7

The Robbers Cave

A year after Muzafer Sherif cancelled the Middle Grove experiment, he was behind the wheel of a university station wagon, heading south-east from Oklahoma City to Robbers Cave State Park. Sherif planted his foot on the gas. He drove like he was racing towards the future, the past disappearing in a cloud of dust behind him.

‘He just wanted to forget it,’ Herb Kelman says, leaning back in a chair beside a squeaking air conditioner that was losing the battle to keep the lounge room cool. The caretaker in the 1953 photos at Camp Talualac now has white hair swept back from a bald pate. He is clean-shaven, but he wears the same kind of heavy-framed black glasses that he wore back then.

The details of the last dramatic last days of the Middle Grove experiment are not in any of Sherif’s files and boxes in the archives at Akron. But Herb Kelman has held onto his notes for sixty years because he was convinced that Sherif should have written about the study instead of trying to bury it. He’s dug out his notes and papers in preparation for my visit, and jokes that I’ve reinforced his habit of never throwing anything away. These days, Kelman has an international reputation as a pioneer in peace research. Since he retired from Harvard, he’s been trying to go through and sort all the papers and files that he’s brought home with him to his Cambridge apartment. At eighty-five, he is just back from Vienna, where he was awarded a Gold Medal of Honor from the city for his work in international peace research.

‘My feeling was an interesting thing happened, a terribly interesting thing happened!’ Kelman’s voice rises with excitement. ‘And it would be interesting to find out why it happened — these kids found their own way to reconciliation, and for anyone interested in these processes, it was a very exciting event! It didn’t have anything to do with the original experiment, but it was a great learning opportunity.’ He shook his head. ‘Yet it went against Sherif’s hypothesis and so he treated it as a failure. As far as he was concerned, the best thing to do with this study was to try and forget it. And to try as much as possible to blame it on others. It was easier for him to say it was a manipulation failure rather than to say, “There is some other variable operating here that I haven’t recognised in my theory.” Muzafer’s reaction was, “I wish this hadn’t happened. Take it away!”’

Like Herb Kelman, Marvin Sussman didn’t want to forget the experiment either. He wrote to Sherif saying that even though he expected Sherif’s ‘continued mistrust’ and blame for the experiment’s failure, he believed it was important to write about its flaws: ‘You would then be actually making another contribution to Social Psychology. It seems to me and others that advances in group research are made both with successes and failures … Many social scientists have asked about the ’53 study and expect some kind of report.’

But Sherif would have none of it. He was so intent on pushing the failed Middle Grove experiment out of his mind that six months after it was over, he still had not told the Rockefeller Foundation that he had aborted the study. It was only by chance that they found out. The Foundation received a letter of complaint from a man who had read about Sherif’s study in news reports of the Foundation’s 1953 annual report. The man wrote, asking:

What is the professor’s background?

Were the children in the camp underprivileged or orphans? If they had parents, did the parents know what the professor was doing to the minds and characters of their children?

What benefit to humanity does your foundation expect to derive from the expenditure of $38,000 on this study?

The Foundation contacted Sherif, asking for more detail about the experiment in order to draft a reply. In their exchange of letters, program officer Leland DeVinney was clearly dismayed at Sherif’s answer: ‘Do I understand correctly from your letter that the work last summer went only to the end of stage 2? If this is in fact true, is my inference justified that this must represent something of a disaster with respect to the main objectives of the grant?’

Sherif replied saying that he just needed a little more time to run an additional small study, and to both reassure and distract the Foundation, he included the manuscript of his soon-to-be published book ‘Groups in Harmony and Tension’, which he described as a ‘manual’ for researchers containing his theory about group behaviour that he was about to test in his upcoming experiment. He didn’t mention that the major funded experiment — the 1953 study — was to be little more than a footnote in the book. Whether DeVinney bought this or remained sceptical, he reported to his superiors that

Professor Sherif reported that a great deal had been accomplished to date as is evidence in the completion of the well-received book, Groups in Harmony and Tension, and in a number of research monographs and reports which are appearing in various journals. He feels it important, however, to re-check certain aspects of the field experiment during the coming summer before completing the project with the preparation of the final report …

Sherif might have temporarily appeased the Rockefeller Foundation, but this 1954 trip to Robbers Cave was a last-ditch attempt, with just the crumbs of the original grant money, to rescue the project. No matter what undertakings he’d made to Harvey to hand over the reins on this next experiment, his instinct was to tighten his grip, not loosen it.

‘He was under enormous pressure,’ OJ Harvey told me. ‘He knew he had to make it work.’ And OJ, as I came to know him, felt the same. ‘We were both zealots, anti-Nazi. And we would have thrown ourselves off a cliff if it hadn’t worked.’

OJ’s deteriorating eyesight made him a reluctant driver, so he had arranged for his friend and former student Gerry to pick me up at my motel on the highway. A bearish white-haired man with a gentle manner, Gerry told me on the drive that he hadn’t realised quite how much my trip meant to OJ until that morning, when his phone rang at dawn. It was OJ, checking once again that Gerry had the details right for my motel and pick-up time.

We drove along the highway towards Boulder but then took a right-hand turn along a country road, past white picket fences and occasional long, low houses surrounded by paddocks, set back from the road. OJ came out to meet us. I recognised him from the photo I had seen of him posing with Sherif and White. He had the same open and curious smile, as if he was expecting the punchline of a joke. In his eighties, he was still sprightly, and although his features were softened with age, I glimpsed the eager young man with his hands on his hips I’d seen in the photos from Middle Grove in 1953, looking determined and gazing into the distance, as if he could see a better future there. Despite fifty years in Boulder, OJ’s Oklahoma accent is unmistakeable.

The mountains visible from his back porch were capped with snow. OJ had been a shrewd businessman as well as a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, and the house was large and comfortable, with long leather couches, slate floors, a throw rug over a rocking chair. It was a far cry from the sharecropper house where he grew up in south-east Oklahoma. OJ was proud of his roots. He picked up a long stick with a string net at one end from where it leaned against the wall. It was a ball stick, he said, used in a traditional Choctaw game. He swooped it through the air. Did I know that Native Americans invented lacrosse?

But beneath his courteous manner, OJ seemed a bit nervous. I asked him what ‘OJ’ stood for, and he said his parents believed that if you named your child after someone bad, you inoculated them from the same behaviour. OJ was called after a notorious cattle rustler who preyed on poor families like his own, stealing away their livelihoods in the middle of the night.

Since then, I’ve discovered that OJ was the first Native American man to get a psychology PhD. His friend Jack White, from the Kiowa tribe, was probably the second. Not that OJ would have told me that fact himself. He has a horror of bragging: he says that’s an ‘Okie’ thing. As a boy, he used to read to his parents at night because neither of them could read or write. OJ’s father impressed upon him that just because he could read, it didn’t make him any better than anyone else. How ironic that he teamed up with a professor who boasted that his theory eclipsed all other explanations of group behaviour, who dismissed Freudian psychological theory as ‘one-sided’, a ‘failure’ that lead to ‘blind alleys’. Was this another reason Sherif and OJ worked so well together, I wondered, with OJ as a kind of ballast to Sherif’s grandiose claims?

Despite OJ’s protestations that he had forgotten a lot of important detail, his recall was impressive. We began talking about Robbers Cave, but first I wanted to know about the earlier 1953 study. The story he wanted to tell was the scientific narrative. But it was impossible to talk about the experiments and the ideas they were exploring without also talking about Sherif’s personality. ‘I’m getting personal now,’ OJ would say, as if what he was about to confess was irrelevant. And I would straighten up, pay closer attention.

By the summer of 1954, Sherif’s dejection and depression was gone. He was excited as he drove into what he called the Wild West, towards that corner of the country close to where the borders of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas cross. He had pushed last year’s failed experiment to the back of his mind and was full of a nervous energy.

OJ sat in the passenger seat. In the intervening year, he had found an alternative experiment for his dissertation, a comparison of group solidarity among lower- and upper-class young men in Oklahoma; completed his PhD; and had a postdoctoral researcher position lined up at Yale for the fall. He stayed quiet and let Sherif talk. Sherif’s confidence seemed to have returned. This time, he told OJ, things would be different.

Sherif trusted OJ, and asked his former student to call him Muzafer. But OJ was wary. He’d worked with him long enough to observe the bouts of paranoia and erratic behaviour that buffeted Sherif and then those around him. ‘I had to keep him at arm’s length because he was just so temperamental,’ he confessed.

Sherif talked rapidly as he drove, waving his hands about and seeming to pay little attention to the road, telling OJ what they must do when they arrived. But OJ had his own plans for what would happen when they got there. He’d spent the past twelve months mapping them out. He was worried. It seemed that Sherif might have forgotten about their bargain.

Up ahead, OJ caught a movement. A mob of cattle was travelling slowly across a field and were headed for the road.

‘Dr Sherif, there’s some cattle up there.’

‘I see them.’

‘You might want to slow down.’

‘Oh’, Sherif said, ‘I’m okay,’ and kept his foot to the gas.

‘Slow down!’ OJ said urgently, as the steers moved into the centre of the road. But Sherif didn’t pause. OJ leaned across and slammed his hand on the horn. The steers scattered to the edge, but a big Hereford bull had stopped in the middle of the road.

OJ squeezed his eyes shut at the last minute and felt the car swerve. His body was flung hard against the door, then away again, as Sherif zigzagged up the road. When he opened his eyes, Sherif was thumping the wheel, exhilarated.

‘Pull over, Dr Sherif,’ OJ said through gritted teeth. ‘Pull over.’

‘I handled that well, didn’t I?’ Sherif said proudly, slowing to a stop.

But OJ didn’t answer. He flung open the car door and stood out on the road, taking deep breaths until he felt calm enough to get back in the car and take the wheel. It seemed a metaphor for what happened when Sherif was allowed to take charge, and OJ vowed as he opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel that he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

At schools across Oklahoma City in the spring of 1953, OJ stood at the edge of the yard watching fifth-graders at play. This time he was looking for a different kind of boy than the ones they had recruited in the past. This time he would target athletes, boys who thrived on competition, with average grades. They would be ‘normal’ white Protestant and middle-class boys with no obvious physical or emotional problems; this time there’d be no bedwetters, no loners, no truants. Among the flurry of activity on the playground — the pock of the ball on the bat, the cries of the children — OJ watched to see who ran fastest, who rallied teammates with shouts of encouragement during the games.

Sixty years later, OJ was still proud of how he talked his way into the Oklahoma City school system and how he convinced the Director of Elementary Schools to write to principals in schools across the city, giving him access to detailed student records so he could select just the right boys for what he told them was research on leadership. Once he’d chosen a boy, OJ contacted parents by phone, an informal and more effective method than writing a letter in a place like Oklahoma City. The fact that he was from the University of Oklahoma opened doors. It was home to the Sooners football team and the legendary coach Bud Wilkinson, whose recent winning streak — including the first of what would be three national championships — had fanned a religious-style football fervour across Oklahoma, reinstating badly dented state pride. The Sooners were revered, and their home university basked in reflected goodwill. Add to that OJ’s gentleness, his respectful manner, and his Oklahoma accent, and he won parents’ trust.

OJ told parents ‘the truth but not the whole truth’, describing the camp as a chance to study which boys would become leaders and which would become followers. This might have appealed to parents’ Cold War era anxieties, and all of them, OJ said, were pleased and enthusiastic about their boys taking part. He asked them to promise not to come visit because it caused homesickness. Welcoming a native Oklahoman into their homes, one who had none of the airs and graces they would normally expect of a university man, these lower-middle-class and working-class parents would have had no inkling that OJ was worried about the experiment ahead.

This time there was no nurse, no camp director, no Herb Kelman to play scientific conscience, and a much-diminished staff team. Things were both simpler and more complicated. Sherif and OJ had streamlined the theory they were testing to make it more achievable. They abandoned the hypothesis Sherif had started out with in 1953, that group loyalty overrides friendship. At Robbers Cave, they left prior friendships out of it altogether: this time, they wouldn’t allow the boys even to meet before the competitions, let alone become friendly. But finding boys who didn’t know one another — even if OJ did select them from twenty-four different schools — was a challenge in Oklahoma City in the pre-TV era, when the locale had a strong social network, and OJ ended up with just twenty-two boys.

Running the experiment with only four staff, OJ knew that a ‘hands off’ approach would be impossible. Participant observers Jack White and Sherif’s newest graduate student Bob Hood — a former pharmacist from the small town of Guthrie who was a private, sweet-tempered man — would have to pitch in with the junior counsellors to run activities with the boys. Even with the best organisation, the day-to-day workload was going to be gruelling. Sherif’s role, too, was more complicated. OJ worried that the boys would be apprehensive about someone with such a heavy foreign accent in a time when fear and suspicion towards foreigners was intense. So he introduced Sherif as his friend, who would help out with caretaking. But above all there was the pressure: this last attempt with the dregs of the money from the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sherif’s reputation at stake. OJ was conscious that he was both the glue and the buffer that would hold the group of four together. ‘It was an ingroup amongst us really, it was a case of high loyalty to Sherif. Jack and Bob weren’t as close to him as I was, but they respected him and they were gung-ho.’ Yet OJ knew that the ties that bound them could be tested.

Bill Snipes, a round-faced boy with a cheeky smile, sat in the back seat of the bus between a scowling boy called Red and a small boy with a toothpick that he worked in the corner of his mouth, called Hollis. There were half a dozen boys on the school bus that OJ hired by the time they got to north side of Oklahoma City. Unlike the boys from the 1953 study, many on this bus wore well-tended hand-me-downs and carefully patched jeans.

Northside was the wealthier part of town, and Red made a fuss when a group of northside boys boarded, shouting, ‘Only southsiders up back!’ None of the newcomers objected. Red was bigger than all of them and looked ready for a fight, so they meekly took their places behind the driver.

By Holdenville, Bill Snipes had left the back seat and was swaying in the aisle between a group of boys up front, leaning to look out the window every so often to announce the number of miles to McAlester each time he saw a sign. For Bill, the diminishing miles to their destination was something to celebrate. His parents had never been able to afford to send him away to camp, and he was excited to have been picked. For Smut Smith, a pale lick of a boy who had found it hard to say goodbye to his parents that morning, it was only the beginning of the realisation of exactly how far away this camp was.

A cheer went up at the end of the four-hour drive when the bus slowed off the dirt road and passed through the park’s entrance, marked by a pyramid of logs painted white to spell out Robbers Cave State Park.

Before it was named Oklahoma, this was known as ‘Indian’ territory, the final destination on what Native Americans called the Trail of Tears, a dangerous and anguished journey for the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. Pressured by white settlers who coveted the rich farmland, the tribes were forced by the federal government to leave their homelands and walk more than a thousand miles with few supplies to the new ‘Indian’ territory across the Mississippi. The Choctaw tribe established the Choctaw Nation here; Robbers Cave State Park was on their land.

The first time I visited Robbers Cave State Park, it struck me that it had a long history of intergroup conflict, especially after what had been thought of as barren new land turned out to be rich with oil and gold. I wished I’d thought to ask OJ whether and how the subject matter of Sherif’s theory about animosity and prejudice between groups fighting over resources related to OJ’s own life, and the poverty and dispossession of Native Americans he saw growing up in Corinne, not far from Robbers Cave, as a child.

The new territory had a reputation for lawlessness. Rich in gold and oil, it was a magnet for rogues. The San Bois Mountains, with their caves, became a hiding place for train robbers, bank robbers, gangs, gunfighters, and desperadoes. Just a few years earlier, the park’s caretaker had found bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd’s haul of stolen gold jewellery buried in mud when he was netting minnows in the park’s stream. And the place was built by lawbreakers. It was carved out of the forest back in 1931 by a construction gang of fifteen prisoners from nearby Oklahoma State Penitentiary. For the prisoners, four white and eleven black men, who worked for months without a guard building the stone huts, digging and laying water pipes, and constructing fences, it must have been a welcome but brief taste of freedom before they were returned to the darkness of their cells.

The Division of State Parks brochure made the location’s dark past sound romantic: ‘The Robbers Cave … is the legendary hideout of Belle Starr, the James Brothers, and other colorful early-day outlaws. Legends of hidden treasure, outlaw trails and gun battles with law enforcement officers stir the imagination of young park visitors.’ I couldn’t avoid the thought that the experiment that unfolded there was a continuation of this place’s past, where the line between the good guys and the bad was blurry, and it was difficult to know who to trust.

Off the bus, the boys followed their counsellor between the trees to a stone cabin with a large chimney and a brown-shingled roof, which sat halfway between a recreation hall and a mess hall. Back then, the site was used as a boy-scout camp. Built of the same stone, with the same brown roofs, the camp buildings merged into the environment as if they were camouflaged. The air in the bunkhouse was dusty and close, and the boys would have headed off enthusiastically to the swimming hole. So too did Sherif, as he moved silently from tree to tree, tracking the boys as they made their way to the creek.

‘We wouldn’t call them a group yet. At first they were just a bunch of boys,’ OJ said. ‘So we had to do something about that.’ At lunchtime, OJ and Sherif joined the boys on the pretext of bringing food and watched as they decided how to divide up the slab of ham, the unsliced bread, and the whole watermelon. ‘It was deliberate,’ OJ said. ‘We created situations of interdependence where they had to rely on one another, to divide food, to carry canoes and equipment.’ The men memorised who coordinated lunch preparations, who cut up the meat, who sliced the bread, who carved the watermelon and served it. After lunch, the boys spent the rest of the afternoon placing rocks as steps to the swimming hole and building up a rockpile to dive from. Red, the aggressive boy on the bus, directed their activities, and the men noted how the rest of the boys seemed to follow his lead.

The next morning, the boys took the path that climbed up through the trees above the camp to the stone corral at the base of the Robbers Cave, which, with its spring and grass, was a perfect place for outlaws to water, feed, and hide their horses. By midday they reached the top of the steep climb to Robbers Cave. After the exertion of the climb and the build-up, Smut was disappointed at how small the cave was. He was expecting something much bigger, but the cave was long and narrow, like a collapsed house of cards. Stone slabs were piled precariously on top of one another so that the cave’s entrance was at the bottom of a steep slit in the rocks.

Bob Hood told them in his slow drawl how this opening was just the beginning, that down in the darkness the rocks had formed crevices and canyons and secret passageways that led to more hidden caves.

‘Can we go in and have a look?’ Red wanted to know.

Hood shrugged as if to say, It’s up to you.

‘C’mon!’ Red called to the others.

One boy made his way closer to the entrance and wrinkled his nose at the stale air that wafted up from the cave. ‘I’m not going in there,’ he said, pushing his hands into his pockets as if to indicate that was that.

‘Me neither,’ another boy said.

Then a chorus of relief.

‘Nope.’

‘Not me.’

‘Some other time.’

They were city boys and weren’t quite brave enough to go clambering around in the dark.

But Red seemed to take their reluctance to go in as a challenge. ‘I’m no yellowbelly,’ he said. Even though he was the biggest boy, and he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze into some of the smaller spaces that someone like Hollis would be able to negotiate, he took Hood’s torch and disappeared inside the rocks.

Meanwhile, the rest of the boys climbed the rock above the cave and stood on the edge of a precipice that jutted out over a valley of pine trees, cooeeing and yelling, listening to their smaller- and younger-sounding voices echoing back from the other side.

They were getting impatient by the time Red emerged ten minutes later. Hood noticed how the boy had created a tension within the group but also how, after this trip inside the cave, he set the pace. If Red did something, such as climb a particularly high rock, Hollis was right behind him, and most of the other boys would do the same. They might have been too fearful to climb down into a dark cave, but in the sunlight they could pretend to be brave.

Unbeknown to the boys, as they were climbing the rocks above the cave on their second day, far down below another bus had arrived. A second group of boys who thought they had the place to themselves were disembarking, with Jack White, and carrying their things to a stone cabin on the other side of a small hill almost a mile away.

The men kept the two groups ignorant of each other during the first three days, making sure their paths didn’t cross. It wasn’t difficult: the two cabins were over a mile apart, at opposite ends of the camp. A pretty mountain stream flowed through the park, ending at peaceful Lake Carlton, where they could use boats and canoes. But the stream, named the Fourche Maline by early French explorers, translates into English as ‘treacherous fork’.

Taking the lead on the research team was a challenge for OJ. At night, the men convened at 9.00 pm in the makeshift office that doubled as OJ and Sherif’s sleeping quarters. A fan usually creaked on the table, stirring the hot air and ruffling the notecards OJ had laid out on the desk, detailing their hypotheses. ‘I wanted to go through it methodically, let Jack and Bob offer their observations and evidence for each hypothesis from what they had observed during that day, but Sherif was eager. He was so eager that he practically jumped on them when they came through the door and chided them if they were even a few minutes late.’ OJ shook his head. ‘I had to get him under control. Jack and Bob were determined to do a good job — they were under pressure, as we all were, and Sherif was overstepping the line.’ OJ was determined to remind Sherif of the ‘ground rules’.

Did those ground rules include the fact that OJ was in charge?

OJ rolled his eyes and nodded. ‘They sure did.’

How did Sherif react, I was curious to know.

‘He acted upset, raised his voice, that kind of thing. But he knew I was not one to be bossed around. And he knew I didn’t like to see him doing it to others.’

I suggested that with his doctorate completed and his position at Yale on the horizon, OJ might have found it easier than he had the year before to stand up to Sherif. But he shook his head. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no, it was not easier. It was an uncomfortable feeling — I was always waiting for when he would blow up next. It hung over me and I couldn’t relax. I had a deal of trouble sleeping.’

Hood took his group away on a two-night camping trip so that White’s newly arrived boys could have the run of the park and spend their first few days swimming, playing ballgames, and taking their turn exploring the cave and its surrounds.

Hood and the boys hiked to a site four miles away. When they set out after breakfast, the air was velvety. The colours of the bush were still bright and the shade deep. By the time they reached their camping spot, the sky was a hard blue, and they were itching with dried sweat. The boys had to build latrines, put up tents, chop wood, and cook their own lunch with little help from the adults, all with the aim of cementing friendships. It sounded more like army life than a fun summer camp to me, but the boys seemed taken with the novelty of it all. ‘I was a city boy from a poor area and I hadn’t been in that kind of environment before,’ Smut Smith remembers. ‘I had stayed on my Aunt Leela May and Uncle Harley’s farm in Texas, but this wasn’t like a farm. The Robbers Cave wasn’t like anywhere I’d ever been before. It was exciting. We spent a lot of time swimming and hiking and exploring. It was a real adventure.’

In the late afternoon, the men took them out canoeing. Bill Snipes and Smut were in Bob Hood’s canoe, and the boys took turns paddling across the lake, with Bill keeping up an excited commentary on everybody’s stroke. As they moved close to the reeds, they heard a commotion. Two snakes had hold of a large frog. Each snake had one of the frog’s legs in its mouth, and they were thrashing about in the water. The boys stopped paddling, drifting as they watched in fascinated horror.

‘Look at that!’

‘Whoa!’’

A loud crack and a boom made them jump. Birds exploded from the trees, shrieking. They turned to see Bob Hood aiming a gun and firing, boom, a second time. When they turned back, a spray of water was shooting up where the snakes had been, and the frog was gone. The sound seemed deafening, and it rang out and echoed back at them across the water. The boys looked at the quiet man sliding his gun back into a holster with a combination of fear and awe. Bill and Smut had never seen a real gun before, let alone a man shooting one.

That night around the campfire, Red and another boy argued about whether the snakes were water moccasins or copperheads. Hollis, a small boy with the authoritative air of someone who spent a lot of time around adults, announced they were rattlesnakes and suggested the boys should name their group after the snakes. Then he got them to vote on a name.

Hollis’ pattern of resolving quarrels by vote and shortcutting disagreements made him popular with the other boys. Red, who tended to use his size and his fists to get his way, wasn’t well liked by the others, and the more he sensed it the more aggressive he became. The boys were torn between their liking for Hollis, who was jockeying with Red for the role of leader, and their desire to appease the bigger boy. The men noted how Red had ‘a pronounced tendency to rough up the smaller boys’ for his own amusement and how they resented the way he took over and allocated jobs. When Hood suggested the boys would need to dig a latrine at their hideout, Red ‘handed the shovel’ to one of the smaller boys, who later complained to staff, ‘We’re tired of just doing the things he leaves over.’ But the boy was too intimidated by Red to say it to his face.

Hood noted with satisfaction that by the end of the two-night camping trip a ‘toughness’ norm had emerged among the group, and gave plenty of examples to illustrate it. The boys’ games grew increasingly reckless, for one. At a reservoir, Red instigated a game of climbing the slippery dam wall, but made no effort to help the others up it. Three boys slipped, and Smut remembers his skinned knees and the combination of water and blood flowing down his lower legs. Despite these injuries, the men noted gleefully, the group frowned upon crying. It was Red who so often set the pace in games of daring, and under his influence none of the boys wanted to be seen as weak.

But for all their supposed toughness, the boys were happy to return to the familiarity of base camp in the late afternoon of the fifth day. That night, they had a campfire at the stone corral, where they told jokes and sang songs, accompanied by Bill on his ukulele. Hollis hung a hand-painted sign on their cabin door: Home Sweet Home.

Yet this was about to change.

While Hood’s Rattlers had been thrown in the deep end, left to deal with aggressive Red and the physical exertion of building latrines, pitching tents, and carrying water, back at the campsite Jack White’s group had been having an easier time of it. For the first few days, Davey Munroe was the leader of White’s boys. OJ had chosen him as a subject because he was a good athlete, but also, as the eldest of four, Davey was a good organiser. He had expressive black eyebrows that he wiggled as he spoke in a Donald Duck voice to cajole the others and get them on board, and the others looked to him to take charge in the first few days of camp.

By the second day, they had found a canoe near their hut — deposited there the night before by OJ and Sherif — and carried it downstream to a swimming spot. They were led by their junior counsellor, Bert Fay, who had recently fallen in love with geology (and would later make it his lifelong career), and along the way he pointed out fossils and interesting rock formations to the boys. In the water, the boys spotted a water moccasin and dubbed the place Moccasin Creek.

After their swim, the boys decided to build a rope bridge across the creek, and Davey coordinated the effort. A rather serious-looking boy called Will impressed them all with his knowledge of knots and the methodical way he measured out the spreader ropes. Dwayne, a skinny kid whose bony ankles stuck out from his too-short jeans, swam across the creek to tie the anchor ropes on either side. The job took most of the afternoon, and when it was finished, each of them crossed the creek, with boys on either side yelling advice as the bridge swayed over the rushing water. A chubby boy had trouble with the crossing, and he wobbled and several times looked like falling in. He got particularly loud applause when he made it to the other side.

‘You’re too fat,’ Dwayne told him when he stumbled off the bridge among the backslapping of the other boys. ‘You’ll break that bridge.’

‘Shut up,’ a few of the boys cried. Davey Munroe scowled at Dwayne and turned away.

‘I was an awkward kid, I always had my foot in my mouth,’ Dwayne told me on the phone. He had the confident voice of someone who had left that persona behind long ago. ‘My mother was always warning me. I used to say the first thing that popped into my head.’ His laugh was a sharp bark. ‘It was like I had no filter.’ His mother was always giving him advice about how to get on better with folks since they’d moved to Oklahoma City from their farm down south, he said, after his father got a job building a new turnpike.

Dwayne tried to make up for it the rest of the afternoon by making himself useful. He volunteered to hold the anchor ropes to keep the bridge steady when the boys wanted another turn walking across, and he built the campfire and got it going when the others had trouble.

Late in the afternoon, Virgil, the large boy, yelled out, pointing at a copperhead sliding towards them, just eight feet from where they were sitting. All the boys except for Dwayne huddled together as Jack White and Bert Fay hit it with a rock and killed it. ‘It didn’t bother me,’ Dwayne said. ‘I used to go hunting with my uncle, so I’d seen worse.’ He got them a stick to lift it up with so they could carry it off the path.

That night, while the boys were roasting potatoes and cooking hamburgers, junior counsellor Fay told them about the animals that used to be so plentiful in these parts, including bears and buffalo and mountain lions. After they’d gone to bed, the wind blew up and the boys listened to the rustling in the bushes outside. Perhaps it was the talk of mountain lions or the memory of the copperhead, writhing and bloodied, as the men pounded it with a rock, but one boy said that he missed his folks. Another boy started to sniffle. Will’s voice trembled: ‘They didn’t say anything about snakes.’ Davey told them all to settle, and the tent went quiet. In his sleeping bag, Dwayne silently prayed that the boys would like him better tomorrow.