Isaac French@isaacfrench_
I found a whole pile of buried axeheads in our backyard.
I'm finally telling the story, 20 years later.
One day when I was about 9, I decided to dig a mine. I grabbed a shovel, found a spot in our backyard that felt right, and started digging.
About 5 minutes later, I heard a “clink.”
Our house was about a mile from a known Comanche crossing on the Brazos river, and we’d found all manner of flint shards and even a few good arrowheads around our place.
I dropped to my hands and knees and clawed out a few handfuls of soft sandy soil. And there was the biggest arrowhead I’d ever seen. Bigger than arrowheads could even be, I thought. Then I found another, and another. Twenty minutes or so later, I’d unearthed 24 unique pieces: axes, spearheads, knives, and scrapers - some fully formed, others preform.
The cache had been piled right there together, maybe 12 inches directly beneath where my shovel had punctured the earth.
I was pleased. After all, this is what mines are for, right?
My older brothers, upon seeing my treasure, excavated a massive hole, but to their dismay, nothing more than red sandy dirt and a few tree roots was found.
One Monday after family dinner, we took the basket of treasure down to the archaeological society meeting at Baylor University.
I remember waiting patiently through all the formal discussion, led by a group of bespectacled and important-looking folks. When the meeting finally dismissed, we approached a few members and presented our case. More soon gathered round. The room moved from delight that a boy of my age cared about archaeology, to skepticism as I told the story, to sudden shock when the evidence appeared, and then, talking all over each other, into a commotion of claims and questions. This cache was “almost certainly in the top five largest ever found in the US…” “worth up to $$......"
Then they asked for exact coordinates where it was discovered. When someone uttered the word “dig,” I remember my dad and grandfather glance at each other. A few moments later, my dad politely excused us, and we drove home.
I get it now - he didn't want a massive archaeological site in our backyard :)
We never returned to the archaeological society meeting, but I kept the prize sealed in a giant Ziploc bag among the many hunting rifles in my dad’s fire safe. Gradually, the novelty wore off, and I pretty much forgot about them. Until a few years ago when I found them in a cabinet in my folks’ home in Idaho and moved them across the country to mine, where they are sitting in a cubby under my desk, safe and sealed, still in the ziploc. Waiting, maybe, for me to show another group of experts someday - perhaps this time with my own boys.
Was it pure coincidence that I happened to dig my mine at this exact spot?
Maybe so, but I still wonder...
