A Little Chunk of History. Louis Shalako.

A rendering of an archaic longhouse.

Louis Shalako

If I should ever fail as a writer, I shall surely go back to my first love, which was archaeology.

(Which is kind of sad when you think about it, but that would be a story for another day.)

I blame the Bookmobile of elementary school days, and Louis Leakey and the Olduvai Gorge; which I read all about as a very small boy…the Bookmobile was a trailer, dropped off in front of our school, regular as clockwork, every Thursday morning, about nine a.m., rain or shine. More importantly, the teachers encouraged us to go out there and have a look, two or three at a time, and if nothing else, it got us out of class and out of the building for a while.

It’s just a little promise that I make to myself sometimes, and the funny thing is, it’s not such a bad idea. I might even look good in the archaeologist’s hat, but I do promise to shave, trim the hair and the eyebrows once in a while, and the odds of good old Tony Robinson, (a.k.a. Baldric), and the Time Team following me around anytime soon would appear to be rather slim.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just that my sister gave me this crazy old map, and I was a little startled to see that the bones of a mastodon had been discovered down by the river. Studying that map, I see that more mastodon bones were found near Brigden. It seems that when the glaciers melted around 12,300 years ago, they and other creatures were following along the Wyoming and Seaforth moraines. Primitive man arrived not too far behind, with their spears and their bows and those big brains, which we still enjoy today. I can find the Wyoming moraine. If you leave Wyoming, and head west on Churchill Line, you really can’t miss it: just north of Marthaville, the land climbs, there’s few small dips, and then, voila! You’re looking down from a height, and down below are the flatlands so familiar here in Sarnia-Lambton.

I was interested to learn, that there were ancient Algonkian earthworks in Corunna of all places. These are long since gone, or otherwise inaccessible due to being on private, or industrial land.

...some crazy old map...

Here’s the thing. At some point I was Googling key words and all of a sudden I’m reading a pdf of an archaeological dig in the Thedford area. I’m reading about an Iroquoian village from pre-Columbian times, in the Burley section of Pinery Provincial Park…I’m looking at drawings of arrowheads, and looking at photographs of pottery sherds, some of which had been reconstructed in order to demonstrate the shape of the original piece. I’m looking at site maps, I was looking at photographs of the famed Kettle Point chert, the dominant colour of which turned out to be a surprising shade of yellow, and which was traded all over the Great Lakes. It is, essentially, a kind of flint, and used for arrow points, spear heads, scrapers, and knife-blades.

I’ve actually seen that stuff on the beach, and never even gave it a thought.

The map at least claims, that the final resting place of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh is on Walpole Island.

This site is typical of Iroquoian culture, it is in Middlesex.

That may be true, I simply don’t know, but this map is a gold mine of information. I won’t name them all, but at various times the Dawn Tramway and the Erie and Huron Railway operated in the south of the county. The Canadian Southern, the Michigan Central. There were half a dozen companies, most of them short-lived, all dating to that golden era of rail and steam.

When you consider the present population of Dawn-Euphemia is less than two thousand people, even the smallest of spur lines seems like a very ambitious project. Ah, but when the roads were muddy tracks through the bush, this was the way the milk, butter and eggs, all those bushels of corn and wheat, got to market.

The other thing was settlement—if you want people to take up and clear the land, build homes, schools and the like, you’re going to have to produce some kind of surplus, and get those products to market. The big economic lesson here is that it was a cash-poor, and credit-poor society. Turnaround from investment in seed to selling a crop was a yearly cycle. The margins must have been very tight. What they did have was land—just land, their own, back-breaking labour, and some kind of a dream, I guess.

When they got around to building that first, one-room schoolhouse, it was a communal effort, where the majority of materials and labour were donated. All they had to do then, was to find the money to pay a teacher, and it would be eight grades, all under one roof.

Next time I go for a walk in the woods, I will definitely be keeping an eye out for mastodon tusks sticking out of the side of a creek, or arrowheads, or fossils, or a piece of chert. Some location, one that looks like the perfect campsite from times immemorial, or almost anything, really. If I find a chunk of history or something, that would be okay too.

Also—

Iroquoian pottery had rounded bottoms. It distributed the heat more evenly, and the pots could rest in soft earth or ashes, as all cooking was done over an open fire. In that sense, I am learning something new every day.

And that, as they say, is archaeology.

 

END

Chert, ladies and gentlemen.

 

Notes.

The Moore Museum is located at 94 Moore Line, Mooretown, Ontario.

The Lambton Heritage Museum is located at 10035 Museum Road, Grand Bend, Ontario.

The former Stones & Bones Museum has found a new home on the second floor of the Sarnia Library, 124 Christina St. South, Sarnia, Ontario. It’s a $3.5 million project, hopefully opening in 2028, and you can donate here. 

Sources indicate the final resting place of Tecumseh has never been proven.

The earliest known use of archery dates back approximately 60,000 years as evidenced by artifacts recovered from Sidubu cave in South Africa.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

Thank you for reading.