Once when I excitedly brought home an arrowhead, Emil scoffed at my find, for it was missing the tip. “That’s no good, it’s broken,” he muttered. Alta’s parents lived nearby and one day, when I stopped off there, her mother surprised me by bringing out a tin pail half full of arrowheads for me to look at. They had been found years earlier at a distant farm. I sorted through them with great interest. Some time later I went back, thinking that she might give them to me for my collection, but she said she’d put them away somewhere and couldn’t find them. Someone on the farm had collected them, had recognized and searched for those arrowheads. That elderly lady perhaps, when she was a girl? I drove out to that farm one fall, walked briefly over a hardened cultivated field, but failed to see any signs. Perhaps the arrowheads had come from a different field.
So anxious was I to acquire arrowheads that I responded to an ad in a magazine for a free arrowhead. Imagine my delight when I received a parcel in the mail from Arkansas containing six beautiful arrowheads. I hurried to show them off to Emil and his father-in-law. It was the older man who tactfully pointed out that I’d have to return them or pay for them, for they had been sent to me “on approval,” something I’d overlooked. I was crestfallen.
My folks had a cottage at a lake not far away, and in my teens I persuaded them once to drop me off several miles away from the lake near a spot along the Fox River where we could see several “Indian mounds,” sculptured earthen burial sites of the prehistoric Effigy Mound Culture, atop a nearby ridge. I reasoned that nearby fields along the river should be good places to look for arrowheads. As I recall, I didn’t find anything that day, but I had a good hike. Eventually, I found places in which to look in the vicinity of the lake, once even finding an arrowhead in the sparse lawn beside the cottage.
Indian mounds—they fascinated me, just as they did so many others. On hilltops beside rivers and lakes throughout southeastern Wisconsin, their prominent shapes were not easily overlooked. Usually burial sites, the smooth grassed forms of mounds drew my attention far more than did any churchyard cemetery. Something of the distant past, the lore of Indians, and especially the suggestion of buried goods—artifacts! I heard stories from farmers, from colleagues, accounts of ">mounds dug up, plundered, pillaged of carved catlinite pipes—pipestone, of spearheads, of skulls taken for souvenirs.
At Madison, Indian mounds, carefully preserved and identified with markers, occurred right on campus. Some mounds were in the shapes of animals, effigy mounds: eagles, swans, swallows, turtles, cougars, serpents, even humans—clan symbols, perhaps.
In an article called “Northern Woodlands” in Nature Canada, I wrote: “During my teen-aged years, going ‘up north’ was a joyful event, a rare opportunity to hunt, fish and explore in the wilderness of northern Wisconsin….Wandering alone for hours over distant hills I searched on sandy ridges for chipped-stone Indian artifacts. The pink and white quartzite ‘arrowheads’ I found were handled all day long, clinking in my pocket like old coins, but more highly valued.”
The Milwaukee Public Museum, I soon discovered, housed attractive displays of many subjects. A budding taxidermist in my early teens, I spent hours there, talking to such notable staff members as artist/ornithologist Owen J. Gromme and taxidermist Warren Dettman. Once, those busy people even came out to my home to see some of the birds I had mounted. At that time there were large series of arrowheads on display in old-fashioned glass-covered cases that one could lean over. I studied those arrays for hours, fascinated by the many different kinds. W. C. McKern, archaeologist and Director of that Museum, once kindly took time to look at some small flints that I was sure were artifacts. When he looked a bit skeptical, I urged him to use a magnifying glass, to see the tiny chipped edges that I thought must be man-made. I was deeply gratified when, after peering thoughtfully through a glass, he said: “You know, I do believe you’re right.” I was fifteen at the time. Only much later did I come to understand McKern’s stature as an archaeologist. His classification system for prehistoric culture complexes is still in use today.
Looking for arrowheads is fun, finding them is exciting and—like all amateur collectors—I enjoyed my finds, showing them to friends, handling them with care and just a little awe. Years afterwards, I could sort through my collection and recall the moment and place I’d found each particular specimen. Artifacts, in addition to their scientific or intellectual aspect, often have considerable artistic qualities. Even a crudely flaked implement has intrinsic beauty, and some pieces are aesthetically pleasing much beyond their functional design. A projectile point made of semi-transparent agate, for example, gleaming in the sun, is undeniably beautiful. I suspect that this aspect of artifacts is one of the reasons they are treasured by so many collectors. One small, pink quartzite arrowhead that I found on a hunting trip in central Wisconsin, ended up a few years later as a romantic sacrifice. I had taken the arrowhead to a jeweller who fastened it with a gold band to a necklace. The recipient of that attractive pendant, when I last heard from her many years later, was married and living in Hawaii. And, yes, she still had the pendant. Later, I discovered an even more satisfying aspect of my hobby: studying artifacts and writing about them; working up a report for publication, it turned out, yielded an even greater reward.
With the advent of World War II in 1943, I dropped out of university and left a factory job to enlist, and was soon looking for artifacts and finding them during my military training period in the deep South, searching in cotton fields and eroded gullies in Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. While stationed outside of Austin, Texas, a friend took me to visit the archaeology museum at the University of Texas. There I chatted briefly with Alex D. Krieger, as I later learned, a renowned archaeologist. It was a brief but inspiring visit. One day in Alabama I even dropped out of drill formation momentarily—a daring move for a young trainee soldier—to pick up a flint knife I’d spotted. It’s one of the few early finds that I still have left. None of my army buddies at that camp knew that on Sunday when I regularly left on a day pass I was off to look for arrowheads. How they would have hooted if they had known that I was doing this in the company of a seven-year-old girl! I had met Khaki, that really was her name, on her grandparent’s farm outside of town. She was good company, and wise beyond her years. When I pointed to the beautiful clouds forming above us one day, she said: “Yes, but you can’t walk on them.”
Stationed for five weeks in 1944 at Finschhaven on the southern coast of New Guinea in preparation for the coming invasion of the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands, despite a heavy workload I still kept on looking for artifacts. Bulldozers had cleared the forest growth to make a military campsite, in places scraping right down to the hard coral base. There must have been an early habitation site there, for I found five small ground-stone celts and several pieces of prehistoric pottery, all of which I gleefully pocketed. Let the war go on, I was still finding items of interest. Later, Mr. McKern wrote to tell me that the potsherds I’d sent him from New Guinea were similar to some he’d unearthed years before the war on one of the Tonga Islands in the Southwest Pacific.
I also found a few shiny flakes of obsidian on the bare dirt trails leading up the steep hills behind our temporary camp to a nearby native village—it was a long climb, but worth the effort, and a grand view over the surrounding forested range, jungle to the horizon. When I showed those pieces to the natives and asked about artifacts made of such material they seemed to know about them, but didn’t have any. Papuan villagers