Serpent a good trip

If you enjoy a little history, you'll like the serpent. If you don't like history, well, you'll just see an indention in the grass.

But I like history. I found the story is interesting -- the shadow of a serpent eating an egg, art developed by Native Americans several centaries ago.

There probably other intaglios once, before farming and other practices covered them up.

While some see a serpent, I actually think, from Stan Herd's painting, that it looks more like a spirit rising.

Snake in the grass

Earth depression a remnant of American-Indian civilization

Amy Bickel
The Hutchinson News
abickel@hutchnews.com

LYONS - On a hill amid the pasture, something mysterious emerges from the mixed-grass prairie. Just off U.S. 56 near the Rice County seat of Lyons is a flowing earth depression that's 160 feet long.

It's smaller than one would think, but delicate. It stands out distinctly - tightly bunched buffalo grass in the middle of knee-high prairie. Moreover, it curves in a way that at first makes one think it's just a wallow.

No, this isn't a crop circle. Aliens didn't form it.

This manmade curiosity represents an enormous serpent in the act of swallowing an egg. It is one of the best-preserved Indian carvings still around.

In Kansas, there are only two, said Janel Cook, the director of Lyons' Coronado Quivira Museum.
They call it Serpent Intaglio.

Rice County has long been known for its American-Indian artifacts. A trip to the museum shows countless arrowheads, pottery and tools from centuries ago. Several archaeological digs have occurred over the years, uncovering many of the objects.

However, the serpentine marvel might be one of the oddest finds.

Go back to a warm October day in 1917, when Miss Faye McGuire, a teacher at a one-room Rice County school, led her young students on a field trip. A boy had earlier reported finding a strange concentration of buffalo grass amid the pasture on his walk to school.

They concluded it was an upland creek. However, what they found was the remnants of another society's beliefs.

Then the indention was forgotten.

It would be 20 years later, when Robert Higgins, a Rice County farm boy, would notice the depression while working cattle. He was convinced it wasn't natural.

He pressed for answers.

Clark Mallam, a college professor, researched it in 1982 and 1983. He died of a brain tumor a few years later, Cook said.

That's just one more quirk some folks attribute to the serpent, Cook said.

What is generally accepted fact is that Wichita Indians dug the serpent around the year 1200,
Cook said. They removed the topsoil, which is why buffalo grass grows prolifically instead of the mixed grasses of the county.

She said there were probably some religious ceremonies associated with the earthwork. Three sites of villages lie northward, and oddly enough, line up with the serpent's outline.

The serpent image had some significance to the people, maybe representing the renewal of life, she said. The serpent could be a calendar, as well as an instrument for determining seasonal cycles.

Cook makes the trip to the site several times a year with visitors. The tour includes nearby Indian petroglyphs, then the Serpent Intaglio.

The scene from the top of the hill is beautiful, Cook notes.

The mystery might never be fully known.

There is one thing Cook does know.

"It's survived centuries," she said. Copyright (c) 2008, The Hutchinson Publishing Co.