Middle America’s Museum Mystery

When life as a museum curator grew hectic, Stacey Vanden Heuvel used to ward off the world by closing her office door. Now, she props it open all day, keeping watch when visitors linger by a display case of rare Indian moccasins. She listens for the sound of wrenching metal and breaking glass--noises she wishes she had heard a year ago.

During visiting hours on Aug. 24, 1995, thieves entered the basement gallery of the Friends of the Middle Border Museum, a collection of 100,000 American Indian and Western relics housed in rustic cabins off Highway 90. Striking while Vanden Heuvel was in another room, they snapped weak metal locks on the display case. Ignoring more valuable items, they removed a single pair of 100-year-old beaded Sioux moccasins worth $4,000. Then they disappeared.

At first, Vanden Heuvel blamed herself, agonizing over her decision to step away just before the robbers struck. But when she called around to other tiny museums in South Dakota, she heard similar stories. Thieves were breaking into poorly guarded historical collections and walking out with precisely picked relics from America’s past. And it was happening across the Great Plains.

“It’s as if they were working off a shopping list,” she said.

A year later, the moccasins are still gone and museum thieves have only grown more prolific. From Oklahoma to the Dakotas, nearly three dozen robberies have occurred over the last two years in small-town repositories of Americana--and some museum officials suspect dozens more thefts have gone unreported. Native American and Civil War artifacts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars have vanished, experts believe, into an underground of unscrupulous traders thriving on Americans’ fascination with their heritage.

Museums long have been essential elements in small-town society, places where the tiniest communities re-create their history and celebrate the heroes of their ordinary life. There are about 7,000 small museums scattered along the nation’s back roads, quiet repositories where townspeople can still admire founding families, store yellowing photographs, claim a tenuous place in historical dramas. While some small museums thrive by catering to tourists, hawking caged reptiles and staged Western gunfights, most simply offer their regional riches in settings designed for easy access--perfect victims for thieves.

The surge of thefts coincides with a soaring demand for 19th-century American historical items. Curators and collectors point to the popularity of the PBS documentary “The Civil War” and the films “Dances with Wolves,” “Gettysburg” and “Glory” as the prime moving force behind the latest wave of interest in Americana.

Artifacts with the faintest significance fetch prices and spur desperate acts that astonish even the savviest collectors. A reader of the Civil War News, a monthly catering to aficionados of that era, complained to Managing Editor Kathryn Jorgenson in a recent letter about a dealer who offered to sell a chip supposedly chiseled from the Virginia Monument honoring Confederate Gen. George Edward Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. The asking price: $165.

“That’s pure vandalism,” Jorgenson said. “The prices are out of sight, and when you couple that with the fact that there’s only a finite number of these pieces available, some people will do just about anything to get their hands on what they want.”

Police suspect several rings--operating independently of one another--are responsible for the thefts. But in two years, only three cases have been solved and two men arrested--a museum administrator in Kansas and an Iowa dealer suspected of selling Indian relics to a gallery in Santa Fe, N.M.

“It’s frustrating. There are no leads and the stuff getting stolen hasn’t turned up anywhere,” said Tom Phannestiel, curator of the Smoky Hill Museum in Salina, Kan., which lost $2,500 worth of Indian artifacts to thieves in April 1995. “The sad part,” he adds, “is when they take it for their own, it deprives everyone else of the chance to see it.”

The roster of missing artifacts could fill a gallery: Rare moccasins, beaded Indian pipe bags and tomahawks stolen from six South Dakota museums; Civil War sabers and muskets pilfered from collections in southeast Kansas and Missouri; 600 Indian relics hauled out during a night robbery of a Lexington, Ky., anthropology museum. Last December in Osawatomie, Kan., the Adair Cabin--where Civil War abolition leader John Brown once lived--was set ablaze by burglars who made off with vintage Union cavalry sabers.

“It’s such a shame,” said town historical society member Benjamin Maimer, a former Kansas City resident. “I thought life in a small town was different.”

For many of the Midwest’s victimized small-town museums, the thefts have come as rude awakenings. They have endured on the fringes of the nation’s tourist trade, often relying only on their trust in community patrons who trickle in every few years and visitors who wander in off nearby highways.

Poorly funded and often unwilling to upgrade exhibits, many museums protect their holdings with aging locks and dime-store display cases. Volunteers, not guards, patrol the hallways. Alarm systems are rare.

When the Siouxland Heritage Museum in Sioux Falls, S.D., lost a $25,000 beaded Indian pipe bag to thieves in July, the intruders rifled a hallway display case in full view of a desk normally occupied by a secretary who was on a lunch break. The museum had video cameras, said curator Bill Hoskins, but nothing was taped.

“We’re the perfect victims because we trust people,” Vanden Heuvel says. “It would be a shame to see that trust erode, but I’m afraid we’re all going to have to do a lot of things differently.”

Her Friends of the Middle Border Museum was an easy target, yet an unlikely one in a tourist-trap town where six tiny museums vie with each other with well-tended collections of history and kitsch.

In the heart of Mitchell’s wind-swept downtown is the Corn Palace, famous for its garishly painted onion dome minarets and its murals made of corn. Across the street is the Doll Museum, an ersatz castle crammed with 4,000 ersatz children. A block away, the Soukop and Thomas Balloon and Airship Museum beckons visitors with “something for everyone”--a motto taken to heart by someone who tried to break into a display of Hindenberg zeppelin memorabilia.

But Vanden Heuvel’s museum and its collection of century-old Lakota Sioux crafts were well off the beaten track, hidden by pines in a neighborhood of ranch homes. “I kept wondering how these guys even found us,” she says.

She was unaware of the theft until after the museum closed that August day. Returning to her office, she saw the display case glass had been cracked open and a pair of moccasins was missing.

“I felt violated and ashamed that I let the museum down,” she recalls. “My primary job is to protect the collection, and they stole it right from under my nose.”

When she called the town police, officers advised her to mention nothing to residents or the local newspaper. “They were afraid if word got out, we’d get more visits from burglars,” she said.

Small-town wariness of publicity may have minimized the extent of the robberies, some curators say. In Kansas, where 21 museums are known to have lost artifacts since January 1994, state investigators were hampered early on by the failure of rural police forces to report the thefts. Local police often fail to realize the value of the stolen relics. An Indian pipe bag stolen from a Yankton, S.D., museum was reported by police to be valued at $75--when it was actually worth $18,000, according to the museum.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation widened its year-old probe of museum thefts when it learned about new robberies--not from local police, but from museum directors who uncovered the cases when they called each other with tips.

“Without accurate reporting, who knows what the real numbers are?” said KBI investigator Tom Williams.

Puzzled by why only small Midwest museums are reporting robberies, some curators wonder if historical galleries near Eastern and Southern Civil War battlefields are hiding their losses. Several museums in the Carolinas have acknowledged thefts of Confederate bayonets, muskets and Bowie knives, says Jorgenson. And robberies of vintage grave markers, statues and even iron cannons have plagued parks and cemeteries along the Eastern seaboard. That leads Jorgenson and other collectors to speculate that museums there are unduly silent.

Blair Tarr, curator for decorative arts at the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka, grew exasperated when he learned that a museum director in the Kansas town of Meade failed to report an April theft of Civil War weapons because he worried he might alienate a prominent town donor. Tarr only found out about the first theft when the museum was struck again in August, this time losing a pair of handcuffs believed to have been used by one of the infamous Dalton Gang train robbers.

“The only way these cases are going to be cracked is if curators are vigilant about these thefts and up front about them,” Tarr said.

Tarr and several other curators and historical society officials have set up an informal network to keep apprised of new thefts, phoning in reports and faxing each other descriptions of missing items. The most recent theft reports, indicating that the West Coast may also be vulnerable, were from collections in San Diego and Portland, Ore.

Vanden Heuvel has gone a step further, printing up flyers with photographs of her missing moccasins and mailing them to 125 private galleries and auction houses across the country. It is “a shot in the dark,” she admits, but one based on practical experience.

In August, police in Santa Fe recovered a stolen Sioux saddlebag in a gallery after a visiting Iowan recognized the relic as part of a group of Indian artifacts taken from the Sioux City (Iowa) Public Museum in January. The suspect in that case was charged with first-degree theft.

In the only other arrest linked to the thefts, the administrator of the Evah Cray Historical Home Museum in Atchison, Kan., was charged in January with six counts of felony theft for stealing and selling artifacts. He faces a November trial.

“We’ve heard numerous reports that there are unsavory dealers in the Santa Fe area who ask exorbitant amounts for items hidden in their back rooms,” said Elizabeth Sackler, president of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation in New York, a group that has tried to halt trade in Native American relics.

That black market may have been unintentionally stoked, Sackler and other experts say, by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. That 1990 law declared illegal almost all trade in historic Indian artifacts.

“The dealers who wanted to keep dealing and the buyers who wanted to keep buying just went underground,” said Claudia Nicholson, curator at the South Dakota Historical Society.

NAGPRA, as the 1990 law is known, has done little to stem the underground outflow of Native American relics to Europe, where demand has reportedly intensified in recent years. Sackler and other Americana experts say Indian and Civil War items are sold openly in European galleries--just as artworks, statues and other cultural patrimony from Europe and the Mideast once sold in private American showrooms and auction houses.

Vanden Heuvel wonders if her museum’s moccasins are sitting in a display window in Cologne, Germany.

Last year, on a trip through that city several months before her museum was robbed, she stopped--stunned--in front of a gallery window. Inside were neatly arranged old Lakota tribal crafts and artworks, artifacts she knew could only have been traded illegally in the states.

“How they got all those things, who knows?” she says, shrugging. “It sure makes me wonder now. Maybe they have our moccasins, too.”