A funny thing happened to Dawson Dahl of Rushford during a family trip to the beach. It was a typical summer day and the family decided to go swimming. While walking through the sand, Dahl accidentally stubbed his toe. That painful moment led to a very interesting discovery for him and the rest of the family.
“It was a hot day and we went down to the Point, which is what we call the spot where the crick and the River meet,” he recalled. “We were swimming while my mom sat on the bank and read a book. After getting out of the water, I stubbed my toe on something. I wanted to rip it out of there so no one else would get hurt. I didn’t know it at the time, but I stubbed my toe on the horn of a big Bison skull.”
Dahl grew more interested as he kept digging and saw that his find was something large. As he worked it out of the ground, his mom noticed all the digging and wanted to know what it was too. After finally working it free, Dahl said his mom wasn’t too thrilled by what he’d found.
“She kept saying ‘throw it away’ but I wasn’t going to,” he recalled. “I said ‘I’m keeping this thing.’ It was heavy. After we cleaned the sand out, I’m sure it was lighter. We took it home and hosed it off. We didn’t polish it or anything like that, but we sure did clean a lot of sand out of it.”
As some folks might imagine, he said it was obviously quite a shock to pull a full-sized, complete Bison skull out of the ground. Dahl dug to the point that he could yank the horn with both hands and finally pulled it up out of its resting place. His first reaction?
“Wow, what is this,” he said. “I literally sat there for a few seconds trying to figure out what it was that I had just pulled out of the creek.
“We live pretty close to the creek, so I just carried it home, and then we got it hosed off and cleaned up,” he recalled. “After that, we stuck it in a wheelbarrow and I guess it sat there for six months. Then, we got the idea to bring it to the family White Elephant gift exchange at Christmas.”
Dahl said he actually wanted to hang the skull on the wall, but his mom wasn’t really high on the idea. So, when Christmas rolled around, the Dahls wrapped it up in a box and decided to give it as a surprise gift to a family member. So, which extended family member got the ‘gift?’
“Of all people, my grandmother picked it out,” he said with a smile that was almost visible during a phone conversation. “She’s really not into that type of thing. She unwrapped the big box and opened the lid, jumped back in her chair and yelled. Everyone wanted to know what it was. She started laughing and said she wasn’t going to touch it.
“My great-uncle Larry walked in, saw what it was, and grabbed it by both horns to pull it up out of the box,” he added. “The whole room just exploded in surprise. He’s into that kind of thing and took it home from the family get-together. I’m pretty sure he actually had someone look at it and tell him the skull was actually from the 1800s.”
The skull actually has a hole in it near the brain and figured that’s where hunters shot and killed the bison. The people who dated the skull figured that the Point is where the skull had been buried before eventually working its way back to the surface, where Dahl literally bumped into it.
“It was absolutely perfect timing,” he said.