The Anthropology Lab at the University in Lincoln that summer was actually a staging area for incoming students and diggers who were then assigned or re-assigned back out to Field Parties scattered far and wide over the Central Plains. While waiting for new arrivals, those of us already there, were told to "take a room" downtown at the Grand Hotel - a flophouse in the grand old tradition of such (shades of Denver's Metropolitan!), with windows nailed shut against premature departures (or unheralded arrivals), no air conditioning (in June, in mid-morning, the temperature outside was already in the high 90's) and illumination from a single bulb which hung down on a bare wire from the old embossed tin ceiling high above. A common bathroom was shared at the end of the hall. The desk clerk wore bib overalls...
By day we sorted and helped classify an amazing amount of artifacts and ethnographic materials even then coming into the Lab from parties already out in the field. It was all new and highly fascinating to me: whole clay pots with dirt still adhering - I was told some dated to before the time of Columbus! Wow! Dig bags full of chips and "projectile points" 
(the error of the layman's "arrowpoints" being the first illusion the novice loses in this arcane science...). There were cardboard boxes marked "Skull fragments" or "baby's bones." Dried corn cobs, burnt sticks, beads, bear teeth, sea shells from some far-distant Ocean (we were in the heart of the Continent - and learned thus of "native trade routes" and the like). It was sort of a mini-crash course in Archaeology 101.
The days stretched into a week or more... When will we be leaving? "Soon, Soon", was always the answer. Most of us were living on much reduced funds. Getting enough to eat became somewhat of a challenge. Fortunately, Mr. Bib Overalls put me on to a good strategm: the area was full of hardhat workers doing construction work nearby. He told me that out of kindness to their collective guts, they would always hit upon the restaurant where you got the best and the most to eat for the least amount of money. The trick he said, is to watch where they go to eat - and follow them! This led me in short order to the "Blue Bell Restaurant and Coffee Shop" - and a number of congenial souls to dine and swap lies with! The old "Blue Bell" was jammed all hours of the day and night and the trick was to tunnel right into their midst, like piglets at the trough. Suzy, the waitress, favored none and dispensed hot coffee in endless refills, and there were always extra biscuits and gravy a-plenty and no one was counting. I remember the "Blue Bell" with fondness. Burp! (Pardon!)
A few days later I was assigned at last to a Field Party. We were about eight or ten guys maybe - and one or two girls. We were given a Chevy "Carryall" and two jeeps (military style) with trailers. These latter were packed with shovels and all manner of dig equipment and tents, kitchen utensils and impedimentia for life in the field. One other guy and I were the oldest in the group (I wasjust 20 - and Lee was maybe 27 or so). We were put "in charge" and told we must get the entire group up to a dig "....outside Ft. Pierre, South Dakota" - maybe 400 miles or more distant from where we were, up on the central reaches of the Missouri River. There we would join the Director and a skeleton force already hard at work on what was to be known as the "Buffalo Pasture Site."
For some reason, it was decided we would depart after dark, and so one night shortly thereafter, we left the Anthropology Lab and got onto the highway headed north. It was a trip, I tell you! This is some of the last and wildest country "out West" and settlements are few. The night was dark and a huge thunderstorm soon engulfed us. I was driving the lead jeep ("because you been in the Service") and I had to keep the Carryall close up behind me and the trailing jeep astern of it. Shades of "armored patrol" back in the Fatherland! Was I ever to break out of my role as general roustabout and "driver" everywhere?
On and on we drove. The storm stopped and the stars came out. When we stopped for relief breaks you could hear the coyotes in the distance. There were many impromptu stops and discussion/debates over map readings and people leaning over the hood, and shining flashlights in one another's faces. However, it didn't seem likely we could get lost - as there was no other road to go on but the one we were traveling. Vast stretches of it were unpaved and gravel, which kept our speed to a minimum since I didn't want any of the other drivers skidding in the loose soil.
Dawn broke clear and bright, and we stopped for gas at a lonely station way out on the Plains, I remember. I stepped outside the jeep to stretch and stand by the pumps and I heard an angry rattle and hiss. I looked down and in a screened box almost at my feet was a large Gila Monster regarding me with the basilisk eye of his kind, and in a box right next to him was a Prarie rattler doing its thing also, and much irritated withal! The station owner, a grizzled old guy with no teeth, let out a cackle and 'lowed as how his "pets" wouldn't hurt no one - he collected them you see, and "...they was a roadside zoo sort of thing" he kept for folks to look at and see while they pumped their gas! We all crowded aound and ooohd! and awwwd! at his fine collection, and thanked him for the opportunity to behold such fine specimens and all. The Gila, of course, was a shill imported for "effect," as this is way north and east of its appointed range. But the Prarie Rattler was the real goods - believe me! - and but a foretaste of what we were to encounter all that summer along the Missouri...
Later that day we "checked in" at Camel Creek - another remote "dig" way out in the Nebraska Sandhills. The Director there was a friend of someone in our party and they wished to exchange pleasantries. We were soon on our way again. I remember that many of the party at Camel Creek were Japanese. Japanese students, I guess. This was not all that much postwar, and "Japs" still were not popular with most Americans...
We drove down the main street of Mitchell, S.D. - home of the incredible Corn Palace whose rococco design is done anew each year at harvest time with zillions of real corncobs! Even the lamposts along the street are in the shape of giant ears of corn, or were when I was there...
At Wall, S.D. we made an obligatory stop at Wall Drug - world famous (really!) for its free roadside signs to all customers, who are supposed to take them back to their hometowns and post them alongside their local roads - urging one and all "...when next in Wall, S.D." to be sure and shop Wall Drug! LOL! I brought one back once and put it up alongside High Ridge Road north of Stamford, CT - where its oddball message peeped forth from the encroaching Eastern underbrush till it finally disappeared thereunder one day... Wall Drug signs have been reported from as far away as Central Germany, Australia, the South Pole (!), Paris... and well heck, check the site yourself!...
At last we came to Pierre (and across the Big Muddy on the other side, lay Ft. Pierre). The Buffalo Pasture Site was on the old "Phillips Buffalo Ranch" (hence its name) - now abandoned some miles outside Pierre. After a few false turns off the hiway, we found it at last, and linked up with the rest of our colleagues.
We were just about at Ground Zero - that is the site of the incredible Oahe Dam right across the entire Missouri River at this spot, and at that time, just a-building. Oahe (pronounce "WAH-hee") was billed to be "...the largest earth-fill dam in the world, exceeding even one built by the Russians on the Bug or is it the Dneiper maybe - some river in that ill-starred and distant land." I presume it attained - and holds - its "title." I don't know. I have never been back and it was finished long after we were there. In fact, where we dug on those dry terraces above the river is now well under water in the pool the Missouri eventually formed here. That a dam could even be driven across the Missouri in the first place is mind-boggling when you behold the "Big Muddy" for the first time! More than a mile wide in spots and a dark tan to red-chocolate color, roiling and boiling in all seasons and hours, it drains half a Continent, and would seem impossible to block or impound. But the Corps of Engineers and the long-suffering American taxpayer know no limits - and so this work was going forth 'round the clock. Our presence was dictated by the fact that this "dig" was a "salvage dig," actually of a onetime Mandan Indian village which had stood right here. It had, in fact, been visited by Lewis and Clark on their epic voyage up the Missouri so long ago.
And in this manner I was initiated into the "brotherhood" of trowel-and-dustpan in "units" and of 'unit levels' and stratigraphy: whose presence or absence was argued all hours of the day and night. Backbreaking work with "idiot-sticks" (shovels) in the 120-degrees-by-10-a.m. broiling sun and bone-dry air for hours on end. Sifting endless pails of dirt in the shaker sifters. Assisting (and learning) at the excavation of "features" such as firepits and firespots, 
hearths and human burials, (discovering that the latter often had no finger bones, because said fingers now hung around some other skeleton's neck at another site, proof of coups and other warrior attainments in the sometimes not-so-ancient-past (and sometimes, attributed to roaming village dogs who gnawed on corpses laid out before their lodges prior to scaffold burials back up on the tablelands and breaks behind us...). Stuff like that. Tricks of the trade. How to layout a 3-4-5 triangle. How to "shoot a grid line." Read a topo. Set up a transit. How to survey farther afield for unknown burials and "ancillary sites." (Hint: learn to check the red ant mounds: if there are burials below, they will bring up the glass beads along with the grit and gravel ...).
We slept in Tents out in the open exposed to fierce winds every night in thunderstorms. This is the land made familiar to some in the movie Dances With Wolves, which was actually filmed I believe on Standing Butte Buffalo Ranch some distance west of us. Luckier than most Field Parties, we had the still standing outbuildings of the onetime Ranch, so one of these we converted to the "Cookshack." I hired an old gal in town to cook for us. (I had become sort of schlep, and general factotum to the Director - and in charge of the "Motor Pool" and any "trips to town" that became necessary). This old gal was something: she had cooked bunkhouse style for legions of cowboys over the years, and there wasn't any known foodstuff she could not abuse or serve up burned to a crisp... Wow!
We also had a unique feature: a thermal spring issued forth right here, and the Phillips, I guess, had long ago "tanked" it with a big concrete sort of bin around it. The water was about five feet deep inside, and a luxury beyond compare at the end of a hard day's digging - but you had to crawl up a ladder on the outside to sort of let yourself up and over the edge - and getting out sometimes posed problems... but letting down for a soak in that hot sulferous water was a godsend. Right across the Missouri on the bluffs on the far side of the river, was a monument you could just barely make out on the skyline. I never made it over there, but it marked the exact geographic center of the North American Continent. (Not the U.S. - that monument I believe is down somewhere in Kansas). The big Sioux Reservations lay all around us - The Lower Brule most immediate to the south, with Pine Ridge and Rosebud further south still. In town, the Sioux seemed to be the dominant population, and I remember clearly a bar we used to frequent, which had a big sign outside: "No Dogs and No Indians Allowed." Nevertheless, drunken Indians were a fact-of-life in many doorways.
We had weekends off, and about the only thing to do was hike out into the wild country around us - often looking for burials or additional sites. Lee Madsen, my tentmate, was already a consummate and competent dirt archaeologist (of the kind increasingly rare these days). He had no degree, but had been on many Summer digs over the years, and was a steady employee of the BAE (Bureau of American Ethnology) which was actually our sponsor - under yet another supernumerary organization called the "River Basin Surveys." All - as I noted earlier - part of a vast bureaucratic undertaking of the Smithsonian Institution. Lee was my mentor in many things "archaeological", and I learned much from him. He had been another victim of the "Dry Years" as were so many of my somewhat older friends down in Texas, and in the Army (shades of Shorty Metcalf - see Bunkmates ).They came from families broken by the Depression, and the Dust Storms, and most had "hit the road" at a tender age. Many had been "hobos" in the old original sense of that word. The kind immortalized in their folk song about the "Big Rock Candy Mountain."
Lee and I often went out at dawn or dusk - when the sun was just on the horizon, as its long, slanting rays would then reveal the faintest of impressions or dips in the undulating landscape, otherwise invisible in noonday glare. Many of these were sites of former "wallers" (buffalo wallows) from the days gone by when the bison roamed here in countless numbers. But others might prove to be depressions revealing onetime vanished lodges, and we would carefully "test" these... From Lee I learned the fine art of sifting the large red ant mounds scattered everywhere. Mixed in with the fine grit and sand the ants were bringing up from down below would often be glass Trade Beads including pony (early) and seed (later) types and, the bead staple on the Plains, called by the early trappers and Indians the "whiteheart" - sometimes, the "Cornaline D’Allepo" or Hudson Bay bead. My fascination with "trade beads" continues unabated to this day; later, chosen as an honor to "study" under the imminent visitng scholar Irwin Shaw ("The Young Lions") as visiting prof at NYU, I proved his ultimate despair when I wrote purple passages about "trade beads" on the Western Plains of Yore instead of ...people... (http://www.bwpowell.com/without1/chp6bk3bloomers.html)
The ground was charged through and through with buffalo bones. Everywhere. Every shovelfull. 
Most were attributable to the butchering and occupation activities of the onetime "Rees" (Arikaras) and Sioux who once lived here, as recently as a mere 75 years ago! - but Phillips we understood, had "raised" buffalo here up till a very short time before - and so some of the bones were likely more recent, too.
But it was the rattlesnakes that got and held your attention! They were legion! Everywhere! In the morning, we had to jump down into our excavations and throw them out. At night they crept beneath our tent floors. Every step you took in the buffalo grass you heard their hissing and rattling. It sounded like nothing so much to me back then, as the cellophane (anyone remember cellophane?) wrapper on a cigarette pack whenever a smoker crumples same in his fist. In fact for sometime after that summer, I sometimes got jumpy back home when someone loudly crinkled a cellophane cigarette pack nearby...
Some of us, including myself, got to skinning these critters. They had beautiful skins - patterned in soft saffron and grey shades with the diamond chain down the midline. We used rancid butter for "tanning." Pretty odiferous and all - but when dried on a board in the Plains heat, they could them be sewed into wallets and pouches and woven as fancy hatbands around our hats. Due to my exalted rank as official driver, and the daily trips I had to make to town for supplies, mail, etc. I sort of got the market cornered in rattlesnake skins. The way it worked was this: We were maybe ten or 15 miles outside Pierre, I guess. Part of the way was paved highway, and the snakes, you see, would crawl up onto the tarmac in the morning sun and lie along the edge of the road basking. Whenever I saw a particularly big one up ahead, I would swerve slightly and run over him. And just keep going. In town I would make my rounds (I got to know and became known to many tradesfolk and others there: I was sort of the "mouthpiece" and PR rep for the strange group of eggheads "...who lived in tents out thataways and was diggin them old Sioux bones..."
On my return trip, however, I would stop and retrieve the carcases of the specimens I had run over earlier, and throw them in back of the Carryall. Back at camp I would set to skinning and soon I became known as the snake-man and my stock-in-trade was negotiable. Our tent was redolent with drying snakeskin effusiva... LOL
I wish I could say our existence that summer were idyllic - if unusual - but it wasn't. Our relations with the nearby Corps of Engineers camp were not good. These hardhats wheeled huge off-the-highway "Le Tourneaus" (giant earth scraping machines) across the landscape with abandon, and their unseen presence in great columns of obscuring dust were a menace to us in our smaller jeeps. And ditto the Monster Cats they also drove: huge contraptions that could push up a wall of dirt 15 feet high like an advancing tsunami! "Sheepfoot Rollers" that could pack 6-feet of fill into a rock-hard six inches of rammed dirt with one pass! You never see this kind of equipment east of the Mississippi... Yet they lodged a formal complaint about the "science guys" and their peculiar ways down at Phillips Ranch, and all. Not that some of us were not "complainable," for sure. The Director whose name was Donald J. Lehmer (deceased now some years), later became an acknowledged authority on Central Plains Prehistory, and his works, including his report on the site we dug, are "classics" now. The site we dug, sometimes known as the Buffalo Pasture Site, was the "first ever" for the River Basin Surveys which employed us, as noted there:
"Lehmer, Donald J. Archeological Investigations in the Oahe Dam Area, South Dakota, 1950-1951. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 158; River Basin Survey Papers 7 (1954): 1-190. This was the first detailed technical report issued covering the excavations carried on by the Missouri Basin Project of the River Basin Surveys of the Smithsonian Institution. While there had been some previous excavations in the area, nothing as extensive as the investigations at these sites (Dodd and Phillips Ranch) had been attempted. The Dodd site contained evidence of three different occupations. The Phillips Ranch site was one occupation dating immediately after the final Dodd occupation."
But he was a peculiar duck for sure, and rather mean-spirited into the bargain. He was no leader in any event, and soon the party was riven with factions and unbelievable quarrels and disagreements. Over everything. Things went from bad to worse. Lee and I - being older than the largely late teen-age set that made up most of the hands - managed to stay rather aloof from much of the turmoil.
But once some of them - now away from home for the first time in their lives, and running hog wild in the wilds - managed to collar some "wild" horses nearby. (They were not really "wild," but rather "abandoned" when the ranch had closed down). And they had tried to ride some of them bareback up a very steep and precipitous incline strewn with loose gravel near the C of E's camp. One horse had lost its footing, fell, broken its back, rolled over and died on the spot. The miscreants then abandoned their horse rides all and vanished - leaving the carcase to bloat in the hot sun - the odors of which eventually reached the C of E's camp and lent to another formal complaint against us.
Nor was that all. One night some sort of high jinks afterhours in the cook shack set it afire and they burned it to the ground. (Now we had no kitchen - and were reduced to the same makedo as other less-fortunate field parties). Since we were supposed to be "taking care" of these structures during our temporary stay, Lehmer had some explaining to do to the local Sheriff or whomever it was that got involved. And things were not improved by the presence among the largely young male makeup of the "team," of two or three young girl students. This led to the usual tomfoolery in a nearby haystack and elsewhere - furthering increasing "intra- and interpersonal social interfacings" whatever in the affected argot of these "sosh"(read SOC-iology)types. LOL! and was further fuel to the fire... And these derelictions became known to the folks in town with whom I interfaced every day or so and many were the questions about "what all's y'all's doing out there to the old Phillips place, anyhow?" Stuff like that.
The crowning blow came I guess when one of the guys pulled a knife one night on another one and stabbed him deep into his thigh during a roughhouse of some kind. The stabber, whose name was Bruce Something, was a social misfit from the gitgo, if not an outright sociopath, which was obvious to anyone with a head on their shoulders, and should have been sent packing the day he showed up on the "dig," but Lehmer had no management skills at all. And in keeping with "group think" which I came to understand was - and is! -so highly rated among "social science" types, no one chose to make an issue of it, so he was just "tolerated" and "taken in" by the group at large. I was to learn that social misfits are a dime a dozen in archaeology - an observation that has never changed in the ensuing 50 or more years since that I have been associated off and on with this pursuit. Their presence in classrooms and lecture halls is a pain; their presence in the field and "on the dig" can lead to disaster. (This is not some peculiar peeve of mine: it has documentation in the study by a wife of no less than George Gaylord Simpson, published in a long-ago Scientific American and you shall have the reference here if I can possibly find it!). The most interesting subject I have ever known has been Archaeology; the most disagreeable people - in general - I have ever known, have been "archaeologists." I stand by my observation!
It was already late in the season and the dig was winding down anyhow. Lee, I belieive, had already left, and I was packed too, ready to depart next day in fact on my long Hegira back to the East and civilization. I think I left the following morning, along I remember with two or three other guys - they were from Missouri, I recall - and had once dug as young boy volunteers in some rockshelters down that way with no less than Roy Champman Andrews somehow, if my wits have not got it all mixed up since first hearing their tale...
Actually, they were buttoned-up, orderly young guys, and we were joined by another "departee" - whose name will certainly be familiar to any of my archaeological colleagues who might chance to read these notes - Jim Deetz! - THE Jim Deetz of later Harvard faculty acclaim, and one of our country's finest and most beloved archaeologists ever! Jim is long since deceased, having perished while rather still young - but this "dig" was his first, too, I beleive. And so Jim and I and these fellows from Missouri plus the son of a gas station owner in town (whose father I had gotten to know during the summer), borrowed the father's pickup, and all drove west to the Black Hills and Deadwood Gulch and Rapid City and Deadwood to see the sights: Boot Hill and Calamity Jane's grave, and certainly the famed Saloon No.10 where Wild Bill Hickok got his comeuppance and all, but, and most notably - for a great week or ten days of "roughing it" in a camp-out in the very heart of the Dakota Badlands, where we collected immense quantities of fossils and Jim played with the rattlesnakes of which he was quite enamored - holding one up by the head one morning right over my shoulder so I saw it in my shaving mirror - and liked to have sliced my juglar clean through! Ha! Ha! .
Later, I was to to hitch-hike back East with an old valise stuffed with these fossils - ammonites, and oredont jaws with rows and rows of coal-black, pearly fossil teeth - it must have weighed eighty pounds and was bulging at every corner with petrified bones and shells - and never failed to raise a look of alarm with Greyhound bus drivers along the way - whose glance took in also my unkempt first-ever growth of beard, and my snakeskin banded hat... LOL!
As to the sorry fate of the first season's dig at the Buffalo Pasture Site, I heard grapevine-wise only in later years, that Lehmer had indeed, been called on the carpet by his Smithsonian sponsors and others for his sorry conduct of affairs here and there was quite some to-do about it all - even career-threatening at the time, but he apparently weathered same.
As for our scratch team foray into the Badlands, we broke up a week or so later in Rapid City - each to go his own way. I never saw any of them again. I stayed one night in a flophouse - one of worst I ever knew - and next morning hitch-hiked down to Denver. Here I almost gave my maternal Grandmother a heart attack when she answered the door to behold such an apparition as never she had seen. An obligatory scrub-up in Gran's old ball-and-claw tub and a few of her meals restored me dramatically. My uncle was still living with her then, and we squeezed in a few fishing trips up in the mountains. I still had a month or more before classes started back at Washington Square, so I decided to stay and visit a bit but I needed a job of some kind to fill in the days. My Uncle produced two leads: one, they were looking for "knockers" at the local slaughter house ("knockers" being the employees who swing the huge sledge-hammers with which the incoming beeves are stunned between the eyes preparatory to having their throats slit). As you might imagine, there is a high rate of turnover in "knockers" (!). And two, the other was freight-loader down in the railyards. Sort of a landsmen's counterpart to the dockside stevedores in marine ports, if you will. Hired and fired daily out of a line "shake-up."
While neither one particularly attracted me as to future career possibilities, I was a transient in town you see, and beggars and itinerant shovel-bums cannot be choosy, so I opted for the second job. At least you could sleep nights...
