by Gina Perry
It was a three-hour drive, and they stopped halfway, at the small town of Heavener, for a drink. By now Sherif and OJ were elated. While the boys drank sodas in the town’s drugstore, Sherif bought a card at the counter and scrawled a quick note to Carolyn on the back, signalling the study’s success. ‘Dearest, the boys (members of the two groups) are having pops together in this drugstore in Heavener after their joint overnight camp. All going to Arkansas. Love M.’ Then, scribbled in haste along the edge of the card, he added, ‘See you tomorrow evening.’
Soon after returning to the road, they reached the state line and OJ pulled over. The boys piled out and gathered round a metal sign hanging off a plank, which read ‘Arkansas Welcomes You’, and one of the men snapped a picture. In the photo, a couple of the boys are looking upwards at a large boy, who has climbed to the top of the sign and is hanging upside down above their heads. I can’t tell if he’s a redhead, but it looks like the sort of thing Red would do. Only this time no one paid him much attention. The boys lined up, and one stood in the middle with his legs wide apart, with one foot in Oklahoma and the other in Arkansas, straddling the border of the familiar and the strange.
When they arrived at their destination — the small town of Waldron, in Arkansas — the boys jostled and laughed together over lunch in a diner, and in his notes Sherif wrote in happy capitals, ‘EXPERIMENT ENDED AT THIS POINT.’
‘We were delighted, just delighted with the outcome,’ OJ said. ‘Sherif challenged the idea that individuals are the problem or that they are inherently antagonistic. We created factions — we showed that by putting a group of normal eleven-year-old WASP boys in competition for highly desirable goals, you could mould them into factions. Then you could dissolve them again. It was an idealistic sort of thing for us, and we really felt we had a cure for our problems. We were fighting prejudice. But it was so busy that we didn’t have time to stop and savour it — we just had to keep going.’
On the bus on the way back to Oklahoma City, the boys took turns in singing songs they’d performed during camp skits, with Bill Snipes accompanying them on the ukulele and leading the singing. As they got close, everyone ‘rushed’ to the front of the bus to join in singing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Oklahoma’. ‘Everyone in both groups took part, all sitting or standing as close together as possible in the front end of the bus.
‘The gaiety lasted during the last half hour of the trip; no one went back to the rear. A few boys exchanged addresses, and many told their closest companions that they would meet again’, The Robbers Cave Experiment concludes. It may well have been a triumphant moment for the men, but was it for the boys too? Did it mark the end of a fun and happy camp, or was their elation at least in part sheer relief that they were finally heading home and leaving the strange place that was Robbers Cave?
I understood now why Bill’s memories of the camp veered between cheerful recall of happy times and the uneasy memories of the raids and the fighting. One of Bill’s vivid memories was of a moment after they had left Robbers Cave for Arkansas. All twenty boys sat in the back of the truck, excited to be going to another state. The vehicle had a canvas tarp, and as they drove along the dirt road, dust blew back at them. Soon they were covered in it, their faces coated in the same brown mask. Opposite Bill, Red’s pale, freckled skin and fiery thatch of hair was brown with dirt. ‘I remember looking at that boy Red, the way his white eyelashes looked against the dust. And I remember thinking we all looked exactly the same,’ Bill said. The differences between them had been obliterated. What’s stayed with him is that final image, perhaps a vision of the camp as he had hoped it would be when he first arrived — a bunch of boys making new friends, who saw their similarities and not their differences, setting out together on a new adventure.
The 160-mile trip to Robbers Cave that OJ and Sherif made back in 1954 would have taken a lot longer than it does today, but still we left Oklahoma City early in the morning so we could make it there and back in a day.
Cherie, Bill’s wife, drove us in her neat white Toyota hatchback. Bill had been cautious the first time I spoke to him about the experiment. Yes, he remembered the camp, he said. No, he didn’t know it was an experiment. The words were familiar to me by then.
The traffic was light and we made good time, but after a while the double-laned highway narrowed to a single road and we passed gas stations, the occasional small town. Cherie and Bill pointed out the signs to the Okemah, where Woody Guthrie was born. The names of the towns are poetic: Shawnee, Keokuk Falls, Henryetta.
Robbers Cave in 1954 was Bill’s first experience of summer camp, and he was looking forward to going back with me. He has a degree in sociology and psychology, and although he could not remember ever reading about the experiment during his studies, he was tickled pink to think he was part of something that’s now in textbooks.
‘I enjoyed that camp,’ he told me. ‘I had a great time.’ Bill grinned at the memory. I was unsettled by this cheerful impression because it sat strangely with his and others’ accounts of the fights and violence. Until Bill explained. ‘My parents didn’t have a lot of money,’ he turned in his seat to tell me. The camp was a holiday for Bill that his parents would not normally be able to afford.
He hadn’t been back this way in a long time, Bill said. He was clearly excited about this trip. Even his last visit down this way had been dramatic and frightening. In 1973, he and a bevy of officers from Oklahoma City got news there were riots at the state penitentiary and raced along the highway to get there. When they arrived, the place was on fire. It was chaos. The riots lasted for three days and left three dead and twenty-one injured. Twelve buildings burned to the ground. Bill didn’t say much more, and I found it hard to imagine him raising a hand to anyone, let alone a baton or a gun.
We knew we were getting close to McAlester when we passed the state penitentiary. A sign by the side of the highway warned, ‘Hitchhikers may be escaping prisoners’, and I pondered the ambiguities of this statement all the way to McAlester. We parked at the small town of McAlester, the last stop before the turn-off, and had lunch in a diner with plastic tablecloths.
I guessed it was not often that Bill and Cherie got this far from Oklahoma City, and by this point I had caught the same mood of adventure they shared. I was grateful for their generosity in taking a total stranger on an outing like this, and on McAlester’s main street, we took turns posing for photos beside a man-sized fish standing upright on the pavement outside the angler’s shop. On the wall beside the shop, a poster advertised the annual Wild West Festival, which pays homage to the town’s early beginnings, with a High Noon showdown, rope tricks, and a rodeo. Anyone looking at us would have thought we were ordinary tourists. But we weren’t. For Bill, this was a chance to relive an early episode in his life. For me, it was an opportunity to visit the park for the first time with one of the boys as my guide.
When we stopped for petrol on our way out of McAlester, I spied a weekly newspaper in the rack called OK Jailbirds, which seemed to publish the mugshots and details of crimes for which people across the state had been arrested. I picked up a copy partly for its novelty value. Flipping through it, looking at the faces of alleged rapists, murderers, petty criminals, and paedophiles, I thought, These are the kinds of people Bill has worked with all his adult life. But he had none of the cynicism or seriousness I associated with someone who had done the job that long. He had a positively buoyant nature.
After we took the turn-off, the road slowly started to climb. The trees rose on either side of the road, and the flat grey landscape of the highway was replaced by a lush quiet forest. Finally, we turned into the entrance, Cherie parked the car, and we climbed out. Immediately we were hit by a wall of heat: it was like standing in front of an open oven door. Cherie and I wanted to stop in the shade and read the information boards at the park’s entrance, to look at the tourist map and its faded black-and-white photos of famous outlaws, but Bi
ll was impatient and hurried us on.
Trees shaded the road that snaked through the park, connecting the lower half, with the lake, to the upper half, with its cabins and cave. There was no one else around; we had the place to ourselves.
‘There was nothing around it,’ Bill had said on the drive, describing the cave to us. ‘We climbed over these big granite boulders, twenty, maybe thirty feet in the air. They came out of the earth on a slant and you climbed up on them. You could climb real high.’ For eleven-year-old Bill, this first week of the camp, exploring the park and climbing over and around the cave, had been a real adventure. He couldn’t wait to get up there again.
We followed the signs to the cave. Almost immediately the path began to climb, but it passed under thick trees so I couldn’t see where it ended. It was mid-afternoon, and we stopped often to catch our breath. Bill was the first to admit he was out of shape — unlike Cherie, who was fit and active. We took our time, stopping and resting and starting again. The trail was marked in fluorescent yellow, spots that in places had faded away or been obscured by bush. I expected to descend to find a cave: it seemed counterintuitive to be climbing upwards towards something I knew plunged deep into a mountain. It was an odd parallel of the feeling I had about Bill, who was treating the outing as a nostalgic trip to a place of his boyhood. How could he have enjoyed an experience that sounded so unhappy?
When we got to the top, it was exactly as Bill had described it. The trees cleared and we came to a flat plate of rock that jutted out above a valley, surrounded on all sides by forest. Up here, the road we’d driven in on was invisible, and on the rock we could look out across a wooded valley and to the Ouachita Mountains. Insects hummed in the otherwise silent wood as we wiped the sweat from our faces. We seemed to be the only people for miles around.
Bill was disappointed that we couldn’t get closer to the cave, but barriers had been erected around it to prevent the public from entering. Looking at the cave mouth from where we stood on a wooden walkway, I could see how the light stopped abruptly just inside, swallowing the sun in a thick darkness.
‘We used to climb down to there.’ He pointed to one side of the cave’s entrance. ‘It was really steep, and we’d slide down in there. You didn’t know how far you were going to go. It was very dark … But it was fun,’ Bill protested quickly when he saw Cherie and I exchanging glances. ‘We had stakeouts. We found some great hiding places. I had a great time.’
Bill’s face was shiny with sweat and he was still puffing from the climb. We decided to take a break before we began the descent.
I climbed back up on top of the rock, above the cave. I could see why ten- and eleven-year-old boys would have loved this place. Standing on the slab of sandstone jutting out across the valley, I could imagine that Jesse James stood in the same spot, keeping a lookout, back in the days when there were ‘cowboys’ and ‘Indians’. There was a kind of spell over the place. To city boys like Bill, it must have seemed magical.
I could hear Bill talking loudly below me. ‘Guess what I’m doing?’ He sat on a rock, his face pink, a cell phone to his ear. ‘I’m climbing a mountain! I’m finally gonna get into shape.’ He chuckled. One of his daughters, clearly incredulous on the other end of the line, was making him laugh.
The stone-and-wood cabins looked exactly as they did in the 1954 photos. The camp caretaker unlocked the door of one and let us have a look around inside. The park is busy in the cooler months, when the snakes are not active and the weather is bearable rather than blistering, and she told us they often rent the cabins to families, former school classmates, or members of church groups who camped here together in their younger days and now return for reunions. But the cabin I was in smelled as if it hadn’t been used in a while; it was musty and crowded, with old wooden bunk beds harbouring yellowing mattresses. Bill swore it was the one the Rattlers had slept in, and outside he headed off through the trees, over a creek, to the Eagles’ cabin.
Bill made a slow circle around it. ‘I remember when I came through that window, Davey Munroe’s eyes were out on stalks. He was not happy, he was real kind of upset.’ Bill looked troubled at the memory. He stopped, and Cherie handed him a bottle of water. ‘You know I played football with Davey Munroe at college?’ He unscrewed the bottle and took a sip.
‘You did?’ It was the first instance I’d encountered of any of the boys crossing paths in later life, and I was excited.
Bill shook his head. ‘It’s the strangest thing. We talked a lot about other things, but we never mentioned this camp. You’d think we would, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to remember you falling on top of him,’ Cherie joked.
But Bill went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I mean, this is where we met, and every time I saw him I would think about this camp. I just don’t know why we never got together and talked about it.’ He looked at me hopefully. ‘Boy, I would love to meet up with those fellas again.’
Bill returned to this topic like a tongue at a sore tooth, and we talked about it a number of times over the next couple of days, but he wasn’t able to explain it any better than this first time. ‘I have no idea why Davey and I never talked about it,’ he said, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘Or why I never stayed in touch with these guys!’ This is not at all characteristic for Bill. This is the man who meets for coffee every Thursday with his friends from elementary school to reminisce and catch up on gossip. Bill is clearly proud of these longstanding friendships. Which is why he’s so bothered by Robbers Cave.
And yet Bill recalls so much detail — not just the description of the cave, but the first week exploring and playing, the bully Red, the night raids, and finally the happy end stage, where the boys all seemed to get along, and Bill led the singalongs on the way back home, playing his ukulele.
I wouldn’t be able to put Bill together with Davey Munroe, but I had managed to track down another boy from Bill’s Rattler group. Maybe meeting and talking would put whatever it was that was bothering Bill to rest.
Smut Smith had been on Google, reading about the experiments, ever since I first made contact. He was excited to see himself online in a picture at the head of a group playing tug of war. ‘I said, “That’s me!” I called my wife over to look and she said, “No doubt about it, that’s you.”’
Smut has a strong Oklahoma accent and lives in Edmond, not far from Bill Snipes, although they haven’t seen each other since 1954. ‘We really had fun,’ he told me. ‘We swam a lot. We had our own pond, and even though there were snakes in the water, we’d make a lot of noise and splash around a lot so they wouldn’t come near.’
What were the experimenters trying to find out, he wanted to know. I gave him a brief rundown and he was silent for a while. Then he said slowly, ‘I remember the rivalry. I remember we tried real hard to win in all these games. But it seemed they had better athletes, and they dominated us. We didn’t like that. I remember we ganged up against them and plotted out strategies, but I can’t remember the specifics.
‘I remember I made some good friends, some real buddies. But I remember one guy, he was a real bully. He was bigger than anyone else and was always pushing people around.’ Smut veered between recounting the conflict with Red and with the other group. But both he and Bill returned to Red a number of times.
The other thing he remembered was the relief when it was over. ‘We were there for three weeks, and I didn’t realise how homesick I was until I saw my folks. I remember crying when I saw them again.’
He was voluble on the phone, excited that he was in what someone had told him was ‘a world-famous experiment’. I would have thought he would be keen to meet one of the other boys, but although he agreed, I sensed some reluctance.
A week later, Bill and I met Smut at the Cracker Barrel, a chain restaurant that boasts traditional home cooking, located halfway between Oklahoma City and Edmond. I took a photo of them together befor
e we went inside. Smut, tall and straight and fair-haired, in a polo shirt, smiled in a restrained kind of way. Beside him, Bill, short and stout, in a loud Hawaiian shirt, grinned widely, but I was surprised by how nervous he seemed. Inside, waitresses in long gingham aprons took our orders. The conversation proceeded in fits and starts. Both men had brought their wives. Bill asked Smut what line of work he was in, and they exchanged details of college and careers. I realised what a thin thread tied these two men together. Smut was reserved, cautious. Bill too seemed wary. I was fiddling with the straw in my drink, wondering why Smut had agreed to meet us if there was so little to talk about, when Bill mentioned the frog. Smut’s head came up and his glasses flashed.
‘You remember that canoe?’ Bill said, grinning.
‘Pfft.’ Smut was dismissive. ‘Six or eight of us in it.’
‘That counsellor with the horn-rimmed glasses —’
‘He was with us a lot,’ Smut said. ‘I remember he was trim.’
‘Around my dad’s age,’ Bill said.
‘And that terrible noise.’ Smut grimaced, laughing.