A mystery has been brewing on the West Fork of the Bitter Root for many years, with little evidence to indicate any solution in the foreseeable future. An historic, if somewhat cryptic, large stone slab has been missing now for almost fifty years from its proper place in front of the old Alta Post Office, and if anyone knows of its whereabouts, they’re not talking. The granite slab was a local landmark, and the mysterious writing on the stone was certainly as intriguing as its eventual disappearance. The rune stone had a boldly lettered message that some people found difficult to decipher. TOTI EMUL ESTO rolls off the tongue like some sort of strange and ancient form of Latin, or some other long forgotten language that should never have found its way to a small mining community in western Montana. Whether the inscription really dated back to the days of the West Fork Gold Rush now even appears to be in doubt. An anonymous informant believes that the lettering was actually done in more recent times, well after the hustle and bustle of the Hughes Creek bonanza had faded into complete obscurity.

If the stone was original, or even embellished at some later date, is of little consequence really, it merely places the missing monolith in the dubious company of other infamous stone relics that have surfaced in odd places throughout the country. Most of these mysterious stones appear to portray questionable tales of lore that usually don’t quite fit in with your typical American History lesson. One of the more interesting discoveries was unearthed by a farmer’s plow in Kensington, Minnesota, in 1898. The Kensington Stone supposedly provided strong evidence that a group of Norsemen had visited the mid-west just a few hundred years after Leif Erickson visited North America. The crude runic symbols are expertly chiseled onto a 200-pound slab of gray sandstone, and tell the tragic story of a failed early mission of discovery.

According to one translation the runes are said to proclaim that, “Eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians, upon an exploring journey from Vineland, came very far west. We made camp by two rocky islands, one day’s journey north from this stone. We were fishing one day, when we returned home we found ten men red with blood and dead. Ave Virgon Marie, save us from the evil. We have ten men by the sea to look after our vessel, forty-one day’s journey from this island. Year 1362.” Could the vessel they mentioned have been anchored at Hudson Bay? And whatever happened to the twenty men who left this strangely fascinating message behind? For many years the stone was considered by experts to be an outright hoax, primarily due to inconsistencies in the phraseology and grammar used in the text, at least as far as it was understood at the time. Recent studies would seem to indicate that the odd phrasing and improper use of grammar is actually quite consistent with 14th century Nordic runes.

Another interesting stone was found in a burial mound in Davenport, Iowa in 1874. This remarkable find, known as the Davenport Calendar, is written in three different languages, which would make it something akin to a North American Rosetta Stone. The unusual tablet is written first in Iberian Punic, which was a language used exclusively in northern Portugal and Spain. The same text is then repeated in ancient Libyan and Egyptian scripts. It appears to be the only tri-lingual text of these particular tongues known to exist in the world. The burial mound also contained the skeletons of two adults and a young child, surrounded by numerous artifacts, which seem to be of North African or Iberian design. The text of the stone tablet gives specific details required for the construction of an equinoctial calendar, which would be used for accurately defining the four seasons. The authenticity of this artifact appears to be irrefutable, seeing that the ancient Iberian and Libyan scripts had supposedly yet to be deciphered at the time of its discovery!

An unfinished calendar discovered in Oklahoma, known as the Pontotoc stele, also points toward an Iberian-Egyptian connection. Scripted in Iberian Punic, it is apparently a partial extract from a hymn written in the 13th century B.C. by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhnaton. The tablet states that “When Ra rises in the east, the beasts are content. When he hides his face, they are displeased.” The inscriptions form the shape of a pyramid, with the sun at the top, and four equal triangles radiating downward, presumably representing the four seasons. For some reason the tablet was never completed, the author having only fully inscribed two of the four panels. When and how these strange artifacts came to the New World is any one’s guess, that is, if they even came here at all. It’s possible they were all made by some crafty forger who took a certain amount of pride in the fact that he had fooled some of the leading scientists of the time.

One of my favorite ‘hoax stones’ was found by an Idaho farmer in 1931. The farmer claimed to have dug up a rock naturally shaped like a human head, which had “John Colter” carved on one side of the skull, and the year “1808” on the opposite side. Though it’s certainly possible that Colter may have been in the part of Idaho west of Grand Teton National Park during that time period, the fact that the farmer was seeking a horse concession with park authorities really throws a shadow of doubt on the authenticity of the artifact. Reportedly, he was actually granted the concession when he donated the Colter Stone to the park museum!

I have one more hoax to mention before I return to the subject of the West Fork rune stone. This particular inscription involves a carving on a tree rather than a stone, but the intentions of the industrious practical joker were undoubtedly the same as all the others, to ‘pull one over’ on the so-called experts. Situated just west of the Continental Divide, near Monida Pass, there stood for many years a very old quaking aspen with the mark of a famous frontiersman carved upon it. The inscription read “D. Boon 1776” and it really caused quite a stir among the local population! Was it possible that Daniel Boone could have been beyond the headwaters of the Missouri the same year that America was claiming her independence from England?

Oddly enough, it is entirely possible. Boone would have only been forty-two years old at the time, and he was actually living along the banks of the Missouri when Lewis and Clark traveled up the river in 1804. Tree carvings by Daniel Boone have been found in many of the locations he explored, in fact, one dating back to 1760 was first noticed ten years later in 1770, and was photographed in 1853. He normally chose beech trees for his carving because of their smooth skin, but here in the Rocky Mountains a quaking aspen would certainly make a suitable substitute. And, it just so happens that there seems to be a full ten-month period where his actual whereabouts is unknown, beginning late in 1775, and ending in the middle of 1776.

All of this evidence appeared to prove that Boone had made the trip to the upper Missouri, and that he had left his mark on an aspen tree well before Lewis and Clark began their epic journey! Unfortunately, a tree ring analysis later proved that the carving could not have possibly been made before the 1870’s. This date does happen to coincide with a series of expeditions led by Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, a cofounder of the U.S. Geological Society, who headed several fact finding tours to the Yellowstone region. The tree carving is not far from West Yellowstone, and it has been suggested that this company of well-educated explorers may have been responsible for a number of hoaxes perpetrated throughout the area. It seems likely that whoever committed this particular hoax had actually brushed up on their history, and were aware of the fact that Boone and a “few adventurers” had gone off “to see the country” during the period of time in question. Daniel Boone spent about twenty years on the Missouri, and died in 1820 at the ripe old age of eighty-six.

By now you’re probably asking yourself, “what in the world does any of this have to do with a missing stone up the West Fork,” and luckily, I’m about to come to that part of the story. Gold was first discovered on the West Fork of the Bitter Root by Barney Hughes, one of the original discoverers of the rich diggings at Alder Gulch near Virginia City, Montana. Hughes soon moved on in his endless quest for the Mother Load, but the locals, who actually managed to take out a substantial amount of gold over the years, avidly pursued the claims located on Hughes creek. A town was soon established near the ranger station at Alta, which by the way, was the first ranger station constructed in the United States.

A Post Office opened at Alta in 1898, and in front of that establishment there once stood a large stone that according to some accounts was nothing more than a stark and bare pillar, serving only one purpose. Then, at some point in time, a couple of quick-witted fellows came up with the bright idea of making the stone a little more noticeable. And so they approached it with a bucket of black paint, and using plain and simple English they boldly produced the following instructions: TOTI EMUL ESTO. Yep, the clever pranksters had effectively pointed out exactly what any reliable and self-respecting prospector who ever left his pack animals parked on the street would already know, you should always find something “to tie mules to!”