A Kansas story too big to bury: Etzanoa and the scholar who won't quit

Yahoo

11-05-2025

Donald Blakeslee, who sometimes suffers the slings and arrows of fellow scientists, has yet another dazzling Native American story to tell about the ancient Quivira culture that he says was central to much of North America north of Mexico.
Some might say it rewrites our ancient history.
And some scientists wonder whether he's making stuff up. And how that's really bad for science.
Yet every time he tells the story to news organizations — each time with more dazzling detail — the stories draw tens or even hundreds of thousands of page views.
People like it, even when scientists whirl their slings.
Something is going on here.
And it isn't only about science or accuracy. It's about us.
That's what this story is about: How we crave stories. And boy, how we do like to argue about them.
And how many scientists don't get that.
They are in trouble now.
Scientists are mostly lousy storytellers — at a time when thousands of them are getting fired.
Rolfe Mandel, a geoarchaeologist from the University of Kansas — and a fierce Blakeslee critic — says most scientists for centuries now have stayed comfortably inside ivory towers. 'And that's bad for science, too.'
'We need scientists to do a better job of explaining what we do.' Mandel said. 'And we need them to use language anybody can understand.'
'I'm really worried about this.'
He should be. Our attention spans have shrunk, even while stories true or false hypnotize our imaginations.
Anyway: I'm about to tell you why Blakeslee thinks he's telling an astonishing story. And why he says it's real.
I'll tell you why other scholars think he's giving us what Mark Twain used to slyly call 'stretchers.'
I'll tell you why we should care about an octogenarian scholar who apparently enthralls us so much.
And I'll stick up for Don a bit.
You'll see why.
And judge for yourself.
'Oh, the Don Blakeslee story again,' Mandel said. 'The story that won't go away.'
Blakeslee is a semi-retired anthropologist from Wichita State University. He's polite, soft-spoken most of the time, and able-bodied enough to climb up and down archaeological dig pits even with the achy knees that remind him that he's 82.
The Quivira culture in his telling lasted roughly from 1400 to 1700, mostly in central and southern Kansas. They were direct ancestors to the 3,000-member Oklahoma-based Wichita tribe, which provided its name to our city.
He prompted this latest story when he called me in mid-April. He was preparing a presentation for the Society for American Archaeology when they met April 23-27 in Denver. 'I think what I've got now will set them pretty far back in their chairs.'
He's told the story several times to The Wichita Eagle, each time with more detail, more evidence. 'This time,' he said, 'There are going to be so many source citations and footnotes that people will have difficulty getting through them all.'
His big reveals this time build on what he's asserted before: That the Quivira culture was huge (200,000 people) and created a vast, highly sophisticated trading network across North America that made them critically important across the lands.
They hauled goods and brought gifts to communities hundreds of miles away. And people from other tribes hauled goods and brought gifts to them. ('Gifts were important; they were not capitalists,' Blakeslee said). Some of this trade might have been done at the family-size level. Some was larger. Goods were carried out on foot with men and sturdy dogs dragging travois. They exported lots of bison robes and bison rawhide. Quivira's size and reach made it the biggest and most active in what is now the U.S. 'London only had 50,000 people then,' Blakeslee noted.
Much of what he says might trigger adrenal glands all over North American anthropology.
For example, how he's basing his new interpretations on centuries-old journals and reports written by Spanish conquistadors (and a few French guys), who traveled North America hundreds of years before Thomas Jefferson dipped quill into inkwell and scribbled the Declaration of Independence.
Modern scholars have too often discounted those documents, he said, in part because the conquerors often discounted what indigenous people told them. 'They thought the native religion was the religion of the devil, and therefore they were all liars,' Blakeslee said. But scholars also discounted the old papers because they thought the Spanish were exaggerating things themselves.
The reason this culture grew so enormous, Blakeslee said, (trigger warning, all ye anthropologists) was that the Quivira trading network grew from a sudden and anxious need for more bison hide all over North America. The resulting coast-to-coast network and hefty hunting efforts were so sophisticated that they employed professional interpreters and planning so thoroughly that women planted supply depots (i.e. gardens) along trails to hunting territory.
His research has led him to conclude that the Quivira innovated how to talk with people who could not understand Quiviran. There were bilingual and multi-lingual Quivirans, he said. And there are hints, he said, that they employed some professional translators using a tongue that many other translators across the land could understand.
They used their specialty language, Blakeslee said, as a continental lingua franca in the same way that French, German, Italian and British Medieval people used Latin to talk with each other. Today, the world with its 6,000 languages uses English for the same purpose.
Those translators, he said, spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, whose culture lay an eyebrow-raising 1,500 miles south of the Quivira in what's now Mexico City.
Assertions like these get scholars like Susan Vehik and Mandel metaphorically hopping up and down.
'Don as a scientist has a habit of putting his carts well past a mile ahead of his horses,' said Vehik, a long-respected Oklahoma-based archaeologist who has known and occasionally compared notes or worked with Blakeslee for going on 60 years. 'He does this, and then I and other scholars hang our heads and whisper: ' 'Oh, Don!' '
'A lot of what he says is true,' she said. 'They probably did reach a population that large. They likely had a trade network, as he says.
'But I wonder sometimes where he got it.'
But along with this criticism, there's this twist:
Archaeologist Holly Pittman gets blunt about scholars bopping on Blakeslee.
'Unless they believe he is lying, making up evidence, and completely misconstruing what the ancient situation was, they need to reflect on what their agenda is.'
I'll get to Don's tale shortly.
'That crazy story,' Mandel calls it.
But first:
Mandel is renowned for advancing knowledge about the First Americans.
No one ever whupped on Mandel for telling tall tales or 'stretchers.' And no one can argue that he's a poor storyteller. He's been featured in many documentaries about the first people to cross from Siberia into North America, possibly as early as 25,000 years ago.
Moreover, he's dug in pits all up and down the lower Walnut River, right where Blakeslee said 20,000 Quivirans lived in a town they called Etzanoa.
I first heard about Blakeslee's slings and arrows when Mandel and I spoke eight years ago, right after he saw the first big Blakeslee reveal about a vast Quivira Plains culture. It was in a story I wrote for The Wichita Eagle in 2017. 'Great story,' Mandel said. 'But parts of it seem fact-free. That's bad for science.'
This stings — you can see a flicker of disappointment on Blakeslee's face when he hears about it. But there's no contempt for him in this story from Mandel or Vehik. Just a little side-eye. 'He's a good guy,' Mandel said.
And: Both Mandel and Vehik said they would work with Blakeslee on anthropology projects again, as they have worked with him before. Much of what he's done in 60 years of climbing into dig pits and interpreting broken pottery has been verifiably solid work.
'And he's a not-bad storyteller. That's important,' Mandel said. 'I just wonder sometimes — where is he getting some of his stuff?'
Vehik, a fierce critic, has solid Etzanoa cred herself: Blakeslee says she's known among scientists as the archaeologist who studied old maps, turned one map around in a different direction, and so made a breakthrough in showing where Etzanoa actually was.
'A lot of what Don says is true,' she said. 'Some of it is evidence-free.'
'He always acts like his newest find is the biggest thing … but it's often something that somebody else has previously advanced. He makes it sound like he's the one who discovered it all — and that tends to piss people off. He's been called out on this before.
'We talk,' she said. 'Sometimes we're quite in agreement. Other times, it's just like, 'Where the hell did you get that idea?' '
A number of scholars studying Plains history share that opinion, she said.
Even the Wichita tribe has doubts.
'Until he gives us hard evidence, I'm going to be skeptical,' said Terri Parton, the tribe's past president. 'There's no point in telling a story about our people if it turns out that it isn't true.'
But it's time to stick up for Blakeslee now.
Holly Pittman can sound blunt. When I called the other day, her first words were: 'Okay. Talk.'
Scientists thump hard on each other. It can seem as ruthless as trash talk you see on social media, only with no F-bombs and lots more fancy words. When she heard that Vehik and Mandel whupped on Blakeslee here, she pushed back.
Pittman, based at the University of Pennsylvania, is a star archaeologist. She's dug up stuff from some of the world's earliest civilizations — in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. She's also dug at Uruk, one of the older cities on the planet.
Even before I told her what the beef with Blakeslee was about, she volunteered that there's always been tension between archaeologists, (like her, Vehik and Mandel), who dig things up and interpret, and anthropologists like Blakeslee, who study those same artifacts but do more dot-connecting, who study textual sources a lot more. Which, by the way, is what Blakeslee said he's done with much of his Quivira story.
Much of Blakeslee's more recent work relies on his new studies of reports written by the old Spanish and French explorers. In other words, 'texts.' But those who dig and don't rely on texts as much, Pittman said, 'tend to be very hesitant to take textual sources at face value.
'I work in a part of the world where we do also have textual sources which describe physical things that are long gone. And there's always a tension between the people who study the texts and the people who do the material culture.
'Maybe part of the problem they have with Don is that (scientists) like him are notoriously, notoriously slow at delivering papers with the evidence. So, maybe Don has been slow about publishing. Maybe he has it, but hasn't yet put it all out there.'
In March of 2024 Pittman's life partner, Gary Hatfield, a philosophy professor also based at Penn, brought Pittman to his hometown of Wichita.
They made a bee-line for Blakeslee. 'I think I had read his story in an alumni magazine,' Hatfield said. Blakeslee took them on the 66-mile ride to Arkansas City/Etzanoa.
She studied Etzanoa artifacts, asked a lot of questions, heard Blakeslee's theories — and that they are backed by such things as his extensive recent connect-the-dots studies of old explorer accounts.
'And I'm absolutely convinced,' Pittman said.
'He's trying to get this story out there so that there can be a richer understanding of the deep culture of this country, right?' Hatfield said. 'So he's trying to make this story available to the regular people. And that, I think, is laudable.'
About the study of texts, Pittman said. 'It's tricky.'
Some scholars take the histories of the Greek historian Herodotus 'absolutely seriously,' she said. 'Others don't.
'Or the Bible. Some people say the Bible must be true in absolutely every fact. But there are generations of scholars who say it's all metaphorical.'
Sorting this out, she said, 'requires somebody who is willing to take both lines of evidence seriously … and let one inform the other. What I think Blakeslee really did was take the new transcriptions of the Spanish texts and read them very carefully and draw on his deep knowledge of that landscape.'
But there is a bigger picture here.
The one positive thing Mandel said eight years ago about my story about Blakeslee and Etzanoa was: 'It has a catchy headline.' Lost city found: Etzanoa of the great Wichita Nation.
But when Mandel fussed about the story, I teased him: It IS a good story. And you guys have all these great stories, but you don't tell them. You write scientific papers instead, and hardly anybody reads them because they all read like Sanskrit.
Mandel laughed. 'All true,' he said.
There's nothing bad about scientific papers, (unless those are the only stories a scientist tells). And there is genius. Those papers are the dry matches that light up scientific darkness and illuminate the way for everything from cancer breakthroughs to trips to the Moon. We have smart phones, streaming shows, digital banking, artificial intelligence, quantum physics and aluminum tubes that fly us safely around the world because zillions of scholars wrote zillions of papers.
But for ordinary people they are invisible texts written by invisible scholars. And about as readable as any cuneiform tablet written in Akkadian.
They are usually meant for tiny audiences — and shed almost no light that dazzles ordinary folk who lack Ph.Ds. They are read only by a tiny priesthood, like the one that insisted on saying the Catholic Mass in Latin long after Latin died out.
How impenetrable are these peer-reviewed papers? Here's a fun way to show it:
Roy Beckemeyer is a retired aeronautical engineer, an artist, a scientist who studied butterflies and who wrote peer-reviewed papers about dragonflies — modern and fossilized. And he's one of the better poets in Kansas — including about dragonflies.
Here's Beckemeyer writing a scientific paper about dragonflies:
In-phase flapping of the fore and hind wings was used during the yaw turn and in the following pursuit of the challenger.
And here's a bit from a poem he wrote about dragonflies:
But surely there is magic at work here.
After all, the waters contain,
with each rhythmic tap,
another and another and another
translucent, jeweled, organic watch-work
machine of infinite coiled complexity:
Scientists who write those impenetrable papers are nearly always fascinating when they talk with ordinary folk. Get them talking about their one-celled creatures or a new wheat hybrid chromosome or about the wonders of new innovations in composite materials and they can get as excited and as captivating as kids who just discovered they can torch leaves into ashes with the beam from a magnifying glass.
The bigger picture here, as Mandel is about to tell us, is that the failure of most scientists to do more than write papers is a crucial mistake. 'Most people have no idea what we do.'
'This is also bad for science,' Mandel said.
He has watched with growing alarm as the political faction running the U.S. is firing or defunding thousands of scientists from the National Weather Service, federal solar power programs, the National Institutes for Health, the Federal Aviation Administration, Health and Human Services, Medicare, Medicaid and the National Institutes for Health. Florida a few years ago passed a law banning anyone in government, including scientists, from using the phrase 'climate change.' Rolling Stone recently wrote a story about how many scientists are fleeing what was, until recently, the most innovative and scientifically significant country in the world.
Scientists, when I've asked them, mostly agree with Mandel about papers being dull for us muggles. And that they don't storytell outside their cubicles. But they point out that they all have formidable projects to research, classrooms to teach, papers to grade. Work weeks that go far past 40 hours. They have families.
But …
Many Kansas scholars/scientists got upset last year when the Kansas Board of Regents started talking seriously about killing degree programs, including some in science. (The Regents are still considering that). For my story about that for The Eagle, I interviewed scientists/scholars from Wichita State and elsewhere: Teachers of philosophy, quantum theory, ethics, history, English, astronomy, and much more. And I brought up how the danger of cuts was one more reason why they should storytell more.
But they don't.
This is puzzling. Some of their greatest heroes are a tiny minority of scholars who wrote all their scientific papers in the usual pseudo-Sumerian. But they also went on to write shelves full of wildly popular books, written often as sublime literature. Carl Sagan. Jane Goodall. Stephen Hawking. Stephen Jay Gould. Goodall still amazes millions, and the other guys do it even from the grave.
And E.O. Wilson? He studied ants and almost single-handedly created the science of sociobiology — and most of us peasants don't know or care about that.
There's no doubt that his scientific papers read like a (metaphorical) cuneiform Proto-Persian.
But he also won two Pulitzer prizes — for his writing. His books read in many passages like poetry.
'Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.'
'People would rather believe than know.'
'We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.'
Some scientists, including Mandel, pointed out that storytelling is a gift that not every scientist gets blessed with. 'If it's math you want, I'm no good, I still count on my fingers. But I can tell a story.'
'I don't have that skill,' Vehik said. 'I just don't.'
'And we are never rewarded for it,' Vehik said 'I have a good friend who wrote what I'm going to call history — he wrote popular history. Got all sorts of non-academic awards and was a popular speaker. But when his department reviewed him for promotion, they denied him. 'That's not academic research. You're just writing popular books.'
'He actually did good research, but he also wrote popular things — and 'popular' is not appreciated or rewarded in academia.'
Stories are more moving to ordinary people, Pittman said, than scientific papers written in the scholar world, all composed for 'tiny little audiences, because we all stay in our tiny little silos.'
It's Blakeslee's turn to talk.
He told his latest Quivira history while we rode the 66 miles down to Arkansas City/Etzanoa in mid-April. He drove us to a house-size dig pit situated on a human-made mound atop a hill just east of the Walnut River. From the top of the hill, 20,000 ancient Etzanoans could have seen bison or visitors or enemies from miles off.
He had already given me a flash drive that contained his Denver presentation slide show. I will interrupt the narrative here to say that the slide show presentation alone had nine pages of single-spaced and detailed citations. And in the draft copy of his upcoming book, I counted 29 single-spaced pages of citations at the end, in which he says which parts of his book information came from other scientists. There are 31 single-spaced pages of footnotes that do the same. And there are nine pages of a section he calls 'perspectives' in which he outlines what research (done by others or himself) led him to his conclusions.
He's also got a comment in the flash drive from a man from the Wichita tribe who listened in early April to a presentation Blakeslee gave the tribe — and told Blakeslee at that gathering something that blows Blakeslee away. (The presentation was videotaped, and Blakeslee transcribed what the man said):
'All this information lines up with the story that my grandmother passed on – a whole history. She says that the place in Kansas…that you could not walk it in a day. It was so big, it was so vast, and it was a cultural trade center…she said when she was little, she remembers seeing macaw feathered capes that a certain family had and how they got it was that they traded with the people down south out of Mexico. Also, she talked of having or seeing certain types of artifacts, like jewelry, that originated from the northern Plains and northern Great Lakes area, certain seashells, and also from the east and west coasts.'
That man, a member of the tribal executive committee, could not be reached for this story.
What comes next here is both cited information from his work, but also Blakelee himself talking. I will stick close to what he actually said, even though he states some things as unattributed fact, (like a storyteller would) and in other places he laces what he said with qualifiers like 'I think,' or 'likely' or 'probably.'
So consider what I just said as a blanket attribution. I'm telling this tale pretty much as he told it.
At the dig site on the day we visited, Blakelsee pointed south down the hill slope. 'We found the remains of huge barbecue pits. This hill was likely a party place, where they'd have large feasts for themselves and for visitors, some of them probably important people, ambassadors or traders from other tribes.'
Deep in the pit, he pointed to a pair of flat, sharp bison bones, 7 inches long, sticking out from brown dirt several feet below the mound top.
'This feature was probably a storage place where they'd store food and other things. They grew corn and beans. Eventually they turned it into a trash pit when they decided to leave. And just before they left, they buried two deliberately broken grinding stones, which we found here. The broken stones were their way of symbolizing how they were never coming back.'
The Quivira story is a horror at its end, he said; slave raids and smallpox killed off most of the people in the 18th century. At their nadir, fewer than 400 still lived.
Blakeslee pointed to the shapes of holes he and his fellow diggers had left intact. They likely stored food and other goods, with holes lined with hide and dried grasses to keep moisture out.
The Quivira had a vibrant culture: In a Rice County cow pasture lies the 160-foot-long image of a serpent swallowing an egg, located only a couple of miles from ancient Quivira settlements. The Quivira people cut it into the sod 600 years ago. And the Wichita tribe now owns it. When the Wichita had a gathering there to symbolize their ownership, Blakeslee gave a talk.
The Quivira believed in a mythology that encompassed the skies, the land and an underworld, Blakeslee says. Water penetrated to the underworld and was therefore sacred; water rained down to give life to their corn and beans; tobacco smoke rose to the sky, so the people could pray with the smoke.
Blakeslee's draft of the book he's writing describes the first day a Spanish explorer found Etzanoa.
On a hot August day in 1601, Blakeslee's book begins, Juan de Oñate led a little Spanish army toward a native town in southern Kansas. Warned by sentries posted on hills, warriors from the town poured forth, all in war paint with bows and arrows and shields and clubs. According to the official account of the expedition, 'they advanced, challenging us to battle and war with shouts and by throwing dirt into the air.'
'I've studied every document I could find about that expedition,' he told me.
'The locals came out to meet him as he approached the village. The bison bull was their war symbol, so the Spanish saw warriors wearing headdresses with bison horns. They started tossing dirt into the air.
'The bison bull when it gets aggravated will paw and stomp the earth like cattle do. But the bison also rakes his horns and tosses dirt in the air. I've got similar stories from the Southwest, from the Zuni and others, where that's what warriors would do when they were getting ready to fight.'
There would be a battle later. But at first, Spaniards and Etzanoans looked each other over. That evening, Quivira visitors to the Spanish camp startled the Spaniards by speaking to them in Nahuatl — the language of the Aztecs, even though Aztec culture lay 1,500 miles to the south. Oñate had a Nahuatl interpreter in his little army, so they could now talk easily. And then, nomadic natives from the south of Etzanoa, Quivira enemies, told the Spaniards that the Quivirans had a Christian hostage captured during a previous expedition.
'This was serious stuff in that day,' Blakeslee told me. 'They had to try to rescue the hostage if he was in there.
The Spaniards took six hostages the next morning, one of them an Etzanoa chief. He called out to his people: 'Leave the town, all of you.'
The Spaniards found the town deserted.They took a tour.
'What they saw left them awestruck,' Blakeslee said. Miles of clusters of houses, bunched along both banks of the Walnut River, with farm fields surrounding each cluster growing corn and beans. Evidence of a people busy as bees, turning bison hides into robes and rawhide.
Blakeslee thinks the Quivira hunted bison at industrial scale.
'They grew their own tobacco. We've found pipes, made from Kansas pipestone. The smoking was probably a bonding thing, bonding men in that way.
Cooking fires everywhere. 'People would have smelled like smoke.'
And people, thousands of them, worked at hundreds of tasks. Including preparations for what Blakeslee said was the sophisticated Quivira tactic for hunting bison on a massive scale.
'They didn't have horses, which didn't show up until late in the 1600s. They hunted on foot. And that was tricky. Bison bulls are notoriously irritable, so they could charge. Or run away.'
'What I think they did was use a whole lot of guys to come up on a herd slowly. They would get a bunch of bison to start moving in a circle, and then running in a circle, with the hunters with bows and arrows in a loose circle around them, taking aim. They might have also used fire to keep the bison hemmed in the circle.
'They would end up with dead bison scattered over a big area. Then they would butcher. They had to move fast, or the meat would spoil. When the Quivirans left their settlements and walked west to hunt, whole families came along to work. It was all hands on deck.'
All this, Blakeslee said, was done in part to feed a trading network stretching from Quivira in the center, to the Great Lakes, east to what's now South Carolina, the Deep South, deep into Mexico — and as far west as California and in Pacific waters off the Mexican peninsula of Baja.
'I've got a report from a Spanish explorer, Cabrillo, (from 1541) that says that on Isla San Martin, a tiny, uninhabited volcanic cinder cone lying just off the coast of (Mexican) Baja — they found two bison horns there. I'm thinking they were put there as part of a shrine.
'This is significant because there were . . . no bison on that far-southwest part of the continent.' Isla San Martin, by the way, is 217 miles south of the Mexican border at San Diego.
The Quivira hauled tons of bison robes and rawhide, at least as far as pueblo country in New Mexico, Blakeslee said. That round trip of more than 1,100 miles was done on foot, with dogs dragging travois loaded with goods.
'We know they had a trade network because people have found pottery shards in Kansas made in the Pueblo culture (New Mexico). We've found volcanic obsidian, blades from stone cores shaped in Mexican forms. There's a lot more evidence like that,' Blakeslee said. 'There were bison festival dances in all the distinct Pueblo cultures — even though, again, there were few bison west of the Rockies.
'What the Quivira exported were preserved bison meat, bison hides and bison rawhide, which everybody wanted because bison rawhide is tough, twice as thick as cowhide.'
He suspects that 'once a year, women would go out many miles along the hunting trails, and plant crops. So that when the people came along, they had food waiting for them.
About those translators that Blakeslee proposes:
'There were hundreds of tribes along these trade networks, speaking a lot of different languages. They had some form of sign language. But from the records, I think they had those professional interpreters, speaking the Aztec language, Nahuatl.
Blakeslee has created a map, showing the locations mentioned in 'first contact' Spanish explorer annals where expeditions ran into that rare person who spoke Nahuatl.
'In 1541 another explorer, Hernando Alarcon, who was supposed to be supporting the Coronado expedition, sailed up the Gulf of California and took a small boat up the Colorado River. Then a little ways up the Gila River.
'Well on the way, he ran into — by my count, when I went back through — five people who could speak the language of the Aztecs that Alarcon's interpreter understood, and the last one of them up here, he found at what today is Bisbee (Arizona)'
Alarcon saw warriors there carrying large, round rawhide battle shields, sturdy and hard, 'two fingers thick.'
'Alarcon asked: 'What animal is that?' And one guy proceeds to give him a really accurate description of bison.'
'Alarcon asked 'Where are the bison?'
' 'Far to the east' the guy told him. And the guy says in that place, in the summertime, the people live in painted hide tents, and in the winter time, they live in really tall houses with more than one story with a wood framework.' The man relating this to Alarcon then told him: 'I can say this because I was there.'
'Well,' Blakeslee said. 'Those are the Quivira houses.'
Another explorer, Hernando de Soto, ran into people in what is now South Carolina, who had lots of bison products, which they told him came from 'a very far country.' This is a big deal, Blakeslee said, because there were no bison at that time living east of the Mississippi River. Those same people in South Carolina led de Soto to a room filled with rawhide helmets and body armor — and the same kind of big, round bison rawhide war shields that Alarcon saw in what's now Arizona.
Blakeslee has handed his book draft to a publisher, but hasn't heard back yet.
'He STILL hasn't finished that book?' Vehik said. 'He says he's got this unfinished book every time he tells this story.'
Some people have spent years admiring Dr. Donald Blakeslee. They think of him with gratitude.
'We really like Don and what he's done here,' said Randy Frazer, the Arkansas City city manager. 'I guess we don't have the same concerns the scientists have. He really put us on the map. We still really think this whole story could do a lot of good for us.'
Frazer is not only talking about how Etzanoa is a great story, but about how he and the city have worries. A look at census records shows that Arkansas City's population of just under 12,000 has declined a couple percentage points with every census.
They need something. Tourism, for example.
Maybe based on a great story.
I'll let Mandel wrap this story up, because though he vehemently questions many of Blakeslee's assertions, he sticks up for him just a little bit, at least with what you will read next.
It's key to this story – and the power of stories.
Because, as I said, this story is more or less about us. About how funny we often are about stories, and science, and politics. About most things, really.
'I've worked (in dig pits) all up and down the Walnut River valley basin,' Mandel said. 'It's rich in artifacts. And maybe it really is what Don says it is, though I have doubts.'
'But when they were building that big (Highway 77) bypass that goes around the east side of Arkansas City, the city people down there had no use for us. 'Those $#&@% archaeologists!'
'We were getting ragged at.
'A lot.
'About getting done and getting the hell out of there. They had to call us in every time they found artifacts. And so we were slowing down their construction.
'And then Don Blakeslee comes along.
'And says, 'Oh, this is Etzanoa.'
'And after that, it was 'Oh, my God, this is really important.'
'This crazy story that Don presented.
'After that, they thought the Etzanoa story made their city look pretty cool.'
'This was really ironic to me.
'Because they all liked us well enough after that.'