Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

I was driving down a narrow lane between two buildings, I met him head-on, coming the other way in a flatbed.

The rules of the road at a quarry are quite specific about encounters like this: The loaded truck always has the right-of-way. My truck was carrying fifteen tons of rock; his flatbed was empty. There was no room to pass, and no room to turn around. He would have to back up.

But he didn’t. I waited, and he sat there grinning at me. I honked my horn; he just grinned more widely.

I’d tried all summer to be nice to this guy, but clearly it wasn’t doing any good. Something finally snapped. I jammed the gearshift into first and eased out the clutch. As the bumper of my truck kissed the front of the flatbed, his eyes got big. But he still didn’t back up. So I mashed down on the gas pedal, and the big dump truck lurched forward, shoving the flatbed back.

What I didn’t realize at first is that the bumper of the dump truck was nearly a foot higher than the bumper of the flatbed. This soon became evident, though, when the grill of his truck collapsed, the radiator burst, and geysers of steam shot out the front end. Oh, damn, I thought, but the damage was already done, so I figured I might as well keep going until I’d pushed him out of my way.

I caught a tongue-lashing from my stepdad later, but from then on, the older men at the quarry treated me with respect—and that mean son of a bitch stayed out of my way. Ever since, I’ve valued power above speed.

In South Dakota, though, it was speed we needed if we were to have any hope of outrunning the rising waters of the Missouri. As I fretted over the problem for the next two summers, a possible answer finally came to me: Maybe the key to speed was power.

On a cool morning in June 1960, a truck hauling a flatbed trailer bounced and lurched its way up to the Sully site, carrying a bulldozer and a road grader. I’d asked the National Science Foundation for a grant to rent power equipment to excavate, and—clearly with mixed feelings—they’d agreed to let me try it as an experiment.

I was banking on a particular property of the soil: The disturbed earth of an Arikara grave was darker and fluffier-looking than the denser, undisturbed loess around it, making the grave’s circular outline easy for the trained eye to see. At least, that’s how things worked when the top layer of soil was carefully removed by hand. Would that hold true if we used earthmoving equipment to scrape away the upper foot of topsoil? Would we still be able to spot the burials’ wood coverings and distinctive circular outlines—or would the blades and wheels of heavy machinery churn everything into one big mass of dirt and bone shards? If it did, it would be an ironic comeuppance for me, since one reason I’d come to South Dakota had been to protect the bones, not crush them.

We started in an area where the ants and our excavations had told us we’d be likely to find burials. The driver made a straight pass, eighty feet long but just two inches deep. Nothing but sod and that fine-grained loess.

Several more passes; still nothing. I was just about to call a halt, convinced that it had been a harebrained idea, when I saw it: In the wake of the scraper and the bulldozer—at that magic depth of twelve inches—was a distinct circle of darker, looser soil. I let out a whoop that would have done an Arikara warrior proud.

That summer, with the help of the power equipment, we excavated more than three hundred Arikara graves—ten times the number we’d excavated by hand the year before.

By this time, we were a regular summer colony in South Dakota. Initially we’d camped in tents at the site, but after the first couple of years we began renting a house for the crew, plus another for the Bass family, which by now included me, Ann, Charlie, and a new addition, William M. Bass IV—Billy. My crew always consisted of ten students plus one cook, who labored mightily to keep us all fed (sometimes seemingly on nothing but government-surplus peanut butter, a food I still can’t eat to this day, four decades later).

The houses were sparsely furnished. Everybody slept on Army cots, slings of green or tan canvas stretched over rickety wooden frames. Early on, I noticed a problem with the cots: They kept breaking. Now, if millions of soldiers can sleep on Army cots without breaking them, a handful of students should be able to also. The problem, it soon surfaced, was sex: Two bodies in motion just put too much strain on the cots’ flimsy joints. So I passed a rule, the first of my two cardinal rules for summer crews: No sex on the Army cots. The breakage stopped.

Rule number two was equally simple and much more serious: Don’t get arrested—not for speeding, drinking, fighting, disturbing the peace, or so much as spitting on the sidewalk; if you do, you’re out. We were under so much pressure already, from the rising waters of the river, we couldn’t afford to complicate our task by antagonizing the locals. I only had to enforce rule number two one time, and I never, thank goodness, walked in on a violation of rule number one.

Even with the addition of earthmoving equipment, the work of excavation remained exhausting. We were covering a lot more ground now, but we were still moving a lot of dirt by hand. To keep the crews motivated, I’d stage games and contests—pointing out the crotch of a tree that was about to be submerged, for instance, and seeing who could hit it with the most shovelfuls of dirt. It might sound silly, but it kept morale high. The summers were hard and hot, but they were