Category: Books

Written by Russell Burrows: In 1987 I was at the end of my rope or very close to it when some people appeared that gave the project a great lift. It started with the visit of a little hunch-back man named Warren Cook. Warren was a PhD from Castleton College in Vermont. He was an […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: Somehow I was able to get everything done, and on Monday I loaded up my motorcycle and took off. My plan was to get to Vincennes before Bart and Robin, and confront him there. I arrived in Vincennes in mid-afternoon on Wednesday, checked into the same mom-and-pop motel and then took […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: One day in March of 1987 I found myself in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, for the first time in years – the Mid-Manhattan Branch is where they keep the books I usually want – and as I sat on a stool bending […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan One night in February of 1987, the phone rang. It was a call from Warren Cook in Vermont, with his friend the photographer Warren Dexter on the other line. They had just received the slides of photos (finally) from Jim Whittall and were jumping up and down with excitement. Well, Warren […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: In late October I had some slides made from my prints and rode my “new” bike up to Rowley, Massachusetts, to the meeting of the Early Sites Research Society at the home of Jim Whittall. Someone had withdrawn from the program and Jim put me in his place to drop my […]

(Ed.) Herewith a summary of the various narrators’ accounts of this controversy (from #s 36, 38, 39, 44, 50, 54, 56). The Crespi Collection, in Cuenca, Ecuador, contained a stone tablet, a “stele,” with an elephant at top and an inscription below. This “Cuenca elephant stele” apparently disappeared at the death of the collector, Padre […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan I arrived home with seventeen rolls of print film, all but one containing thirty-six shots. I spent hundreds of hours finding a shop to print them adequately, sorting out the best views, obtaining duplicates, cataloging and numbering them and putting them into an album for display – not to mention hundreds […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan As it happened, someone offered me a good deal on a “new” used motorcycle and I bought it. I had come home earlier then usual and had some three weeks to myself before I would have to go back to work. I decided to try out the bike with a trip […]

Written by Virginia Hourigan: As I parked my motorcycle at the curb in front of the sleepy little Sonoftobac Museum nestled at the foot of an Indian mound in Vincennes, Indiana, that hot August afternoon in 1986, I rather expected to be disappointed again. The book I’d seen back home in New York City had […]

Written by Russell Burrows: The next event that I consider to be important is the arrival of Virginia Hourigan. This occurred in the late summer or early fall of 1986 if my memory serves me correctly. Now Virginia is something. She is a big gal, not fat mind you, just big. She takes her summer […]

Written by Russell Burrows: It got more and more difficult to get to the cave without being followed. I had begun to receive telephone calls from people I had never heard of, wanting information on the cave. And always, those calls and requests for information included the request and even demand that they be shown […]

Written by Russell Burrows: One of the many problems in an operation like this is keeping the secret. That’s not easy, here in Southern Illinois. Just about everyone and his brother is a “pot hunter,” or at the very least an Indian artifact hunter. If word got out about the cave, I would have to […]

(Ed.): You would think that everyone could at least agree on the kinds of stone used to make the artifacts from the cave. Yet the geologists’ reports have differed greatly. Of course, with so many artifacts to choose from (several thousand, once, though there are fewer than 200 now in Burrows’ hands), there is no […]

Shortly thereafter, I received a call from Mr. Ward informing me that we at last had an opportunity to learn what had transpired in the cave so long ago. Not only that, he told me, but we could finally get the stuff authenticated. One of the Old Northwest Corporation officers, a judge no less, had […]

Written by Russell Burrows: The next events that were damaging to us again involved the Old Northwest Corporation. By this time I had had several discussions with Mr. Black concerning the cave and, being interested in history and education, he expressed the idea that it should be studied by all the right people using all […]

Written by Russell Burrows: Mr. Black informed me that the farmer was his wife’s grandfather and that the land had passed down through the family. (The legendary cave, and the one I’d found, were very probably part of the same cave system.) From that time onward, I had no more problems with the people living […]

Written by Russell Burrows: Here is the story of the gentleman who discovered a cave on his section of land back in the 1800s. As to whether or not that cave is the same as Burrows’ Cave remains to be seen. A family had, at that time, migrated into southern Illinois from Kentucky and taken […]

Written by Russell Burrows: Some of you are probably putting yourself in my boots and saying, “If he has someone shooting at him, why doesn’t he just get the hell out of there and stay out?” Well, I have never been run out of anywhere and I sure wasn’t going to start then. After returning […]

Written by Russell Burrows: Then came a definite warning that I was not to be snooping around in those woods. The event left no question in my mind what somebody meant. When I returned to my pickup that day I found all four of my tires cut and flat. That act of vandalism made me […]

Written by Russell Burrows: In all the time I had spent at the cave site I had never been directly accosted by anyone expressing an interest in why I was spending so much time in that area. I began to notice that during every visit I would meet a pickup truck or auto going in […]