The Strange Story of Jack Harelson

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Outside Magazine October 2004

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The Killing Bones (cont.)


	Sacred Ground: Elephant Mountain and environs (James Fee)

Children of the Cave
NEVADA'S BLACK ROCK DESERT is a broad expanse of empty flatland and low, sagebrush-studded mountains, the kind of landscape that repels all but the hardiest cattle ranchers, hermit miners, and wild horses. It's a six-hour haul from Grants Pass, but for Jack and Pam, it was worth the drive: Nevada's arid climate and 10,000-year human record make it one of the most fertile artifact grounds on the continent. Archaeologists

Lloyd Olds's brother liked Jack, but he had seen flashes of his aggression. The man had a vindictive streak. "Jack's going to cause problems," he told the judge.

have cataloged more than 60,000 sites—and they've inventoried only 3 percent of the state.

It took the pair several months to find the site that had produced Marge's arrowhead—a cave near Elephant Mountain. They had searched on foot and in Jack's Blazer, discovering it in May 1980 after spotting two owls hunting mice near the entrance of the shelter. The fissure, just six feet deep and two feet high, sat at the top of a steep 75-foot run of shattered volcanic tuff.

"It was hardly a cave back then," Pam told Outside. "You could crawl in and bang your head, but there wasn't room for two people."

The Harelsons soon changed that. Using shovels, five-gallon buckets, and a sifting screen, they set to work destroying what Pat Barker, the Nevada state archaeologist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), would later estimate had been one of the five most important archaeological cave sites in the Great Basin.

First they found a cowhide, corn kernels, shell casings—white-man stuff. Then they started turning up arrowheads and broken shafts. The deeper they dug, the older the treasure. "There was something in every bucket," Pam said. Thanks to ARPA, there was also a crime committed with every turn of the spade.

Jack and Pam began driving to the cave as often as four times a month, leaving after work on Friday afternoons and arriving after dark. They killed their headlights as they drove past the ranches near Elephant Mountain, and built their tailings pile into a wall by the cave entrance to hide the activity. They realized they had found an important Paiute site—the tribe that has occupied the area for several thousand years—and took their booty home in bank bags: obsidian knives, intricately woven nets for catching rabbits, antelope-hoof necklaces, baskets, smoking pipes, perfect spears with shafts still attached. They found sandals estimated to be 10,000 years old—among the oldest footwear ever found on earth. Each discovery inspired them to dig deeper.

Then, one day in 1984, the couple unearthed a burden basket—a woven hamper that ancient Native American women wore like a backpack—and a conical container in which they could see the outline of a small head.

"We found them early in the weekend, so we hid them in the sagebrush until it was time to go home," recalled Pam. She worried all the way back to Oregon. Stealing baskets was one thing. But this was taking—they were pretty sure—actual bodies.

"What if we get in a wreck, Jack?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing's going to happen," he said.

Jack didn't know how to open the sealed containers, so he contacted some pothunting friends, one of whom had worked at the La Brea Tar Pits, in Los Angeles. They all gathered in the Harelsons' garage. Delicately, they opened the burden basket and pulled out small funerary artifacts—a bowl, a knife, a rabbit net. Then they removed the remains of a boy. He was tiny—probably around four—with leathery, mummified skin.

A dessicated young girl came out of the conical basket. She was older, perhaps ten, her knees pulled to her chest. "Her long black hair was still there," said Pam. "She had her teeth, too." Carbon dating would later reveal that the children had been buried around 2,000 years ago.

Pam took the baskets into the bathroom and scrubbed them clean with Pine-Sol. The other pot hunters marveled at the treasure. None of them knew where the cave was—"we never told anyone," Pam said—but at least one friend warned the Harelsons against continuing the dig. "You ought to stay away from it," the friend cautioned. "This is serious stuff."

According to Pam, Jack shrugged it off. Once the baskets were clean and dry, the Harelsons planned to display them in a glass case Jack had built. But what to do with the kids themselves?

"You know we need to take them back to the cave, Jack," Pam said.

"Aw, hell," Pam recalled Jack saying. "Just put 'em in a bag and we'll bury them here."

Pam said she didn't argue, but she refused to do any digging. She watched anxiously out her daughter's bedroom window as Jack dug a three-foot hole in the backyard. He laid the two Paiute children to rest, in a plastic garbage sack, next to the strawberry patch. And that's where they stayed for the next 11 years.

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