Big Bone Lick -- Union Kentucky

Today we visited the Big Bone Lick in Union, Kentucky.  WHAT a fascinating place.  First we visited the herd of buffalo - bison.  Not an easy feat considering the heat wave KY is experiencing but we took it slow and steady.  Then we visited the museum and read the historical markers (my favorite).  Tyler really enjoyed seeing the huge mastodon and mammoth bones.  One was of a head with "tusks" and he thought it looked like a car.  It was a nice way to spend the day because we got to play on the playground which as you may remember is Tyler's favorite.
If you want to know more about this remarkable place check out http://www.big-bone-lick.com

Aren't these renditions marvelous.  Growing up in the foothills of the Adirondack mountains we had a camp on a bog lake.  I remember reading with amazement in Conservation magazine that there were big bones underneath the mucky bottom we all hated to touch while swimming.

I wanted to plant a letterbox as a continuation of my Buffalo Theme - Leaves of New York State but the poison ivy is worse that what we have in our orchard at home.  I am hoping to convince the driver to stop someplace near by on the way home to plant one nearby in a Poison Ivy Free place. Like may be a cemetery?

History was boring to me when I was in high school.  Homeschooling my children made it come alive and visiting places like this that talk about Jefferson and Lewis and Clark make it all the more real.

Meriwether Lewis traveled to Big Bone Lick in October 1803 on his way west to join William Clark and the men assembling in Louisville for the Corps of Discovery.  

Being the New Yorker that I am and Aggie from Morrisville State I couldn't pass up the recognition - a poem byRobert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University. 

Big Bone Lick

At Big Bone Lick the first explorers
found skeletons of elephants they said,
found ribs of wooly mammoths, tusks.
They dug out teeth the size of bricks
and skulls of giant bison, beavers.
In salty mud licked bare by elk
and deer and buffalo and bears
for ten millennia, the bones
seemed wreckage from a mighty dream,
a graveyard from a golden age,
or killing ground of titans. Here
they saw the ruins of a world
survived by its diminutives,
where Eden once gave way and shrank
to just a regular promised land
to fit our deadly, human scale.

Poem reprinted here with permission by the author.  Poem was first published in August 2011 by Southern Cultures journal (Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011 edition).