HISTORY OF MANITOWOC COUNTY


consisted of goods to the value of $117.89. He never reached his destination,
being murdered by a drunken Chippewa at the mouth of Green Bay merely for.
refusing him credit.
At this place the sandy beach extends back from the lake at places for a
mile
or more inland. A considerable portion is now covered with second growth
pine and hemlock, while the windswept partial clearings form constantly shift-
ing excavated hollows and ridges, and dome shaped elevations, or "dunes,"
often thirty feet high. These dunes dot the landscape everywhere, upon which
grow in profusion the sand and choke cherry, and the wild grape, while the
trailing juniper forms a thick matting over large areas.
The ever shifting and changing sands constantly uncover new records of
ancient settlement here in prehistoric as well as historic times. Although
relics
of all descriptions have been gathered from this site for many years, still
wagon
loads of flint chips, flakes and cores, the refuse of the manufacture of
arrows,
spears and knives, can still be found. Arrow and spear heads, knives, perfor-
ators, stone balls, hammerstones, notched pebble net weights, grooved granite
axes and celts and hammers, scrapers, pipes, paint cups and pieces of ochre,
gorgets and other ceremonial artifacts are very numerous; also burned charcoal
and burned and disintegrated stones from fire places abound everywhere.
Fragments of pottery, shell, sand and quartz tempered, are particularly
numerous. Articles of bone are easily preserved in sand, which in less porous
soils would soon decay. Bone awls, needles, hollow tubes, barbed harpoons,
bears' teeth and bears' and birds' claws, jawbones of the pickerel and other
fish,
"lucky" or jewel stones of the sheepshead perch, heaps of the common
clam
shell, the columella of the couch shells, the shells of various small land
snails,
and the ordinary wampum, bone and shell beads have been found in large quan-
tities.
But far more precious in the estimation of the collector are the articles
of
copper, of which perhaps more than one thousand have been recovered and pre-
served from this site alone. Arrow and spear points of various designs, knives,
chisels, hoes, axes, celts, rods, spuds, gouges, adzes, awls and drills,
needles,
hundreds of fishhooks, besides other nondescript implements whose uses .remain
unknown have been found. Far less in number are the articles once used as
ornaments such as, rings, earrings, bracelets, crescents, gorgets and pendants,
but most numerous of all rolled copper beads. No place of a like area in
the
world has yielded a richer harvest in copper relics than this village site.
Mr.
H. P. Hamilton of Two Rivers has made the study of copper implements and
ornaments a life study, and has succeeded in amassing one of the finest and
largest collections in the United States.
One grave opened in i898 near Molasses creek, contained fragments of
human bones and an extraordinary lot of implements, consisting of one hundred
and seventy leaf shaped blanks and points, one stone bead, a flint knife
ten and
one~half inches long, a copper spear exhibiting evidence of cloth wrapping,
sixty-
four small copper beads, and a necklace of forty-six large copper beads.
It is
likely that these represented the worldly possessions of the Indian with
the
fragments of whose bones they were found.
Indications of contact with white traders are also very noticeable, such
as,-
fragments of brass kettles, pewter spoons, iron knives, bullet moulds, gun
bar-


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