Photo and text courtesy of City of Pelican Rapids website :
“Before the White Man Came…
It was summer, 1931, and a highway construction crew was busily carving a roadway through a small knoll on the east shore of Prairie Lake. Suddenly the operator of the big bulldozer stopped. He had uncovered a human skeleton!
Nine feet below the surface, entombed in laminated glacial clay, Minnesota’s pre-historic woman had slept for at least l0,000 years and perhaps for as long as 20,000 years. She was a young woman, so say the paleontologists who examined her bones. How she died will never be known. Some believe she drowned in a lake. Because of the fragments of a knife found near her bones, many believe she died in combat.
One thing is certain. Here, a few miles to the northeast of present day Pelican Rapids, Indians roamed centuries before the great ice sheets ground their slow, frigid path over most of North America …”