June 12th, Saturday: I went to the post office, mailed the usual stuff, nothing in the box. I just missed the Woodstock Poetry Society meeting, walking around in the sunlight, a beautiful day. Doing errands, etc From one to four today, several people in my circle of friends who are healers, felt depressed for no reason whatsoever! Still no answer.
I got a message from Jennifer Meiers from the Poughkeepsie Journal, so I called her back and we did an interview on the spot about the relationship between the Native Americans and the rivers of the Hudson Valley, in the old days, and I stressed the importance of the estuary, the salt point itself, where sea and fresh water life is abundant. I also talked about the old canoe crossing from Waryus Park at the bottom of Main Street (next to Fall Kill Falls) and Highland Landing a mile to the north, how colonists used to stand on the shore and wave a white flag on a pole, and Native Americans would come and give rides in exchange for wampum, trinkets, food, etc. We may have talked for an hour.
Garrison Keilor is at Ocean Grove today, doing his show, but I didn’t go (to thank him for mentioning my book Whole Hearted Thinking on his Prairie Home Companion show) or listen in, too busy.
Shawna called out of the blue, panting, saying excitedly, “I found the rocks.” I said, “Can we go now?” “Yes!” So suddenly I was on another adventure with Shawna. Apparently, she had gone by herself and meditated and burned sage, etc, before trying to locate the rocks. The rocks “led her to them.” (I know, spooky, right?) She brought me with her to the spot. This time we found it, and I was quite puzzled and surprised. I found that the east wall was certainly man-made and well done, but there was a rock of different type sticking out which seemed to be carved into a turtle head, with a turtle’s fin to its right sticking out. The rest of it looks like it was at one time a hemispheric dome, six feet tall, representing the entire northern hemisphere. There were natural steps to climb to the top. I have often stated that Algonquins did not create monuments, and yet here is a monument of a turtle, a tremendous discovery. Of course there’s no way to prove it was not made by a “drunken farmer.” But here are some reasons to say it is Lenape; 1. Lenape used turtle designs as boundary markers 2. this spot is at the northeast corner of the old Lenape territory. 3. it is on the same exact longitude as the most famous turtle boundary marker, from the Bronx River. 4. it is created using the same techniques as the shelf or platform constructions found at Oley PA (at the SW corner of Lenape Hoking) and also in Vermont, where there are eighty of them on a single slope!. This shows that more “recent” Lenape did have this platform tradition still intact. 5. it can be used as a platform, but is much more. Ted added to this to say there are many possible “turtle effigy” spots in Lenape territory, but none are that convincing. I took a roll of pictures of the site.
At night, I worked on making a flier compiling news stories about space weapons which don’t get coverage in the US. The two main sources were The Ottawa Citizen, an article which I had seen on the stands while in Ontario, and Counter Punch, which I believe is British. Space weapons may pose the greatest threat to freedom and democracy if fallen into (or created by) the wrong hands. I called Raymundo to tell him of the Great Turtle. He was very pleased. He likes turtles. He’s a marine biologist.
Here is the email I sent Ted:
Hi, Ted,
Speaking of wild speculations, I saw and explored the new “rock pile” in Rhinebeck, and it is quite puzzling.
You have to see it for yourself, and decide if it is exactly what it looks like.
It is not like the platforms you have filmed, and is in bad shape, but perhaps it is MORE, not less.
It looks to me like it was a hemispheric turtle (facing East by southeast) about 6 feet tall, which was stripped of its capstones for fencing. There is a rock that emerges from a well-pieced and intact wall on the east face that looks like a roughly carved turtle head, and a turtle’s fin to its right. The rest could well have been what remains of a perfect hemisphere, (actually a little bit oval, in the opposite way than a turtle is oval) and yes, there is a ton of large quartz rocks near the top. There is also a little “doorway” opposite the turtle head. And there is also a large stepping stone which makes it quite easy to climb to the top, which leads us to consider it may have been a ritual platform as well as a form of sculpture.
Now here’s another thing: it is very roughly in line ( of longitude) with the famed Bronx River Turtle Petroglyph, known to be an eastern border marker of the Lenape, (Beirhorst says circa 1000 AD) as the turtle is the sign of the ruling Unami “clan.” It is also in the general area of the no-man’s land between Lenape and Mohican territory, roughly between Rhinebeck and Hyde Park. Therefore it is a candidate for being the NE boundary marker for all of Lenape-Hoking. It is certainly within a few miles of that spot. It is near or in Staatsburg, which I heard was a northern-jutting outpost of Lenape culture as was Coxsackie in the West.
What this implies is that,since it is part platform and part “modern” Lenape boundary marker, that the Lenape knew of the platform tradition and remembered it! Or perhaps the platforms are not that old. Oley PA was the southwest corner boundary of Lenape Hoking, probably during the 1730s (easy to research, in fact I have the relevant deed maps somewhere, and the date the Susquehanna ceded the land back to the Delaware) and also an important spot in 1000 BC. As I mentioned, Oley PA is rather near the Schuykill rift (about five miles north) which was a natural boundary between north and south.
I would suspect there would also be a similar “platform” marker near Lexington NY for the Munsee as that was their border with the Mohawk. The southeast border would probably have been Cedar Swamp in Delaware, or Cape May NJ depending on how you divide up the tribes.
According to my reading of William Richie, any Lenape boundary markers in Staatsburg would have dated from before 1300 AD, because the Wappingers had rather different E-W boundaries and didn’t use the turtle. However, their boundary with the Mohicans was roughly the same as far as we know.
The article on the stone walls in the bottom of the Hudson was published in the NY Times on April 16th, 2000!!!!
The divers/researchers claim no news since then. I suspect its all being kept secret. But there were significant numbers of Orient Point fishtail projectiles found at Dobbs Ferry less than a mile from those walls built at that same time.
I took a roll of photos which I guess I should have digitized and send to you asap. I don’t know how good they will look. But they may whet your appetite. It took about 20 minutes walking. I think I could find it again. There would not be a good view of the sunrise from that turtle’s perspective, but a better one of the sunset if the trees were clear.
I don’t have any tribal maps of Vermont, but there might be a case that the Rochester site was a northern boundary of L speaking (Lenape type) people. I have a Canadian government map of 1700 that shows Atikamek (Algonquin/Cree) people’s boundary down into Vermont quite a ways. They were N speakers, not a Lenape type. Just more wild speculation.
Talk to you soon
EVAN
MoPress 
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