There are many ways to connect with human history in the landscape of Kansas.

One of these ways is literally carved in the native stone.

Petroglyphs are symbols and images etched in rock and there are numerous locations in Kansas where petroglyphs can be found.

The book, Petroglyphs of the Kansas Smoky Hills, published in 2019, takes an in-depth look at these with extensive research and beautiful photography.

One of the principal authors is Rex Buchanan, director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey.

On his way to give a presentation about the book at the Public Library in Goodland, Kansas, Buchanan stopped to visit with Don Rowlison at the Cottonwood Ranch.

So we're with Rex Buchanan today and he is a co-author of Petroglyphs of the Kansas Smoky Hills.

There's a greatly illustrated or photographed book with excellent explanations.

Thank you all for coming out today.

I always enjoy giving this talk in libraries.

My grandmother was a librarian and when I was a kid I spent a lot of time in libraries.

So this talk is based on a book that I did with a couple of other guys about petroglyphs and I'll talk about what those are in a second.

The book itself is one that I wrote most of the text for.

The second author, Burke Griggs, is a law professor at Washburn University in Topeka but also a very accomplished photographer.

And then finally Josh Svatty, who is a friend of mine from Ellsworth County.

A number of these locations are difficult to get on to, get landowner permission to get to.

Josh was pretty central in not only identifying some of those locations but he knew the landowners that would allow us to get there.

So those are the three of us that really did the book.

So what got you on the idea of recording these?

Okay to do that book.

I grew up within a mile or two of a number of these features and yet I was always a little surprised how little people knew about them.

Here are features that were in our own backyard.

They were significant, yet people there knew very little about them.

And then there was a period where Josh and I, we started in field trips to go look at these things because they were meaningful to both of us.

But you can't take just everybody on a field trip.

Almost all these are on private property, landowners don't want people there.

So kind of the only way for people to experience them was to do it through photography.

It just seemed to me like a part of the landscape that people should know more about.

They couldn't access it.

So you put all that together and that was a lot of the motivation behind it I would say.

And it's a book about, and there is a term that I don't really like and I don't use it in the book much, but you probably are familiar with it and it's rock art.

You hear people talk about rock art.

Rock art is composed of two different types.

One is petroglyphs which are rock carvings and that's what I'm going to be talking about today.

But the other half of it that people talk about is pictographs and that's paintings on rock with pigment.

And probably a lot of you are familiar with the cave paintings of France and Spain.

You know those big bulls a lot of times they show from the insides of caves.

Those are pictographs.

They are paintings.

So what we're going to talk about are petroglyphs, rock carving.

Now I will say that almost everything I'm going to show you today was carved by a culture that was here, a native culture, American Indians, that were here several hundred years ago if not longer.

Now the rock that most of these things I'm going to show you today is carved on is a sandstone that's part of the Smoky Hills called the Dakota sandstone.

The Dakota is the sandstone that makes up Coronado Heights just north of Lindsburg.

And all the hills as you take I-70 and go to Salina and Ellsworth County, Saline County, that's all Dakota sandstone.

Okay and those hills, that's kind of the heart of the Smoky Hills.

That's where I grew up.

In Rice County people don't realize that when Coronado came into Kansas in 1541 that some estimates are as few as 10,000 people lived in Rice County of Native Americans and some of the anthropologists predict it much higher than that, up to 80,000 which is more people than is there now.

And that actually, they sort of put kind of the peak of that population density wise in the headwaters of the Little Arkansas River.

And that is exactly where I grew up.

This is the location where in 1541 Coronado came into Kansas, okay.

This is where he ran into the land of Quavira.

He was looking for people with gold, what he found were a bunch of natives living in thatched villages and they were the Wichita Indians.

The petroglyphs that they carved on the Dakota sandstone are stylistically very different from anything else that we depict in the book.

Those, I would guess, are probably associated with the Wichita Indians where almost everything else in the book is associated with the Pawnee.

And in fact when I was working on the book I got some folks from the Pawnee tribe to come up and go out in the field with me.

But for various reasons the Wichita who were in Oklahoma of course were not interested in driving all the way up to Central Kansas.

So I went to them and took a lot of the photographs from the book and I showed them the photographs.

They weren't very interested.

They kind of flipped through them and you could tell they didn't care until they got to this one.

And then when we got here then they did want to talk.

Here is this one here.

Now when I was writing about these features I interpreted that as a human.

And when I asked them what this was they didn't say it was a human.

They said it was something else.

What do you think they said it was?

What do you see?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

A lizard.

That's what the Wichita said.

Because they can show this same feature to me in like pottery and other places and they say that's our depiction of a lizard.

I would say from that interaction they claim those in the sense that they recognize them, they depict things they're familiar with.

Again stylistically they're completely different than anything else in the book.

I would say that's a reflection of the time frame of when the Wichita's are there.

Which you said Coronado times and that's where they're associated.

15 to 1700.

Most of the other things depicted in here, most of the Pawnee stuff I would guess is much more recent.

I would guess it's 1800.

Well Pawnee stuff has horses in it.

Yes exactly.

It's got horses.

It's got people wearing military uniforms.

It's got clues about the dates.

So we have those clues and then the other part of this is the Dakota sandstone.

The Dakota is a very soft, very easily eroded material and it's hard for me except in certain locations it's hard for me to believe that the Dakota would stand up for a thousand years.

It just erodes way too easily for that.

And that actually was another motivation for doing the book which is let's document how these things look in whenever it was, 2018.

Here's a feature.

This is an old black and white photograph of the outside of the cave that was taken in 1867 and the big thing here is this reclining figure.

It's a human figure.

You can see the head with rays kind of coming out of it.

There are the eyes.

I don't know if you can see this or not but this is actually superimposed over the top of the body as a snake.

There's also, there's a deer.

There's all sorts of carvings in here.

That's why this photograph is really important.

It was taken by Alexander Gardner who was a famous Civil War photographer and again I know you know him whether you know the name or not because Alexander Gardner took the last photograph of Abraham Lincoln before he was assassinated.

That was in 1865.

Two years later Gardner comes across Kansas with a railroad and he takes pictures.

Here's what that cliff face looks like today.

That broke off in 1995 and basically doesn't exist anymore.

This sandstone is very soft.

It erodes easily.

Nobody did anything.

It just naturally eroded away and you see that all over the place out there.

I will say and I get this question a lot from landowners because these things do erode and they do go away.

There is this kind of understandable desire to want to preserve them.

My answer is always kind of the Hippocratic Oath which is first do no harm because almost everything I've seen in terms of preservation, the odds that you're going to do more harm than good are not in your favor.

The inside of the cave there are a lot of drawings, carvings.

Here's again a geometric circular feature but the big thing I want to point out, the Pawnee depicted stars with a cross.

Not like if you and I were to draw stars we'd draw a five point star.

I think that's what's on the flag right?

It is this five point star.

Pawnee draw a cross to depict a star and we know that for certain.

I can go into how we know that but that's one of the very common carvings you see throughout these hills.

When we talked about the Pawnee and stuff, the Pawnee had star charts that had all the constellations and stuff and different names and what we call them but they recognized all this constellation and they could pass out on.

Some of the Pawnee were very celestially oriented, very oriented to the sky, particularly nighttime sky.

It's a very important part of their culture and it's depicted in these features that we talk about.

As far as dating the artwork you have to go by the artistic style because you can't get what would popularly be thought of a radiocarbon date.

There's nothing there to date.

I tell people one of the challenges is dating.

So you have to use clues, indirect clues like yeah if you have a horse it's got to be post 1541.

If you have a military uniform it's got to be post 1800.

Yeah.

Okay so here's your chance at audience participation.

So here are three human figures.

One, two, three.

What's the first thing you notice about this one here?

The hat?

Yeah.

What else?

What clothing has stripes down say the legs?

A cowboy or a cavalry.

There you go.

Exactly.

A military uniform.

Okay.

I said before we struggled to know how old these are when they were carved.

Well you wouldn't expect somebody to carve a military uniform prior to about 1800 because there weren't any military people out here prior to 1800.

So what this figure is telling you is that it's a pretty recent figure.

I mean relatively recent.

What?

225 years or less.

Okay.

And it's also an example of how you have to be careful about what you say.

Because when I wrote the captions for this book and when you do a book like this you got to send it out for what they call peer review which is they find an expert on the field and that expert reviews everything you wrote to make sure you got it right.

Okay.

I had written that this is the depiction of a soldier.

The peer reviewer wrote back and said you don't know that.

What you know is it is somebody wearing military clothing.

Just because somebody is wearing military clothing doesn't make them a soldier.

And one of the, you know I mentioned before that stars are one of the common glyphs that you see.

Another one, and you see this throughout the world, is a simple hand print.

And you don't just see it here.

It's common in Kansas.

You see it all throughout the southwest.

Actually caves in France.

Australia.

You see it everywhere in Africa.

And it is sort of a, I tell people it's kind of a identity marking.

It's like, and again I struggle for words here, but it's almost like I was here, this is mine, this belongs to me.

And I see that and I wonder if that's an order signature that we see in the world.

It's another way of.

Okay, so let's talk about these things.

There are three types.

There are the human figures and geometric figures and animals.

So this is a geometric figure, the zigzag line, that's one of them.

There is a human figure right here and then over to the right that's probably farther up than I can point, there's a bird.

So all three kinds in this photograph.

But one thing is it's sort of, the reason I really put this up here, there were more petroglyphs on this panel of rock until people decided they liked them so much they were going to cut them off and take them home.

And that's what those squares represent.

And we find those missing glyphs all over the place out there in the Smoky Hills.

So close up a little bit of that panel, I just showed you here the rectangular spots that are gone, they're missing now.

Here's that zigzag line I mentioned before and here's this human figure.

It's not very big, it's about six, eight inches tall, but it's a classic human figure as depicted in these petroglyphs.

As opposed to say some portraits of people that are looking sideways, this one looks out at you, his eyes are on you.

He's a rectangular body, that's real typical of how these things are carved, a sash around the waist.

This particular one has a head with a top knot, a long string of hair that would have come out from behind it.

And finally what's really noticeable about this one is this feature off to the side which is a lance or a spear extending from the side of this human figure.

But that is very characteristic of the kind of depiction of people that we see in these carvings in this part of the world.

Also in Ellsworth County, this location, and it's a little hard to see, but back in this jumble of boulders is this little rock overhanger cave, goes back five or six feet back there.

And then off to the right side is a boulder that has this feature on it, which I love because it is a depiction of a horse, but it's very simple.

There are only a few lines in this thing, but not only do you know what it is, but you see the horse got his ears up, his eyes open, he's alert, there's something going on.

This is not easily done.

Pawnee depicted horses in a certain way with their legs.

This is very characteristic of how the Pawnee would draw a horse.

They would show the leg down to about the knees and then they'd just turn it into a line.

Also the Pawnee very often showed the horses with bob tails.

So that's indicative probably that this was drawn by the Pawnee or carved by the Pawnee, I guess.

This is about a mile from where I grew up.

I still own a pasture about a half a mile from here.

At the base of this sandstone bluff is a spring and then they're all over that bluff.

There are all sorts of features.

One of them is a classic thunderbird.

You see this in Native American imagery all throughout the American Southwest.

But what I really want to call your attention to is this one down here because it's really just two lines.

Now there's some cross hatching on the tail and there's some feet down here, but in effect this is two swooping lines, right?

And yet you know exactly what it is.

That is not easily done.

One other thing, Don, I will say the most common question I get in talks is how did they create these things in terms of material, which I didn't talk about in the book, basically what they used to carve these features.

And I would say the older ones are almost certainly like other rock material like chert, which is much harder, or in some cases antler or bone.

Sure.

The more modern ones you can see begin to use metal instruments, knife blades, a much finer work.

So you can watch these things evolve a little bit over time in terms of how they're constructed depending on the material they're using to create the things.

So the one of the lizard, see how broad that one is?

These are not fine lines.

These are very deeply in size lines.

That's another argument for how old I said I thought it was because I'll bet you anything that was with an antler, okay?

And not a knife.

Because not just deeper but rounded edges and a knife probably is not going to produce that.

I'll bet you anything that was done with an antler.

And I can't prove anything I just said.

All the evidence that I see, these things are very specific there.

They're for a reason.

They are where they are for a reason.

I can take you to places in Kansas landscape that look like they out of shelter hundreds of petroglyphs and there won't be any there.

A half a mile away, I still own a pasture in Rice County that has Dakota sandstone on it.

It looks perfect.

There's nothing there.

Half a mile away there's a spring and the rock is covered.

Why one and not the other?

Well, I don't really know.

But I know there's a reason.

There are a lot of these locations we didn't put in the book.

A lot of them we visited but didn't put in there.

And a lot of them we didn't visit because we could only go so far.

And then finally the royalties for the book are going to the historical society.

You probably all have a county historical society here in Goodland, right?

There's one where I grew up in Rice County.

There's one where Josh grew up in Ellsworth County.

So the royalties from the book are going to them as well as the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder, Colorado.

So we're not making any money off of this because it didn't feel right to me to do that when you consider these are really kind of sacred features of the landscape.

So like I said, some of these locations we fished there when I was a kid.

So I'd spent a lot of time around them.

But as I ran onto this book, one of the locations we went to, I saw two parallel lines that were in about 150 feet along the base of a bluff of sandstone.

I had never seen those until I started working on this book.

I looked at them and I spent probably a couple of hours following those things.

What do they mean?

I don't know what they mean.

I'm not going to hazard a guess at what they mean.

But I'm pretty sure they were part of those glyphs that we talk about and are worth looking at and thinking about.

And I see them in other places now in the pictures and I hadn't noticed them before.

So even as I worked on this book, I began to see things.

So the value of these things I think is twofold.

The one, and I've talked about this before, is a better knowledge of the landscape and the people that were here before.

But I would argue there is some very direct modern knowledge that's useful.

You really ought to keep in mind not just the history that you might know about, happen to know about what happened to natives in the West.

You ought to approach it with a point of view that these are people that have a history.

They're still here.

They've got a modern history.

They have a very vibrant culture.

They're not just defined in terms of victims.

They're defined as an important people who are still here today with their own culture yet today.

I would argue these features, in addition to their historical value, ought to inform the interaction we have.

I'd probably say, and that just doesn't apply to indigenous cultures, that probably you can make that same statement to any time you go to another part of the world.

Yeah, anthropologically they would call that a mental template, that your culture has things that way, but you don't think of the cognitive knowledge that these other cultures had all these years.

It doesn't compare it.

It can't compare.

Another thing, though, that has come up in this process.

I've got one of the locations we have in here was a rock overhang.

It was a really small defile.

Like it was four or five feet back into Kompa Boulder.

It's very dark back in here.

It was so dark that Burke, who took these photographs, had to do like a four and a half minute exposure to get enough light to get this photograph taken.

It wasn't easy to do.

What's really cool about this spot is when you go back and look at these features, it's so cramped in there, you know you're setting exactly where the person sat when they carved them.

That feeling is incredibly powerful.

So one night, down by Hutch, somebody held up their hands and said, "What was so meaningful about that feeling?"

Now, I've given this talk 50 or 60 times.

Nobody had ever asked that question, and you talk about stumbling for an answer.

I stood up there for two or three minutes, and it almost felt like something that couldn't be put into words.

Finally, it was a feeling.

One part of it was it felt like a privilege.

It really felt like I was good to do something.

Not very many people get to do.

That was cool.

But just the fact that I was in that spot was ...

I don't know what the word is that I'm searching.

I'm still struggling to put that into words, but it was so powerful that it was very moving.

It still is just as I tell you about it, because it was an experience most people are not going to get to have.

They got to have it, and it was all that was cracked up to be and then some.

I think another reason we wanted to do this book is if you were to say something about rock carvings, native rock carvings, everybody's mind would immediately go to New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, the American Southwest, maybe California, maybe other places.

They wouldn't go to Kansas.

And yet, I grew up around these things knowing they were here.

Most people didn't.

Again, in general terms, maybe my whole career has been spent trying to convince people that there's more to the Kansas landscape than folks give it credit for.

Yeah, than I-70.

Yes.

And so this is an example of, I think, an element of the Kansas landscape.

Even people who lived here all their lives don't know that it's here.

And even if they do know it, like out where I grew up, they don't know much about it.

There are stories associated with these petroglyphs that I think are really important stories to understanding this place and these people that were here first.

And yet, those stories have really seldom been told.

And you put all that together, and a lot of that was the motivation, just letting people know they're here, what we know about them, documenting a specific point in time.

It seemed to me like that story was there to be told.

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