A different kind of Indian

I have always been mystified by the fact that I can hunt for two hours and not find a darn thing and then, I do a quick fifteen minute hunt at lunch and find something cool right away.

Of course, lately I’ve doing a lot of finding, mostly wheats, because one of the beautiful things about my XP Deus metal detector is that it is a complex machine with many layers and even after two years I am still learning cool things about it. This time, I figured out how to squeak another inch or so of depth and I have been revisiting many spots in our beloved city.

So today after I spent 15 precious minutes of my lunch hour standing in line in front of this woman who was ordering for her whole office (I am pretty sure that if all her co-workers had bothered to come themselves the whole process would have been a lot quicker; but I digress) and then scarfed down my lunch, I managed to still have 20 minutes or so to disturb some soil at Riverside park. Right away, I got a deep signal filled with possibility. At about a little over 7 inches I found what looked like a pin. I could see that it was copper or brass and through the mud it looked like some kind of floral design. After I got back to my office and cleaned it some, this is what it was:

If you are a native Wichitan you’ll recognize that this is a pin from North High School. The pin has writing on the front, right where the warrior’s neck is but it is near impossible to read. I may be matrixing but I think I can see some letters. After a while my brain is torn between seeing the word INDIANS or the word MINAHA followed by the year 1929. On the back I can see the word FAIRGROUND followed by 4 letters I cannot read and ending with the letters KS which could mean Kansas or it could be the last two letters of the second word. If I look at the front from a certain angle, the words seem to be North H.S. 1929.

At any rate, this is not the only piece of North High’s Redskins themed bling I have ever found but it is certainly the oldest. North High opened in 1929 and perhaps that is why I think I see the year 1929 on this pin. Neither the word INDIANS nor the word MINAHA was ever associated with the High School (although admittedly, my research was very shallow) so who knows what really is written on the pin. Heck, at the end it may not even be a North High pin. My reasons for believing it is are that I found this pin on Riverside park, which is very near the High School and that the other two or three North High objects were also found on Riverside park. The only thing I can be sure of is that it is an old relic.

It is also very small:

I may be making a big deal about this pin because I have not been out hunting for a week and this is the most thrilling thing to come up from the ground for me in a while.

Happy New Year and thank you for stopping by.