George McJunkin was a remarkable man. He was born on January 9, 1851, in eastern Texas. Enslaved until the end of the Civil War, in 1868, he moved to New Mexico to start a new life as a free man and lived there for more than half a century. He was a champion cowboy, an outstanding ranch manager, a self-taught reader and naturalist, and a collector of ancient stone tools, ceramics, animal bones, and other interesting objects he found while working.
On August 27, 1908, when McJunkin was manager of the Crowfoot Ranch, an unusually strong summer thunderstorm dropped 13 inches of rain on Johnson Mesa, several miles northwest and upstream of what we now call the Folsom site. A flash flood swept through the region, wreaking havoc and downcutting arroyos.
After the storm, McJunkin ventured out to repair broken fence lines. He noticed large bones protruding from the newly eroded base of Wild Horse Arroyo. With his knowledge of animals and natural history, McJunkin determined the bones belonged to bison much larger than any modern bison he had encountered. He collected some bones and took them back to his cabin, where they took pride of place on a mantle.
From then until his death, a period of nearly 14 years, McJunkin tried to get friends and associates out to see the site. But none came. The trip required an arduous two-day horseback ride that most were unwilling to endure, and few, if any, people in the region had a car.
Then in 1922, Carl Schwachheim—a blacksmith and amateur naturalist from Raton, New Mexico, whom McJunkin had told about the bones—convinced banker and car owner Fred Howarth to make the journey. On December 10, 1922, nearly a year after McJunkin’s death, the two drove to the Folsom site. They immediately understood why McJunkin had been so excited: The bones were huge and unlike those of any modern animals.
To learn more about the bones, on January 25, 1926, Schwachheim and Howarth met with Jesse Dade Figgins, the director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History (CMNH) in Denver. Several weeks later, CMNH honorary Curator of Paleontology Howard Cook confirmed the bones were those of Bison antiquus, an extinct ice age bison. Figgins immediately committed his museum (now the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, my current employer) to further work at the site.
