‘A Continuity Of Place And Blood”   Nearly twenty years ago I
passed a winter in a woods cabin in that neighborhood and got to
know an older man, part Indian, who remembered his grandmother
telling of the natives’ removal. The story (or legend) was that
the chief of that group above the river stayed behind with his
daughter when their kinsmen were sent off to Oklahoma, and that
the two of them fasted to death in protest of the loss of their
wilderness home.  Pothunters long ago dug up and carried off
anything of worth from the flour-fine, never-rained-on dust of
those shelter floors. But the evidence of two thousand years or
more of habitation is not so easily erased. Scrambled by
careless shovels, to be surebut not obliterated.  A profusion of
chert flakes tells where a man sat pressing a deer antler
against the edge of his stone blank, shaping a projectile point.
A bowl-sized depression worn to perfect symmetry and smoothness
on the top of a boulder beside a shelter entrance evokes the
imagined sound of sto