About midnight on August 27, 1908, a disaster struck Folsom, NM, described in La Epoca newspaper as, 'the most destructive flood ever witnessed by the people of Folsom'.
Folsom's website has the newspaper's account of the cataclysm:
'Vivid and continuous lightning soon developed and the unbroken background of solid gray cloud underneath a black and rolling mass of upper lining revealed the evolution of a most extraordinary and terrific battle of the elements. The near approach of this…was heralded by the lowing of cattle, the barking and howling of dogs, and the fluttering chirp of birds from their roosts among the willows.'
After a cloudburst upstream, a river swollen with debris burst through the town. A total of 17 people were killed, and many buildings washed away. What had been a settlement of 800 would never fully recover.
But the flood led to a discovery that intrigued an extraordinary local man, and would eventually lead to a profound shift in humankind's understanding of its own history.
George McJunkin lived and worked on Crowfoot Ranch, near Folsom. Born a slave in Texas in the 1850s, he had moved west working as a cowboy on the cattle drives of the late 1800s. Historians estimate that during that period, of about 35,000 working cowboys, about a quarter were African-American.
According to a book about him by Franklin Folsom, McJunkin became literate by teaching children to ride in exchange for reading lessons. He collected crystals, rocks and bones. He studied the weather and, with a telescope, the stars. In Folsom, he rose to be a ranch foreman.
After the flood, McJunkin was riding in Wild Horse Arroyo, about ten miles from Folsom, when he saw huge animal bones sticking out of the earth, exposed after rushing water washed away layers of soil that had been covering them.
"He knew enough about animal anatomy to realize that these were highly unusual bones, and he noted the place where those were found," said archaeologist Steve Nash of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. "And then, for the next 14 years, tried to get friends and colleagues interested in going out to see the site."
McJunkin did not live to see it happen. But after his death in 1922, a blacksmith named Carl Schwachheim from Raton, whom Folsom writes McJunkin had told about the site while getting a wheel fixed, went with friends, including banker Fred Howarth, to Wild Horse Arroyo and found gigantic bones.
Schwachheim, too, collected bones and fossils and kept a diary of observations of nature (he also had a fountain featuring elk antlers in his front yard). He took some of the mysterious, massive bones with him from the site.
In 1926, according to a book about the site by David J. Metzer, Howarth and Schwachheim traveled to the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver and met the museum director, later shipping him some of the bones.
Harold Cook, a paleontologist at the museum, identified them as a previously unknown species of bison. He traveled to Folsom to excavate the site himself, with help from Schwachheim among others.
They were looking for museum quality skeletons of ice age mammals, and found them. But on one July day in 1926, they also found in loose soil a projectile point, the tip of a weapon made by a human. Schwachheim sketched and described it in his diary. "It is broken off nearly square & we may find the rest of it. I sure hope we do," he wrote.
The team sent a message to museum director Jesse Figgins, who told them to look carefully for artifacts in situ, among the bones. Finally, the carved rock that came to be known as a Folsom point was found between two bones in 1927.
That discovery brought several paleontologists and archaeologists to the site, and after much study it was concluded that, as the archaeologist Steve Nash puts it, "Yep, that's evidence that human beings were present in North America with ice age mammals. So that's the importance of the Folsom site."
Because scientists agreed that the stone objects (more were later found) and the bones came from the same era, the site showed that Native Americans had lived alongside these huge mammals, thousands of years earlier than anyone had previously realized.
Though McJunkin didn't find the projectiles himself, Nash said his discovery was key.
"What George McJunkin gave us was a segue, a license, a link to a pre-Colombian past," he said.
McJunkin's life, leading from slavery to success to a place in history, is a reminder of the important role of Black cowboys in the region.
"There's a long history of enslaved people tending cattle," said Ronald Davis, curator of American History at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas, where he co-curated an exhibition about Black cowboys.
During the Civil War, many Texan cattle ranches were primarily worked by enslaved people as white workers joined the fighting. And after Emancipation, skilled formerly enslaved cowboys looked for work, just as ranchers sought to drive huge herds up to lucrative markets further north.
"And so once the first cattle drive starts in 1866, you need people to go do that," said Davis. "And formerly enslaved men are already trained to go do it. So it becomes a place for them to get a job and make money.
They traveled all over the West. The first book of cowboy song lyrics was begun after the author overheard Black cowboys singing around a campfire in Eastern New Mexico. But they are not just a historical phenomenon.
"There's still a lot of Black cowboys in Texas, and Oklahoma as a matter of fact," said Davis. He grew up in Massachusetts but moved to Oklahoma as a young man. The first time he went to a majority Black rodeo, he was invited to sit with one family having sweet tea and barbecue.
"They're telling me about growing up on ranches and riding horses," Davis remembered. "And I remember at one point, I asked them,'How long have your family been cowboys and ranching?' And they said, 'since before the Civil War'. It blew my mind and I never really forgot that."
Now, Davis is working on a PhD about Black cowboys. He says awareness of the history is growing in the wake of movies like The Harder They Fall, which was loosely based on the life of Nat Love, who wrote an autobiography of his exploits, and was filmed in New Mexico.
Alongside growing awareness of the diversity of American history has come bitter nationwide debate about what parts of history people should learn.
"I think it's because people have decided that they don't want to see African American history as American history," said Davis. "It's just another lens to view what it means to be an American and when people understand that, then there's really nothing contentious about it."
For many modern African American cowboys, their history is a source of pride.
"It's like a story that only some people learn about and others just walk on kinda in oblivion," said Kevin Woodson, who announces for the Cowboys of Color rodeo.
He includes McJunkin's story as one of half a dozen historical Black cowboy tales he draws inspiration from.
"Oh, absolutely inspiration," he said. "Not just in the area of cowboying but, you know, Black people have contributed so much to America."
