Saturday, April 2, 2016

HoCo's native American Indian shelter

As you wind down Daniels Road, the path to the shelter is marked in the fashion typical for native American historical sites, namely...


Yeah, namely not at all.  Whether by accident or on purpose, there are no markings. Which was to my great surprise the same way such sites are marked out in the desert in California.  Because when they are easy to find they get tagged with graffiti or otherwise despoiled.  So maybe it's better this way...

So this is what you look for heading down Daniels Road.  This gate has a secret.  Park down the road a bit, in the small lot above Daniels Dam or just below the dam if that small lot is full.  Then walk back up to this gate and hike across the steam.  You will see a trail to your left, take it slightly uphill.  On your left you will see a big pile of rocks.


It's like every other big pile of rocks in the park, except as you get closer....



There's a hole in the rocks.  A big hole.




It's a really really big hole.  So big you can walk into it standing up. It is, in fact, an intact shelter used by native Americans for roughly 10,000 years.  This is the Camel's Den.  Until last year you could find old articles about it in the Baltimore Sun archives, but all the old links are now dead.  Those links described a series of archaeological expeditions performed at the cave decades ago.  Thousands or American Indian artifacts were collected here.  They all disappeared immediately along with all the records of the collections.  Presumably sold by unscrupulous collectors.  This is a great loss, but the shelter itself still stands.

If you walk in and look up you can still see the evidence of thousands of years of fires.  




Looking out from the inside you can see what a great shelter from the elements this would have been.  It has a natural chimney in the back that would have let smoke escape.  It's exposed only to the North, and the opening isn't so big that you would get wet if you slept in there.  On the ridge across from the stream are oaks that would have provided starch.  The forests here would have been full of game, and there were massive shad and herring runs here before the dams came with the settlers in the late 1700's.


So much history in Howard County if you go and look for it!