When the Bear Paw East Fork was raging a friend brought a lot of equipment to the Bear Paws to help fight the fire. He also brought his eight year old boy.
That first hot, windy night, the friend was told to build a fire line for several miles with his bulldozer. His eight year old son got on a smaller bulldozer and to the amazement of everyone watching, took off after his dad to help with the fire line.
They had portable radios and so at the home base, listeners heard things like the father say, “How are you doing buddy?”
“Just fine Dad, my gauges are all level and I think everything is good.”
Conversations like that went on for an hour or more when finally the son asked his father, “How are you doing, Buddy?”
I had to laugh because I knew something no one else knew. Almost exactly two hundred years before, that area of the Bear Paws had been a large Native American encampment. It was easy to tell because it was between two creeks which was a favored place for encampments and it was a place that I had picked up chards or fragments of arrowheads and a few real arrowheads as well.
I thought of some Native American dad sitting by a campfire teaching his young son how to make arrowheads and tossing aside the chards when the arrowhead broke with too hard of handling.
“How are you doing Buddy?”
“Fine dad all my tools are very sharp but still I am breaking some arrowheads.”
“That’s all right son, we have plenty of churt to practice on.”
So, there you have it. Fathers teaching sons what they already know. Only in two hundred years it is far different things to teach.
I became an arrowhead collector reluctantly.
An old friend told me there were several encampments in Beaver Creek and Clear Creek where arrow heads could be found easily. He cautioned me that I must never tell anyone where to find these places.
I did not like that. Nor did I like the idea of taking arrowheads from where they had been left some two hundred years ago.
But I went with the friend several times and learned that sure enough encampments were likely to be found where two creeks met and formed into one and just after a rain, on bare ground, fragments of arrowheads and arrowheads themselves could be found along with scrapers which all sparkled in the rain washed sun.
Rocks to make those arrowheads and the like were never, most likely from around here. They were brought in from the Yellowstone Country and consisted of agates, jasper, churt, obsidian and some stones I have forgotten.
I found a lot of chards and always thought of some dad teaching his son to make an arrowhead and throwing away the chards and me picking up those valuable pieces of rock some 200 years later.
And who would have thought that 200 years later some other dad would be teaching his son how to do something in the same place.
Amazing.
Well, I never did become an arrowhead hunter. I always had this dilemma on whether to take the chard or arrowhead or to leave it. Usually I left it and to this day, I have never told anyone where these places with all the arrowheads are.
But when I see a piece of blue agate, I know where it came from and how it got into the rich black dirt of the Beautiful Bear Paw Mountains.
