I have been involved in the cattle business for the past forty years, and in the Spring of 1994, I purchased a 285 acre farm in southeast Salem, just north of Turner, for both business (and) pleasure, and the beauty of the country. We feed a lot of cattle and from Spring through Fall most of that feed comes from pasture. So it did not sit well with me when the Northwest Natural Gas Company informed me that they intended to dig a ten foot deep, four foot wide trench through our land. We would be losing a large area of our pasture for the better part of a year. However, the work began in the Spring of 1995, and by July, the trench was about halfway completed. This is when an unfortunate situation turned into a "mammoth" discovery.

A phone call from an agent for the pipeline one afternoon in early July informed me that prehistoric remains were uncovered and that all work on the pipeline would come to a halt while the remains were being excavated. Evidently the excavators dug through and shattered a four foot wide section of a tusk belonging to a prehistoric Woolly Mammoth (about) ten to fifteen thousand years old. 

A paleontologist, hired by Northwest Natural Gas to be on site in case of such an occurrence, carefully dug out what remained of the tusks. It was fascinating to watch how meticulously he worked, as ivory becomes very chalky over time and breaks easily. He excavated the two ends of the tusk (originally about twelve feet long) and a jawbone. He showed us how to solidify the chalky material and so our work began.

(Today) when we are out working the cattle in the area where the remains were found, it always causes me to visualize this huge and hairy elephant eight to ten feet below me drinking out of a lake 15,000 years ago.