Chapter 21
Vickery had asked me how I’d gotten into forensic cases, and the answer had been “South Dakota.” South Dakota was also where I’d first thought that if I wanted to move the earth—or at least a few long layers of it—a diesel engine and a wide steel blade might pinch-hit for a lever and a place to stand.
The engine and the blade were on an earthmoving machine—an aging LeTourneau “Tournapull”—and as it coughed and rumbled forward on the prairie, it carried my hopes and my potential ruin with it. A fraction of an inch at a time, the Tournapull’s angled blade eased down into the South Dakota soil and shaved off a layer, the way a carpenter’s plane shaves a sliver of pine off a plank. In this case, though, the sliver was eighty feet long, ten feet wide, and two hundred years deep.
I’d spent the prior year—the summer after earning my master’s degree in anthropology—leading a crew of students at this same archaeological site, an Arikara Indian village whose timber-and-sod huts had once housed hundreds of people. Inhabited between the early 1700s and the early 1800s, the village was now on the verge of being inundated by the rising waters of a new reservoir. Anything we hoped to learn about the village and its inhabitants would have to be learned fast—unless we wanted to call in scuba divers. The previous summer, the water level had been twenty feet below the site’s lowest areas; now waves were lapping at the very margins of the village.
We’d worked feverishly the prior season. Gridding the entire site into hundreds of five-foot squares, marked by stakes and string, we’d dug down by hand, inch by inch, through dozens of test squares. Over the course of the summer we’d managed to find and excavate thirteen graves—great progress, by most measures, but maddeningly slow in the face of the rising waters. It hadn’t been easy to convince the Smithsonian—the expedition’s sponsor—to let me trade my trowel for a road grader this season; they worried about the damage that heavy equipment could inflict on fragile old bones. I argued that even though the technique was experimental and seemingly risky, there was much to gain and virtually nothing to lose by bringing in earthmoving equipment. Saying no posed zero risk of damaging bones, but it also offered zero hope of recovering more than a relative handful of skeletons. In the end, I won an important but provisional victory: I could cut one eighty-foot trench with the grader, and if the technique proved successful at finding graves without damaging bones, I could forge ahead full speed.
But despite my confident arguments in Washington, D.C., I’d felt anxiety carving into me as the steel blade sliced into the soil. I was counting on the wind that swept across the Great Plains, unrelentingly but also consistently. Year after year, decade after decade, the wind carried powdery alluvial soil—the infamous dust of the dust bowl—across the Plains, sifting it down amid the grass stalks at the steady rate of one inch every ten years. So sixteen or eighteen inches down—in theory, at least—the Tournapull would uncover what had been the surface layer back to the early 1800s, when the village had been abandoned, fire-building and pot-breaking had moved elsewhere, and grave digging had ceased. We’d see the ground the Arikara had worked with hoes fashioned from bison scapulae. We’d find, I hoped, the circular graves they’d scooped out to bury warriors who’d fallen in battle, women who’d died in childbirth, children who’d succumbed to smallpox, the invisible new enemy unleashed by the whites.
The eighty-foot test cut lay alongside a row of squares we’d excavated a year before—squares that had contained many of the thirteen graves we’d found. I was gambling that this area was part of a larger burial ground, and that somewhere in the next eighty feet, the blade would intersect and reveal more graves.