When Randy Heany was a boy growing up in Kansas City in the ‘60s, his parents used to send him to his grandparents’ farm in Arkansas for the summer. There, Randy would follow his grandfather around as his grandfather plowed his fields, picking up arrowheads in his wake.
“I got shoeboxes full of them,” Randy recalled. “I used to wonder what the guy looked like who used them and what animal he killed with them.”
Randy gave those arrowheads away, but last Saturday, brought boxes and baskets of arrowheads he has found to the Windsor Historical Society’s September meeting. His program drew 30 people, some from as far away as Independence, wanting tips on where and how to find them.
The first part is easy, Randy said.
“There’s not a creek in Missouri that doesn’t have arrowheads in it,” he said.
The hard part: seeing them.
“You have to know what to look for — the size, color and texture,” he said.
The best time to go arrowhead hunting is after a rain, he said, because rain washing down creek beds reveals arrowheads, or washes them up on lake banks.
Randy said he loves rainy winter days.
“I can hardly wait for it to stop raining,” he said. “There’s no competition. I’m the only one wading the creek in the cold.”
He used to find an average of 100 arrowheads a year, he said. He “finds,” as opposed to trades or sells, but said arrowheads can range in value from $5 to $15,000, depending on their rarity. Arrowheads can be found in Missouri from 12,000 years ago, he said.
It’s the bits of history in the rock that he values. Most are not actually arrowheads, he said, but were probably used as knives or spear points, as they are too heavy to put on an arrow. The quality of stone weapons declined, he said, from the era when natives were hunters and relied on weapons in order to survive, to when they started growing food.
Then, only 20 percent of the weapon points produced were good enough to use, he said. The rest were buried in a cache for possible use later. Windsor did not have any local tribes, according to historian Glenna Morse, but the area was used by hunting parties.
The color of the arrowhead depends on what kind of rock it was made of. Missouri has a wealth of rock hard enough to make stone tools, Randy said, better than out west — flint, which is mainly brown or gray, Mozarkite, which is white, gray or brown, and chalcedony, most commonly a bluish white or gray. Missouri also has deposits of Burlington Chert, which has a waxy luster and is white, light gray or tan. Most of the points Randy brought to display on Saturday were white, gray or brownish tan in color.
Native Americans never used rock they found lying on the ground, he said, but used “virgin” rock they quarried. Arrowheads will have scoop-shaped divots on the surface where the maker used a bison bone to knap flakes off to shape the rock into a triangle or an elongated triangle with a point. Points that were broken were cut down for other uses, he said.
Randy also displayed other bits of found history — pottery shards, ceramic and wood pipes, a nutting stone probably used for grinding and a stone with holes through it used to hold sticks for fire-starting. He also had a display case of drills, spiraled-shaped stone points.
“They may have been used to make clothes from hides,” he said.
April Morgan, who attended the program, said she has gone arrowhead hunting with Randy and they’ve never come home empty-handed.
“Every time we found at least one or two,” she said.
Randy said that when he takes friends arrowhead hunting, they frequently walk right past arrowheads in the creek bed. So he encourages them to circle back and check again. If they ask why, he tells them “I just have a feeling there’s an arrowhead there.”
Go to projectilepoints.net for photos of types of arrowheads that can be found in Missouri.
