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BUFFALO  FRONT LEG WITH EMBEDDED ARROWHEAD
South Loup River, Custer County, Nebraska

I was born and raised on a farm in Custer County near Litchfield, Nebraska, and in 1954 at the age of fifteen, I found my first arrowhead and immediately became totally addicted to the hobby.  There were not many collectors in that area in those days, but the man with the best collection by far was Robert Phillips of Lexington, about 40 miles distant.  His father, Earl Phillips, had begun collecting in the Republican River drainage in southwest Nebraska in the early part of the Twentieth Century, and by the early 1950s the two of them had amassed a huge collection. 

 Naturally, when I learned of the Phillips collection, I soon visited Bob and was awestruck by the quantity and quality of the items, but the one thing that was most impressive to me was the buffalo leg with the arrowhead stuck in it.  Bob told me that he acquired this specimen from a man named Howard Alva Miller (1874 - 1942), also of Lexington, who had told him it was found on the banks of the South Loup River some 25 miles to the north.  Miller was a farmer who was well known locally for his collections of guns and Indian artifacts.  Bob also said that the price of acquisition was a fifth of whiskey.  I do not know if Howard Miller found the piece or obtained it from someone else.  As of this writing, Miller’s grand niece, Mrs. Olivine Burman, now in her 90s, is still living in the area on a farm near Sumner, Nebraska.  Her mind is totally sharp, and while she remembers her great uncle’s artifact collection, she has no recollection of this particular piece.   Bob Phillips passed away a few years ago and his son, Robert Jr., now of Colorado, had little interest in the collection and so soon disposed of all but a few choice pieces.  His wife Kay contacted me in March of 2010 with the news that the bone was available, and it changed hands a short time afterward. 

 The South Loup River is the southernmost river of the three that compose the Loup River[1],  the largest tributary of the Platte, and which comprises over 1800 miles of streams and drains about one fifth of Nebraska.  The ecoregions of the Loup River Basin are the Nebraska Sandhills and the Central Great Plains. The basin drains an area on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, and the South Loup fork arises southeast of and adjacent to the Sandhills, in Logan County, a rural area comprising about 570 square miles with a population of less than 800.  It flows in a southeastly and easterly direction, passing through Custer and Buffalo Counties before  joining the Middle Loup in Howard Co. just east of Boelus.  It is fed by groundwater springs from the Ogallala Aquifer and  is shallow with a sandy bottom and water flow varies little during the year.  Custer Co. is still mostly cattle ranching and wheat country and historically has supported large herds of buffalo.  Early big game hunters were present, drawn by the herds, and the area was populated from the time of their arrival continually by native American groups until the arrival of white settlers in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.  Major tributaries of the South Loup in Custer Co. are Ash Creek and Spring Creek, both of which supported villages of Central Plains Tradition people.  The Cumro Early Man site mentioned by Wormington (pp.141, 143) is located on the South Loup in Custer Co.

 The leg bone measures 13 ½” long and appears to be the right humerus of an adult Bison bison[2], more commonly known as the American Buffalo.  The projectile point measures 15 millimeters wide at the base and extends 12 1/2 millimeters out of the bone. Since the arrowpoint entered just below the shoulder, the angle of impact would suggest that the Indian was slightly in front of and apparently somewhat higher than the animal. The downward angle of entry might be consistent with a shot from a mounted rider, although a bowman on foot could easily have been standing on a slight elevation at the time of the arrow release. After examining images of the artifact, well known author and authority on plains archaeology Jeb Taylor is of the opinion that it dates from the pre Contact Period, and thus not shot from a horse[3].  The small ridges of bone surrounding the embedded arrowpoint, called periosteal thickening and which result from the trauma caused by the impact and penetration of the stone, indicate that the animal did not die immediately from this wound, but lived an indeterminate length of time afterward. 

 The arrowhead is of a common type on the Great Plains and in Nebraska, formerly called Upper Republican Unnotched, and now sometimes referred to as Plains Triangular[4].  This type was used from about 1000 AD until Contact time[5].  Indeed, Plains Indians continued using the bow to hunt buffalo up until the time they acquired repeating rifles and breech loaders, since arrows could be shot much more rapidly than reloading muzzle loaders, and often the arrows could be reused[6].   The stone appears to be of the usual type for the area, often called Smoky Hill or Republican River jasper, actually silicified chalk from the Cretaceous[7].   Since we know the animal was shot an indeterminate length of time before its death along the Loup, and keeping in mind the mobility of the great buffalo herds, we must consider the possibility that the manufacture and shooting of the projectile point could have occurred many miles distant, although there is no evidence whatever to suggest this.  The age of the artifact can only be guessed, but a likely time range would be approximately from one thousand to one hundred fifty years, during the periods called Late Prehistoric and Historic, with the earlier time period appearing to be more probable.

 The bone was subjected to a CT scan by Dr. Albert Gutierrez of Summit Imaging of Brooksville FL[8].  The scanner used was a Philips 16 Slice Brilliance Scanner, and the images were done at one millimeter slice thicknesses and reconstructed in three planes.  Dr. Gutierrez’ interpretation was that the projectile hit the bone with such force that the distal end of the point penetrated the bone cortex and shattered in an expanding radius into the inner portion containing the marrow..  He also stated that the living bone displaced by the stone point immediately clamped down around the remaining intact portion of the point, holding it in place, and that, had the bone been dry and dead when impacted by the stone, it would have blown out a chunk of bone into the softer center of the leg[9].  This fact, along with the periosteal thickening, confirms the authenticity of the item.  Dr. Gutierrez also stated that it was amazing that the wound did not become infected, and that the bone and buffalo appeared to be healthy and none the worse for the incident.

 In conclusion, we can say that this artifact appears to be a genuine, fine and extremely rare example of interaction between the American Plains Indian and one of his most important food sources, the bison.  It is also a dramatic and tangible illustration of the power and efficacy of what we often consider a primitive weapon.  Further, it would be difficult to imagine a superior symbol of the saga of survival and life on the Great Plains during the distant past.

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