For years odd stories and superstitions had circulated in the backwoods about the grassy mounds that lay on the Craig property outside of Spiro. Horses shied up when they were in the vicinity, and strange blue flames could be seen there at night. Stranger still, an earlier owner claimed once to have witnessed a tiny wagon emerge from the largest mound, pulled by a team of cats. There was the general opinion that the mounds were haunted and not a good place to be after dark.

Beyond the isolated farms along that stretch of the nearby Arkansas River, the mounds and their tales were little known. And no one, not even the neighbors, realized that the mounds comprised one of the most important archaeological sites in the United States. Obscurity had saved them—at least until 1935, when word of the treasures they contained began to spread around the world.

People had been finding relics in the area since anyone could remember. There had been a small amount of digging on the largest mound, known as Craig Mound, twenty years earlier, though little was uncovered. J. B. Thoburn of the University of Oklahoma excavated two minor mounds in the area between 1913 and 1917, but found few indications of the treasure trove nearby. Thoburn took the earliest known photograph of the Craig site, important for later researchers. He concluded correctly that the mounds were associated with the ancestors of contemporary Native Americans and were related to similar sites in Arkansas and elsewhere in the South.

After this brief period of interest, the mounds retreated into obscurity again until the summer of 1933, when a local man, R. W. Wall, convinced the owner of the property to sign a two-year lease (for $350) with a group of half a dozen men calling themselves the Pocola Mining Company. Although previous owners had been good stewards of the mounds, the current owner, a preacher named George Evans, may have found any offer hard to refuse in the depths of the Great Depression.

The Pocola group went to work and showed that their company was aptly named. Using the crudest and most destructive methods, the men sunk holes haphazardly into the mounds, throwing away shards of pottery, pieces of textiles, and other evidence that might have been invaluable to scientists. Engraved shell fragments were shoveled out and walked on like gravel. When the yields of artifacts were not satisfying enough, they then resorted to tunneling, hiring local coal miners for extra help. The largest of the tunnels, through Craig Mound, was big enough for a man with a wheelbarrow.

By now some of the wonders of the mounds were being revealed—finely carved maces and pipes, ornately engraved shells, beautiful masks, beads, and pearls, along with, of course, human remains. Near the center of the Craig Mound, which soon came to be known as the “Great Temple Mound,” the Pocola men claimed to have discovered an inner chamber, buttressed by cedar poles, enclosing a skeleton in ceremonial garb. They used the cedar poles for firewood, another great loss to science—not to mention the fact that they were clearly robbing a grave. As many as five hundred skeletons were eventually disinterred from the site.

When the Pocola partnership began to market its finds to dealers nationally, word spread through professional archaeology circles and made its way to F. E. Clements, head of the anthropology department at the University of Oklahoma. Clements and other investigators undertook trips to observe the operations at the site and were appalled by what they saw. Newspaper reporters also arrived on the scene, including one from Kansas City who likened the discovery to King Tut’s tomb, a worldwide sensation when it was found a decade or so earlier. Prices and demand for the artifacts skyrocketed with all of the publicity, and Clements realized that something had to be done to preserve Spiro and similar sites from further looting.

Thanks to public pressure, the Oklahoma legislature passed a law in the spring of 1935 to protect the state’s antiquities, requiring interested parties to apply for permission to excavate through the OU Department of Anthropology. The penalty for violators was a $200 fine or thirty days in jail. The Pocola company ignored the new law and continued with their digging until they received a warning from the local sheriff’s office. They packed up and left, but only temporarily. At this point Professor Clements, with very bad timing, accepted a summer teaching job in California and thus left the Spiro site unmonitored. The Pocola partners returned and did some of their dirtiest work in his absence, which included dynamiting part of the Craig Mound. Finally their lease ended in November 1935, and they were done.

Meanwhile, the fame of the site only grew. The Tut analogy appeared to be coming true: The place seemed to have a curse associated with it. R. W. Wall, who had negotiated the Pocola lease, fell in a creek nearby and drowned under suspicious circumstances. One of the two heirs to the property, a sixteen-year-old boy, died of tuberculosis while living at the site. And a local attorney who opposed the new antiquities law also died by strange coincidence. Such stories only served to drive the price of Spiro artifacts higher, and to start a bidding war among dealers for what was left of the mounds.

Clements and state officials realized that more steps had to be taken to secure the site for the public interest. The state acquired a lease and deployed teams of excavators, over-seen by the universities of Oklahoma and Tulsa. The excavators spent several years (1936–1941) salvaging scientific information from the mounds. As it turned out, many of the artifacts sold by the Pocola vandals were eventually acquired by respected institutions, including a large collection at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. An archaeological park was established at the site in 1966, and over the years excavations have continued to add to our knowledge of the mounds and their fascinating treasures. Up to twelve different mounds have been identified on the site, spread over eighty acres in what seems to be a predetermined geometry.

The builders of the Spiro mounds are now known to have been part of the Mississippian culture that flourished from around AD 800–1400, specifically a western branch known as the Caddoans. The Caddoan peoples engaged in wide-ranging trade networks that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the desert Southwest. Their societies were divided into ranks of chiefs, priests, warriors, and a large majority of ordinary farmers. Higher-ranked individuals like chiefs were favored with elaborate burials within mounds like the ones at Spiro, their bones born on litters piled with luxury goods, then covered with dirt. Spiro was a particularly rich and important location because it was situated at a strategic spot on the Arkansas River, which allowed the chiefs to control trade and territory over a wide area.

Although the Spiro mounds have had more than their share of ghost stories and curses, they also abound in genuine mysteries of this lost civilization that left its mark on the landscape across the southern United States, and about which we still have much to learn.

MARIA TALLCHIEF

Elizabeth Marie Tall chief (1925–2013) was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, on the Osage Reservation. Her father was a full-blood member of the tribe, and her mother was Scots-Irish. In 1925 the Osage people were just beginning to emerge from the dark period known as the Reign of Terror , when dozens of tribal members (including the family of Tallchief’s cousin) were murdered for their valuable oil headrights. Tallchief and her sister Marjorie were kept focused on dance and music lessons, and the two got their start performing at local fairs, rodeos, and the family-owned theater in Fairfax. Once their potential became clear, Tallchief’s ambitious mother moved the family to Los Angeles in 1933.

In California, Tallchief trained in the dance studio of Bronislava Nijinska and attended Beverly Hills High School. Her first big break came in 1940, when she had a prominent role opposite headliner Cyd Charisse at the Hollywood Bowl. This performance helped earn Tallchief a spot in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo touring company and ultimately entrée into the New York dance scene.

In 1946, Tallchief married choreographer George Balanchine , one of the titans of modern dance. Tallchief became his muse, and he composed roles to showcase her own extraordinary talent, such as the title character in Firebird (1949) and the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker (1954). Tallchief emerged as America’s first prima ballerina.

Tallchief’s marriage to Balanchine was annulled in 1951, and she was married twice more. For the next decade and a half, she continued to perform in America and Europe, including a 1962 television appearance with Rudolf Nureyev . After her retirement from the stage in 1966, Tallchief took up teaching and served as the artistic director of Chicago’s City Ballet from 1981 to 1987. She was honored by the Kennedy Center in 1996 for her genius and individuality.