In November of 1990, Dave Wasion made the discovery of his life. Wasion, animal warden for the city of Zion, has, by his own account, searched for Indian relics for many years. He had come across an old newspaper article about the discovery of mammoth bones in Kenosha County in the 1920s and ’30s, so he consulted with Dan Joyce, senior curator and archaeologist at the Kenosha Public Museum, and went to the Kenosha County Historical Society in search of more information. An intern mentioned there was a box of mammoth bones in storage, so they went to take a look.
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However, the three had very little information about the origin of the bones. They had been found in a field many years before, but the historical society had not kept precise records. Joyce remembered that there was a map at the museum of another area where several mammoth bones had been discovered during some ditch digging. He suggested they excavate that site, on a farm, for further evidence of mammoth hunting. The three secured a Department of the Interior grant and began excavating in the spring of 1992.
Excavation of this and other “kill sites” on the Schaefer farm took two summers. Early in the process, Schaefer and John Hebior, a neighbor, approached Wasion, Joyce, and Overstreet. Schaefer handed Joyce a large, weathered bone and said slyly, “Is there anything interesting about this?” It turned out to be another mammoth femur, which Hebior’s son had found 15 years earlier and kept lying around his barn. So in the summer of ’94 David Overstreet returned to supervise the excavation of the Hebior farm.
A full-scale reproduction of the Hebior mammoth skeleton will be placed on permanent display this September when the new Kenosha Public Museum opens for business. Joyce has spent most of the past six years working on the new museum, which is being constructed on the site of Kenosha’s old lakefront Chrysler plant. The museum’s “walk through time” exhibit traces the development of life in the region from 440 million years ago, when southern Wisconsin was a shallow tropical sea, through the age of fishes, of dinosaurs, and, of course, the Ice Age and the age of mammoths. The Hebior skeleton and a re-creation of the Schaefer bone piles, complete with real bones, anchor the display.
