And that seemed to happen fairly fast, after the railroad cut off the flow of water.
Yes.
Since it was a very shallow lake to start with.
There was a light, humus-type stuff when the bed blew off. It uncovered all these very ancient Indian camps. Lots of people, like Frank Payne and I, saved that material and a lot of it’s in the museum. And a lot, like this, has been studied. It wasn’t entirely a case of vandalism, but the professional community of archaeologists probably would consider me as a vandal for having salvaged all this stuff. I’ve spent a helluva lot of money getting it and having it tested and so on.
You worked very closely with the Forest Service and BLM people in the past.
Yes, and I still do. I can’t say that [of BLM] because I don’t know of anyone in the BLM that wouldn’t perhaps rather see me in prison. But I work with archaeologists from three different national forests- Modoc and Klamath- and I’ve given papers at their professional meetings. So I don’t have an antagonism, a built-in antagonism, for them. But I know amateur collectors who have important information, and they wouldn’t give them the time of day. They are so nasty in their description of anyone who hunts this stuff or preserves it.
A lot of this was done before any of the laws were ever on the books.
It was. I’ll bet you 90 percent of the information that archaeologists have accumulated has been a result of some amateur somewhere.
