A Whatzit… From North Carolina?
Posted in Whatzit? by John E. Pannell on November 22nd, 2010 at 4:00 am 
Mystery White Buffalo Patch
Greg Grimes recently sent me this image of a patch that we cannot identify. He says rumor has it it may have been a Yamni Wakpa chapter piece, Occoneechee lodge 104, from the 60′s – 70′s era. A group of us here in North Carolina are skeptical.
Occoneechee lodge has been fortunate in recent decades to have many active patch collectors who have well documented what the lodge has issued and produced. Even though chapter patches tend to be less well documented, it seems unlikely something possibly as recent as the 1970s would have been missed by the local collectors. Also, the white buffalo has been used by several other lodges. In fact this looked familiar to us but we could not place it.
Greg writes:
I saw this piece at the Jamboree TOR in Fredericksburg. A guy that was originally from 104 as a youth in the 80′s supposedly got this from a once DE from the old San/Lee District. Apparently he ended up trading it later on. When I was talking and trading with him, he said he wanted to hang on to it for a while. It almost looked to me like it may have been cut out from another piece.
This story has not been verified. The form District Executive (DE) was not named. It changed hands a few times since. We would be right to be skeptical about this story.
Can anyone out there conclusively identify what this patch is?
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For what it’s worth, (and this is only speculation on my part) that patch screams Hi Cha-Ko-Lo 458. The design of the left-facing buffalo standing on green with a blue sky fits just about every one of their regular issue flaps.
Again: I am speculating. I am not speaking from any specific knowledge, beyond that the design of this patch matches many of the 458 flaps.
There has also been some speculation that it’s from 343-Woapeu Sisilija too but that could not be verified. I know someone out there that can give us a + ID on this piece.
John-
Cant provide an ID, but can tell you with 100% certainty that this is not a 343 piece.
The piece is the center of a Lodge 489 Nishkin Halupa A Pe Lachi Lodge Wapsu Sisilija Chapter eA1970. Looks like someone found one floating around, cut out the center, and tried to pass it off as an Occoneechee piece.
Thanks, Mike. We recently figured this out, too. I was going to write a blog entry for it. I may still do so.
[...] Fall I posted here about a “whatzit” purported by some to be a chapter patch from Occoneeche lodge. Some, including this webmaster, [...]