bav. No 26] SMALL SITES ABOUT FORT BERTHOLD—METCALF 31 
these buttes will become mud bars in the course of a few years. This 
is particularly unfortunate in the case of 82ML9, where an apparently 
fairly rich occupation level is present in addition to the remains of an 
eagle trap or traps. 
ROCK CAIRNS 
Rock cairns were occasionally noted during the course of both the 
1947 and the 1950 surveys. Apart from those which appear to be 
associated with tipi rings, they appear to be most common in the 
rugged country above the mouth of the Little Missouri. In general 
they were near the edge of bluffs overlooking tributary streams but 
are seldom so close that they will be endangered by wave action or 
slumping, and all those seen were well above the full-pool level. Since 
the 1950 reconnaissance party had a large area to examine, one which 
contained a great deal of exceedingly broken badland terrain in which 
roads, when present, were poor, and since the time at our disposal was 
limited, few records were made of these features. Characteristically 
they were simply small piles of the glacial boulders—‘nigger- 
heads”—which are so plentifully distributed over the area. In size 
they varied from a pile of a dozen small boulders to one or two 
which were possibly 10 feet in diameter and 3 feet in height. The 
1947 notes indicate that in the upper reaches of the reservoir area a 
change occurs in the character of these features, many of them having 
the interstices between the stones filled with earth. It was not deter- 
mined whether this results from the deposition of wind-carried dust 
or whether the cairns in this area should be considered small boulder- 
and-earth mounds. 
A local collector, James Vaagen, of Werner, N. Dak., reported that 
the smaller cairns were not uncommon along the edge of the upland 
overlooking the valley of the Little Missouri River, west of Hans 
Creek. Vaagen also told us that he had hauled the stones from some 
of the cairns to his ranch, where they were used for building purposes, 
and that he had found broken and poorly preserved human skeletal 
material beneath some of the boulder piles. As a boy he had been 
told by old Hidatsa and Mandan individuals that when a death oc- 
curred in a hunting party far from the village, the body was placed 
beneath a pile of stones. Bowers (1950, p. 100) was told that when 
a Mandan died while away from the village, the body was wrapped 
in robes and placed either in a tree, in a crevice among the rocks, or 
in a shallow grave covered with stones. 
We were told by local people that similar cairns occur along the 
edge of the valley, overlooking the Missouri River in Montana. In 
1833 Maximilian describing the country about Fort Union, says: 
“We observed on the highest points, and at certain intervals of this 
mountain chain, singular stone signals, set up by the Assiniboins, of 
