ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE GUYS YOU MEET IN THE ROCK GARDEN

 

Larry Street is nothing if not interesting. He’s the sort of guy you meet among the regulars in Jim Bowsher’s phenomenal Rock Garden in my home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio. (See my book, The Rock Garden and Other Stories https://www.amazon.com/Rock-Garden-Other-Stories/dp/B09M516KF1/ref=pd_bxgy_img_sccl_1/131-9409896-5232257?pd_rd_w=zAclw&content-id=amzn1.sym.7757a8b5-874e-4a67-9d85-54ed32f01737&pf_rd_p=7757a8b5-874e-4a67-9d85-54ed32f01737&pf_rd_r=9V4K42PMFSGMQQ2E0C65&pd_rd_wg=cJGuu&pd_rd_r=fced8742-1306-44ec-9fdf-08a93e775ec4&pd_rd_i=B09M516KF1&psc=1) ).

When I say “the kind of guy,” what I mean to say is that, if you want to hear interesting stories and meet some unique and creative individuals, hanging out with the regular crowd at the Rock Garden is a good place to start.

That’s what I was doing a few weeks ago when my friend Mary Jo Knoch introduced me to Larry, and Larry invited me to a fish fry. Seems Larry is famous for his Friday night fish fries. He is, by all accounts, an expert fisherman, who will wet his lines in just about any body of water you put in front of him. His expertise means that he always has way more fish than he can eat himself, and Larry’s the kind of guy who enjoys social congress with friends and acquaintances. Hence, his now traditional Friday night fish fry.

Anyway, Larry insists that I should be there, that nobody does a fish fry like he does. I tell him I’ll try to make it, but in the end, a family engagement makes it impossible.

“Thanks a lot for coming to my fish fry!” says Larry, irony dripping from his voice when I see him again at the Rock Garden the following week.

I tell him I really would have gone if I’d been able, but this doesn’t seem to wash with him. There’s what I perceive as a tense moment before the conversation takes a turn for the better. That happens when Jim Bowsher joins in and we ask Larry about one of his favorite topics of conversation. Namely, hunting for Native American artifacts.

Larry’s a seeker by nature. It’s not just catching a fish that does it for him. No, he enjoys going after just about anything that’s rare or hard to come by. He knows where to find the best mushrooms in the countryside. And he’s a rather well-known gatherer of ginseng, which, until I met Larry, I didn’t even know grew in Ohio woodlands. In fact, I thought it only grew in Asia. 

But then, Larry knows a lot of things I don’t know, like how to plant and grow tobacco seeds that were last in human hands—native human hands—several centuries ago. He’s generous. Gave some of his seeds to Jim and Jim’s brother Walt, and that’s the very tobacco Jim is chewing right now.

We have a brief conversation about this horticultural miracle. Then Jim spits Native American tobacco juice in the dirt in front of the porch swing he’s got hanging between two trees in his backyard and where he most likes to sit, and then we carry on.

Like I say, Larry is an eclectic seeker and gatherer. But what really sparks his seeker’s interest is anything to do with early Ohio Native American culture. Jim urges him not to be shy, to tell me a little about it. I prod, asking if it’s something he always studied. Larry says his first interest was almost accidental.

 “I found my first arrowheads when I was a kid,” he says. “I was setting trap-lines and came across some things by accident.” He thought, “Hey, this isn’t just a
rock,” washed it off and put it in his pocket. He says that a collector later offered to buy the pieces from him. Said he’d buy any more that Larry found as well. He gladly sold them to the guy and a boyhood cottage industry was born.

It was only then that he started taking a more scientific interest in what he was looking for and what he found. He also learned by experience where to look and how. And over the years he has become a sort of ad hoc archeologist, and a not unknowledgeable gatherer of Ohio pre-history as well. This is something that has brought him and Jim together. Jim, who is something of an Ohio Native American historical expert himself, had urged me to get to know Larry even before Mary Jo introduced us.

Jim, to this day and at age seventy-three, is still forever digging up artifacts wherever he can find them. But he apparently considers Larry to be a veritable guru in this métier.

Larry doesn’t live in Wapakoneta, the county seat of Auglaize County. He lives a few miles west in Saint Marys. Saint Marys is built around Grand Lake Saint Marys, which extends into Mercer County, the next county over. And that’s where his most regular stomping ground is for archeological finds. More specifically, Larry has a predilection for a spot in Mercer County known as the Cranberry Prairie.

There isn’t much there but the “prairie” itself—once a lagoon and later a rather vast peat marsh (subsequently drained) with a handful of homes surrounding it. It’s farm country, which became a recognized locality when a post office was opened there in the early eighteen-fifties. That’s when it was established as an unincorporated community.

The Cranberry Prairie

The post office was only open until 1904 (when the village of Saint Henry became the main community in that zone), but the Cranberry Prairie name stuck. The community eventually featured a general store and the St. Francis Catholic Church. Later came a school, attended by kids from the surrounding farming population. Today the St. Francis parish is associated with Saint Henry—a community of about twenty-six hundred souls located about twenty miles from the Indiana state line.

St. Francis Church

The Cranberry Prairie is of no little topographical significance. It forms part of the watershed that feeds the headwaters of the Wabash River. Indeed, the source of the Wabash is near Saint Henry, where the river rises to the surface and flows from there more or less south by southwest through parts of three states before emptying into the Ohio River.

Native Americans of Ohio seem to have had a detailed knowledge of waterways—which was why Wapakoneta, on the banks of the Auglaize River, for instance, became a major population center for the Shawnee Nation, since, from its headwaters near there, the Auglaize eventually flows north all the way to its confluence with the Maumee and Great Lake Erie. Aboriginal Ohioans also had a complex system of trade and that trade moved on the waterways. Settlements in Ohio near the Wabash gave native traders a “highway” to the Ohio on the territory’s southern edge and those on the Auglaize had trade access to villages along that river’s course all the way to Lake Erie on the region’s northern edge.

Jim and Larry both agree that the natives who lived in the Cranberry Prairie were “glacier people and bird stone people”.

Adena bird stone

“Finding a complete bird stone is rare,” says Larry. “I’ve found three.”

What he is referring to are prehistoric Native American stone carvings that are abstract representations of birds. The ones that have been uncovered have been predominately found east of the Mississippi River, notably in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as in New York State. Archeologists believe that bird stones had ritual significance, because they have often been found in graves.

According to Larry, “A lot of the ones found in grave mounds are broken.” But he theorizes, and Jim Bowsher concurs, that the breakage was intentional, not accidental, pointing out that a lot of the ceremonial pottery found in Native American graves is also smashed to pieces. “People are always blaming plows for breaking them, but I figure eighty-five to ninety percent were broken on purpose by the Indians.” Both he and Jim figure that this was part of a ritual. Perhaps, they posit, painstakingly creating art objects and then breaking them when they were placed in a grave had some spiritual significance for these early peoples.

Here, Jim breaks in to tell us that he once knew a guy who had meticulously hunted artifacts his entire life. Probably his most prized possession were two halves of the same bird stone. “He found the first half when he was ten years old. The second half he found when he was ninety!” says Jim.

Bird stone effigy pipe

Some of the bird stones found complete display holes drilled at the neck and lower end. This may have been done to permit them to be mounted as ornaments. Others are now thought to have been designed as a sort of ornate tool used in making fiber or for manufacturing matting. This relatively new theory is supported by the fact that these have often been found in marshy areas where there would have been reeds that could be used as raw material for this sort of activity. That would have been the case of the peat bogs at Cranberry Prairie—so named, says Larry, because it was also a place where abundant cranberry bushes once grew wild.

Whatever the case may be, these are objects that were created somewhere between two thousand five hundred and five thousand years ago. The attraction for Larry isn’t in collecting such artifacts, but in being the one to find them. “Every time I find an arrowhead,” he says, “what’s exciting is knowing that, until I came along and picked it up, the last person to touch it was the guy who shot it into the air at least two thousand years ago.”

Muma Mound in Franklin  County, Ohio

When Larry and Jim refer to “glacier people”, they aren’t talking about the Ice Age as such, which, in Ohio, is thought to have ended roughly twelve thousand years ago, but about the fact that many of these cultures’ most sacred places were glacial kames (also known as ridges or knolls). A kame is basically a knob or hillock formed by Ice Age glaciers. They’re made up of mostly sand and gravel mixed with soil and are from when retreating Ice Age glaciers dragged these materials into depressions, where they piled up, forming hills that remained behind when the ice melted further.

What Larry and Jim describe as “glacier people” refers to what is known among archeologists as the Glacial Kame Culture, which was prevalent in what are today Ontario, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana between about eight thousand and one thousand BC.  These peoples used glacial knolls as sacred grounds on which to bury their dead.

The earliest discovery of the Glacial Kame Culture in Ohio was in Hardin County, a little more than an hour away from the Cranberry Prairie, and was accidental. It happened in the mid-eighteen fifties when a rail line was being built and workers were mining a knoll for gravel. As they dug into what turned out to be a glacial kame, they uncovered the prehistoric burial ground inside.

Adena stone axe

In answer to how it was that he started looking for native treasure in the Cranberry Prairie, Larry tells me, “I was on a farm out that way buying seed potatoes. While I’m standing there talking to the guy, I see this stone axe head that’s just laying there on a beam. I asked the farmer where he’d got it. ‘Potato digger dug it up,’ he says. So I asked if he’d mind if I had a look around where he found it and he told me to help myself.”

He says he’s been searching for signs of the prehistoric past in the Cranberry Prairie ever since. “So far, I’ve detected four Native American villages in the Prairie. And I’ve found signs of twenty-seven fire pits.”

Artist's conception of an Adena village

When I ask how signs of campfires can be found after a couple of thousand years, Larry says simply, “Fire-cracked rock. You find these rocks that have been shattered by years of hot and cold, hot and cold. Those rocks were the ones that lined fire pits, and like I say, there are a lot of them out there.”

Larry’s also proud to have discovered a couple of arrowhead caches in that area. He says that, like in the case of the axe head that first sparked his interest, famers’ plows often turn up the first signs of discovery.

I’ve always found this dubious. I wondered aloud how artifacts last above ground twenty or thirty centuries ago can be close enough to the surface for a plow to turn them over.

“They rise,” Larry says. My blank gaze makes him realize more information is needed. “Deep freezing expands the soil. The process of freezing and thawing draws the things closer to the surface each year. Then along comes the plow and turns them over with the dirt.”

Larry says the caches he found were about twenty-five feet apart in one of the village sites. In one cache he found seventy-five axe, spear and arrowheads, and in the other, thirty-eight. All were similarly made. “I figure they were by the same maker, who was manufacturing them to trade rather than for himself.”

Adena blades

This seems to jive with what archeologists have said about craftwork from the same period. They say that the single arrowheads found in prehistoric Ohio burial sites from the same era tended to be significantly different from each other, as if fashioned by each user rather than by an early manufacturer.

Says Larry, “These were Adena people. They preceded the Hopewells.”

Adena doesn’t really refer to a specific tribe of people. It is a name given to cultural finds crafted by people of about the same era. The term comes from the name of the rural home of Thomas Worthington, who served as the sixth governor of the Ohio Territory from 1814 to 1818.  He had previously served eight years as an Ohio Senator in the National Congress. It was on his Adena estate, located about a mile and a half northwest of Chillicothe, that an enormous burial mound (twenty-six feet high) was discovered. It revealed a great deal about the culture of a people who had lived some two thousand to two thousand eight hundred years before the present day. These prehistoric tribes, then, began to be referred to as the Adena people and the vestiges of their crafts and rituals as “the Adena Culture”.

The Adenas were hunter-gatherers, but there is evidence that they also began domesticating certain crops, like squash, sunflowers, goosefoot and knotweed. It is believed, however, that, as hunters, they were probably still nomadic tribes who followed not only animal herds, but also moved their camps in order to do seasonal gathering of such food sources as nuts and wild fruit. But they already showed signs of horticultural development, supplementing their hunting and gathering diet with basic gardening wherever they camped for any length of time.

Adena pottery

The Adenas were also the first people to produce clay pottery in Ohio. It was less ceremonial than practical—most characteristically large, thick-crafted vessels used for cooking.

But the most noteworthy way in which the Adena people manifested their cultural presence was by means of their elaborate burial rites. Since they were very likely semi-nomadic, they appear to have used burial rituals as a means of tying their culture to the land and of establishing territory. They went beyond the simpler Kame Culture practice of using knolls already provided by nature and, instead, constructed their own mounds, which became more and more elaborate as the culture developed. They ranged anywhere from twenty feet to three hundred feet in diameter and contained tools and ornaments to accompany the spirits of the departed on their journey.

Archeologists think that the height of the mounds was progressively determined by the number of burials. The theory is that Adena dead were placed in wooden mortuary structures built on a knoll along with objects to honor them. Then the mortuary structures with both the body and accompanying objects inside were set ablaze, essentially cremating the dead. When that was done, the vestiges were covered by renewed earthworks. Each time someone died in a given place, this process was repeated so that layer after layer of gravesites eventually created some pretty imposing burial mounds.

Miamisburg Mound near Cincinnati

The Adenas also built much smaller mounds to form a ring that was probably where tribal communities met for civic and ritual gatherings. In Patagonia where I live, similar pre-Columbian structures remain, but made of stone rather than earth. Early Spanish conquistadores mistakenly thought these were corrals for animals and called then “corrales de piedra” or “stone corrals”.

Larry says that another factor that he takes into account in his searches is water. “Wherever there’s movement caused by lakes, rivers and streams, stuff gets uncovered.”

As an example, he tells me about an artifact-hunting expedition he took, not in Ohio, but in Sioux country in South Dakota. “It was north of Pierre,” he says, “near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. I was with my wife. Just when we crossed a lake there and got camped on the other side, this huge storm broke. There was a lot of wind. I remember how, all night long, the tent would go wump…wump…wump with the wind trying to pick it up. My wife wanted to leave but I told her we couldn’t. The lake was so choppy I knew the waves would swamp the boat. So we hunkered down and waited.”

"I hear a lever gun being cocked behind me"

Larry says that when the storm finally ended, his wife had had enough and wanted to leave right away. But he refused, saying that after all the movement of water that the storm had caused, it would be the best possible time to hunt for relics. And that’s what they did.

Among other things, Larry says, “We came across this entire skeleton that had been washed up out of the ground. As we were making our way back, I see this shiny, white surface on the top of this knoll. It was strange looking and I wondered what it was. When we got close enough, I saw that it was all bones.”

Larry says that he reported the find to a local Lakota chief, who thanked him and gave him permission to explore further. “So the next day we’re out there again looking around and all of a sudden I hear the sound of a lever-gun being cocked behind me. I turn around and there’s this Indian with a rifle standing there. He says there’s been a find out that way and they don’t want anybody poking around. I said, ‘I’m the guy that made the find.’ He was like, ‘Okay then, let me show you some other stuff.’” So Larry ended up with an Indian guide for the rest of his stay.

Jim tells me that Larry has given away whole collections of relics he has found. “Finding’s the thrill for him,” Jim says, “not owning.”

For his part, as we end our little interview, Larry seems anxious to impress one thing and one thing only on me. “Next time you’re back, you’d better come to my fish fry!”