The Discovery
I wake up to the very first day of summer with anticipation of yet another three month vacation.  I open my eyes and roll over to look at my clock. Its only 9:33.
“Oh boy,” I say as I haven’t quite made it out of my school year schedule.
I roll out of bed and dig my toes into the soft carpet.  I slowly stand up and walk out of my room and down the stairs to begin my daily routine.  I take a quick shower, eat a big bowl of cereal, and head out the door into the bright sun.  I go into the backyard to start my chores for the day.
My first chore of the day was to dig a few holes for fence posts.  I grab the posthole diggers out of the shed and head across the field.  After digging six holes, three feet deep, I strike something hard.  I dig around it to find out what I’m hitting.  What could be blocking the posthole diggers? Dad just tilled this field last week.
I continue to dig and peer down the hole. It’s a large object so I run and grab a shovel and continue to dig.  It takes me about forty-five minutes to dig a spot large enough to uncover the large object.  I brush it off and pull it above ground.  What?  A trunk?  Who would bury a trunk in our field?   Dad told me the land has belonged to our family for centuries.
I look it over and notice a bulky lock attached so I start to heft the large trunk back to the farm house.  After about twenty minutes I finally make it to the house with the trunk. I look up as the sun is now at its prime, blazing hot into my eyes. I take the trunk over to the shed and prop it up onto a bench as I find a crowbar to bust the ancient lock. I search for a while until I find one in a random drawer. I spin around and slam the crowbar down hard on the big lock as it breaks the center of the locking mechanism.  It makes a loud clink is it pops open.  I then pry open the large trunk with the crowbar until I manage to slowly wedge it open. I lean over to look inside, it’s so dark that I have to reach my hand into the large mysterious trunk un-knowingly of what I will find. Curiosity spreads across my face as I feel a rough texture. I pull out an old piece of parchment paper that has dark scribbles in a foreign language spread across it.
I lay it down on the bench and continue to search the trunk and find a variety of items. A few arrow heads, tools such as a knife and a hatchet carved out of animal bone with stone tips. I also find a few arrows and a bow. I keep feeling around and get hands full of more parchment, although these pieces have pictures drawn across of a Native American man standing beside a fire. Another one near a teepee, a third has the man fishing out of a canoe and the last piece has him fighting bravely in battle with many other men. By the looks of his head and animal skins he appears to be the chief of the native tribe. 
Ancient artifacts in our back yard? We should call someone. We could be rich! I shuffle everything together and place it all back in the trunk as I run off to search for my dad. I run past our barn and back across the field in excitement to tell my dad just what I had found. I finally run up to my dad who is still working on putting the fence posts in the ground.
“Dad! Dad! I found something!”  I slow down to a walk as I try to catch my breath and tell him the news at the same time. 
“What is it son?”
“A trunk!”
“A skunk?!?!”
“No a trunk!! It has ancient artifacts in it!”
“Where did you get it?”
“The ground. It was buried.”
“Maybe my father buried it when he was alive or maybe his father. This land has been in our family tree for centuries you know.”
“But Dad it’s written in a different language. It looks like some really old Native American stuff. It has arrow heads and ancient bone tools!”
“Did you say Native American? Let me have a look, where is it?”
“It’s in the shed by the house, I had to bust a lock open on it.”
“Well let’s go then.” We pack up dads tools and hop into the pickup. Dad fires it up and we cruise across the empty field and slowly come to a stop near the shed. Dad kills the engine and we climb out, we head into the shed. I wait quietly watching intently as dad sifts through the stuff in the trunk.
After a few minutes he pauses and says it looks like it could be something in the family line and that I should go to the computer and research online my great grandfather and see if there are any leads. I gladly oblige and race through the house up the stairs and into my bedroom where I then turn on my computer. I flop down in the computer chair waiting eagerly as the monitor slowly brightens and comes to life.
I then scroll over to the web icon and double click waiting for the browser to pop up. I quickly navigate to google and ask how to find a family tree, It sends me straight to ancestry.com where I type in the my great grandfathers name and at first get nothing then I search through old photographs in the attic and find his father’s name I then type it in and come across a few of his ancestors who are listed as great historical figures. I decide to probe further and click on a few links that are listed beneath the names. It shows that the men were part of the Cherokee tribe in the southern parts of the nation. Which makes sense because our ranch is located in Tennessee. I keep searching to find specific names of my ancestors.
After about twenty minutes of searching I come across one of the most recent great warrior chiefs of the Cherokee tribe who was named Oconostota. It showed he was born somewhere around 1715 and that he was known for being a fierce fighter and he was also known for trading well with the French. I go back to googles home page and look up sons of Oconostota, I find that he had many children with four different wives. I stay searching four hours and follow the family tree all the way back to my father’s great-great grandfather. I then edit the family tree adding in my name my fathers and all of my grandparents name to the list.
I think back to my dad telling me the land has been in our families name for centuries and realize that our ranch must have been a famous village at one time. I immediately begin my research. I keep thinking back to remains of log cabins I have seen in our forest and at the time I had thought nothing of them. I type in our location on a site that identifies what land use to belong to what territories. When I get the results it shows that our ranch was fought over in several battles. The English wanted to take all of our land but the famous Oconostota fought so hard that the English had to retreat. I shut down my computer and go to find my dad who is grilling steaks for supper. I tell him everything that I had found out today. He says he knew that we had some Cherokee in us but he didn’t figure that we were a direct blood line to anyone as special as the famous Oconostota.
I ask if we can take a vacation to go and see any famous memorials of the Cherokee tribe. He says he will have to think about it because there is a lot of work to be done around the ranch but if I do my part then maybe sometime this summer we can go somewhere truly historical and find out more about our historical Cherokee bloodline. After a long day of researching I am ready to go to bed. I take the trunk up to my room and place it at the foot of my bed. I then take all of the other ancient artifacts and display them around my room. I crawl up into my bed thinking about how I could make my life to be worthwhile just like the famous Cherokee warrior chief Oconostota did.