On October 1, 1936, a farmer named Howard Kohr found human bones in a field between the Smoky Hill and Saline rivers east of Salina, near a spot where a settler digging a dugout had turned some up decades before. He called Guy and Mabel Whiteford, a Salina police sergeant and his wife who dug ancient house sites as a hobby. Within a week they had uncovered more than fifty skeletons. Guy Whiteford wrote to the Smithsonian that they had put a fence and a tent over the pit, "and if some of the people around here want to see it, its going to cost them."
The display
It cost a quarter. The Whitefords kept digging while visitors watched, and they left the people where they found them, flexed, knees drawn up, as they had been buried, with their pots and ornaments beside them. More than a hundred people lay in the cemetery. Archaeologists place it in the Smoky Hill phase, farmers who lived in earth lodges along these rivers roughly a thousand to six or seven hundred years ago. It was advertised as the largest prehistoric Indian burial in the Middle West. A building went up over it, with a curio shop.
In 1937 the Price brothers bought the farm, and visitors drove in and honked for someone to come collect the admission. The Whitefords left in 1946 and the Prices ran it for four more decades. The state took part. A Kansas historical marker on US-40 told drivers that one mile southeast lay a burial pit with more than 140 skeletons, preserved in the positions of their burial, that showed "the remarkable size and strength of these prehistoric indians." In 1964 the site became a National Historic Landmark.
The closing
The first organized protest on record came in 1972, when the Lutheran synod refused to hold its meeting in Salina while the display stayed open. The fight that ended it began in the mid-1980s and was carried by Native nations, the Pawnee foremost among them, in talks with the Kansas Historical Society. In 1989 the legislature passed the Kansas Unmarked Burial Sites Preservation Act. From January 1, 1990, displaying human remains from an unmarked grave without a permit was a crime, and the board that rules on such graves includes a representative of each of the four resident nations, the Prairie Band Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Iowa and Sac and Fox. At the end of 1989 the state bought the site, and the pit closed.
The funeral
In April 1990 the Pawnee, regarded as the nearest descendants of the people buried there, covered them with blankets and shawls, said the final prayers and held a funeral feast. The cemetery was filled with 125 tons of clean sand, capped with concrete and planted with grass. Donna Roper, writing in Kansas History in 2002, said it rests much as it did before October 1936.
There is nothing to see and no reason to look for it. It is a cemetery again, closed to visitors, and the only thing it asks of anyone driving past is to keep going.