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Boys unearth bones on Prairie Lake island
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| By: Anita Zimmerman |
August 26, 2009 |
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Brothers Zachary Zank, 13, Luke Zank, 9, and cousin Taggart Lund, 7, were fishing off an island in Prairie Lake when they saw what looked like a white rock. After digging for a few minutes, they realized it was a skull.
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It was an ordinary day at the lake, and three boys were fishing off the small island near their grandparents' Prairie Lake cabin.
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Seven-year-old Taggart Lund, of Altoona, was first to spot the white rock. He dug around the smooth surface, trying to unearth it. He saw something that looked like teeth.
"This is the best day of my life!" he said.
He called his cousins over.
"I thought it was a paw, like a freaky animal or something!" remembers 13-year-old Zachary Zank, a Fall Creek boy who broke his left arm the day before. "We kept digging and saw the eyeball. I said, 'Grandpa, it's a skull!'"
Zachary's brother Luke, 9, a "Pirates of the Caribbean" fan, wants to be an adventurer.
He was afraid they would be cursed, he grins.
As soon as their grandfather Ron Lund saw that it was, in fact, a skull, all digging stopped. They covered up the remains and called the Barron County Sheriff's Department.
Officials didn't release much information immediately following the Aug. 16 discovery, saying only that prehistoric Native American remains had been found on an island.
For locals, artifacts are nothing new. Former Chetek resident Timm Severud, now a facility manager for the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa near Winter, is a local historian.
Severud says 600 burial sites have already been identified on the Chippewa flowage. Many more are unknown. In fact, all of Prairie Lake is a burial ground, Severud says. The graves of an estimated 20,000 indigenous persons are in the once sacred area, most of them beneath the water.
The remains could have been from a number of tribes, he explains, and the orientation of the body is a clue to its origins.
Ojibwa buried their dead in birch bark shrouds, in a sitting position facing west. Dakota, also buried in a sitting posture, faced east. Earlier groups cremated or buried weathered bones.
Although the remains were found on an island, they would not have been buried on one, Severud says. What are now little islands in Prairie Lake did not exist centuries ago; when the region was surveyed in 1854, there was only one small, inhabited island in the lake.
"Burial grounds" are generally thought of as finite places (like graveyards), but the place of death largely determined the final resting places of most Native Americans, he says.
"Ojibwa and Dakota warriors were buried near where they fell, as most people were buried near their deaths," he says.
Chetek-and Barron County in general-have long been studied for its tribal remnants. In an October 1917 article in The Wisconsin Archeologist (courtesy Severud), authors Charles Brown and Robert Becker detail the dozens of burial and/or effigy mounds scattered throughout the area.
Folklore has it that Dakota (Sioux) were the area's first inhabitants and builders of the mounds. According to Brown and Becker, they were eventually driven out by the Ojibwa (Chippewa), inhabitants of Rice Lake as early as 1700.
Twenty-two distinct sites around the Chetek chain, one containing an estimated 75-100 mounds, were catalogued in the article. Mounds varied in size from one- to two-foot slopes to 18- or 20-foot hills, and, if excavated, some contained human bones.
Certain sites, like the fenced-off mound near Kwik Trip, have survived development. Most-including a mound once located in front of St. Boniface Catholic Church and one near Bailey's Pond-had been destroyed or "nearly obliterated" by 1917.
Graves not disturbed by man are still subject to weather. Flooding in the 1920s unearthed many dead, Severud comments. Traditionalists didn't want to disturb graves then, and even now, further excavation is "something the tribes would not be in that much favor of," he believes.
Still, Wisconsin statutes regulate how to deal with burial grounds, and an excavation is required. By law, the cost will fall on Barron County taxpayers, says Interim Administrator Jeff French.
Although the Barron County Sheriff's Department released a statement identifying the remains as a prehistoric Native American, Wisconsin Historical Society archeologist Sherman Banker won't comment on the origins of the bones.
Responsible for overseeing the excavation process, Banker says all specifics on the deceased person's culture, age or year of burial must be confirmed by qualified persons. The sheriff's department said Tuesday that the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at the UW-La Crosse was contracted to do the excavation and examination of the remains.
Findings will be back to the department by Oct. 31, but the analysis takes 30-45 days, followed by construction and verification of the report, which takes another 30 days, followed by a series of other lengthy steps. In short, an official report won't be released for months.
Banker says the proper authorities will be notified, and the bones reinterred, once the process is completed.
"I would speculate ... the remains being eventually given to the Tribal Historical Preservation Officer of the St. Croix or LCO for tribal disposition," Severud says.
"They have to go through long ceremonies to accept and touch the bones ... they would prepare them for reburial and the place of that reburial might be close to where they were found."
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©The Chetek Alert 2010
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