Rod Matson’s seminars were always fun for the men of the Toivo expedition, and they looked forward to them – at least partly because Matson was a good teacher and could make things interesting. Then, they got the chance to do some real archaeology, and put some of what they’d learned to use.
In April of 1985, Gil got a phone call from his brother-in-law. “I wonder if you and the guys might like to come out to the dig for a week or so sometime this summer.”
“Might be,” Gil conceded.
“We got into some interesting areas last summer before we had to close down,” Rod explained. “There’s no way of telling for sure, but I think we have a spot where we may be getting into an unmarked grave. If so, it might be a chance for you guys to assist in excavating remains in situ. It wouldn’t be quite the same thing, but it’s probably as close as I’m going to be able to come up with for you guys to practice on. Even if it proves not to be a grave it might be interesting.”
“Yeah,” Gil told him, “I’d like to come if we can work out the timing.”
Working that out proved to be a little difficult. Bud was shorthanded at the railroad and in the midst of the summer rush, and Ryan and Steve had union negotiations that summer; although no big snags were expected. Even for the rest of them, finding a time to get away proved difficult. It was made more complicated by the fact that Gil himself couldn’t leave until after the middle of June due to his oldest son, Garth, getting married to his girlfriend, Michelle, following their college graduations earlier in the year. Gil and Carrie had to take a week off to go to the wedding in St. Paul.
Finally, they were able to come up with a week that three of them could go. It was a long haul out to Montana, but Mark borrowed his dad’s old postwar Stinson 108-1, which was a four seater, compared to his own Cessna which only had two. Late in June he flew Gil, Harold and himself out in a single day, landing right at the site, which was on a piece of tableland at the junction of the Missouri River with a smaller stream coming down from the north. It was big sky country, with only a small fringe of cottonwoods down below them on the river breaking the view of an immense dome of blue sky overhead.
It was late in the day when they got in, and they were tired. The three set up camp near the old travel trailer that Rod spent the summers in, and Rod took them on a quick tour of the site.
It had been a long time since any of them had done much camping, except for Mark, who usually took a backpacking trip or two each year, and it took them a while to get things organized. They spent the evening swatting mosquitoes and shooting the bull with Rod, who none of them had seen since the previous summer, bringing him up to date on the still pretty hopeless visa situation for the expedition and other small bits of news.
The next morning, Rod led them over to the dig site, which wasn’t far away, and put them to work. “There’s no guarantee that there’s a grave site here,” he told them, “But last summer, Brandy and Phil found that the original soil had been disturbed in a way that suggested a deep grave, possibly of a smaller person. We went down a couple feet, but didn’t discover anything that would indicate it was any sort of a midden pit where they threw their trash, and it’s far enough away from the buildings that it could be a grave. We know from historical records there were some smallpox deaths here in the 1843 epidemic. If there are any remains, or how deep they are, well, no idea. Work your way down through it carefully, and see what you can find. Call me if you find anything interesting.”
It was slow, careful work, removing the soil in small sections and running it through a grate, much like Rod had set up for them in the Labor Day training exercises in years past. The first day they didn’t find much of anything, nor the second, but it was fun and interesting to work on the real thing, not just a training dig that Rod had salted.
The dig was especially interesting for Gil in that he got to be with his daughter, Brandy, a bit, and her boyfriend, Phil Wine. He hadn’t seen much of her in the past couple of years, and with three kids of the five out of the house now, Tara, his intense, shy, bookish, artistic daughter was getting set to leave in another year and Danny, his youngest, wouldn’t be far behind that. The place was getting quiet.
Gil loved all of his kids, of course, but had a special soft spot for Brandy. She was a plain-looking girl, a little on the chunky side, and didn’t look much like the superb athlete that she was – easily the leading girl athlete that Spearfish Lake High School had ever produced, and probably one of the best, period – a list that also included her father. Brandy had gotten a lot of mileage out of taking advantage of opponents who reasoned that because she was short and plain and on the heavy side she was a soft touch, which she never was.
Brandy’s finest moment as a high school athlete actually came a couple days after she graduated, in the state softball finals when, after she’d carried off an unassisted double play, she suckered the opposing Camden St. Dismas pitcher into letting a ball intended as an intentional pass get too close to the plate late in the last inning. Her three-run homer provided the Marlins a come-from-behind victory that gave the school the only playoff-determined state championship in any sport that they’d ever won.
Brandy had gone to Michigan Tech on a combination of athletic and academic scholarships – she was the class salutatorian, and missed the top spot only by a hair, and a fluke at that – and she was now majoring in geology and minoring in math and secondary education. Gil had only briefly met her boyfriend, Phil Wine, but now got to know the kid and discovered he was a pretty good kid despite all the hair, and sharp as a tack as well. It was the second summer the two had worked for Rod at the dig, and he was pleased to see the kids were both hard, careful workers. Brandy was working on a paper on the geology of the site; it wasn’t particularly interesting geology of itself, she said, being mostly an outwash, but it did have some interesting points.
As the three continued to dig, they began to work their way into darker soil, and began to turn up a few small items, and finally, a few very small bones, about the size of a rat.
“Well, I hate to say this, Dad,” Brandy told them after a brief look at the morning’s activities. “But I don’t think you’re excavating a grave, unless they really didn’t like the guy.”
“What do you mean?” Mark asked.
“It ought to be obvious with all that loam you’re going through,” she said. “You’re excavating an old outhouse.”
A consultation with Rod brought the same opinion. “Well, that’s almost as good as a grave,” Rod told them. “A lot of interesting stuff gets lost in an outhouse pit over the years, and no one really wants to fish it out. Keep going. It’s starting to get interesting.”
They dug for another day, and turned up more artifacts – nothing big, an odd button or coin, but evidence of activity. Then, they started to turn up bones again. They were on the large size for a small animal. The first couple got them curious, and they called Rod over.
“Now, that is interesting,” he said. “Those are the bones of an infant, maybe a toddler. That’s just a guess, not an expert one, but I’ll have a specialist look them over once we get them excavated.”
“What would a toddler’s bones be doing in an outhouse pit?” Harold asked.
“Good question,” Rod told him. “It’s those kinds of questions that got me interested in this field in the first place.”
Rod worked with them as they excavated the tiny corpse, taking many notes and lots of photographs as they went. That evening, Rod spent some time in his trailer with the historical documentation of the site, then came out to the campfire where the guys were sitting around with Phil and Brandy and a couple of other students, passing the time of day. “I thought I remembered something,” Phil said. “You guys have just solved a hundred and forty year old mystery. The factor kept a diary, not a very good one, but he did note that during the 1843 epidemic a Cheyenne woman died of smallpox and her small child disappeared. He guessed carried off by wolves. Guess he was wrong. We ought to be able to carbon-date it pretty accurately.”
In another couple days, they packed up their tents, loaded up the Stinson, and flew off to the east. It had been in interesting week, they’d learned a lot, both about excavating a site and a set of remains, and about the fascination that Rod felt for it.
And, the fascination hit one of them harder than it hit the rest. For the next several years, Harold took a couple weeks each summer to join Rod at the fur trading post site and later at a site in Wyoming to work as a volunteer excavator. It was more for the pure enjoyment of it than as preparation for the Toivo Expedition that at times almost seemed like it never would come. The experience made him recognized as the second – albeit a distant second – most qualified person of the expedition at archaeological excavations, and they hoped they might be able to put it to use some day.