On a typically balmy mid-September day in southern Arizona in 1924, WWI veteran Charles E. Manier took his family for a drive. Manier, along with his wife, son, and father, enjoyed a picnic at nearby Picture Rock. Now they were driving back along Silverbell Road.
Many of the homes in the U.S. Southwest are built from adobe, a sort of mudbrick which keeps buildings cool during the day and warm at night. These homes were plastered with lime, leaving old lime kilns scattered across the landscape. Entertainment was hard to come by in 1924, so when they passed an abandoned lime kiln, the family pulled over to have a poke around.
Charles noticed something strange poking out of the ground. A flattish, metal object was stuck in the hard caliche (soil cemented together by lime into a hard concretion). Intrigued, Manier fetched an old pick and began working to free the object…