Remember When: Finding Arrowheads

Remember When: Finding Arrowheads

The farm my parents bought and moved us to in Southern Missouri used to be a First Nations Encampment in earlier times. We never found out for sure but the community our farm was located in was called Blackfoot. In my research, I found that Blackfoot was a common name given to some tribes of mixed cultures.  It is not generally known if they were true Blackfoot as they rarely traveled south of the northern territories.

 We discovered A Native American presence when it came time to get the garden spot mom picked out, ready for planting. Dad plowed the rows with his Massy Ferguson tractor and field plow. It would dig up four rows at a time. Our job was to walk behind the plow and pick up rocks and things that would get in the way of mom hoeing. She would spend hours hoeing and pulling weeds. She said the garden was her quiet place. We started finding lots of arrowheads, spearheads, pottery, and other artifacts that had come to the top of the ground. Mom asked the extension service about them and they told her about the encampment. That the reason we found so many was it had been a gathering place for several different groups.

That was the reason the district and school were called Blackfoot. We were located about four miles from Bennett Springs, another gathering place for the natives and sacred to all tribes. She was told that the area had been gone over and deemed cleared for sale. What we found we could keep.

We had collected boxes of the artifacts and even tried to put some of the pottery back together. The boys used the arrowheads to trade with their friends. But being kids we didn’t see that they might be of value in the future.   

Several dump sites were found on the property and provided many hours of hunting and discovery for us kids. When relatives came for visit we would take them on hunting expeditions and makeup stories of Indian raids and buffalo hunts.

Dad had built a pond at the top of a steep incline to catch spring runoff and from the bottom, it looked like a volcano. We would take our cousins on expeditions to the volcano and pretend we were in the mountains.

We didn’t have social media or video games back then and had to use our imagination to occupy our time. Maybe that is where I started learning to be a storyteller. Now that we have grandchildren and great-grandchildren it would be nice if we had kept some of the artifacts to pass on.

I think about the old home place as we called it. Life and the passage of time have changed my thinking. As a teenager, I couldn’t wait to leave home and pursue my dreams. Now I would love to be back there and try to rebuild the fond memories of family and simpler times. We live and learn.