Person:George McJunkin (2)

(Story of George McJunkin begins at the 7:00 min mark and goes through the 9:25 min mark.)

Gravesite of George McJunkin

Cowboy George McJunkin

Cover of Black cowboy: the life and legend of George McJunkin by Franklin Folsom

George McJunkin in 1910 Census

Newspaper Reference to George McJunkin's Achievement (1968)

Newspaper Reference to George McJunkin's Achievement (1948)

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} George McJunkin, in Find A Grave
   Find A Grave Memorial# 24993170, 2 March 2008.

   Birth: Jan. 9, 1856
   Death: Jan. 21, 1922
   Burial: Folsom Cemetery, Folsom, Union County, New Mexico, USA

2. ↑ George McJunkin, in Bureau of Land Management: A Chapter in New Mexico History
   Article by Brenda Wilkinson, BLM Socorro Field Office Archeologist, 25 March 2011.

   George McJunkin was born a slave near Midway, Texas in 1851. George was freed at the age of 14 after the Civil War ended. He was already fluent in Spanish, experienced with horses, and used to helping his father in his blacksmith shop, but he had never had the opportunity to learn to read. He left home to join a cattle drive, ended up in northeastern New Mexico, and never returned to Texas. Along the way he stopped to help a man dig a well. He earned a handful of quarters, the first money he had ever been paid for his work. He used it to buy the first footwear he had ever worn - a used pair of cowboy boots.
   
   His skills increased with each new job he took on, and eventually word got around that he was one of the best horse breakers and cowboys in New Mexico. He traded lessons in breaking horses for lessons in reading, and soon began reading anything he could get his hands on. He had always been curious about the natural world around him and was particularly interested in science.
   
   McJunkin was the foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch when the great flood of 1908 hit nearby Folsom, New Mexico. At least 15 people were killed in the flood, including the telephone operator, who died at her switchboard trying to warn people. Afterwards, McJunkin was out riding, assessing the damage. Wild Horse Arroyo had become deeply incised, and he saw something protruding from the surface. He recognized them as bison bones, but they were much larger than modern bison. George realized that the find was significant and tried to get an expert to look at his discovery, but it did not happen until after his death in 1922.
   
   Scientists later studied the Folsom Site, and their findings rocked the scientific world. What they discovered were the remains of a Bison antiquus at a Paleo-Indian site dating back as far as 9000 BCE, where ancient bison had been killed by early peoples using special tools, now referred to as Folsom points. With this find, scientists were able to establish a human presence in North America about 7,000 years earlier than had previously been thought.
   
   Eventually, McJunkin was given credit for his find. His hunger for knowledge and his persistence eventually earned him a special place in history, although he didn’t live to see it. George McJunkin was a remarkable man whose discovery re-wrote the books on early man in North America. His intellectual curiosity and determination continue to inspire a new generation of archaeologists.

3. ↑ George McJunkin, in Engines of our Ingenuity
   No. 2010.

   In 1908, a torrential rain fell on Folsom. The destructive flood carved out fourteen feet of soil in Dead Horse Arroyo. As McJunkin rode by after the flood, he found an exposed group of bison bones. His self-trained eye quickly recognized something exciting. The bones were down too deep and were too big to be modern buffalo. He also found pieces of flint, seemingly worked by human hands. These bones, he thought, must be incredibly old. Early humans had hunted and killed the animals.
   McJunkin tried to bring his discovery to the attention of sci-entists. He contacted people across the Southwest with an interest in bones, but none would come to the site. By the time McJunkin died in 1922, his discovery still rested in obscurity.
   But, in 1926, some of McJunkin's bones finally found their way to the Colorado Museum of Natural History. The Director, Jesse Figgins, recognized their significance. He declared that the bones offered clear evidence of humans in North America as much as 10,000 years ago.

4. ↑ George McJunkin, in Memoir in Honor of Franklin Folsom
   Article by George A. Agogino, 13 September 2000.

   I first became acquainted with Franklin Folsom's writing skills when I was studying several caves in New Mexico for possible archaeological sites--the Bureau of Land Management had recently named a cave near Ft. Stanton after me. I bought Franklin's book, Exploring American Caves: History, Geology, Lore and Location, to learn more about cave research.
   
   I met Franklin when we worked together trying to bring George McJunkin out of the realm of folklore into reality in the late 1960s. I had long before decided that McJunkin was a real person, and not a fictional character as some had suggested, and I had visited the Folsom, N.M., area and obtained a number of interviews with people who knew of McJunkin. I later sent this material to Franklin Folsom, who was a well-established historical researcher and writer with a special interest in archaeology.
   
   Our first meeting established a friendship that lasted until his death. He and his wife, Mary Elting, who often collaborated with him, continued my initial work. They spent several years doing research before publishing The Life and Legend of George McJunkin, Black Cowboy, establishing that McJunkin was the man who found the Folsom site in 1908. We were eager to find as much information on McJunkin as possible--a difficult problem because he died in 1922.
   
   Our association taught me better investigative and interview techniques. I was quickly impressed by Folsom's warm and open personality and his dedication to the work of separating facts from folklore. He was more than a friend, he was my teacher in this type of research. We worked together without any conflict; we shared our information and worked with maximum cooperation.
   
   He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, and he graduated from the University of Colorado in 1928. For a time he worked as a Rocky Mountain guide, an experience that must have developed his walking skills, for he enjoyed walking. At an advanced age he walked across the United 2 Views of World Peace march.
   
   He wrote more than 80 books, some of which made the best-seller list. His books were instructive, but more important, they were able to be read by the general reading public. A number of his books were for children.
   
   His books that helped me most in my field of anthropology included America's Ancient Treasures, Famous Pioneers, Red Power in the Rio Grande: The Native American Revolution of 1680, and Science and the Secret of Man's Past. Books written with his wife included If You Lived in the Days of the Wild Mammoth Hunters and The Story of Archaeology of the Americas.
   
   Though now deceased, Franklin will live for generations in the hearts and minds of all who are interested in spelunking or the Indian past of the Southwest. And I will never forget this man or our long association.

5. ↑ ^5.0 5.1 George McJunkin, in Seattle Times: "Clovis Man: Giving Credit Where It's Due"
   Article by Jerry Large, Times Staff Columnist, 23 February 1997.

   Until just the other day, the oldest evidence of a human presence in America came from an archaeological dig just outside my hometown of Clovis, N.M. Clovis man, as the first inhabitants of that region came to be called, left some 11,200-year-old spear points as evidence of their existence. Now the word is that humans were living in Chile 12,500 years ago, so Clovis has lost one of its claims to fame. It still has the Norman Petty Studio, where Buddy Holly got his start, and it has livestock auctions, but none of that is quite as special as being the site of the oldest human settlement on the continent. History is important to us humans. Some years ago, Hill Williams, who has since retired as The Times' science writer, told me a black cowboy had something to do with the discovery of Clovis man. I'd grown up in Clovis without ever knowing that. Turns out the cowboy discovered bones and spearpoints of Folsom man. Folsom is a village in northeastern New Mexico, and that discovery led to the later discovery of Clovis man, after the cowboy had died. Just before the Chile discovery made the papers, a friend in Bellingham told me about an article in Natural History magazine that laid out the cowboy story. George McJunkin was born a slave in Texas in 1851. At 17 he joined a cattle drive to Dodge City and went on to do cowboying for a number of New Mexico ranchers.
   
   From slave to foreman
   
   He became well-known for his skill and eventually became foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch, a significant achievement for a freed slave. People sought him out for his ranching expertise, but they also sought him for his scientific knowledge. McJunkin had gotten a couple of boys to teach him to read in exchange for him teaching them about horses. He spent a lot of time reading scientific texts. The story said he carried two scabbards on his horse. In one was a rifle and in the other a telescope. Ranchers hired him to settle boundary disputes because he could use a compass transit. He spoke Spanish and was often a go-between for Anglo and Hispanic people. One day in 1908 he was out mending fences when he came across some bones that had been unearthed by a flood. Because he was a student of science, he recognized the bones were significant and began collecting them and spear points from the site. He described his find to a bone collector in Raton and wrote to another man who had once discovered a woolly mammoth. Neither was interested in coming to see his find. A few months after McJunkin died in 1922, the two men he'd tried to interest in the dig visited the site and gathered bones there. It would be another six years before the discovery made it into Scientific American. The climate at the time favored the belief than Indians hadn't been here all that long, and scientists tended to reject most evidence to the contrary. Eventually McJunkin's discovery lead to the Clovis mammoth hunters in 1932 and changed the face of American archaeology, but as the Natural History article notes, "Not one scientific publication about the Folsom discovery mentioned McJunkin. The two men McJunkin had written to about the find got the credit in early articles about the site. "By the 1960s, many archaeologists assumed that the persistent story of the ex-slave-turned-cowboy-scientist was no more than a colorful myth." I wonder how many other people have been lost to history that way?
   
   Truth to the rescue
   
   This time someone came to the rescue. A professor at Eastern New Mexico University went to Folsom and started asking around. He eventually pieced together McJunkin's story. The article in Natural History, by Douglas Preston, spread the story further. February's focus on black Americans began as an inducement to search out contributors to our society who might otherwise go unrecognized. It isn't for their sake that we remember them, but for our own. So that what we know about our world will be more accurate. We have a lot of ground to cover. Not only do we know little about people like McJunkin, but the continent we live on has 12,500 years of human history of which most of us are woefully ignorant. There is more power in history than in gold. Take my money, leave me my history. Today is a good day to learn.

6. ↑ George McJunkin, in Albuquerque Journal
   Article compiled by Fritz Thompson, Leslie Linthicum, Bill Hume and Dennis Latta, 19 September 1999.

   In 1908, a northeastern New Mexico cowboy named George McJunkin was riding up a dry arroyo called Dead Horse Gulch when he spotted some unusual looking, bleached bones imbedded in the bank. McJunkin didn't know it at the time, but he had discovered the bones of an extinct, giant bison. Mingled among those bones, McJunkin found some finely crafted flint points. Despite McJunkin's efforts to get somebody interested in the find, scientists didn't really do so until 1925 -- and then they got pretty excited. McJunkin's discovery, now famous as the Folsom points, offered first proof that man lived and hunted in North America during the Ice Age, dating from at least 8,000 B.C. McJunkin, a black man whose father was a slave in Texas before the Civil War, was pretty remarkable himself. He was barely out of his teens and a free man when he went to work as a horse wrangler for Thomas Owens at the Pitchfork Ranch near Folsom. McJunkin taught himself to read and write, speak Spanish, play the fiddle and guitar and become a fair to middling amateur archaeologist and historian. When Owens decided to fence his open range, he turned the job over to McJunkin, who became among the first men in the West to create barbed-wire-fenced pastures.

7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1 7.2} George McJunkin, in Folsom, Franklin. The Life and Legend of George McJunkin: Black Cowboy. (E P Dutton, December 1973)
   December 1973.
   Cover of "Life and Legend of George McJunkin: Black Cowboy" by Franklin Folsom
8. ↑ George McJunkin, in Encyclopaedia Brittanica
   discovery of Folsom culture site.

   In 1908 George McJunkin, ranch foreman and former slave, reported that the bones of an extinct form of giant bison (Bison antiquus) were eroding out of a wash near Folsom, N.M.; an ancient spear point was later found embedded in the animal’s skeleton.

9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1 9.2} George McJunkin, in Discovered Folsom Man: A Nomadic Hunter who roamed New Mexico more than 10,000 years ago
   Folsom Museum News.

   In 1908, after the Folsom Flood of August 27th, a Black Cowboy by the name of George McJunkin discovered a large deposit of bones protruding from the bank of the Dry Cimarron River while riding in Wild Horse Arroyo with a friend, Bill Gordon. Bill took some of the bones to Raton and showed them to Fred Howarth. It was George McJunkin, however, who was convinced that these bones were unusual. An amateur archaeologist, George knew they had to be of some extinct animal. Unfortunately, George did not live to know that he had discovered "Folsom Man." It wasn't until 1925 that scientist determined that George's discovery was one of the most important archaeological finds ever made in North America. George W. McJunkin, affectionately known as "Nigger George," was W. H. Jack's foreman of the Crawford Ranch. Born on a West Texas ranch during slavery, George belonged to a man by the name of Fergesen, of whom George always spoke very highly. George's father was a fine blacksmith. In addition to his master's work, he did work for all of the neighbors. His master allowed him to keep the money he earned in that way. Saving his money, he was finally able to buy his own freedom. When the Civil War ended, George was about 14 years of age. He worked at driving oxen with freighters and later worked for a cow outfit. Never having attended school, George could neither read nor write. Around the campfire at night, the cow punchers taught him to read and write. His first pen and paper were a piece of slate rock and a ten penny nail. After learning to read, George read everything he could get his hands on and was a well-informed man. As a buffalo hunter, George was a master shot and hunted buffalo with many men employed by big fur companies. When a herd of buffalo was found, each man would kill as many as he could skin by nightfall. With hundreds of men working, the buffalo were quickly exterminated and some meat was saved for their own use. Later, George worked for Gid Roberds, who raised horses. George went with Gid when he moved his herd to southeast of Trinidad, Colorado. As Gid's sons grew up and George was no longer needed, he kept George on until he could locate other work. When Ben Smith, the Owen's range manager, went to Roberd's ranch to buy horses, he hired George for the Pitchfork Ranch. George stayed for 13 years, then went to work on the Crowfoot Ranch for William "Bill" H. Jack. An expert bronc rider, George was one of the best ropers and cow hands of this country. When he died, he was buried at the Folsom Cemetery, Folsom, New Mexico.

10. ↑ ^{10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3} McJunkin, George, in Black Past: Remembered & Reclaimed
    Contributor Peterson, Heather.

    George McJunkin was an African American cowboy known for discovering bison bones in Folsom, New Mexico which eventually made archeological history. McJunkin was born in the slavery era in Texas. His father was a blacksmith. McJunkin grew up on a ranch and mastered the skills of a ranch hand. Growing up, McJunkin only received four years of education; he learned to read and write by watching other workers and became literate. McJunkin worked at various jobs such as buffalo hunting and skinning. For about fifty years he was also a bronco-buster along the Texas-New Mexico border and at one point was a ranch foreman. In 1908, McJunkin and a friend, Bill Gordon, found bones sticking out of the ground at the bank of the Dry Cimarron River near Folsom. The bones where bigger with horns that were different from any McJunkin had ever seen. McJunkin knew the bones were neither from cattle or buffalo and believe they needed to be studied. McJunkin attempted to publicize his discovery and feared that it would be ignored or the site would be raided for souvenirs. Eventually scientists took an interest in his discovery and in 1925 announced that the bones McJunkin had found seventeen years earlier were from extinct bison estimated to be over ten thousand years old. McJunkins discovery led to the subsequent finding of human spearheads that where stuck among some of the bison bones showing that humans were living in the American Southwest far earlier than previously believed. The archeological site that McJunkin discovered eventually yielded human remains that became known as “Folsom Man”. George McJunkin never married nor had children. He did not live long enough to learn of the scientific recognition of the significance of his discovery. McJunkin died in January 1922 at the Folsom Hotel in Folsom, New Mexico.

11. ↑ George McJunkin, in Arrowheads.com: The History of the Folsom Site
    Article by Jeb A. Taylor.

    The Folsom site is located in Colfax County, New Mexico, and it is one of the most famous archaeological sites in North America. There are a number of versions of how the site was discovered, but credit for its discovery is generally given to George McJunkin, a black cowboy and foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch near where the site was located. The presently accepted version regarding the discovery of the site is as follows: In September 1908, a torrential rainfall on Johnson Mesa sent torrents of water running down and cutting deeply into the banks of Wild Horse Arroyo, a tributary of the Dry Cimarron River. Soon after the flood, McJunkin and a companion were riding along the arroyo where McJunkin noticed very large white bones eroding out of it. Having worked with cattle most of his life, McJunkin was familiar with cow bones, and as a young man, he had crossed the Staked Plains of Texas during the days of buffalo hunting and was familiar with modern bison bones. Consequently, he was able to determine that the bones in Wild Horse Arroyo were neither, and deduced correctly that they belonged to an extinct variety of bison (Folsom 1974:35). By all accounts, McJunkin realized the significance of the site, and through the years attempted, but failed, to solicit much interest in it. However, in 1912 he related the story of the giant bones and location of the site to Carl Schawachheim in Raton, New Mexico. Schwachheim was interested in the site, and would eventually become its chief investigator, but at the time, he did not own a car and was not inclined to make the sixty mile long round trip journey to examine it by horse drawn wagon. Sometime later, probably in 1918 or 1919, McIunkin met another amateur naturalist and a friend of Schwachheim named Fred Howarth, and once again related the story of his discovery to an interesting listener who would also eventually play a key role in the recognition of the site. On December 10, 1992, Schwachheim, Howarthm, and three other associates made the trip to Wild Horse Arroyo. Sadly, McJunkin, who had promoted the site for more than ten years, was believed to have died the previous spring, so he was not aware that anyone had finally taken interest in it, or just how important it was.

12. ↑ ^{12.0 12.1 12.2} McJunkin, George, in Online Encyclopedia: Cowboy, Discovers Important Bone Pit, Chronology.

    George McJunkin was born a slave in 1851 on a ranch in Midway, Texas... In September 1908 McJunkin found a gap under a barb-wired fence. The gap was the result of a flash flood, which tore a ten-foot gully in the bottom of Wild Horse Arroyo. The flood was so severe that seventeen people in the nearby town of Folsom were killed. While trying to determine how to repair the fence, McJunkin saw bones exposed at the bottom of the gully. He went into the gully and dug out the bones. Over time he found more bones and even a skull. He placed these bones with his collection that he kept at his ranch house. He had a museum of sorts in his cabin that included skulls, rocks, minerals, arrowheads, and other bones. As an avid reader of scientific books, McJunkin knew the bones from the gully were from a bison but their size and the fact that they were mineralized and thirteen feet under the surface told him this find was an important one. McJunkin wrote to several bone collectors about the place he called the bone pit... As McJunkin grew older nothing came of his letters and efforts to have others see his find. When the Crowfoot Ranch was sold he moved to a cabin in an isolated part of the ranch. His cabin was struck by lightening and burned to the ground, destroying all of his collection of bones, fossils, books, and his telescope. When McJunkin became ill he moved into a room at the Folsom Hotel. Unable to get out of bed his friends helped him to sustain himself by setting up rubber tubing to drink from. McJunkin could only drink raw bootleg whiskey. His friends took turns visiting him and telling stories or reading from the Old Testament. On January 21, 1922 McJunkin died. He was buried in the Folsom cemetery with a large gravestone to mark his resting place. (Read more: McJunkin, George(1851–1922) - Cowboy, Discovers Important Bone Pit, Chronology - Bones, Discovery, Ranch, and Scientific - JRank Articles http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/4374/McJunkin-George-1851-1922.html#ixzz2jpNoAWcZ)

13. ↑ ^{13.0 13.1 13.2} George McJunkin, in Black Cowboy and Pioneer of Anthropology
    Article by Clifford D. Conner.

    George McJunkin was born into slavery in Texas in 1851. At age 14 he was freed by the Civil War and moved west to find work. By 1908 he had worked his way up to being the foreman of a ranch-the Crowfoot Ranch near Folsom, New Mexico. In September of that year a flash flood destroyed a fence on the ranch, so McJunkin rode out to inspect the damage. He discovered that the flood had torn a ten-foot gully into the landscape, and he noticed some big bones sticking out at the bottom of the gully. McJunkin's self-education had prepared him to recognize that the bones were of some sort of bison, and to realize that they were too large to be from any living species, so he knew he'd made an important find. He wrote letters to other amateur bone-hunters about his discovery, but he couldn't find any who were interested enough to make the thirty-mile, two-day ride on horseback that it would have taken to see them. McJunkin died 14 years later, in 1922, and in all that time nobody had ever come to see the bones he'd found.

14. ↑ McJunkin, Geo, in Union, New Mexico, USA&msdpn=74153&msdpn_PInfo=8-|0|1652393|0|2|3249|34|0|2958|74153|0|&uidh=f93&pcat=ROOT_CATEGORY&h=1003674592&db=USDirectories&indiv=1&ml_rpos=9 Ancestry.com: U.S. City Directories 1821-1989
    Folsom City Directory, Page 282, 1903.

    McJunkin Geo, cattle

    Geo McJunkin as Folsom Resident (1903)
15. ↑ McJunkin, George, in Union, New Mexico, USA&msdpn=74153&msdpn_PInfo=8-|0|1652393|0|2|3249|34|0|2958|74153|0|&uidh=f93&pcat=ROOT_CATEGORY&h=16851589&db=1910USCenIndex&indiv=1&ml_rpos=11 Ancestry.com: 1910 United States Federal Census
    New Mexico, Colfax County, Precinct 7 Sheet 12B, 13 May 1910.

    Name: George Mcjunkin
    Age in 1910: 59
    Birth Year: abt 1851
    Birthplace: Texas
    Home in 1910: Johnson Mesa, Colfax, New Mexico
    Race: Black
    Gender: Male
    Relation to Head of House: Head
    Marital Status: Single
    Father's Birthplace: Illinois
    Mother's Birthplace: Mississippi
    Neighbors: View others on page
    Household Members:
    Name Age Relation
    George McJunkin 59 Head
    Welliam Ronero 22 Employee
    Vincente Valdez 21 Employee
    (Image: http://interactive.ancestry.com/7884/31111_4330936-01186/16851589?backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestry.com%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3frank%3d1%26new%3d1%26MSAV%3d0%26msT%3d1%26gss%3dangs-g%26gsfn%3dGeorge%26gsln%3dMcJunkin%26msddy%3d1922%26msdpn__ftp%3dFolsom%252c%2bUnion%252c%2bNew%2bMexico%252c%2bUSA%26msdpn%3d74153%26msdpn_PInfo%3d8-%257c0%257c1652393%257c0%257c2%257c3249%257c34%257c0%257c2958%257c74153%257c0%257c%26uidh%3df93%26pcat%3dROOT_CATEGORY%26h%3d16851589%26db%3d1910USCenIndex%26indiv%3d1%26ml_rpos%3d11&ssrc=&backlabel=ReturnRecord)

16. ↑ George McJunkin, in Deadliest Outlaws: The Ketchum Gang and the Wild Bunch by Jeffrey Burton
    Page 162, 2009.

    By the end of the first week of July, 1899, Sam Ketchum and party were almost ready to leave Cimarron. On Friday, the seventh, Sam and Carver bought supplies at Jim Hunt’s store and stashed them away in Turkey Creek Canyon. Hunt, all eyes and ears, learned they had gone in the direction of Dean Canyon; in effect, the back door of their hideout. Lay and Weaver spent Friday night at Duran’s and whiled away Saturday forenoon in the bar of “Lambert's saloon”— the name commonly given to the St. James Hotel. Early in the afternoon, Weaver settled up with Duran and rode off northeast. He had told Duran that he was going to pick up his “traps” from the WS ranch, but did not call there. Lay left at the same time, heading northwest for Ponil Park. This may have been a feint; he had plenty of time to change course and join the others in time for the planned robbery.
    
    On Monday, July 10, the gang camped in the mountains, eighteen miles west of the railroad. Thomas Owen, of Folsom, writing many years later, identified the site as "the Daugherty Spring at the head of Dry Canyon about four miles from the XYZ ranch.” He said that George McJunkin, a cowboy on the Owen family's Hereford Park ranch, came upon them and “decided that” one of them had to be “a boy raised in Johnson Park” who was able to tag McJunkin’s horse as a six-year old because he “had known this particular horse from [when it was] a colt.” In fact, none of the Ketchum gang had any family connection with the Johnson Park area.
    
    No sooner had the men left Cimarron than the cowboy-teamster-detective, James Morgan, reported his suspicions to Marshal Foraker (though not to Robert Campbell, the sheriff of Colfax County) and tried to get on the trail of the gang? He was too slow: on the night of Tuesday, the llth, train no. l of the Colorado and Southern Railway (the renamed and reorganized Union Pacific, Denver and Gulf Railroad) was held up and robbed by three or, more probably, four men. The robbery occurred at almost the same place as the one in September of 1897 and was accomplished in almost the same fashion. Among the passengers were two sheriffs: Fred Higgins of Chaves County and Saturnino Pinard of Union County. Frank E. Harrington was the conductor, as on the occasion of the previous stickup.

17. ↑ George McJunkin, in ranch folsom&source=bl&ots=jnpqw7Goc9&sig=QNRzBVZpSfvloNuDtndHGEXVNcM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YDl6UvPQNMaisASf_ICwDQ&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=XYZ ranch folsom&f=false The Cruel Plains, by Michael H. Price, George E Turner
    Chapter: The Coming of Mankind, Pages 31-32, 2007.

    The countryside around Folsom, New Mexico, is possessed of an air of primeval antiquity. Ragged hills and mesas rise wild to the west and north. Eastward lies a sloping, undulating plain, its contours engraved in hardened lava from prehistoric eruptions. Southward lies Mount Capulin, the mortal remains of a volcano. Outcroppings of lava rock, splashed with varicolored lichens and crowned with evergreens, lend an eerie texture to the grassy valleys.
    
    But for the village and a few roads and isolated houses, this might be some landscape from the dawn of time. It seems fitting, then, that such a setting should have yielded the first evidence of the earliest human presence in North America — and the first evidence of the origins of herding and ranching as outgrowths of hunting.
    
    The big discovery occurred outside the provinces of formal, academic science, which was typically slow on the uptake once alerted.
    
    The discoverer was George McJunken, a former slave who had lived in Amarillo, central city of the Texas Panhandle, before he became foreman of the XYZ Ranch, west of Folsom. Self-educated and adventurous, McJunken made a pastime of collecting unusual mineral formations, Indian artifacts and fossils.
    
    In 1895, McJunken found a huge number of massive bones, buried deep in an arroyo eight miles west of Folsom. For years, McJunken tried to persuade learnéd men to visit the site, to no avail. McJunken died a quarter-century later, unfulfilled in his quest for scientific validation, but certain that, someday, someone would pick up where be had left off. In 1925, a settler at Raton, New Mexico, named Carl Schwachheim, rediscovered the Folsom bones. Swachheim informed Dr. Jesse D. Figgins, chief curator of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. Figgins brought an excavation crew from Denver the following year.

18. ↑ ^{18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3} George McJunkin, in ranch folsom&source=bl&ots=5LICYTXCYY&sig=MKmFpiyIsJQiwL0jlOMh6L_nrSI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YDl6UvPQNMaisASf_ICwDQ&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=XYZ ranch folsom&f=false Buried Treasures: Famous and Unusual Gravesites in New Mexico History by Richard Melzer
    Entry 120, Pages 138-139, 2007.

    George McJunkin
    Highly respected black ranch foreman of the XYZ Ranch; most famous for his role in discovering ten-thousand-year-old Folsom Ice Age Man after finding enormous animal bones in Wild Horse Arroyo on the Crowfoot Ranch in the aftermath of the August 27, 1908, Folsom, New Mexico, flood; Carl Sehwachheim found a man-made spear point between the ribs of bones from the same site; August 2, 1927; for years, McJunkin was not given credit for this important archeological find.
    Date of Birth: January 9, 1856
    Place of Birth: Rogers Prairie,Texas
    Date of Death(age): January 21, 1922(66)
    Place of Death: Folsom New Mexico
    Cause of Death: unstated natural causes
    Resting Place: Folsom Cemetery. Folsom. New Mexico
    George McJunkin was never the same afier his cabin at Stuyvesant Springs Ranch, New Mexico, was struck by lightning and burned to the ground in the early 1920s with many of his belongings inside, including his fiddle, his guitar, his books, and his telescope. At least the mysterious large animal bones that he had discovered afler the terrible Folsom flood of 1908 were not present and were preserved. McJunkin “had always made a joke about lightning. ‘It never strikes a black man.‘ he used to say. "But it did in this case. George moved to a back room in the hotel in Folsom and died shortly thereafter. Fellow cowboys used their lariats to lower McJunkin's coffin into his grave in the local cemetery outside of town.

19. ↑ The Emancipation Proclamation
    Pages 1-2, 1 January 1863.

    Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
    
    "That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
    
    "That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."