In Your Mind’s Eye	by David Marolf
Central States Archaeological Societies 2022 April Journal	Manchester, Iowa

1. Archaic points. Right:1 ¾ ” Turin dart point with grommet for necklace. Left: 3 ?” Hemphill point, slightly larger than the Sands of Time Hemphill. This Hemphill was previously pictured (in black and white) in the CSAJ, July 2017, page 168.

As a child I remember going with my dad and brother to visit him. As 10- and 12-year-old boys we were most impressed with some cigar boxes full of points that Uncle Ray had found in “his ditch,” as he referred to Mineral Springs Creek, and we were less than impressed with the God-awful-looking leftover stuff in a cast iron skillet on the wood cook stove. Uncle Ray lived with his two or three rat-terrier dogs and slept in an overstuffed chair. He would hike in his stream almost daily with his dogs and usually stopped, turned around and hiked back home when he got to an abandoned bridge downstream to the south. As a young collector hiking with my dad, I saw Uncle Ray’s and his dogs' tracks way more often than I saw him, but even if we didn’t find their tracks at the abandoned bridge, this is where we'd always turn around and head back downstream to go home.

As you can see, the honor system within my family was even more complex than I described in an earlier story (Arlo’s Creek—Honor Among Thieves, CSAJ, Vol. 65 No 3 July 2018). Above that old abandoned bridge was Uncle Ray’s Creek and only his! But, by the time I could drive, in the late 1960s, Uncle Ray was gone, so the whole stream, including upstream of the abandoned bridge, was fair game for the rest of the family to hike and look for artifacts.

Uncle Ray's Ditch is actually only a small portion (the extreme upper reaches) of the more extensive system called Mineral Springs Creek. This creek’s main stem is traversed by four bridges before it’s confluence with the Weldon River; the lower three you can still drive across. Mineral Springs Creek has several tributaries, and you cannot hike it and all its tributaries in a day. When I was younger the entire upper watershed of the stream was comprised mostly of hardwood forest with only a small amount of pasture and hay fields. The only row crop land was on the very lower reaches near the Weldon River where flood plains were well developed.

This topography led to almost always clean water with a streambed consisting entirely of sand and gravel, perfect to search for artifacts. Unfortunately, this is not the case today as too much of the uplands have been converted to row crops. After a rainfall the stream’s water is ...

Read the complete "In Your Mind’s Eye" column in the Central States Archaeological Societies 2022 April Journal which can be purchased on-line after March 2022