Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  But the earth-lodge villages weren’t sustainable. Trees are scarce on the prairie. They grow mainly in the river’s lowest floodplain—what’s called the “first terrace”—so after a generation or so the riverbank for miles upstream and downstream of a village would be stripped bare. The women, whose job it was to gather fuel and building materials, had to walk increasing, exhausting distances for wood. Eventually they would put their weary feet down, and the tribe would resettle a few dozen miles upriver or downriver in a fresh stretch of cottonwoods. A hundred years later, once the floodplain had reforested, they might circle back to the site of a village their ancestors had abandoned.

  By the 1700s, the Great Plains were home to numerous Indian tribes. Four major tribes inhabited and fought over the northern Plains: the fearsome Sioux, who remained nomadic, and the sedentary Mandans, Hidatsa, and Arikara. In what is now central South Dakota, the Arikara built immense earth-lodge villages encompassing hundreds of family houses and large ceremonial lodges.

  Then came the wave of the future: white explorers and fur traders. Lewis and Clark were among them, though they were far from the first. When the Corps of Discovery dropped anchor at a Mandan village in 1804, they were met by blond-haired, blue-eyed Mandans—the offspring of native women and French explorers or trappers.

  On their journey upriver into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, Lewis and Clark attempted to unite the Arikara and the Mandans in a three-way alliance with the U.S. government to oppose the Sioux, but the Arikara resisted the coalition-building and in fact skirmished briefly with the expedition as it continued upstream. The explorers fared much better with the Mandans: The Corps of Discovery wintered over with the Mandans that year, trading and hunting with the Mandan men and sharing the sexual favors of the Mandan women. Often this was done with the encouragement of the women’s husbands, who believed that their wives would receive, and then transmit, the whites’ “magic.” Unfortunately, what was usually transmitted was syphilis.

  On their return downriver in 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition again clashed with the Arikara; in 1809, Meriwether Lewis—during an ill-fated term as governor of the Louisiana Territory—sent an army of some five hundred whites and Indians back up the Missouri with orders to exterminate the Arikara if they were spoiling to fight.

  But for all their bravado, the Arikara were teetering on the brink of extinction. Within half a century of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, the Arikara had all but vanished: victims of the Sioux, the settlers, and smallpox. The tribe’s decimation left behind, on the second and third terraces of the Missouri, hundreds of empty earth lodges and thousands of occupied graves.

  In 1957, as the last traces of the Arikara civilization were about to slip beneath the waters of progress, the Smithsonian Institution sent me out to help excavate as much as possible in the little time remaining.

  THE NATIONAL MUSEUM of Natural History is one of the great Smithsonian museums lining the Mall in Washington, D.C. On the main floor, beneath its huge rotunda, an enormous African elephant stands sentinel. Several floors above him—on balconies ringing the rotunda’s fourth, fifth, and sixth floors—cabinets and drawers and shelves brim with Native American skeletons. Or at least they used to.

  Today, our thinking about excavating graves and collecting bones has changed radically. In 1990, after intense lobbying by Native American tribes, Congress passed a law that forbids the collection of Native American skeletal remains. The law also requires that museums and other institutions return Native American remains if those remains came from a tribe that still survives. The underlying philosophy is simple: The remains of the dead are sacred relics, not collectibles or exhibits, and they should be returned to their ancestral lands and buried with reverence. Spiritually, it makes perfect sense.

  Scientifically, though, excavations and collections such as the Smithsonian’s have played a crucial role in illuminating the history, culture, and evolution of humans in general and Native Americans in particular. By comparing bones from thousands of individuals, scientists can draw an accurate picture of North America’s native inhabitants: their size, their strength, their diet, their average life span, infant mortality rates, and a wealth of other information. And in the latter 1950s and early ’60s, those bones were pouring into the Smithsonian faster than the museum’s scientists could process them.

  That was lucky for me.

  I HAD DISCOVERED anthropology during my last two years of undergraduate school at the University of Virginia. By then I had completed most of the requirements for my major, psychology, and finally had a few slots open for electives. As I scanned the course offerings, the first thing that caught my eye was “Anthropology.” (Not surprisingly, the list was alphabetical. If I’d started reading at the bottom instead of the top, I might have wound up as a zoologist!)

  Virginia didn’t actually have an anthropology department—just one lone professor, Clifford Evans, who was lumped into the sociology department. But Evans was an adventurous field researcher and an inspiring teacher. He had recently returned from excavating a prehistoric village in Brazil, and his slides and stories brought its ancient inhabitants back to life in the classroom. I took every class Evans taught.

  In the spring of 1956, as I was finishing my master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Kentucky, I wrote Evans to tell him. I figured I was probably his only student ever to earn a graduate degree in anthropology, and I thought he might be pleased to know. By then he’d left Virginia and taken a job as a curator of archaeology at the Smithsonian.

  Evans wrote back immediately. He remembered me well and told me he was glad to hear of my progress. He also told me the Smithsonian was desperate for help analyzing the flood of Native American skeletal material that was pouring in from the Great Plains, and offered to get me the job. It was a golden opportunity at a remarkable time.

  The flood of bones had been unleashed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps had been created to wage war on flood-prone rivers, and it did so with a vengeance. By the late 1940s its engineers had dammed and diked most of the Mississippi, so they branched out to other rivers. In the 1950s they were working their way up the Missouri.

  By the time they reached the center of South Dakota, they were working on a colossal scale. Six miles upstream of Pierre (pronounced “pee-AIR” by the French but “peer” by South Dakotans), they began piling up a ridge of earth nearly 250 feet high and almost two miles long. The Oahe Dam, named for a Sioux council lodge, was the largest earth-fill dam in the United States when it was begun in 1948. It still is.

  The reservoir it would create was also going to be enormous. Destined to stretch upriver about 225 miles and spread some 20 miles at its widest point, Lake Oahe would be one of the largest artificial lakes in the United States. It would inundate hundreds of square miles of prairie—and countless Native American archaeological sites.

  The Corps of Engineers had earmarked part of the dam’s construction cost for archaeological research and excavation, and contracted with the Smithsonian to do the scientific work. The funding was a tiny share of the dam’s budget—just one-half of one percent—but the dam and its budget were so big that, by typical archaeological standards, the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys (as the overall project was called) was grand of scale and deep of pocket. As the Corps of Engineers began piling up earth to hold back the river, a small army of archaeologists and their indentured servants—undergraduates and grad students—began excavating in the area to be flooded. They began at a major Arikara site just upstream of the dam, since it would be the first to be submerged. It was called the Sully site, simply because that was the name of the county where it was located. On the second terrace of the Missouri—the shelf lying just above the river’s floodplain—the Arikara had built the largest earth-lodge village that has ever been discovered.

  The main clue to the site’s archaeological richness was a series of circles,
ranging in diameter from eighteen to twenty feet all the way up to sixty feet. These marked the locations of earth lodges; when the lodges burned or collapsed, they left shallow depressions in the prairie, because they had been dug several feet below grade. Rainfall is scant in this area, averaging just fifteen inches a year, so the depressions, which collect runoff and groundwater seepage, became tiny oases of green in the brown prairie. (Another five inches of annual rainfall, and the plains would have become forest instead of grassland.) The smaller green circles represented hundreds of houses, each occupied by as many as fifteen to twenty people; the handful of large ones marked community or ceremonial lodges.

  Like many of the Arikara earth-lodge villages, the Sully site had been occupied multiple times, beginning around A.D. 1600. It was abandoned once the nearby trees had all been cut, then resettled after the riverbank had reforested. By dating the artifacts they found, the archaeologists would deduce that the village had been inhabited at least three times before being abandoned permanently around 1750.

  From the ground, the earth-lodge depressions were harder to see but easy to feel: Driving across the prairie in a jeep or truck, a farmer or an archaeologist might feel the vehicle drop down into the slight depression, then climb back out again. The Sully site contained so many of these depressions, driving across it was like one big roller-coaster ride.

  Because the village was so big, and had been occupied for so long, the archaeologists were unearthing a treasure trove of materials: cooking utensils, farming tools, weapons, jewelry, and bones—thousands upon thousands of bones, far more than the Smithsonian’s handful of physical anthropologists back in Washington could sort and measure.

  That’s where I had first entered the picture, walking past that stuffed elephant beneath the rotunda and up into my first summer of bone-cataloging. A lowly graduate student, with no telephone, no pet projects of my own, no journal articles to write or review, and none of the other distractions confronting a loftier scientist, I could analyze bones from dawn till dusk. And so I did, for all of one summer and most of the next. Late in the summer of 1957, the project’s director summoned me to South Dakota.

  I had never been west of the Mississippi before, and I had never even flown before, so the trip to South Dakota opened up a vast new world for me. Some lessons awaited me in old bones hidden in the earth. Others were imparted by the young students who toiled in the heat and the dust of the Missouri River terraces. Still others were taught by the ants and the rattlesnakes that burrowed into the plains with us. Every one of these lessons would serve me well in the years ahead as I began applying the secrets I learned from the long-dead to understanding the stories of the recently murdered.

  BY THE TIME I arrived in South Dakota in August of 1957, the summer was almost over. In just two weeks the project would shut down so the professors and students could return to school. And in those two short weeks Stephenson hoped I could help answer a question that had been puzzling and frustrating him for the past two years: Where had the Arikara hidden their dead?

  From the number of earth lodges being excavated, he knew the population of the village had numbered in the hundreds and that it had been occupied for decades. But so far Stephenson’s crew had managed to find only a few dozen sets of remains. So where were the rest?

  Some Indian tribes, including the Sioux, put the bodies of the dead on elevated scaffolds to decompose in the open. It’s therefore rare to find an old Sioux skeleton, because the bones are often scattered by coyotes, vultures, and other scavengers. The Arikara, though, seemed consistent in their burial practices. The graves were usually dug by the women, digging with hoes made from the scapulae, or shoulder blades, of bison. It was tough work with a primitive tool; so, to keep the task manageable, they made the graves as small and compact as possible: They dug a round pit about three feet deep—smaller if the individual was a child or woman—and lowered the body into a flexed or fetal position, with the knees drawn up to the chest and the arms crossed. Then they filled in the pit; covered the top with sticks, logs, or brush to deter scavengers; and topped the wood with soil and sod.

  By August of that second summer, Stephenson’s frustration was intense. Not only were the remains they’d found insufficient to account for the village’s population, they were also insufficient to teach us much about the Arikaras’ life and death. Stephenson was smart enough to know there must be an Arikara cemetery somewhere nearby. But if we didn’t find it soon, we’d lose our chance.

  Archaeological digs are based on a grid pattern: A site is marked off into five-foot squares, which are excavated by removing very shallow layers of soil one at a time. Each grid is assigned an identifying number, so that as the dig progresses from one square to the next, the artifacts or remains found can be logged precisely according to which square they were found in and where within the square, both horizontally and by depth. It’s orderly, it’s precise, and it’s maddeningly slow—sometimes taking a week or more per square—so that an entire summer can be spent excavating an area just forty to fifty feet square. We had to cover lots more ground in lots less time. Stephenson put me in charge of a crew of ten students and urged me to find the Arikara dead before the end of the month.

  It’s hot as blazes in South Dakota in August, and the prairie is a mighty big place to search. To do the job swiftly, we’d need a small army of workers. What we had, it turns out, was a very large army of very small workers: the ants burrowing into the prairie by the billions.

  The soil of the Great Plains is called loess. Pronounced “lurss,” it’s from a German word meaning “loose.” Fine as flour, it’s what put the dust in the Dust Bowl. That’s in its dry state, of course; just add water, and its character changes drastically. Wet loess is quite possibly the slickest substance in the universe, and if it’s sitting atop wet shale—possibly the second slickest material on earth—things get really interesting: In utter defiance of the laws of physics, friction (and therefore traction) can vanish entirely. That’s why poor Bob Stephenson was so late when picking me up that first day.

  Loess is tailor-made for ants. It’s soft and easy to dig through, but it holds together well, so once a worker ant has tunneled through it, he can be pretty sure his tunnel is not going to collapse anytime soon.

  Even better than virgin loess, in the opinion of our industrious ant, is loess that’s been disturbed and loosened—for example, in the process of digging and filling in a grave. This is nice, easy digging down here, he thinks when he burrows into a burial. But wait a minute—what’s all this extra stuff? If it’s something too big to move, he detours around it. But if he can drag it, he hauls it up to the surface and chucks it outside.

  One digger’s trash is another’s treasure. During my first few days in South Dakota, I spent a lot of time walking in a half-crouch through the prairie’s short grass and scrub. Most of the anthills were just piles of cast-off loess, with a few little pebbles thrown in for good measure. But eventually I began to spot other objects. Looking closer, I saw that they were tiny finger bones, weathered foot bones, and—most startling of all—flashes of brilliant color: blue glass beads, used in jewelry and as currency by the traders and Plains Indians two centuries ago. Digging one foot down, directly beneath several of these anthills, we found crumbling timbers used to close the graves. Jackpot! Fanning outward from the village, we plotted what looked to be the most promising concentration of these tiny grave markers placed by the ants. We began digging lines or rows of test squares running outward from the village site, no longer side by side but separated by five feet, sometimes ranging out twenty or even thirty feet from the prior squares.

  That final, frantic push nearly killed the crew. But when it was done, we knew we’d found a huge Arikara cemetery. Judging by the dozens of graves we found in our strips of test squares, we knew there must be hundreds of burials.

  But we’d run out of time. Excavating them would have to wait until the fol
lowing summer.

  I WAS, and am still, grateful to the industrious ants of South Dakota.

  Not so, the writhing rattlesnakes. In fact, if there was one thing I was dreading as the summer of 1959 approached, it was the prospect of all those damn rattlesnakes.

  The prairie is an ideal habitat for snakes. It abounds in mice, rabbits, birds, and other small prey. Like the ants, the snakes find the soil easy to tunnel into. So the population density of prairie rattlers is unsettlingly high to start with. Then came the added pressure of dwindling habitat: In 1957, Oahe Lake began to fill, and the lowlands along the river began to disappear beneath the water. So, guess what? The rattlesnakes wriggled up to higher ground—the terraces where a bunch of absentminded anthropologists were crawling through the grass, leaning into graves, reaching blindly out of pits to grope for a trowel or a brush.

  Prairie rattlers are fairly small, as rattlesnakes go. Unlike diamondbacks, which can grow to six feet or more, with bodies as thick as a grave-digger’s wrist, prairie rattlers rarely exceed three feet in length. But they’re cantankerous, aggressive little devils, with a tendency to strike first and ask questions later. I decided that was a pretty good policy for us as well.

  As a scientist, I understand that rattlesnakes fill an important ecological niche: They’re a vital link in the food chain, the single most important predator keeping the prairie from being overrun by mice and other rodents. I grasp this thoroughly on an intellectual level. On an instinctual, emotional level, though, I’m terrified of the durned things. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve always believed that the only good rattlesnake is a dead rattlesnake. When I’m confronted by a live one, my position tends to be, “This prairie isn’t big enough for the two of us.” Soon I developed a reputation as the fastest shovel in the West.

  One of the morning rituals for an anthropology crew is to sharpen its shovels. A sharp shovel bites through soil a lot quicker than a dull one. It bites through snake a lot quicker too. Every morning we’d pass around a file and sharpen our shovels, smoothing out any nicks left by rocks, then honing the edge to razor keenness. The test of a truly sharp shovel is this: Will it shave the hair off your forearm? I didn’t always take the time to lather up and shave my face, but every single morning my forearm was as bare and smooth as a baby’s bottom. If I’d put a notch into the handle of my shovel for every prairie rattler it dispatched, eventually I’d have had all notch and no handle.