Loren Eiseley: scientist-poet haunted by ancient ghosts

By Gary Raham
Science Writer and Illustrator

I can't recall exactly when I encountered the writing of Loren Eiseley, but he conjured the past with sentences so elegantly crafted that I immediately became a fan.

He was more than just a wordsmith. As a practicing anthropologist, he made critical discoveries that expanded our knowledge of people and cultures that dissolved with the melt water of the last ice age.

When I moved to the Fort Collins area in the 1970s, I was delighted to learn that his eye first noticed the finely crafted Folsom point embedded in the vertebra of an extinct giant bison--graphic proof that over 12,000 years ago artisan-hunters of the first caliber felled giant animals where we now park our Subarus and build Walmarts.

In 1924, District Court Judge Claude C. Coffin and his son found unusually crafted arrowheads at a location that would eventually be named after the owner of the property, William Lindenmeier Jr. The thin, tapered points made from jaspers and chalcedonies sported delicately fluted edges and variously shaped bases framing a grooved central blade. They might have been called Lindenmeier Points if the discoverers of similar artifacts near Folsom, N.M., had not published their findings first.

Claude and his brother Roy, a geologist at the then Colorado State College, collected and described material for several years. In 1930, Dr. E. B. Renaud of the Department of Anthropology of Denver University declared that the artifacts found by the Coffins closely resembled the New Mexico Folsom points. Between 1935 and 1940 the Smithsonian Museum was invited in to work the site. Eiseley made his historic discovery in 1935.

Eiseley believed in what he did, but with reservations. In his autobiography, "All the Strange Hours," he said: "Men should discover their past. I admit to this. It has been my profession. Only so can we learn our limitations and come in time to suffer life with compassion."

But he went on to say, "I now believe that there are occasions when the earth tells our story just as well, when the tomb should remain hidden, the dead man masked in jade be allowed to lie sleeping at the temple's heart."

Eiseley, the son of a deaf mother and salesman/part-time Shakespearian actor father, tumbled into his academic career in an unusual way. He acquired tuberculosis as a young adult and spent time improving his health while caretaking some property near Death Valley, Calif. He had little money and spent at least a few weeks as a hobo on freight trains that traversed the American West.

Finally, in 1925, he decided he wanted to go to college, but money forced him to pursue that ambition in fits and starts. He finally acquired the credits for an undergraduate degree in 1933. His academic prowess earned Eiseley a scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania, and there he met a kindred spirit in teacher Frank Speck.

"In return (for helping you) he wanted very little," Eiseley said of Speck, "an exclamation over a rare fern, something in the way of beliefs shared as though by two men who sat before a brush shelter in the flickering dark of a campfire..."

So, in 1935, he found himself hunched over the remains of an ancient Paleo-Indian kill site, admiring the skill of someone who "had loved his instrument and so embellished it / that a man centuries away would finger the stone lovingly, / momentarily forgetting its purpose / in the greater glory of art..."

In 1972, in a collection of poems called "Notes of an Alchemist," Eiseley expressed his reservations about the Lindenmeier discovery. In a poem titled "Flight 857," he remembers the discovery as he is flying into Denver during a blizzard. He wrote,

"I know now
it should never have been
resurrected
any more than these wheels and
wings and electronic voices
should ever again be lifted
from oblivion.
I hope they do not find us:
The point should remain in the vertebra,
the offering by the dead child in the cave,
the pterodactyl in the slate,
the poet in the lost book,
the singer as song in the grass.
Why must we usurp
the autumn leaf's prerogative
or the cancellations of
running water
or the erasures of the dust?
Like the hunters, we will leave deadly slivers of glass
where they left flint,
the metal will oxidize.
We will be dangerous if found
by anything wiser
than a field mouse."

The Lindenmeier site now resides on the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area. An observation point overlooks the area where, on July 11, from 10 to 11 a.m., I will do a presentation about the discoveries made there, along with information about Eiseley's contributions. Join me if you get the chance--or look up some of Eiseley's other work, including "The Immense Journey" (1957), "The Firmament of Time" (1960) and "The Unexpected Universe" (1969).