I’ve found a quite a few things over the years.
A badly weathered 99 Savage in .308, leaning against a spruce tree north of Slave Lake.....a rusted solid Winchester in .30 WCF under the rotted floorboards of a cabin on the Mackenzie river near Little Chicago....a catholic rosary, grown deeply in the fork of a tree on the banks of the Peace River south of Carcajou.
The rosary was the most interesting; it had deteriorated to the point of falling apart when I tried to cut it free, but the crucifix was very ornate and made from aluminum with a wood insert. At first glance that would indicate ‘contemporary’, but I learned that while aluminum was in use after 1825, by the mid-1800s was considered a precious metal on a par with gold.
I’ve done a lot of research, but have never been able to identify it or connect it with any specific order of clergy.
Buffalo skulls and dessicated balls of pemmican were fairly common finds under breaking plows in the Peace River country in the ‘50s. My dad had a quite a few, and I never really gave them a second thought as a kid. I still have most of a shoebox full of arrowheads, scrapers and other such stone tools that we (90% he) found - the old bugger had eyes like a hawk, and could spot an arrowhead right from the iron seat of his John Deere “D”. I guess it’s how he kept those thousands of hours on the tractor interesting.
I also stumbled across a couple of hundred joints of 5 1/2” drill stem with 6” poplars growing up between them, that I’m still scheming on how to fetch them home!
Threaded Mode
