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Arrowheads are his passionBy Bill RedekopStaff ReporterBOISSEVAIN — THE story of BUI Moncur is that he never looked where he was going.Ever since he was 14 years old and found a beautiful Indian spear point on his dad’s farm, Moncur has had trouble keeping his head up.“My dad said I never drove the cultivator straight anymore because I u'as always looking at the ground,” said Moncur, 86.Called a Scottsbluff, the spear pointproved to be 9,500 years old and is made of flint found along the Knife River in North Dakota.Today, Moncur has compiled the biggest private collection of Indian arrowheads in the province, some 3,000 projectile points,” as paleontologists like to call them.They are on display at the Moncur Gallery in Boissevain.The gallery is part of a drive to showcase this area’s rich history. Artifacts abound here because it became ice-free more than 2,000 years earlier than the rest of the province in the last Ice Age.Moncur found all his arrowheads and hide scrapers in farmers’ fields. The arrow-heads are churned to the surface when farmers till the soil.I would go 10 to 15 miles on a Sunday,” he recalled. ‘‘The 1930s (when frequent wind storms blew off farmers’ topsoil) w-as the time to find arrow-heads. Oh boy, that was good picking.”The most common type of arrowhead in Manitoba is made of Knife River flint, a kind of reddish-ebony stone that breaks evenly and keeps its edge.Moncur’s oldest arrowhead is a12,000-year-old Clovis point made of obsidian, a glasslike, black volcanic rock found in Yellowstone Park in Wyoming.Like the Knife River flint, obsidian was obtained by aboriginal people in this area through trade for buffalo hides and pemmican.“It’s phenomenal, Michael Dobson, author of Projectile Points of Southern Manitoba, said of Moncur’s arrowhead collection.I was privileged to meet him last year. I think he’s collected just about every artifact there is.”
Newspaper Details
Brandon Sunday Free Press
Brandon, Manitoba, CA
Sun, Aug 04, 1996
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Jessi-Lynn R.
CA 23 Feb 2024
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