The American Bison - Our National Mammal

Celebrate the recent announcement of the American Bison as our National Mammal (via @americasgreatoutdoors) with a virtual bison hunt through the National Archives Catalog!

Help to transcribe and tag vintage Forest Service bison photos in the National Archives Catalog.  This easy transcription mission will help make these images more accessible and searchable for researchers and the public. 

Becoming a Citizen Archivist is easy!

Cartographer:Willem J Blaeu, American Nova Tableau, 1640

First published in 1617 by probably the greatest Dutch cartographer of all time and this was the standard map used by the Blaeu firm thru the 17th century. The appeal of this map stems from its illustrations of native inhabitants and towns of Central and North America. The map shows little knowledge of the Great Lakes and none of the Mississippi river. In the West, California is shown as a peninsula, in contrast to most other cartographers of the period who depict it as an island.

Earliest Evidence of Chocolate in North America

They were humble farmers who grew corn and dwelt in subterranean pit houses. But the people who lived 1200 years ago in a Utah village known as Site 13, near Canyonlands National Park in Utah, seem to have had at least one indulgence: chocolate. Researchers report that half a dozen bowls excavated from the area contain traces of chocolate, the earliest known in North America. The finding implies that by the end of the 8th century C.E., cacao beans, which grow only in the tropics, were being imported to Utah from orchards thousands of kilometers away.

The discovery could force archaeologists to rethink the widely held view that the early people of the northern Southwest, who would go on to build enormous masonry “great houses” at New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and create fine pottery, had little interaction with their neighbors in Mesoamerica. Other scientists are intrigued by the new claim, but also skeptical. Read more.

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Knife Lake: Rewriting prehistory

Recent archaeological finds near northern Minnesota’s Knife Lake may rewrite the current theories on how long human beings have lived not only in Minnesota, but much of North America.

Knife Lake straddles the border between Canada and Minnesota, with Quetoco Provincial Park to the north, and the famous Boundary Waters on the U.S. side. Professor Mark Muniz of St. Cloud State and fellow researches have been digging around there, and what they have found is fairly amazing if their dating holds up.

The Ojibwe name for what the glaciers carved from the earth is Mookomaan Zaaga’igan, while the French fur traders called it Lac des Couteaux, or Lake of Knives. Read more.

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DEVIL’S KITCHEN – GEORGIA

The area known as Devil’s Kitchen in Tallapoosa, Georgia, was thought to be named for “The Devil’s Water,” or moonshine that was made in the creek valley. There are alleged stories of  Satanic worship and witchcraft that have taken place in this area that also added to the legend behind the name, though nothing of that nature has ever been proven. The area is about one mile off of U.S. Highway 78 on Old Ridgeway Road. The actual “kitchen” is a beautiful, secluded area. There is a winding creek that falls away into the deep canopy of oak trees, and as you follow it down, the creek then runs into a small canyon of sorts. This is where the moonshine was made. Many bootleggers tried  their luck in this area, and the revenuers caught every one of them.

Key’s Castle, as it is known, was a grape vineyard in the late 1800s. It has always been an area of spooks and ghosts, according to legend. This home is a large mansion off to the left side of the road before you make it to Walker Creek—the source that feeds the Devil’s Kitchen.

Many hayrides and ghost stories have been given and told about this area, and many articles have been posted on paranormal websites that know nothing of the area and its small history. The other stories tell a tale of a woman who was killed because she was a crime witness—this is untrue. The real story of Devil’s Kitchen is more of a tragedy.

The legend of the ghosts at Devil’s Kitchen started in 1962. A woman named Mary Moore Newman was taken to an area just behind Key’s Castle and was strangled because of an affair that wasn’t going as planned. Two men watched Mary as she left to go to the store for groceries, and they entered her home to await her return. Upon her return, the men forced her into their car and drove her to the Kitchen where they strangled her to death. They then took her body to a well, near Friendship Church, in Muscadine, Alabama, where was later found by the game warden in 1963. He had been stalking poachers who were in the area and smelled the decay as he walked by the well. Around her body were deer heads that had been placed there by the poachers.

The legend says that you can hear her screams for help in the woods around the area of  the Kitchen.

A few years after the Mary Newman murder, teenagers were playing a prank of a buddy. They left him at Walker Creek Bridge, where later stumbled into the creek and drowned—or did he? It is said that you can see his figure awaiting the return of his friends who abandoned him that night.

Then, in the mid-1980s, there was a large flood in the area. A mother and her two children rounded the curve, not knowing that the water was raging over the bridge. Her car was swept downstream. The mother managed to get the children out of the car and placed them atop the roof. She went for help. When she returned, her two children had been swept away, far down to the depths of the Kitchen.

The Kitchen has been filled with death and mystery for years—enough to make you wonder if there is more to it than just a name. Sinister as it sounds, the Devil’s Kitchen has been a den for death and mystery, tales and legends, and still is today.

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