The Strange Story of Jack Harelson

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Outside Magazine October 2004

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The Killing Bones (cont.)

Unfinished Business
THINGS MIGHT HAVE ENDED 12 months later, at Harelson's 1996 trial at the Josephine County Circuit Court in Grants Pass, where he was convicted of aggravated theft, abuse of a corpse, and tampering with evidence. While he has refused Outside's requests to be interviewed for this story, Harelson has defended himself in court documents, claiming that his only crime was failing to obtain a permit.

Harelson had, in fact, handled some of his pothunting finds through the proper channels. In the mid-eighties, he had turned over the skeletons of two ancient camels, and the complete skeleton of an Ice Age horse, all more than 25,000 years old, to the Museum of Nevada—important discoveries credited to his name. During his trial, Harelson's lawyer tried to downplay the significance of the items police found in Harelson's home, portraying his client as a serious hobbyist unfairly targeted by overzealous government officials. Harelson never took the stand in his own defense. In the end, it was the judge's comments upon sentencing that seemed to sting him the most. "You are not an amateur archaeologist," he said. "You are a common thief."

Authorities had searched and seized more than 2,000 artifacts from Harelson's home, including petroglyphs, scrapers, ax heads, mauls, awls, mortars and pestles, fishing lures, net sinkers, smoothing stones, abraders, obsidian blades, an antler necklace, a wooden digging stick, hundreds of arrowheads, and manos and metates (a mano stone is used in conjunction with a slab-shaped metate stone to grind corn). But two items of particular importance were never recovered: When a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist dug up the skeletons of the Indian children, the skulls were gone.

Walt Markee asked Harelson about them, but he just shrugged. "They were there when I buried them," Harelson said.

Native American skulls are highly prized on the international black market. "Looters will often come onto our land to dig, and they'll leave the bones but take the skull," Dean Barlese, a Paiute spiritual adviser, explained to me. "For us, it's not an object—it's a sacred part of a person. It's like somebody digging up your sister or grandmother."

Barlese had driven to Grants Pass from his home in Nixon, Nevada, to witness Harelson's trial and to make arrangements for proper reburial of the bones—sadly, not a rare task for him. After Harelson's trial, he huddled with Markee in a quiet corner of the DA's office. He wanted to make sure that the officer knew that, to the Paiutes, the skulls were more than merely missing evidence. Barlese handed Markee some sweetgrass. Burn it, he said; it will help protect you. Then he gave the officer a hunk of bitterroot, to ward off evil. Finally he offered him a small leather pouch decorated with beadwork. Inside the pouch was medicinal powder and an arrowhead. Markee understood the implication: His work in this case was far from done.

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