Pictograph Cave Cannibals

English professor H. Melville Sayre of the Montana School of Mines at Butte led the first archaeological excavations at Pictograph Cave, a National Historic Landmark, near Billings. Under foreman Oscar T. Lewis, a Glendive rancher and self-taught archaeologist, the dig was funded by the Depression-era New Deal Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. It put numerous crew members to work. According to locals who frequented the excavation site as visitors in 1937 and 1938, both Sayre and Lewis told fantastic tales. They claimed to have found evidence that Ice Age occupants practiced cannibalism. They backed up their story with the supposed discovery of human teeth, a human skull with knife marks consistent with removal of the tongue, and butchered human rib bones bearing human teeth marks. While Sayre’s formal report to Governor Roy Ayers is considerably less flamboyant, he does mention that some items yielded evidence consistent with cannibalistic activity. Lewis further speculates in his notes that notched bone projectile points found in the caves came from Inuits in the Arctic. He figured that the Inuits harpooned buffalo that did not die, but migrated south where they were eventually killed by the early inhabitants of the Yellowstone Valley. Writer Glendolin Damon Wagner, who wrote about evidence of cannibalism among other indigenous peoples, painted a vivid picture of the finds in Pictograph Cave in the Rocky Mountain Husbandman of May 3, 1938. But when professional archaeologist Dr. William Mulloy took over the Pictograph Cave excavations in 1941, these tales died a swift death. If evidence of cannibalism existed, it has been lost along with many of the artifacts discovered under Lewis and Sayre. Most scientists discount cannibalism among Montana’s first peoples as nothing more than bunk.


Bill Browne, photographer, Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 90-96 P3 #18

Archaeologists Gus Helbronner (left) and Wahle Phelan during excavation of Pictograph Cave, c. 1937 Click the photo for a bigger version.

Homestead Horror!

A Plentywood rancher once told of a childhood experience that made a lasting impression. Before the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to many ranches in the late 1930s, the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration helped Montana farmers by channeling some ten million dollars worth of contract money into the desperate economy. Some families who benefitted from this new money splurged on automobiles. This particular family was proud of their new car, and in the evenings they would go visiting. One warm spring evening as the family returned home after such a visit, they drove into the driveway. As they approached the dark house, the headlights flashed upon the attic window, and they saw a white figure moving back and forth in the light. As was the family custom, the children drew straws to see who had to go into the dark house first to light the kerosene lamp. The short straw fell to this youngster. He was terrified, but his father told him to get to it, and so he approached the house with weak knees. Instructed to discover what was in the window, the youngster slowly made his way up the stairs, taking the treads one by one. He thought he would faint he was so scared. Finally he got to the top stair, took a deep breath, and flung the door open. Relief flooded through him. During the cold winter months, his mother used the attic to hang the laundry, and hanging in the window was a forgotten pair of long johns swaying in the breeze.