Steve Lyons

Today, digging up American Indian gravesites is a delicate matter, but back in the 1930s freelance pothunters didn’t pay attention to niceties.

Squint Moore, now “88 and 3/4s,” says that back in those days, while still a free-roving teenager, he dug up two complete human skeletons at cliff ruins he’d discovered in Southwestern Colorado. The first set of bones he kept under his bed at home. At times, he would take them out and lay them on the bedspread. “ I got a kick out of showing them to the neighbor kids,” he chuckles. “When I got married, my mother made me move them out.”

The second skeleton he kept in a box in his barn. When the family sold the homestead, they accidentally left the box behind. The new owner's children came upon it while exploring their new home. They opened the lid and ran, shrieking, to their parents. “Fortunately the parents called the real estate agent instead of the sheriff,” Squint says. “The real estate man knew what I’d been doing and called me. I took the bones out and gave them a proper burial.”

Squint, in his sweat-stained fedora, worn blue jeans and long-sleeve, checked flannel shirt, looks today like an older version of daredevil archaeologist Indiana Jones. If Jones were an actual person rather than a fictional character, they’d be about the same age--and they’d have spent their lives in the same pursuit: exploring ancient ruins and sifting the sands for clues to vanished cultures

It all started one day, when he was a ten-year-old boy. He was out in the dusty hills searching for “pretty stones” for the games he played with his sisters on his family’s farm near Peagreen, Colorado. “I looked down and there was an arrowhead,” he says with a smile and a glint in his eyes. “Man ‘o man –then I was off hunting for them whenever I got the chance.”

Times were tough during the depression. Like many poor folks trying to survive, Squint often poached deer while looking for stone points. Once, when he was twelve, Ott Peterson, a game warden who was notorious for being a criminal himself, caught him in the act. “He gave me a reprimand for toting a gun that was too big (my shotgun was taller than I was) and having no license. He sent me home.” Ott’s admonition didn’t stick: Squint shouldered his shotgun and was out tramping through the sage looking for arrowheads the following week.

In 1928, when he was fourteen, Squint found a rock shelter with walls covered with petroglyphs and “Indian writing.” Moore told Al Look, the editor of the Daily Sentinel newspaper. Al was an archaeology buff. He hiked out to see for himself. He was so impressed he called Dr. Marie Wormington, at the Denver Museum of Natural History and asked her to look it over. She did and almost immediately began a full-scale excavation. She hired young Squint to help with the dig and named the site “Moore’s Shelter,” after Squint and his sister, Ruth. The site turned out to be over 4,000 years old. Excavation took three summers.

One bright summer day, while out hunting with Ruth, Squint ran into Harold Huscher—a man who would later become an influential and well-respected pioneer archaeologist--building a cabin in Roubideau Canyon. Harold invited them to stay the night. They ended up staying two (to the chagrin of Squint’s parents who had no idea where they were). The three became fast friends. They would meet regularly, before exploratory trips into the nearby canyon, in a cabin they believed had been the hideout of the famous outlaw, Ben Lowe. Lowe had caught enough lead to kill him, in a gunfight not far away.

Over the next two decades Squint, Harold and Ruth scouted the wild and remote Uncompaghre plateau, from Whitewater to Colona, looking for ancient campsites, arrowheads and pots. Often they trekked for two weeks, or more, at a time.

“We’d live off the country,” Squint explains. “We’d eat wild onions, pinion nuts, chokecherries and all kinds of roots—we even ate cattails, which aren’t very good but they do the job when you’re hungry enough—and fish, rabbits and venison. We’d catch rabbits the old Indian way with a forked stick. You push the stick into the rabbit hole till you feel it touching the rabbit; then you twist the stick and when it is well tangled in the rabbit’s fur you pull him out.” They made rabbit stew and, after the meal, boiled down the leftovers so they could carry it in their packs. “We’d often walk twenty miles a day and think nothing of it,” he says with a shrug.

Over the years, they went from foot travel to horses to bicycles to a Model A to motorcycles. “We’d use anyway we could to get into the mountains,” Squint says. “I’m probably one of the few people who have spotted arrowheads from a motorcycle.” It was during these forays in the 1930s and 40s that he found many of the Indian sites that he is now showing to the BLM and other agencies.

“I hated the BLM back in those days,” he says. “They had a practice of tearing down pinion and juniper trees. They’d stretch long chains between two bulldozers and pull the trees down. Then they’d come along with a big machine and run it over the downed trees to chop them up. They ruined so many good Indian sites!” The BLM was destroying the trees to make more grassland for sheep and cattle, a practice they no longer do.

“I got to know them after a while. I had a bright yellow jeep that stuck out like a sore thumb.” Squint says. “They knew what I was doing out there and I’d often come back to my truck and find a plastic bag full of rocks hanging from the side mirror and a note on the windshield that said ‘Don’t disturb the ruins.’ They were kidding with me. I found out they were good guys after all.”

Over time, the BLM and state and federal agencies discovered how much Squint knew and began to call on his site-finding talents. He helped Alpine Archaeological Services in their assessment of the Denver International Airport site. He worked as a consultant with the National Park Service on surveying projects along the Gunnison River and around Blue Mesa Reservoir. He also advised the State Highway Dept. in the Cimarron area and the San Juan National Forest Service on Chimney Rocks, a Chacoan outlier settlement, in the Four Corners area.

“Squint knows a hell of a lot. He’s been generous with us” say Mark Stiger, Professor of Anthropology and director of the C.T Hurst Museum at Western State College in Gunnison. “He seems to have walked over most of Western Colorado. His memory for sites, artifacts and natural features is uncanny.”

In the mid-nineties, Squint told Stiger that he’d found Folsom points, a unique kind of spearhead, in the Delta/Montrose area. Paleo-Indians used Folsom points to kill mammoths, mastodons, long horned bison, giant sloths and other now-extinct animals that once roamed Colorado. At the time, it was almost accepted wisdom among archaeologists that there was little or no early Paleo-Indian evidence in Western Colorado.

“Squint’s finds sort of primed the pump,” says Stiger. “We wondered if there might be more.” At a site near Gunnison, Stiger’s archaeologists and students hit the jackpot. The site is now making news. So far, the archaeologists have found more than 25,000 stone artifacts, including 60 distinctive Folsom projectile points. The site, dating from 11,500 to 13,00 years ago, was a breakthrough find. A rock habituation structure there suggests that the Paleo-Indians, who researchers believed to be highly mobile large game hunters, may have been more sedentary than previously believed.

One of Squint’s current projects with the BLM is to find teepee poles in the North Fork Valley near Hotchkiss. On their first foray last month they found only one. But Squint believes there are many more. He’ll search them out later this fall. He also wants to show twenty-five more “good sites” to the BLM.

Squint has trekked many miles since his bone collecting days: He's part of the establishment now--but that hasn't dampened his passion.

“You pick up an arrowhead--it’s been sitting there pretty near a thousand years or over.” Squint’s chest expands, he seems to grow inches and his eyes widen in wonder. “ It just thrills the devil out of ya!”