By CHRIS BENNETT June 21, 2023
Clinging to the face of a sheer, 14’ river embankment, Gauge Oehm, 11 years young, carefully clawed the soil around an outrageous Native American treasure sticking just inches out of the dirt wall, untouched by human hands for millennia. The deeper he dug—4”, 5”, 6”—the tighter the artifact’s grip.
Without warning or wiggle, the object tore loose from the dirt, and Gauge fell backward off the embankment perch and a crashed into a sleepy, 6’-deep bend of water.
Lungs pleading and legs pumping, he surfaced in mid-river and pushed toward the far bank in an odd flailing motion, arms folded inward. Bare feet crunching gravel in the shallows, Gauge scrambled onto dry ground and uncradled his arms, shaking with wonder as he turned about and lifted a massive, caramel-colored blade against a painted blue sky, and shouted triumphantly across the water: “Mommmmmmmmm.”
Behold the prize. He held an 8,000-year-old jasper masterpiece in pristine condition—11 ½” long, 2 ½” wide, and 3/8” thick. Sharing the moment from the opposite bank, his mother, Michelle Oehm, stared in disbelief. “It was unbelievable, the find of a lifetime,” she says. “No, it was the find of several lifetimes.”
Sincerely. An intrepid Kansas mother and her Johnny-on-the-spot son had just found and preserved one of the most stunning Indian artifacts of recent U.S. history. Welcome to the impossible tale of the Oehm Blade.
The Wall-Hanger Beckons
Michelle Oehm has an uncanny eye for the anomalous. Drop her on a carpet of gravel alongside a creek or river and she will pluck out an arrowhead, agate, fossil, bone, or piece of petrified wood.
Her skills were honed in childhood. “My mother used to set me down in shallow creeks as a toddler and I’d pick up random rocks for hours,” Oehm explains. “From there I started as a kid hunting stone tools and never lost the love.”
Presently a nurse practitioner, Oehm is a daughter of Marysville, Kan., an agricultural community tucked in the Jayhawk State’s northeast corner, and her husband, Todd, is a long-time employee with Landoll Company that specializes in agricultural tillage and trailer manufacturing. However, forgoing the freshly turned farm rows where the majority of hunters search for arrowheads, Oehm is a river rat, preferring to roam the waters of Marshall County.
In the early afternoon of Tuesday, June 26, 2019, Oehm, 39, piled Gauge and her daughter, Catalina, 12, into an SUV, and traded a day at home for a lifetime in the outdoors. Marshall County was at the tail-end of prolonged heavy rains, spurring Oehm away from the swollen danger at most of her arrowhead haunts and toward the safety of a lazy, gravel-lined creek. The spot was not a particularly promising honey-hole and had never coughed up many points in the past, but on a day of high water—it would do.
Arriving on private land, Oehm spilled out of the SUV, with Gauge and Catalina 20 paces ahead, already scattering into the water to swim. Walking toward the creek, Oehm cut through a heavy curtain of humidity, courtesy of 95 F compounded with a heat index over 100 F. She second-guessed the decision to hunt.
“I remember that it was clear blue skies and crazy hot. I’d never found anything in the immediate area of big significance, so I knew we probably weren’t going to be leaving with much more than a sunburn, but I truly love hunting more than finding.”
Strapped with a backpack and wearing rubber river shoes, Oehm scanned the far bank for a place to ford. Since her kids had already crossed, the die was cast. She followed behind, wading through silt above her knees—literally stuck in the mud.
“I muttered to myself, mad at the kids for crossing at a bad place, and then washed away all the heavy mud. In the awful heat, it was not a good start to the day,” she laughs.
Back in rhythm, Oehm stepped onto a rock bar and cast a slow look down the creek at a rising bank shoulder roughly 20 yards distant. Contrasted against the brown-rust of the dirt layers, she noted two parallel cavities high on the bank, both approximately 2’ in diameter, containing gray-tinted clams. The first cavity was jammed to capacity with clams; the second appeared half-full. In the moment, Oehm didn’t entirely realize the implication of the clams—she likely had located a shell midden.
A shell midden is essentially a trash heap composed of the shellfish remains of sustained occupation. Simply, the midden was a flashing red light indicating prolonged Native American presence.
“My mind was reeling,” she recalls. “The clams drew my eye to that part of the bank and I knew there was nothing natural about them.”
As Oehm’s pulse jumped, she remained hyper-focused on the bank wall, barely aware of the splashes and screams from her children playing in the creek. Eyes glued to the bank, her gaze slid 20’ downstream from the clam holes and froze at an incongruity 10’ up the wall. Difficult to distinguish against a dark mix of loamy clay, a brown-orange rock protruded out of the soil, its contours extending to a tapered point. A wall-hanger was beckoning, poking 2” out of the wall.
Steeling her emotions, Oehm hollered at her son: “Gauge. Gauge. What do you think that is up there?”
Welcome to Mayhem
He knew. He knew. Cold-nosing artifacts on northeast Kansas creeks and rivers since the age of 5, Gauge only needed a single glance at the protrusion. He knew.
The creek’s lip was a mere 8-10”, affording a tiny space between wall and water. Oehm pulled a large pocketknife with a 6” blade from the backpack and began gouging shoulder-level footholds in the bank—grips for Gauge and Catalina to access the artifact. The brother-and-sister pair scampered up the bank and began gingerly scratching and picking around the artifact, inch by inch. No dice.
Ten minutes later, the object still refused to budge. Catalina descended and Oehm took her spot. Pretzeled into position on the wall, Oehm saw the beauty up close and felt her heartbeat explode. “That’s when I got truly, truly excited. I didn’t dare to believe it was whole, but it had no give—not even a tiny bit of movement.”
Oehm used the pocketknife to meticulously chip away at compactions around the base of the artifact, while Gauge kept soft hands on the exposed blade. “Gauge is always so careful,” she explains. “Several years before this, he found an awesome bird point on a hunt, but it fell out of his pocket in a Walmart parking lot on the way home and broke. Lesson learned.”
Thoughts racing a mile a minute, Oehm patiently chipped as Gauge applied gentle pulling pressure. At 6” into the bank, along with the 2” protrusion, they realized the blade was enormous, yet it stubbornly remained rooted.
Finally, without so much as a tremor, the blade slipped the bank—the momentum startling Gauge, sending him tumbling into the creek. Gauge, along with the blade, disappeared.
“His footholds broke and down he went into the wash about 6’ deep,” Oehm describes. “He popped up and swam for the other side, then turned around and uncurled the blade off his chest, stuck it in the air like a trophy, and yelled out to me.”
“The look on his face was priceless—his eyes were as wide as silver dollars,” Oehm recalls. “Even today, I still get goosebumps remembering how much joy and wonder were in his face. He knew we had just found a piece like no other—something extraordinary—and he’d just fallen 10’ into 6’ of water, crossed the creek, and never dropped the blade. Me, Catalina, and Gauge got wrapped up in a moment we’ll never forget. Nothing can compare with how we felt right then.”
Mayhem. The instant Gauge lifted the blade, confirming its preservation and dimensions to Oehm, her adrenaline went nuclear. The nurse practitioner, renowned for emergency room mettle, lost her senses. “Everything went blurry. I can’t remember climbing down. I can’t remember crossing the creek. My first memory is standing beside Gauge examining the blade like I was in an overwhelming dream. Huge. Incredible. Gorgeous.”
Oehm, the lifetime creek walker and finder of hundreds of Native American points, was in total bewilderment. She eased the blade into the cushioned confines of her backpack, gathered her kids, and quickstepped to the vehicle. Driving away in euphoria, Oehm completely forgot about the initial clue—the telltale midden.
Exquisite
The nature of Native American artifact exposure is fickle. Here today, gone tomorrow. Stone tools surface for brief moments in time, and then are swallowed back into the earth. The odds of Oehm stumbling over a piece of such extreme beauty in superb condition were akin to a snowflake in summer. However, beyond the phenomenal visuals of the worked rock, what had she found?
“This blade is a whole different category,” Oehm notes. “We’ve found Munker’s Creek pieces that are crude, but this is something so far beyond those in craftsmanship. This piece is simply beautiful and to hold it is unbelievable. So thin, so balanced. I knew when I found I had to get information. This was something light years outside the realm of normal.”
“I had, and I have, so many questions: What is this? What did I find? What found me?”
Oehm poured through books and journals, googled for hints, sought out experts, and eventually took the piece to multiple artifact shows to glean opinions.
“There were so many kind people out there in the collecting community that helped me. The blade is made from smoky hills jasper—gem quality, and phallic in shape. It’s not local material and fits none of the known pieces in our area,” she explains. “I’m told it’s conservatively 8,000 years old. The bi-faced chipped part is shinier, indicating it may have been re-chipped, and therefore possibly resharpened by different peoples thousands of years apart. Everyone has speculations and opinions about it, and I welcome them all.”
“Nobody knows what tribe or people group it comes from,” she continues. “I personally think it was made for ritualistic use, not domestic. I often wonder who the maker was because I can’t imagine how much time and expertise it took to shape. The Smithsonian has a Kansas piece called the Gorsuch Knife found about 70 miles away that’s made of the same material, but it’s square and just not the same. The flaking, chipping and appearance are all different.”
“This piece we found is a stunner just to look at,” she adds, “but I promise, when you hold it, the blade takes your breath away. Exquisite.”
The Mystery
The shell midden is Oehm’s single regret. After returning home from the creek on the evening of the blade’s discovery, her thoughts flashed to the forgotten midden. However, the following morning, Oehm and her husband, Todd, left on a multi-day, out of state vacation.
While they were gone, Marshall County was swamped with a 5” rain. Returning from vacation, Oehm made a beeline for the creek, only to find the bank section entirely eroded—sloughed into the flow. The water below the bank spot, once a 6’-deep wash, was filled with silt. The site, briefly exposed, was gone.
“What are you gonna do?” Oehm laughs. “I’m just grateful for the opportunity to find the most beautiful blade I’ve ever imagined. I would never have normally picked that creek section. I would never have normally crossed at that spot, and I never should have seen it sticking out of the bank. It’ll always be a favorite topic of conversation for me and my kids, and we get to relive the excitement for the rest of our lives.”
The mystery of the Oehm Blade remains. “The plain truth is we don’t know much more about it today than when we found it,” she says, “and maybe that adds to the magic.”
And the value? The big offers pour in, but Oehm is unmoved. “Nobody can pay me for the look on my son’s face when he held the blade in the air. Nobody can pay me for the experience of finding it with my kids. It’s not about the monetary value and it’s not for sale. I won’t let it out of my cold, dead hands. I am just grateful to have the opportunity to have such a wonderful piece of history to share.”
SOURCE
https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/co...s-family-discovers-incredible-indian-artifact
Clinging to the face of a sheer, 14’ river embankment, Gauge Oehm, 11 years young, carefully clawed the soil around an outrageous Native American treasure sticking just inches out of the dirt wall, untouched by human hands for millennia. The deeper he dug—4”, 5”, 6”—the tighter the artifact’s grip.
Lungs pleading and legs pumping, he surfaced in mid-river and pushed toward the far bank in an odd flailing motion, arms folded inward. Bare feet crunching gravel in the shallows, Gauge scrambled onto dry ground and uncradled his arms, shaking with wonder as he turned about and lifted a massive, caramel-colored blade against a painted blue sky, and shouted triumphantly across the water: “Mommmmmmmmm.”
Behold the prize. He held an 8,000-year-old jasper masterpiece in pristine condition—11 ½” long, 2 ½” wide, and 3/8” thick. Sharing the moment from the opposite bank, his mother, Michelle Oehm, stared in disbelief. “It was unbelievable, the find of a lifetime,” she says. “No, it was the find of several lifetimes.”
Sincerely. An intrepid Kansas mother and her Johnny-on-the-spot son had just found and preserved one of the most stunning Indian artifacts of recent U.S. history. Welcome to the impossible tale of the Oehm Blade.
The Wall-Hanger Beckons
Michelle Oehm has an uncanny eye for the anomalous. Drop her on a carpet of gravel alongside a creek or river and she will pluck out an arrowhead, agate, fossil, bone, or piece of petrified wood.
Her skills were honed in childhood. “My mother used to set me down in shallow creeks as a toddler and I’d pick up random rocks for hours,” Oehm explains. “From there I started as a kid hunting stone tools and never lost the love.”
In the early afternoon of Tuesday, June 26, 2019, Oehm, 39, piled Gauge and her daughter, Catalina, 12, into an SUV, and traded a day at home for a lifetime in the outdoors. Marshall County was at the tail-end of prolonged heavy rains, spurring Oehm away from the swollen danger at most of her arrowhead haunts and toward the safety of a lazy, gravel-lined creek. The spot was not a particularly promising honey-hole and had never coughed up many points in the past, but on a day of high water—it would do.
Arriving on private land, Oehm spilled out of the SUV, with Gauge and Catalina 20 paces ahead, already scattering into the water to swim. Walking toward the creek, Oehm cut through a heavy curtain of humidity, courtesy of 95 F compounded with a heat index over 100 F. She second-guessed the decision to hunt.
“I remember that it was clear blue skies and crazy hot. I’d never found anything in the immediate area of big significance, so I knew we probably weren’t going to be leaving with much more than a sunburn, but I truly love hunting more than finding.”
“I muttered to myself, mad at the kids for crossing at a bad place, and then washed away all the heavy mud. In the awful heat, it was not a good start to the day,” she laughs.
Back in rhythm, Oehm stepped onto a rock bar and cast a slow look down the creek at a rising bank shoulder roughly 20 yards distant. Contrasted against the brown-rust of the dirt layers, she noted two parallel cavities high on the bank, both approximately 2’ in diameter, containing gray-tinted clams. The first cavity was jammed to capacity with clams; the second appeared half-full. In the moment, Oehm didn’t entirely realize the implication of the clams—she likely had located a shell midden.
A shell midden is essentially a trash heap composed of the shellfish remains of sustained occupation. Simply, the midden was a flashing red light indicating prolonged Native American presence.
“My mind was reeling,” she recalls. “The clams drew my eye to that part of the bank and I knew there was nothing natural about them.”
As Oehm’s pulse jumped, she remained hyper-focused on the bank wall, barely aware of the splashes and screams from her children playing in the creek. Eyes glued to the bank, her gaze slid 20’ downstream from the clam holes and froze at an incongruity 10’ up the wall. Difficult to distinguish against a dark mix of loamy clay, a brown-orange rock protruded out of the soil, its contours extending to a tapered point. A wall-hanger was beckoning, poking 2” out of the wall.
Steeling her emotions, Oehm hollered at her son: “Gauge. Gauge. What do you think that is up there?”
Welcome to Mayhem
He knew. He knew. Cold-nosing artifacts on northeast Kansas creeks and rivers since the age of 5, Gauge only needed a single glance at the protrusion. He knew.
The creek’s lip was a mere 8-10”, affording a tiny space between wall and water. Oehm pulled a large pocketknife with a 6” blade from the backpack and began gouging shoulder-level footholds in the bank—grips for Gauge and Catalina to access the artifact. The brother-and-sister pair scampered up the bank and began gingerly scratching and picking around the artifact, inch by inch. No dice.
Ten minutes later, the object still refused to budge. Catalina descended and Oehm took her spot. Pretzeled into position on the wall, Oehm saw the beauty up close and felt her heartbeat explode. “That’s when I got truly, truly excited. I didn’t dare to believe it was whole, but it had no give—not even a tiny bit of movement.”
Oehm used the pocketknife to meticulously chip away at compactions around the base of the artifact, while Gauge kept soft hands on the exposed blade. “Gauge is always so careful,” she explains. “Several years before this, he found an awesome bird point on a hunt, but it fell out of his pocket in a Walmart parking lot on the way home and broke. Lesson learned.”
Thoughts racing a mile a minute, Oehm patiently chipped as Gauge applied gentle pulling pressure. At 6” into the bank, along with the 2” protrusion, they realized the blade was enormous, yet it stubbornly remained rooted.
Finally, without so much as a tremor, the blade slipped the bank—the momentum startling Gauge, sending him tumbling into the creek. Gauge, along with the blade, disappeared.
“His footholds broke and down he went into the wash about 6’ deep,” Oehm describes. “He popped up and swam for the other side, then turned around and uncurled the blade off his chest, stuck it in the air like a trophy, and yelled out to me.”
“The look on his face was priceless—his eyes were as wide as silver dollars,” Oehm recalls. “Even today, I still get goosebumps remembering how much joy and wonder were in his face. He knew we had just found a piece like no other—something extraordinary—and he’d just fallen 10’ into 6’ of water, crossed the creek, and never dropped the blade. Me, Catalina, and Gauge got wrapped up in a moment we’ll never forget. Nothing can compare with how we felt right then.”
Mayhem. The instant Gauge lifted the blade, confirming its preservation and dimensions to Oehm, her adrenaline went nuclear. The nurse practitioner, renowned for emergency room mettle, lost her senses. “Everything went blurry. I can’t remember climbing down. I can’t remember crossing the creek. My first memory is standing beside Gauge examining the blade like I was in an overwhelming dream. Huge. Incredible. Gorgeous.”
Oehm, the lifetime creek walker and finder of hundreds of Native American points, was in total bewilderment. She eased the blade into the cushioned confines of her backpack, gathered her kids, and quickstepped to the vehicle. Driving away in euphoria, Oehm completely forgot about the initial clue—the telltale midden.
Exquisite
The nature of Native American artifact exposure is fickle. Here today, gone tomorrow. Stone tools surface for brief moments in time, and then are swallowed back into the earth. The odds of Oehm stumbling over a piece of such extreme beauty in superb condition were akin to a snowflake in summer. However, beyond the phenomenal visuals of the worked rock, what had she found?
“This blade is a whole different category,” Oehm notes. “We’ve found Munker’s Creek pieces that are crude, but this is something so far beyond those in craftsmanship. This piece is simply beautiful and to hold it is unbelievable. So thin, so balanced. I knew when I found I had to get information. This was something light years outside the realm of normal.”
“I had, and I have, so many questions: What is this? What did I find? What found me?”
Oehm poured through books and journals, googled for hints, sought out experts, and eventually took the piece to multiple artifact shows to glean opinions.
“There were so many kind people out there in the collecting community that helped me. The blade is made from smoky hills jasper—gem quality, and phallic in shape. It’s not local material and fits none of the known pieces in our area,” she explains. “I’m told it’s conservatively 8,000 years old. The bi-faced chipped part is shinier, indicating it may have been re-chipped, and therefore possibly resharpened by different peoples thousands of years apart. Everyone has speculations and opinions about it, and I welcome them all.”
“Nobody knows what tribe or people group it comes from,” she continues. “I personally think it was made for ritualistic use, not domestic. I often wonder who the maker was because I can’t imagine how much time and expertise it took to shape. The Smithsonian has a Kansas piece called the Gorsuch Knife found about 70 miles away that’s made of the same material, but it’s square and just not the same. The flaking, chipping and appearance are all different.”
“This piece we found is a stunner just to look at,” she adds, “but I promise, when you hold it, the blade takes your breath away. Exquisite.”
The Mystery
The shell midden is Oehm’s single regret. After returning home from the creek on the evening of the blade’s discovery, her thoughts flashed to the forgotten midden. However, the following morning, Oehm and her husband, Todd, left on a multi-day, out of state vacation.
While they were gone, Marshall County was swamped with a 5” rain. Returning from vacation, Oehm made a beeline for the creek, only to find the bank section entirely eroded—sloughed into the flow. The water below the bank spot, once a 6’-deep wash, was filled with silt. The site, briefly exposed, was gone.
“What are you gonna do?” Oehm laughs. “I’m just grateful for the opportunity to find the most beautiful blade I’ve ever imagined. I would never have normally picked that creek section. I would never have normally crossed at that spot, and I never should have seen it sticking out of the bank. It’ll always be a favorite topic of conversation for me and my kids, and we get to relive the excitement for the rest of our lives.”
And the value? The big offers pour in, but Oehm is unmoved. “Nobody can pay me for the look on my son’s face when he held the blade in the air. Nobody can pay me for the experience of finding it with my kids. It’s not about the monetary value and it’s not for sale. I won’t let it out of my cold, dead hands. I am just grateful to have the opportunity to have such a wonderful piece of history to share.”
SOURCE
https://www.agweb.com/news/crops/co...s-family-discovers-incredible-indian-artifact
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