How did 12 boxes of superb arrowheads stolen from beneath a boy’s bed lead to the greatest collection of farmland marbles ever gathered?
Welcome to Wyman Atwood’s unlikely tale of obsession, deceit, and an astounding 50,000-marble haul.
Cottonmouth
In 1963, Wyman Atwood was born to cotton in Greene County, Arkansas, a stone’s throw from the Missouri Bootheel. Along Highway 49, outside the tiny town of Marmaduke, Atwood was raised on level land roughly 5 miles from Crowley’s Ridge, a geologic spine rising 250’ above the flats, running nearly unbroken for 200 miles from southeast Missouri to Arkansas’s Phillips County, and a sustained haunt of Native Americans for millennia.
Atwood’s grandfather, John Henry, spilled out of Kentucky in roughly 1900 and bought timberland outside Marmaduke. He cleared old-growth hardwood on 1,000 acres. “Our farmland had heavy Indian presence,” Atwood recalls. “When my grandfather was cutting trees, he uncovered so many stone tools that he’d carry the big ones to a fence line and drop them, just to get rid of the nuisance of rocks in the field.”
Atwood’s father, Earl, inherited the farm reins. In 1969, he bought his 5-year-old son a motorbike and loosed the boy on rough-and-tumble adventure. “Redneck kid on a Honda 50,” Atwood says. “I rode to ditches and sloughs all day and found fun. In a couple more years, from the moment my toes could push in a tractor or truck clutch, I was operating farm machinery.”
In 1979, an elderly farming neighbor introduced Atwood to a modest arrowhead collection—all pieces collected within a mile radius. Atwood went straight to his own farm and began walking rows. He hit a motherlode in a mere afternoon of searching: An inordinate amount of Native American points atop family dirt that had never been previously picked.
Shortness of breath; rush of blood; cottonmouth; and an uncanny sixth sense. Arrowhead fever roared through Atwood, and he welcomed the disease. Every waking hour of opportunity, he was a shadow in the spring or winter fields, marching the rows and finding absolute treasures: abundant Hardin and Dalton specimens—prehistoric points often in fantastic condition.
“I was hard core. There were days when I went out and filled a pocket in 30 minutes with beauties,” he explains. “No doubt our land was home to Indians for thousands of years. My hunting got to the stage where if a point wasn’t in great condition, I’d leave it right there in the field. It’s fair to say that I became obsessed. I didn’t care if they were worth anything. All I cared about was finding them for their own history and wonder.”
Within several years, Atwood amassed a phenomenal collection as the sole hunter on an arrowhead Shangri-La. He slept atop his most prize pieces, filling a dozen shoeboxes to the brim with tools magnificently crafted from jasper, flint, chert, quartzite, greenstone, and more. The boxes, lined head to toe down the side of Atwood’s bed, were a virtual museum.
“For a boy on a farm, life was so sweet,” he recalls. “Hunting those arrowheads became part of me and made things even sweeter.”
The sweet was about to go bitter.
Wink of Fate
The family farmhouse sat alone—always unlocked. Atwood and Earl typically worked minutes away, darting in and out to eat, use the phone, or grab a necessity.
In 1983, Atwood’s first cousin, likewise an avid arrowhead hunter, visited from Florida. Excited by the arrival of his relative, Atwood dashed to his bedroom, anxious to show off the collection of smokers.
Dropping to his knees, Atwood reached under the bed and pulled out a shoebox with no heft. Empty.
Down the line Atwood went, sliding out the boxes. Empty.
The twelfth box, the last in line, curiously was still full.
Time slowed down as the violation washed over Atwood. “I figured someone dumped all the boxes into a bag and maybe ran out of time on the last box. To this day, about 40 years later, I don’t know who stole my arrowheads and I couldn’t prove a thing,” he explains.
“I’ll never, never forget the feeling of realizing someone had stolen my arrowheads right from my own room in my own house—someone that had to be very close to me because it was an inside job.”
“It’s hard to put into words, but my arrowhead fuse was burnt from that day on. I’d still walk the rows sometimes, but my love of hunting points was never the same. It kind of died.”
Enter a wink of fate and Bertis Walker, the marble maestro.
Hooked
Well over a decade past the theft, Atwood was struck by the charms of Tanginna Walker, and fell in with her father, Bertis, a Greene County farmer who became more of a brother, rather than a father-in-law. The pair of men were inseparable. Find one, find the other, in a chain of hunting, fishing, riding gravel, and marbling.
Marbling?
Walker, whether by fixation or pure passion, was in the process of amassing a lifetime assemblage of tens of thousands of marbles plucked from farmland and old house sites.
Rekindling the collecting fires, Walker became Atwood’s marble mentor, patiently poring through the pages of marble collecting books, teaching Atwood marble history, type, rarity, origin, dates, and more. Atwood contracted a double-portion of the marble virus racing through Walker’s veins.
“I got hooked on marbles,” Atwood recalls. “I’d be in the rows looking any chance I got, going with Tanginna or going alone. Pretty soon, those marbles started adding up.”
Sincerely. But why are tiny, colored spheres—children’s toys—scattered in volume on farmland?
Keepsies
Before the advent of modern agriculture machinery, farmland was dotted with homes. “Every 40 acres or so had at least one house and some farms had clusters of sharecropper houses,” Atwood says. “When you look out today and see empty land, it might not have looked that way just 50 years ago or more.”
Within a given geography, for example, where timber was cleared in the late 1800s, and tenant families moved on and off the ground until the 1960s, scores of children spread across generations were associated with a particular shotgun or dog trot house, i.e., the actors changed, but the stage remained the same.
All those kids, regardless of family income level, possessed the ubiquity of childhood: marbles. In an age prior to television access, and decades before home computers, video games, the internet, or iPhones, kids shot marbles for keepsies in front or back yards, in barn dirt, under porches, and beneath shade trees.
Affordably priced, depending on the decade, at 5 cents to 20 cents per bag at general stores and commissaries, or acquired via giveaways at service stations and shoe stores, marbles were the great equalizer of childhood. Some kids had a little; most had a lot.
“I think all the time about the kids who owned these marbles I find,” Atwood says. “Many of those kids didn’t have too many other possessions besides those marbles and that makes me sincerely grateful for the blessings I’ve been given in life.”
The kids are gone. The houses are gone. The marbles remain. Agates, alabasters, cat-eyes, clays, glazed clays, and more, the marbles of yesterday hide under the dirt—waiting patiently to reveal their color and join the 50,000-strong collection of Wyman Atwood.
Past to Present
Whether climbing in a side-by-side for a short ride to a nearby house site, or driving a truck to more distant locations, Atwood’s blood pumps hard. “On my way to a hunt, I’m full of anticipation, not sure what I’ll find in the sandy dirt. Once I hit the rows, I go into deep concentration and leave the world behind. It’s all about the hunt—finding is just the temporary reward.”
“It’s a unique feeling where I think about good times gone by and great friends of my past, and it makes me appreciate what I have now,” he notes. “There is much more going on in those rows than nostalgia. I’ll have a talk with Jesus when I’m walking and I’ll know that’s right where I need to be.”
With every marble spotted against the mocha soil, Atwood bends over, pulls the sphere out of the past, and gently tucks it into a front pocket. “I love marbles as a hobby and I’ll buy some special ones from time to time, but the ones that matter are those that come out of the fields. Chipped or cracked or even crushed—it makes me no difference. I could care less about the value of the objects I find.”
But what if the value of the object is $15,000—cash on the barrelhead?
No Means No
On April 18, 1991, several years past the heartache of bedroom theft, Atwood walked into a field with random hopes—coins, bear teeth, clay pipe stems, or whatever curios the rows might offer. Minutes into the hunt, Atwood spotted a wide base sticking up from the sandy dirt. He pulled; the point didn’t budge. He wiggled; the point gave the barest sway. He pulled again; 4.5” of a knobbed Hardin slid from the soil and saw sunlight for the first time in several thousand years. A stunner.
Atwood knelt beside an adjacent gar hole and washed away dirt from the serrations, shocked by the quality of the smoker. Forgoing the relative safety of his own pocket, he kept the soft flesh of his hand clasped tightly around the Hardin and made for home, where he immediately deposited it into a foam-lined case.
Word travels fast. The next morning, to Atwood’s surprise, he heard a knock on his front door.
“There was this doctor on my steps from in town that was well-known to buy arrowheads,” Atwood details. “He said, ‘I want to see that arrowhead you found.’”
Atwood retrieved the case and pointed at the Hardin, declining to remove the piece. The doctor took one look and fingered a knot of hundred-dollar bills: “I want that arrowhead.”
“Not for sale,” Atwood answered.
The doctor peeled off 30 bills—$3,000—and placed them on a table.
“No, sir. Not for sale,” Atwood reiterated.
“I’ll be back. I’ll be right back,” responded the doctor, confident in tone.
True to his word, the doctor returned in 20 minutes with a bulkier knot.
“He slapped down $6,000, and I said, ‘No,’ again,” Atwood recalls. “He went right up to $10,000, and I told him politely, ‘No means no.’”
Three days later, Atwood again heard a knock at the door. The doctor was back with $15,000 in cash. Atwood turned it down.
“Everybody told me I was stupid,” Atwood laughs. “I may be stupid, but I told that man the arrowhead was special. I told him I was supposed to find it and it wasn’t for sale. End of story.”
“It’s true that I’m crazy, but it’s also true that I’m the guy who loves what he finds for the story of it.”
Uncovered
Atwood has lost count.
At a total between 50,000 and 75,000, his marbles rest in foam-bottom display cases, glass lamps, countless jars, and an end table with a clear top.
“It’s not about the numbers and it’s not about the value,” Atwood emphasizes. “We’ll pass these marbles on to our grandkids and they can do what they want.”
Beyond marbles or arrowheads, he urges others to foster outdoor interests of any type. “Take your kids and grandkids outside at every opportunity. Get them off the television and phone. If you spend time with them outside, then they’ll take an interest in nature or history or something, and that’s when you praise them, to help build that interest.”
Expect Atwood to stay on the hunt, patiently adding to his marble mountain.
“Life took me from arrowheads to marbles, and there’s so much in our dirt still to be uncovered,” Atwood adds. “It’s coming to the top and I want to be there when it pops out.”
For more articles from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
