On Poteau Mountain near the small town of Heavener, Oklahoma, near the Arkansas line, stands a slab of stone which is 12 feet tall, 10 feet wide, and 16 inches thick, like a billboard. There is writing on this billboard, consisting of 8 deeply pecked letters, whose edges have eroded to smoothness, even though the stone's hardness on the Moh's Hardness Scale is 7, where a diamond is 10.
In the 1830's, the Choctaws of Indian Territory saw the writing but could not read it. Various citizens in the 1800's saw the stone and named it "Indian Rock", although the Indians had no alphabets.In 1923 the lettering was submitted by Carl Kemmerer of Heavener to the Smithsonian Institution, who identified the letters as Norse runes.
Vikings in America
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