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9 The Medicine Creek drainage, with its wooded valleys cut deeply below the grassland of southwestern Nebraska, has long attracted the interest of archaeologists and paleontologists, who have found abundant signs of a long history of human, animal, and environmental events. If we scan that history, going back in time from today, we can see most recently, in the last 40 years, the building of campgrounds and clusters of summer cottages, brought on by the construction of the Medicine Creek Dam and the filling of Harry Strunk Lake in 1951. The lake has served to create abundant recreational opportunities in what was once a rather isolated farmland. Earlier, for three-quarters of a century before the building of the dam, farmers grew wheat and fodder on the Plains upland surface and on the wide terraces and cleared bottoms of the valleys and raised cattle and swine in upland pastures and pens (Hoppes and Huber 1978:62). Still further in the past, before white settlement in the 1870s, the area often swarmed with bison; these were the hunting grounds of Pawnee Indian farmers whose villages were some 240 km (150 mi) to the east, as well as of Western Plains equestrian tribes such as the Cheyenne and Arapaho (Strong 1935:15, 26–27). Archaeological signs of earlier peoples—Indian farmers early in the present millennium, nomadic hunters for many thousands of years before that—are scattered throughout the Medicine Creek drainage, and fossil bones of animals now extinct, reaching back into remote geologic times, are found in eroding banks and gravel pits. The earliest scientific research in the Medicine Creek Valley was by paleontologists, with archaeologists soon to follow. In 1927 a farmer, Alex S. Keith, found large fossil bones eroding out of the bank of a gully on the south side of Lime Creek, a small western tributary of Medicine Creek about 13.5 km (8.5 mi) north-northwest of Cambridge, the town where Medicine Creek flows into the Republican River. Mr. Keith suspected that the bones might be of scientific interest because he, like many other Nebraskans, knew of the fossils displayed at the Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln (now the University of Nebraska State Museum), and a number of people in this area had found fossil bones, some of which they had donated to the museum (e.g., Schultz 1934:373, no. 1, 381, no. 77). This lay interest was the fruit of more than 30 years of dedicated effort by the museum’s energetic director, Erwin H. Barbour (Schultz 1945), who had been publicizing the pioneering geologic and paleontological research that he and his colleagues were carrying on in the Central Plains. As a result of his work, the State Museum, with its mounted skeletons of mammoths and other behemoths of Nebraska’s distant past, had become well known to farmers and ranchers throughout the state (Barbour 1931:191–192). It was not surprising , then, that Alex Keith, farming 200 mi from the university, should notify the museum of his find or that Dr. Barbour would have the discovery investigated . Alex Keith’s fossil bones turned out to be those of a hitherto unknown genus of Pliocene proboscidean that Barbour (1927) named Amebelodon fricki, a shovel-tusked mastodon. This discovery marked the beginning of systematic scientific interest in the valley of Medicine Creek. Intermittently thereafter the museum sent field parties to the Medicine Creek Valley and vicinity to exploit the fossil fauna of late chapter 2 PREVIOUS PALEOINDIAN RESEARCH AT MEDICINE CREEK E. Mott Davis 10 / Chapter 2 Tertiary and Quaternary times (e.g., Barbour 1930; Schultz 1934:377, no. 22). But the museum’s interests were not limited to Tertiary and Quaternary faunas. Stimulated by the archaeological discoveries at Folsom, Blackwater Draw, and other Western Plains sites that demonstrated for the first time the presence of early hunting peoples in North America as early as late glacial times, the museum’s fieldworkers were alert for evidence of human activity in geologic contexts. Particularly active in this quest was C. Bertrand Schultz, Barbour’s student in paleontology and eventual successor as director of the museum. In his search for sites of “Early Man” Schultz enjoyed success, notably in 1932 at the Scottsbluff Bison Quarry in western Nebraska (Barbour and Schultz 1932; Schultz and Eiseley 1932, 1936) and in 1939 at the Lipscomb site in the Texas panhandle (Schultz 1943:244–248). Although no signs of late-glacial human activity came to light in the valley of...

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