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POCATELLO, Idaho (AP) – On the west side of town on a section of private property is a craggy mound, an 8 million-year-old formation of rhyolite, a downfault of nearby Howard Mountain.

From the slight elevation, one has a panoramic view of the valley and beyond. Nearby flows the Portneuf River.

Unlike the basalt cliffs that extend from Pocatello to McCammon and are chock-full of petroglyphs, these rocks are rough-textured and seemingly a poor canvas for artistic expression.

But hidden in the jumble of rocks and sagebrush are historic gems. Here there are several fine petroglyphs, as well as the all-too-prominent chiselings of those who came long after the original artists.

It is not known just what cultural significance this bluff held for Native Americans, but their historical footprint here was impressive. Unfortunately, much of what was once here has been hauled off or defaced.

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Paul DesFosses, 70, grew up in Pocatello. He spent many hours on the Kraft Hill site in the early 50s, sifting through the treasures it contained.

“My dad had done some of the engineering work – heating and plumbing – on the Kraft plant out there when it was built. When I was a little kid, I went out there with him. The hill was full of arrowheads and scrapers, Indian stuff,” he said. “There were a lot of (petroglyphs). The hill was loaded with them.”

To a young boy, the site provided a seemingly inexhaustible supply of riches.

“All you had to do was walk across there and you could fill your pockets in 30 minutes with all the arrowheads and scrapers and spear points you could carry,” he said.

Of course, he was not the only youngster who knew about the site’s treasures.

“Some kids had dug a hole out there – I think they were making forts. They ran into a bunch of arrowheads and these clay balls and we went out and poked around and that’s where we found five pots. The biggest pot was probably 2-foot or a little more than that across.

“They were all broken, but the pieces were all there. I picked each one of those up and put each one in a separate box so that they could be put back together. I was in the seventh grade when that happened,” he said.

Even at his young age, DesFosses knew the pots had some significance. He carted the treasures to the university to a woman in the geology department who was less than receptive.

“She was skinny as a rail and (smoked) one cigarette after another. I gave her the pots and she said, ‘Oh, these are Anasazi. You’re lying to me. You didn’t find those on Kraft Hill. They came from Arizona because they’re all Anasazi.’ And she took our big box full of little boxes and threw them against the side of her house and they stayed there.”

And the hunt for treasure was not confined solely to kids.

“About 1952 or ‘3 or ‘4, some guy was building fireplaces,” DesFosses recalled. “He went out there and hauled off truckloads of the (petroglyphs) to use in building fireplaces.”

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On a frigid afternoon, Dave Williams walks up a snowy incline to the top of Kraft Hill. Although Williams and his father, Ivan, have only owned the property for about three years, they are aware of some of the history, in part from those who knew the site well.

“One of the guys who’s always talked to me about it – he’s 80 years old now, 82. He was playing over here from when he was a little kid,” Williams said.

Williams walks to the first panel on the rock outcrop, partially obscured by sagebrush. In the late afternoon sun, the petroglyphs stand out. The biggest looks not unlike an angel, with a series of large dots encircling it like a heart. Next to it is what looks like a stylized bear’s paw. Both are in essentially the same condition as they were in the photograph from circa 1930.

Williams treks across the hill to the next boulder and sweeps the snow from it. There are numerous symbols on it, but they are overwritten or outcompeted by the initials, dates and names of subsequent visitors. Some portions of the boulder look as if they have been chipped away. Unsuccessful attempts to chisel out symbols are also evident.

He walks to the next outcrop, which again contains petroglyphs that look as they did when photographed some 80 years ago. Williams doesn’t know of any more artifacts on the hill.

“Most of them that were here are gone,” he said.

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The Kraft Hill site – it was known by that name as early as 1930 – is also well-known to those in scientific circles and those who hope to preserve what cultural items are left.

“It actually has an official site number, 10BK1,” said ISU archaeology professor Rick Holmer, noting the Smithsonian trinomial designation. “I’ve been haunted by 10BK1 since I’ve gotten here.”

Shoshone-Bannock tribal member and archaeologist Diana Yupe has also visited the site. Both she and Holmer were part of efforts that attempted to preserve its artifacts. Holmer said some talks were under way in the early to mid-80s with a Utah investment company that owned the land.

However, the company looked at the property solely as a commercial investment. It was sold, and the new owners were not interested in anyone poking around on the property.

“Efforts to deal with the subsequent landowners were disastrous,” Holmer said.

Yupe also recalls talks involving the tribe to preserve the site’s antiquities. She, too, noted that the chance of any accord fell apart. Both remember some petroglyphs of importance during their visit.

“I was the archaeologist for the tribes during that period,” Yupe said. “There were two rocks of real significance. I can’t remember the other one, but there was that one that appeared to be some kind of a drawing of a map and it kind of depicted the trade route or the migration route of the tribes.”

Holmer remembers another, which he believes may have been a depiction of the Snake River.

“When you looked at the squiggle and you looked up out onto the Snake River Plain, you could see the three buttes out there and those three buttes were also depicted on that map in some way or another and they lined up pretty well,” he said. “When you actually start comparing it (to the Snake River’s route), I don’t believe it went as far as Boise down river, but it went all the way up into Jackson Hole.

“That’s when we started thinking, well, maybe it really is a map. And what’s it for? I don’t know. Maybe teaching the kid, Well, we’re going to head up this direction and we usually go up here.’ Who knows?”

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Nicholas Clement, 29, has a Master’s degree in archaeology from ISU. His thesis involved field research documenting prehistoric rock art sites and cultural use areas in the Portneuf Gap and Mink Creek area. He has personally seen most of the petroglyphs in the region, including a hasty visit to the Kraft Hill site before the Williams family acquired the property.

In his not-exactly-authorized sortie, he failed to find any of the petroglyphs. For those petroglyphs in this area he has seen, many are in dire shape, he said.

“These things are fast disappearing. Acid rains, development, vandalism, any number of things are going through there. They’re just wiping these sites out faster than we can record them,” Clement said.

Even those looking for recreational opportunities have had an impact.

“If you go to the sunny side, particularly where a lot of the (rock) climbers go out there by Ross Park, there’s pins stuck right over the tops of petroglyphs. I just don’t even think people were aware they were there,” he said.

In Clement
“It grants some amount of maneuverability ... that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get for an 85-year-old Shoshoni man,” Clement said. “They were glad to see that somebody was taking an interest enough in it to try to learn about it and maybe document and record it in a way that brought the information back to the people of the reservation.”

Just what messages the symbols meant to convey is difficult to establish, Clement noted, and can be a politically sensitive subject. Different families bring different interpretations to the symbols, often based upon a deeply-held belief system.

“Those people that created these symbols are now long dead,” he said. “But we can try to make some reference to the cognitive landscape and see if we can figure out through archaeological evidence what was going on out there. But as far as trying to pin down exact translations, that’s difficult.”

As complicated as interpretation is the dating of the carvings. Even if other artifacts that can be dated are found nearby, that is no guarantee the site was not used for hundreds or thousands of years prior to the last use by aboriginal peoples, Clement said.

There have been attempts to try to date the carvings by dating the lichens the cover the rocks, but the method has proved inconsistent.

“What you’re seeing in the petroglyphs is actually the color of the stone, and the surface is the patination,” Clement said. “Its oxides from rain and rust and weathering. Patination rates are extremely different from one rock to another.”

The methods used to inscribe the rocks is better known, thanks to the original artists having left pecking and finger stones near their works at other sites. Clement, a flint knapping enthusiast, has experimented with trying to etch the rocks using a pecking stone.

“I have tried to do some pecking and it’s exceptionally difficult,” he said. “There is an amount of skill that was involved in that that has certainly been lost, I would say. It’s very time-consuming.”

Although the messengers have long since departed, Clement sees the sites as vibrant outposts.

“These places aren’t dead. They’re very much alive,” he said. “Regardless of what we think is there or lost as with regard to Native American epistemologies or knowledge about these sites, they’re still very important sites and they require a lot of respect from people outside and within the Native American communities.”

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Diana Yupe has a similar message, albeit one that encompasses both her people’s history and beliefs, and her profession as an archaeologist. Standing next to a boulder carved with numerous petroglyphs by her ancestors, she looks out over the Portneuf River valley and beyond.

“We had the run of the place, and we just left all of our home sites, all of our history there, when we were removed,” she said. “From our perspective, those symbols are sacred to us. What was written by our ancestors is our history, is our future. There’s a meaning that was significant between the maker and the Creator, and the meaning of what was happening at the time.

“That message is so important because it
She places her hand on the boulder, looking at the figures carefully placed there by other, ancient hands, before looking to the surrounding rocks that her ancestors frequented.

“They’re here right now,” she said. “I can tell. Right now.”