Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

through the debris deposited by floodwaters rushing through Wild Horse
Arroyo, it was carrying him to one of the greatest discoveries in North
American archaeological history. Over the last few weeks, McJunkin and
the Anglo and Mexican ranch hands he supervised had been slowly tracking
down and recovering the scattered cattle that had survived the Dry
Cimarron River’s flash flood.
The flood had nearly wiped out the entire town of Folsom, New Mexico,
taking the lives of 17 people. As McJunkin dismounted to examine a
damaged barbed wire fence, he might have been thinking about some of
these lost souls, the neighbors and friends who had not escaped their homes
before the raging water swept them downstream. Among the lost was Sarah
Rook, the town’s telephone operator, who had stayed at her post throughout
the terrifying night, calling house after house to warn residents to evacuate.
The townspeople, at least 40 of whose lives she had saved, found her body
12 miles downstream of the canyon, her headset still gripped in her hand
(2).
As McJunkin worked on repairing the fence, his attention was caught by
a pile of bones at the base of the arroyo. He recognized at once that they
could not have belonged to one of the cows killed by the flood; these
remains were old and dry, not freshly decayed. They were oddly shaped for
cow bones, too. His curiosity piqued, McJunkin abandoned the fence and
began to investigate.
McJunkin knew about animal bones, both from his extensive reading
and from decades of experience working with horses and cattle and hunting
bison. After a closer inspection, he determined that the remains he had
found were definitely not those of cattle, but of a bison… and one much
larger than any living creature he’d ever seen. The idea of discovering an
unidentified type of bison was intriguing. He removed some of the bones
from the site, and then began trying to rouse interest in other people to help
investigate his find.
McJunkin’s recognition of the importance of these remains was a
reflection of his experience as a cowboy, a bison hunter, and a welleducated
(albeit self-taught) naturalist. He was unable to get other people
interested in the site, possibly due in no small part to the status ascribed to
him as a Black man. Born into slavery in Texas, George McJunkin had been
living as a free man since the end of the Civil War.