Rose Creekers
Greetings, neighbors. Can any of you Rose Creek folks tell me anything about the "Gun Barrel rock" on Cove Mountain above the old Jesse Mitchell place? I'd like to know if anybody recalls where it is, and many thanks in advance. Here's an interesting anecdote about it from Freeman Tilden, who wrote a book about state parks in 1962:
A family named Mitchell had come from Georgia about 1835, and settled on Rose Creek. The few Indians they encountered at that time were migrants, who usually camped at the foot of Petit Jean Mountain. On the side of the mountain was a petroglyph, or what was supposed to be one, which had come to be known as “the gun barrel.” It was “carved deep in a boulder, to perfect dimensions.”
About 1908 the Mitchells, who still lived here, saw the Indians for the last time. They came in the largest caravan the family had ever seen—ten hacks or spring wagons drawn by ponies wearing brilliantly decorated harnesses with buckles of silver. Hitherto, when the Indians visited the mountain, they had been seen making observations from the rock of the gun-barrel petroglyph, and then spending some days in search of the nearby mountainside for something: never finding the object of their hunt, apparently.
On this last visit, the Indians as usual went to the gun-barrel rock and oriented themselves. But this time they also asked questions of the Mitchells. Could the Mitchells remember a giant white oak that once stood at the foot of the mountain? Or could they recall just where there was once a group of trees that stood in the middle of a field?
About a week after the Indians made this final visit, they left camp during the night. The campfire ashes were still warm in the morning, but no trace of the visitors. There had been a full moon that night. Daylight revealed that the visitors had dug a hole in the field not far from the creek—a hole “big enough to hold one of the spring wagons.”