DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker at Lake Theo tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some stories start with a headline and a dateline. This one starts with a shoreline — and a whole lot of silence stretching back twelve thousand years.
Lake Theo sits in Briscoe County, named for a former landowner by the name of Theodore Geisler. Quiet place. Pretty place.
The kind of place where the water lays still and you'd never guess what's been sleeping underneath it all this time. The first hint came in 1965. Stone tool fragments, turning up on the shores of Lake Theo.
Curious enough. Then 1972 rolls around, and there are more. Now people are paying attention.
So in 1974, proper archeological testing begins — and what they find changes the whole complexion of this quiet lake. Beneath the surface, down four feet into the earth, there is a campsite. A bison butchering and processing area.
And the tools of the people who worked it: projectile points, scraping tools, the kind of instruments that tell you exactly what kind of business was being conducted here. Hard, serious, survival business. And the bones.
Over five hundred of them, from an extinct type of bison. Not the bison you'd see wandering the Panhandle plains today — something older. Something gone from this world long before anyone thought to write anything down.
The dating places all of this squarely in the age of Folsom man. Between ten thousand and twelve thousand years ago. Let that settle for a moment.
Ten thousand years. Twelve thousand years. Before towns, before roads, before Theodore Geisler ever set foot on this land and lent it his name — people were here.
Hunting here. Sitting around fires here, probably right where that water laps today. And why here?
Well, the marker has a theory worth hearin'. Beneath Lake Theo, buried now under all that water, lie the old ponds of Holmes Canyon. Those ponds probably attracted prehistoric men to this area.
Think about that. The bison needed water. The hunters needed the bison.
And Holmes Canyon had ponds. The water that covers those ponds now is the same water that revealed their secret — stone by stone, shore by shore, starting back in 1965. Lake Theo looks peaceful.
It has always been peaceful. But peace, out here in Briscoe County, has got a very, very long memory.
What the marker says
Stone tool fragments were discovered in 1965 and 1972 on the shores of Lake Theo, named for former landowner Theodore Geisler. Archeological testing in 1974 revealed a campsite and bison butchering and processing area dating back to the age of Folsom man, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. Projectile points and scraping tools were found at a depth of four feet, along with over 500 bones from an extinct type of bison. Ponds in Holmes Canyon, now covered by Lake Theo, probably attracted prehistoric men to this area. (1978)