Today I visited the Pictograph Caves, a state park with prehistoric paintings just south of Billings, Montana. Boy was I disappointed.
This is what I came to see:
And this is what I actually saw:
The caves in this park contain evidence of habitation 4,500 years ago. A detailed archaeological survey and excavation took place between 1938 and 1941, at which time the project was abandoned due to the start of WWII. Finds here have included Eskimo harpoons, arrowheads, old cookware, more than 30,000 other artifacts, and even the graves of nine individuals.
But it’s been horribly taken care of. First, it was under the Montana Highway Commission, and tens of thousands of people traipsed through. Then, in the mid-1900s, it was under the jurisdiction of the City of Billings, which couldn’t protect it. Kids in the 1950s and 1960s had campfires in the caves, littering them with trash and painting graffiti over the cave drawings.
To fix this, workers from the city sandblasted the walls to clean them. Can you guess what happened?
That’s right. They sandblasted off much of the ancient art. Oh, bureaucracy.
Now, it’s a state park with better protection. But it’s sad how much has been lost. And how little is left to see.
I came because I feel this is probably some of the earliest religion in America. Other than the standard paintings of elk and buffalo, there are paintings that hint at beliefs of how the world operates and why we’re here – the basic questions of religion. Like these images of paintings that were there before the destruction of the caves:
No one knows what they mean, but I like to think of them as religious. They certainly inspire me to dream up stories about what they mean.
Here are some close-ups of drawings that I could make out on the walls, first of some men:
And of some rifle-looking things:
This is what I found most interesting about the caves. American Indian tribes such as the Crow frequented these caves as late as the 1800s, although they probably didn’t live in them like the people who drew these paintings thousands of years ago. Here’s a sign which details some of the history of the cave, with the layers that were excavated to reveal the images:
If you look closely, you’ll see that 500 A.D. to 1750 A.D. is labeled “Late Prehistoric.” I know that prehistoric simply means that it’s before the time of written history, and many American Indian tribes didn’t write things down, but I wonder if they’d like to be called “prehistoric.” Something seems wrong here.
Anyhow, as I was leaving the caves, I passed this little forested grove that stood out in its beauty against the barren, windswept hills of Montana. I thought to myself “If fairies existed, here is where they’d be.”:
