Quivira: Lost City of Gold?
Prairie Death Tales: V. 2: The Salt Fork Murders — Chapter 8
After J. J.’s party, Michael Legge and Jesse Perkins went out to one of Dine City’s favorite bars. Legge had loved it since high school. Whenever he needed to drown his sorrows, he turned up there, mainly because they always kept Ray Charles’ wonderful version of Born to Lose on the juke box. But, on this night, Legge was there to talk with Jesse and to begin to establish ground rules for their newly discovered relationship.
He hoped for them to have their first man-to-man talk since learning separately from Jesse’s mother, Abbey Perkins, that they were father and son. Abbey had warned Michael that her son’s sense of identity was focused on his Cherokee family and upbringing.
“Listen, Jesse, I know that all this business must have come as an awful shock to you. Your father was a wonderful man, a fine artist, and Abbey tells me he loved you deeply. . . . He was your father and always will be. . . . I would never try to change that.”
Jesse looked steadily at his schooner of beer, then spoke in a mournful tone. “Well, you couldn’t really do that even if you tried.”
“Yes, I know that’s true. I just wanted to tell you that if you ever needed anything that I could help with or . . . just wanted to talk, I would love to get to know you better.”
Jesse looked straight into Michael’s eyes. “Thanks for that. I’d just like to think about things for now . . . for a while.”
Michael nodded, then quickly responded, “yeah, me too. . . . By the way, I really liked what you were saying earlier tonight about respect for native sovereignty. Do you think there is anything that can be done politically to move things in that direction?”
As it turned out, Jesse had been thinking along these very lines, so there was quite a lot for the two men to talk about, which they did until the wee hours of the morning.
The next day, Michael settled into his favorite easy chair and mulled over his talk with Jesse. He decided it had gone pretty well, all things considered. He already felt that Jesse was an ally, at least in his discussions with McLaren about involving the Native American community in any archeological operations in the area, especially such long-term local tribes as were likely to be linked to the ancestral Wichita, Caddoan or Pawnee.
Legge was particularly worried about the popular hullabaloo surrounding what was, at least from an academic point of view, nothing more than a moderately interesting series of artifacts uncovered in a somewhat unexpected location. In Legge’s view, the few gold items pictured in Jeffrey McLaren’s Quivira book were more than likely evidence for some previously undocumented trade route to South or Central America, but certainly were not, at least not yet, proof positive that Quivira, or indeed any of the ‘seven lost cities of Cébola’, had been rediscovered in Oklahoma as claimed in the book’s title.
At the same time Legge wondered if he was just over-reacting to McLaren’s nasty insults from last night at the party. After all, it was indeed interesting to uncover such objects in a North American plains setting, especially away from any major burial mounds. And in any case, even if no further gold is uncovered, pottery shards, beads, tools, bones, stone, and clay will eventually tell the story — as more solid and more extensive evidence comes into play.
Nevertheless, the more Legge thought about it, the more he realized that McLaren had done his utmost to exploit the hell out of his modest finds, publishing first in the popular media rather than in the professional journals. And while the potential archeological significance of his finds might eventually prove significant — the amount of gold and precious stones found to date was subject to a fair degree of exaggeration. In truth, it added up to no more than a few ounces.
The most interesting pieces so far recovered from McLaren’s Salt Plains dig were the two small drinking vessels in heavy yellow gold, perfectly intact. And McLaren acknowledged in the book that these two beakers do somewhat resemble similar pieces which had been discovered earlier on Inka sites in Peru. Both the Inka and the Oklahoma vessels depicted toads as the main motif, and significantly, the South American images had been identified by a Chilean zoologist as members of the family Bufonidae, likely the Andean toad Bufo spinulosus.
But McLaren was unwilling to accept that the Oklahoma toad images were the same as the Peruvian ones. On this point he had solicited the view of Fred Stiles (the Amphibian specialist in the Chisholm University Zoology Department) who offered his professional opinion that the Salt Fork toad images very likely depicted The Great Plains Toad (Anaxyrus cognatus), another member of the Bufonidae family. Stiles based his judgement principally on the distinctive, roughly textured skin shown on the Oklahoma beakers.
McLaren’s book also cited how the toad’s potent serums were also well known as hallucinogenic tools for ceremonial rites which would explain the use of this image on drinking vessels. He called for more extensive study of toads in the Bufo genus, especially considering reports by 16th-century historians saying that some tribes added the dried skins of toads to their alcoholic beverages to make the drinks more potent,
There were a few other pieces of gold uncovered at the Salt Fork site, though nothing so fine as the two toad themed cups. Most particularly there was a gold image of a bird man, quite miraculous in its own way, but McLaren had not yet discovered any corresponding verbal or textual counterpart from any Wichita, or Caddoan, Kansan, or Pawnee storytelling that could help confirm that the bird-man piece stemmed from the tribal Quiviran culture as might have been expected.
Thus to Legge’s initial thinking, McLaren’s claims were significantly overblown and certainly premature. To the skeptical eye, something seemed not quite right here. At the same time, Legge didn’t deny that the dig was potentially promising.
P.J. Beaster, Sheriff of Alfalfa County, was especially pleased to learn that OHP had transferred Dewey Parchman to his county. They were old friends, and had sometimes hunted or fished together, before Dewey’s divorce. Beaster — he was at pains to let folks know it was pronounced “Bester’’ — was an old time lawman himself; he’d served as a deputy town marshal before getting himself famous in a big shoot-out with two escaping bank robbers on the Kansas border. After the gunfight, the publicity helped him get elected, and stay elected, as County Sheriff. Dewey thought of him as something like a crusty old uncle, one who’d helped him through some hard times.
“Hell, boy, when did you get back up here?” P.J. asked. “Why didn’t you call me up?”
“Only been three days, P.J. I had to learn my way around again.”
“Way around? Hell, you can’t get lost in Alfalfa County — they ain’t nothin’ here.”
With less than two thousand people in Cherokee, the county seat, usually only one trooper per shift is assigned to patrol the few highways. Needless to say, it is a rural county. Its major feature is the Great Salt Plains — the lake, the National Wildlife Refuge and the State Park plus an eleven thousand acre slab of pure white salt, but those are mostly the concern of the game rangers. From the Oklahoma Highway Patrol point of view, the only problem it created was when some drunk fisherman got out on the road looking for more beer.
The sheriff got up and wandered over to a little maple folding table in one corner of his office, where he kept a pot of coffee brewing. Beaster was sixty years old, but looked older. He had fine graying hair, mashed down on his massive skull by the big stetson he wore, and his shoulders were stooped and rounded. He looked like an aging bulldog, tough and pugnacious.
“So, what’s going on up here, P.J.?”
“Nothing much,” he said, pouring them each a cup of coffee, “except the archeology dig. You know about that, right? Quivira, I think they call it. Got everybody around here all het up over indian relics and whatnot. Folks are out there diggin’ up their wheat. And gold?, we’ve got our own gol-durn gold rush”
“It’ll pass. We’ve seen it before.”
“You got that right,” P.J. agreed. “A gold rush with no gold!.”
Dewey’s shift was from three A.M. to eleven in the morning, so he didn’t really expect to see a lot of action in his new venue. He went over with P.J. which bars might be closing up late, where the local kids were hanging out, and any trouble spots on the decaying highway system.
“Where’s the best fishing spots these days, P.J.? My girlfriend’s kids are coming home soon — from visiting some relatives in Tulsa. I said I’d take them fishing.”
“On the lake, you mean? Best place for kids is on the spillway. Or out on Coon Hollow — there’s a little jetty out there, good picnic spot. But the fishin’s not that great. Tell you what, bring ’em up here, all of ’em, your girlfriend, too. I’ll take you out to a little private lake I know that’s real nice. It’s stocked with nice fat crappie and got some blue cats that’ll go four-five pounds.”
P.J. walked Dewey out to his patrol unit, still talking.
Near the mid-day end of his shift, Dewey followed the back roads home to Dine City, south to the Helena cut-off, west through Goltry. The roads were narrow two lane blacktops, hedged in tightly with abundant green fields and low, marshy shoulders. Here and there, the road surface was deeply gouged, the asphalt carelessly ripped up by the tines of row crop cultivators. The road shimmered in the summer heat, and the oppressively close crops caught and held the humidity.
After picking up his freshly laundered and starched uniforms from the cleaners, he stopped at the Git’N’Go near his house for cigarettes and beer. Around noon, he pulled into his driveway, and before entering the house, walked around surveying the neglected flower beds. No one had touched them since Donna had left, and they were a mess of brittle dead stems and luxuriant weeds.
He knew that beneath the soil there were dormant daffodil and crocus bulbs, which a little work with a hoe would likely revive. It was time, he felt, to clean the place up. Time for new life and color around him to match the feelings he was beginning to have inside. He wondered what Susan would make of the rejuvenated garden beds that he could see in his mind’s eye.
Next chapter!
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Prairie Death Tales is a compendium of fictitious crime narratives, long and short, written by Courtland Wade, the collective pen name of Court Atchinson and Wade Chambers.
“Smart, darkly comic, edgy, (*****) stories of life, love and violent death in the not entirely fictional Dine City, Oklahoma. Set in the 80’s and 90’s, the plot line might today be described as ‘gender fluid’”.
If the locale and some of the characters interest you, you might like having a go at the first volume of Prairie Death Tales:
