STOP #6 ELEPHANT TOOTH [Early People]

If you look across the field lying to the north of this stop you will see a transformer on a telephone pole. It is located next to a spring on the old David and Letitia Carson homestead. While making improvements to this spring almost 70 years ago, William and Charles Glender discovered an elephant tooth about 15 feet below ground, in gravel that scientists say originated in Canada or Idaho. How did the gravel get here? Near the end of the last ice age, between 12,800 and 15,000 years ago, a warming climate caused at least a hundred huge floods (called the "Bretz Floods") to course down the Columbia River. These cataclysmic occurrences filled the entire Willamette Valley with hundreds of feet of water, mud, and gravel. If humans lived here at that time they must have been crushed or drowned, before being buried with sediments. That is probably what happened to the Glender's elephant. How long have people lived in the Soap Creek Valley? Recent archeological findings indicate a period of at least 10,000 years - time enough to have contributed to the extinction of a number of large ice age mammals, but not long enough to have been directly affected by the gargantuan floods that forever leveled the valley's floor with silt and gravel. Some evidence indicates that humans may have first entered the Willamette Valley as many as 60,000 years ago.