By Geoffrey Sea
Chillicothe Advertiser, Sept 25, 1891. This was the initial report of the massive looting of the North Fork site. The date is non-coincidental, coming 499 years after the landing of Columbus. The looting was in preparation for the 500th anniversary “celebration” in Chicago, which wound up delayed by a year.
The so-called “flints” were actually hornstone discs from a quarry in southern Indiana, meticulously buried along the north fork of Paint Creek in Ohio in what appeared to be a burial mound. My theory is that these had been “soul carriers” — each disc imbued with the maneto of an individual to facilitate transport and burial. Moorehehead treated them like trinkets and passed them out as party favors.