George McJunkin was born into slavery near Midway, Texas, between Houston and Dallas, in 1851. After emancipation he went west as a cowboy on the long cattle drives, broke horses, and settled in the high grassland of northeastern New Mexico, where by the early 1900s he was foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch near the village of Folsom. He had a naturalist's eye and collected rocks, crystals and bones.
The flood
On the night of August 27, 1908, a storm dropped more than a dozen inches of rain on Johnson Mesa, upstream of Folsom, and a flood tore through the village. Riding out afterward with a friend to check fences and washouts, McJunkin found that the water had cut a fresh bank in Wild Horse Arroyo, and in it were bones he recognized as bison but far too large for any bison he knew.
He told people about them for years, among them Carl Schwachheim, a blacksmith and amateur naturalist in Raton. Nobody came to look while McJunkin lived. He died in January 1922.
The point between the ribs
Late in 1922 Schwachheim, the Raton banker Fred Howarth and a few others finally drove out to the arroyo and dug out some bones. In 1926 they took them to Jesse Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver, and the museum's paleontologist identified them as Bison antiquus, an Ice Age species extinct for thousands of years. The museum dug that summer and found stone spear points among the bones, but skeptics said they could have washed in later. In the summer of 1927 the diggers found a point still lying between the ribs of a bison, left it in place, and called in outside experts, among them Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History. They agreed: people had hunted these animals.
An argument settled
Until then most authorities held that people had been in the Americas for only a few thousand years. Folsom pushed the date back into the Ice Age, and the finely fluted Folsom point gave its name to a whole culture of bison hunters. The bones came from at least thirty animals.
Neither Figgins nor his paleontologist mentioned McJunkin in their papers. His part in the story was pieced together only decades later, and he is now remembered as the man who found it. The Folsom site is a National Historic Landmark on private land and is not open to visitors. The village of Folsom, with a small museum of local history, lies a few miles north of Capulin Volcano.