily for all of us, he was right!

I did nevertheless manage to be disappointed in the site since we were there on Juneteenth but there was no programming, or even acknowledgment, of the holiday there. Such a bummer, and I'm wondering if I should have gone to the Gateway Arch instead, because surely the park that held the Dred Scott trial would be having a Juneteenth celebration, but ah, well. I looked at a lot of stuff and read a lot of museum labels anyway!

I thought this ink blotter was super cool. They put a mirror underneath it so you could see all of the times Grant had blotted his signature there:

This is a historical recreation of Julia Dent Grant's wedding dress, watered silk and all!

There was some other Queen Victoria memorabilia elsewhere in the museum that, along with this wedding dress, gave me to understand that Julia Dent Grant was a fan of the Royals. Understandable, and also SAME, GIRL, but low-key scandalous in my opinion barely a hundred years after the Revolutionary War...

One of my favorite parts of visiting a national park site is collecting titles of books that I can spend the next few months reading. I found ebooks of this--

--and this--

--and I'll get to them pretty soon, but currently I am hyperfixated on George Washington Carver so it might take me a minute.

I don't really know what it is about daguerreotypes, but they are so life-like! Julia Dent Grant and her sons aren't even colored realistically, but to me they still look like they could step right off that metal plate. And bonus points for little boys dressed like girls!

It looked like most of the exhibit on slavery that we'd seen during our previous visit had been replaced by that exhibit on Julia Dent Grant, but a few artifacts were still there, including this bill of sale, which is easily the most upsetting item in the museum. Jefferson was only eighteen. Louisa was only seventeen, and described as a "mulatress," as well, signifying that she's already experienced generational violence. At least she's being trafficked with at least one of her children, a one-year-old, but clearly neither of these teenagers are the parents of six-year-old Kitty who is also being trafficked to Julia in this bill of sale. That poor baby...

I'm suspicious that Julia could possibly have been as naive as she's portrayed here, so I'll be curious to dive into that memoir!

That label also sent me on a different deep dive, because when I read it I was all, "They still had people enslaved here in 1864? But the Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863???" 

Okay, so for everyone else who was as underserved in their US History as I was (and apparently I underserved my children, as well, oops--you know us homeschoolers and our lack of curiosity!), the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, specifically freed only the slaves held in Confederate states. I knew that, and I knew that there were states that were both not in the Confederacy AND were slaveholding states, such as Missouri and Kentucky, but I guess I hadn't connected the dots. Juneteenth, which we were also celebrating on this day, was about the last enslaved people finally being told about the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865, and I'd assumed those were the very last slaves ever in the United States, but those were the last Confederate slaves ever. There were literally still people being legally enslaved for several more months! Missouri had already abolished slavery, although not until January 11, 1865, but Kentucky and Delaware, as well as New Jersey and its habit of apprenticing people for life, hung on until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.

So, new holiday idea: we also need to celebrate every December 6, because nobody's free until everybody's free!

Check out this notable coral fossil that was found embedded in some roots on the property:

And the summer kitchen, where enslaved people cooked and did laundry for the white members of the household:

 

I wanted to see where the enslaved people had lived, and the land where they'd labored, but that's all neighborhoods now:

Random, but this was on the bulletin board next to the bathrooms, specifically this dude's pose that is twinning with Grant, is genuinely the best thing ever:

I will NOT be driving back to St. Louis to attend his dinner and colloquy, however, because tickets cost ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS. 

Instead, we went to Fitz's--

--where I ordered something appropriately festive for Juneteenth:

And it wouldn't be a proper field trip if you weren't learning how something is made, so here's a look at their working bottling facility:

Oh, and his name was William Jones! 

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I Read the Canon Work on Ley Lines, and Then I Read Some Ley Lines Fanfic

This is my tourist map of the ancient sites of Great Britain. Watkins used maps about 10 times this size for his ley line hunting.

Early British Trackways: Moats, Mounds, Camps and Sites by Alfred Watkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The other night, I looked up from the book I was reading (this one, lol!) and said to my older daughter, “So, okay. You know the guy who invented ley lines?”

And she had the nerve to be all, “Oh, yes, indeed! The perennial subject of half our conversations? That guy who is a Totally Normal Guy For You To Always Be Talking About? Please, do tell me what that guy who obviously everybody knows and discusses regularly said this time!”

Well, humph. At that point I didn’t even want to tell her, except obviously yes of course I did, because this guy was creating his ley lines by hand with a straight edge and pins on taped-together ordnance maps with a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. England is something like 280 miles wide, y’all! That is WILD WORK!

This screenshot of an ordnance map showing just south of Avebury is about the right size. Even at this scale, though, you can't see the sacred wells or "named trees" that Watkins continually references as waypoints. At this scale, I'd sort of assumed you could see the individual stones of West Kennett Avenue and Avebury, and you also can't see the cross markers that Watkins also continually references. He would have LOVED Google Earth!

There are two things that I find the most interesting about ley lines. The first is that they’re not real. Or rather, it’s more like they’re real, but only in the sense that Great Britain is so chock-full of ancient sites and mounds and wells and earthworks and ponds and tumps and trees and river fords that surely every single one of them must be in line with several others, ESPECIALLY if you dial down to a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. Like, I genuinely do not think you could walk a single mile through the British countryside without bumping into a sacred well, or a tree with a name. A barrow! A hill! A pond! And okay, that’s not *exactly* what he meant--what he wanted to do was find lines that represented purposeful walking tracks, like from a flint quarry to a settlement, say, with markers that you could pick out by sight to guide you back and forth--but still. So many ponds. So many tumps.

That being said, however, I genuinely don’t find the bones of this idea unreasonable, and I think that it makes overt the important concept that people of other times didn’t necessarily perceive or think in the ways that we perceive or think. Their methods of wayfinding don’t have to be ours, and there’s nothing wrong with being creative in our hypotheses about how those methods might have worked. Like, sure, if you’re taking a two-day hike to the flint quarry, you absolutely have some sort of visual markers to guide your way. When it comes to placing Stonehenge and a couple of sacred wells and a really cool tree on that same path… I dunno about that, but maybe sometimes! It would certainly say a lot of interesting things about those ancient peoples at a societal level if it were true!

The other thing that I find the most interesting about ley lines is how they were co-opted by the mystical-minded. Watkins didn’t think they were lines of energy, or magnetic forces. He didn’t think they were mystical. He wasn’t standing on the sidewalk at Glastonbury offering to do tarot card readings. He would be SO sad to learn that his precious ley lines that he invented were now an iconic determinant of an individual’s woo-ness. But honestly, I’m kind of into it! It’s like people have been writing fanfic about ley lines, and I LOVE fanfic! I somehow found out about a small zine, The Ley Hunter, that was indie published in the 1960s and 1970s, allll about the woo version of ley lines and similar mystical topics, and then I found a good samaritan who had scanned a bunch of them into pdfs, and now I am nose deep into Ley Hunter lore. Currently, I’m living in 1965, learning about how the lost civilization of Atlantis was located off the coast of Ireland, and reading an article about how following the path of a ley line out from Bramber Castle makes for a lovely weekend stroll. If I lived in England, I would have so many interesting ways to fill my weekends!

The article actually said that it was the tree-topped mound right next to Bramber Castle that was the actual ley line sighting point, which agrees with Watkins' assertion that many castles and other notable buildings and settlements were placed next to, not on, ley lines. 

I did think it was interesting that in The Ley Hunter vol. 1, issue 4, author Jimmy Goddard writes about buying a 1 inch to 1 mile ordnance survey map of the Isle of Man, with the plan to map and then walk all of the ley lines he could find, creating the world’s first actual comprehensive survey of ley lines in one distinct area. Because the Isle of Man is small, he writes that he thought this would take a few weeks. But then he writes:

“How wrong I was! I now know that if I plot all the leys on it in a year I will be very lucky. From the first time I laid ruler to map leys and centres leaped up at me, and it seems that there isn't a tumulus on the Island which is not a centre. Every one I have tried has proved to be - and there are still a great many more to go.”

So, yeah. You can’t walk a single mile through the Isle of Man without running into a sacred well, or a tree with a name. A barrow! A hill! A pond!

Glastonbury, which Watkins would absolutely have agreed is a ley line center, and which has been associated with VERY much ley line woo since the 1960s.

Fortunately, walking across every inch of England, sniffing out every sacred well, tree with a name, barrow, hill, and pond sounds like the loveliest of pastimes. I'd happily be a ley hunter just for the excuse to amble in straight lines back and forth across the British countryside every weekend!

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