unclemac
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This next story is a story of two...
The basin where I have been finding these bottles is not ten miles as the crow flies from the furthest point north that William Clark made it to on the Pacific coast in 1805. The area at the time was a kind of Indian metropolis of sorts’, lots of villages, lots of trade, abundant year-round food sources…this was before disease wiped out entire bands and left villages empty. The actual basin wasn’t a village but rather, as locals tell it, (and by locals I mean descendants of the original Chinooks), this spot was a meeting place between four villages for trade, gossip, meetings and the like. It has a year-round fresh water source, is sheltered from waves and can be accessed by canoe or on foot. When the area was settled this spot remained popular as a gathering, picnic and, from what I have heard, barter spot. I have found trade beads here; in fact I have found the EXACT type of very distinct beads that have been excavated from Lewis and Clark’s “Fort Clatsop”. I have also heard stories that a blacksmith would set up his forge on the beach and practice his trade. I believe this to be true too as I have found handmade copper blacksmithing tools here. Like this soldering iron…
Anyway since the history of this piece of beach seems to be social….some of the bottles I find seem to have a “recreational” function.
I went back to the basin a few weeks after my fifth bottle pretty much assuming my luck had run out. Sure enough I found my usual pocketful of agates, bullets, coins, marbles etc...but no bottles. So I got back into my pattern of long all day beach walks and started in on scouting for other stuff...found some floats, some this, some that. The weather had moved into spring and there was a lot of glorious 15 minutes of sun mixed with miserable 15 minutes of rain and hail on and off for a month or two. This was also when the tsunami stuff from Japan was starting to show up along with a lot of "not Japanese but still east Asian" stuff that rode the tide with it. (But this is a different story). Anyway over the (probably) next two months I pulled right out of the clay...not a foot or two from where my son found the very first "Beggs" bottle, these two old wine bottles. Notice the rolled in the mold necks, no seam, lack of embossing and the really, really deep punts. I gotta wonder where they came from and what exactly was in them.
The basin where I have been finding these bottles is not ten miles as the crow flies from the furthest point north that William Clark made it to on the Pacific coast in 1805. The area at the time was a kind of Indian metropolis of sorts’, lots of villages, lots of trade, abundant year-round food sources…this was before disease wiped out entire bands and left villages empty. The actual basin wasn’t a village but rather, as locals tell it, (and by locals I mean descendants of the original Chinooks), this spot was a meeting place between four villages for trade, gossip, meetings and the like. It has a year-round fresh water source, is sheltered from waves and can be accessed by canoe or on foot. When the area was settled this spot remained popular as a gathering, picnic and, from what I have heard, barter spot. I have found trade beads here; in fact I have found the EXACT type of very distinct beads that have been excavated from Lewis and Clark’s “Fort Clatsop”. I have also heard stories that a blacksmith would set up his forge on the beach and practice his trade. I believe this to be true too as I have found handmade copper blacksmithing tools here. Like this soldering iron…
Anyway since the history of this piece of beach seems to be social….some of the bottles I find seem to have a “recreational” function.
I went back to the basin a few weeks after my fifth bottle pretty much assuming my luck had run out. Sure enough I found my usual pocketful of agates, bullets, coins, marbles etc...but no bottles. So I got back into my pattern of long all day beach walks and started in on scouting for other stuff...found some floats, some this, some that. The weather had moved into spring and there was a lot of glorious 15 minutes of sun mixed with miserable 15 minutes of rain and hail on and off for a month or two. This was also when the tsunami stuff from Japan was starting to show up along with a lot of "not Japanese but still east Asian" stuff that rode the tide with it. (But this is a different story). Anyway over the (probably) next two months I pulled right out of the clay...not a foot or two from where my son found the very first "Beggs" bottle, these two old wine bottles. Notice the rolled in the mold necks, no seam, lack of embossing and the really, really deep punts. I gotta wonder where they came from and what exactly was in them.
