Miami Mammoth Kill Site

Elias Howard Sellards came to the dig with a long record. Born in Kentucky in 1875 and trained at the University of Kansas and Yale, he had found about 6,000 specimens of Permian insects as a graduate student, served as Florida's state geologist from 1907 to 1918 and joined the University of Texas's Bureau of Economic Geology in 1918, directing it from 1932 to 1945. He researched the Red River for the state in its boundary dispute with Oklahoma. His book Early Man in America appeared in 1952, and he died in Austin in 1961.

What the plaque says

In 1933, a local farmer plowing a wheat field began uncovering large, chalky bones. Knowing them to be too large to be cow or buffalo bones, several area residents, including county judge and amateur archeologist J.A. Mead, investigated the site and made a significant discovery; a man-made stone artifact was found alongside the bones of what were mammoth elephants. The investigators identified the artifact as a Clovis fluted spear point, similar to items discovered in 1932 at the Blackwater draw site near Clovis, New Mexico. In 1934, Dr. E. H. Sellards of the University of Texas became involved. Securing funding through the Works Progress Administration, he led an extended excavation of the Miami site beginning in 1937. Landowner C.R. Cowan asked only that the site be refilled following the dig. Known initially as the C.R. Cowan site, the Miami site was found to be a playa lake filled with blue clay up to about two feet below ground level. The clay had formed from vegetation that once the pond. The remains of three to five adult mammoths, as well as the bones of at least one baby mammoth, were found at this site. Among the bones were man-made hunting tools, such as a spear point found less three inches from a mammoth's atlas vertebra. Archeologists found two other spear points and hide scraping tool. The artifacts alongside the bones indicate that the animals were killed at a watering hole. The evidence is significant, showing the contemporary existence of man and mammoth in North America. It also demonstrates that early man was an efficient, experienced hunter, information that has been used in the debate over the causes of extinction of late Pleistocene era animals approximately 12,000 years ago. The site remains one of the most significant early man sites in North America. (2003)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Roberts County Museum — 6.4 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• White Deer Land Museum — 20 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 20 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• The Citadelle Art Museum — 22 mi
  A 1910 Baptist church saved from demolition in 1977, made into a family home filled with art, and given to Canadian in 2009 as one of the Panhandle's few art museums.

More markers nearby

• Cottage Hotel — 6.4 mi
• Miami Railroad Depot — 6.4 mi
• County Named for Prominent Confederate Colonel O. M. Roberts — 6.4 mi
• Roberts County — 8.4 mi