Many of you may not have heard of George McJunkin. Don’t despair, few have heard of him in his homeland, that is, by way of New Mexico. However, he won’t be able to harm you if you learn some facts about him and his life. On the contrary, especially since this man managed to destroy some concepts in science that seemed fixed, even winning a media battle against one of the greatest prehistorians of his time, which is not easy, given who George was and what he did.

Without wasting time on unnecessary introductory details, let’s say that McJunkin was born in 1851 in the small settlement of Midway in Texas. He was a slave, and obviously from this information you can tell that he was black. He took his name from his master, as was customary in those days, namely MacJunkin. His father was a blacksmith, and this time little George got to see a lot of livestock, especially horses that were brought to be shod, if only to love them. And that was a very good thing, because he had no choice anyway.

However, in 1865 the war of secession ended and George was released and left on the streets. Illiterate, but already with some perfect knowledge of riding, lassoing, tending and driving cattle, the man continued to look for work in Kansas, because there were ruthless herds of cattle, fewer people to look after them. So he became a cowboy, a vanqueros or, more Romanian, a shepherd with a sledgehammer in his hand.

We were interested in the fact that all this time George McJunkin showed an unusual curiosity, as well as a terrible desire to learn, which is not very common in the world of cowboys in the Wild West. In fact, George learned to read by giving riding lessons in return. Service against service. Then he began to spend his money on books and to read voraciously everything he could get his hands on, which he really did not see in the world in which he lived. He also bought a telescope to look at the stars and planets, learned Spanish, took guitar lessons… he wasn’t the only typical cowboy.

Black cowboy, archeologist and amateur astronomer

He later learned that New Mexico paid much better than Kansas or Texas, and ranchers were in high demand. That’s how he got there and stayed there until his death. Well, here begins the most interesting for us. Namely, that George, who became the head of the department at the Crowfoot farm near the town of Folsom in New Mexico, would change science in a way that no one could have imagined.

The man was already a living legend in the tri-state ranching world, where he regularly entered, leading herds of hundreds or thousands of head of cattle straight through Comanche or Apache territory where almost no one ventured. He knew all the places like the back of his hand. So it was that on August 27, 1908, after a storm not seen since the mammoths, with catastrophic floods and terrible landslides, George McJunkin decided to do what no one else had thought to do about the affected area. Namely, to investigate the territories affected by landslides.

So he came across several fossils, which he immediately recognized as bison. It was also hard not to recognize them, especially how many of them he had seen in the wild and how many he had seen in the trenches. The problem was that the bones came from individuals much larger than the bison he was used to, and the fact that he had gotten his hands on several other books, including some on archaeology, helped him realize that the bison that he found were prehistoric. . Also, they seemed to have been dug up, and here’s the big reveal.

To better understand what we were talking about, let’s say that in 1908 the scientific community believed that North America was inhabited no more than 4,000 years ago. All the experts in the field had a hard time finding the slaughter camp, which is almost 10,000 years old. Well, that’s exactly what George McJunkin found.

The poor guy collected as many fossils as he could, took the skull with him, and began sending letters to all the explorers he had heard of in newspapers, magazines, or anyone else he could think of. He worked alone for years, showing everyone fossils of ancient bison, a species that was first described by paleontologist Joseph Leidy in 1852, just a year after his birth.

On top of everything else, absolutely no one answered his letters and no one even bothered to make a trip to investigate the place. Only in 1926 did one Carl Schwaheim, a researcher who had received McJunkin’s letters for many years, visit the site. It didn’t take long for him to excavate the site to discover not only the remains of other bison, but even a prehistoric projectile embedded in one of the bones. This information reached JD Figgins, an employee of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, founded in 1900, who realized that the discovery was a big one and that poor George was not fooling around when he told everyone how old the fossils were.

George McJunkin vs. Concepts of Time

Then J.D. Figgins published a study in the Scientific American magazine, in which he claimed the impossible, that is, the fact that North America was inhabited much earlier than anyone thought. However, here he encountered Aleš Grdlička, then curator of the Smithsonian Institution, a man who recorded an age of only 4,000 years. Between us, Hrdlichka was a figure in the world of prehistorians of the early 20th century, and it was not worth contradicting him, because you risked discrediting yourself for life. Which Figgins did. Hrdlichka tackled him, dispelled his assumptions, and everything seemed to remain as it had been until then.

Archaeologists needed another discovery, made in 1929 by a teenager named Ridgely Wightman, to uncover another slaughter camp. This happened near the small settlement of Clovis in New Mexico. There were not only the remains of bison, but also camels, woolly mammoths, prehistoric horses, all along with artifacts nearly 13,000 years old. Faced with new evidence, Hrdlichka backed down, but he didn’t say much about it either.

In conclusion, the peaks discovered at the site indicated by George McJunkin proved to be definitive of a completely unknown material culture. She was christened Folsom in honor of a small nearby settlement. Their age was about 9000-10000 years. In the case of the artifacts near Clovis, they were the starting point in identifying another, older culture called the Clovis culture itself.

And one more thing. George McJunkin had been dead for four years when Schwaheim decided to investigate the spot he pointed to. He never learned the impact of his discovery. As for the name of the former slave, as a detail, it has not been mentioned anywhere in profile studies for more than 50 years. Even if, as it became obvious, George McJunkin fundamentally changed what was known about the past of humanity on American soil.

Photo source: Dreamstime.com

Bibliography:

Folsom, F., 1973, The Life and Legend of George McJunkin: The Black Cowboy, ed. EP Dutton, 162 pages.

Wanger, T., 2010, Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational, and Little-Known Stories from History, First Edition, ed. TwoDot, 200 pages.