"In September 1908, according to a 1974 article in The American West magazine, George McJunkin was riding along the arroyo when he "noticed some white objects that had been exposed."

"(He) climbed down ... and, using a pair of a barbed-wire clippers, dug out one of the white things that proved to be a bone — one of many."

McJunkin, who was a crack shot, an expert bronc rider and former buffalo hunter, as well as one of the top cowhands in the area, "knew cattle bones when he saw them, and these had not come from any cow," according to The American West. He took the bones home and put them above his mantel.

In 1922, long after McJunkin told a blacksmith about his find, according to the magazine article, a motley group of amateur archaeologists from Raton, including a bank employee, a Roman Catholic priest, a striking ironworker, a student taxidermist and a Lebanese bricklayer, dug up a bagful of bones at the site.

About that time, Jesse Figgins and Harold Cook from the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) had decided that man existed on the North American continent thousands of years prior to what was then commonly accepted theory. But they had no proof."

Get the Story:
Andy Stiny: Tiny N.M. Town Altered Archaeology (The Albuquerque Journal 4/20)