WOW!   You have never been asked what the neatest thing you ever found was?
I get asked that several time a year, particularly with school groups!

My most memorable find occurred while doing the normally boring task on
monitoring.  It was at a fish hatchery being constructed by the "Corpse of
Engenears" on the lower snake river in Washington state.  The job was about
5-6 weeks or so back in the early 80s.  Washington State University had
already conducted prehistoric excavations on a couple of prehistoric house
pits and I had participated with the University of Idaho excavations doing
all of the historic work for the Joso Bridge Construction camp about a year
earlier.  I really was not expecting to find anything significant after all
of that work.

About 300 yards away, I noticed a bulldozer cutting into a small hillock
about 8 to 10 feet high.  On his second or third slice, I saw a white spot
that looked like filling in a twinke at that distance.  I knew that
whatever in the blazes it was, it was NOT natural.  I ran over there as
quick as my gimpy legs would carry me and my hard hat went flying (to be
retrieved later).  The dozer operator was about to make another pass and I
had to try and get him to stop so I could check this out.  It took some
yelling and I had to let my normally sweet and innocent demeanor slip for
just a small fraction of a second.  This seemed to do the trick.

I looked at the small hillock and saw white sand with chunks of wood and
human bone.  Down at the bottom at my feet was the top of a skull, wood,
and hair or fur.  I went back to my motel and called the Univ. of Idaho.
Rick Sprague and some of his cohorts in crime who had more human burial
excavation came out and conducted the work.  It turned out it was a contact
period canoe burial.  It was a young male in his early twenties wrapped in
a buffalo robe inside a dugout canoe.  The canoe had been filled with white
sand.  The only historic artifact that I can remember a some cloth,
probably from a shirt.  Analysis of some beetle exoskeletons in the buffalo
robe revealed that it was either a spring or fall burial.  I can't remember
which.  Rick - if you have your ears on (old CB terminology) can you supply
further details?  I seem to remember something about a tribal tradition
that only drownings were buried in canoes in order to keep them from
drowning again in their next life.

Smoke.


Smoke (Michael A.) Pfeiffer, RPA
Ozark-St. Francis National Forests
605 West Main Street
Russellville, Arkansas 72801
(479) 968-2354  Ext. 233
e-mail:  [log in to unmask]

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.