08/30/2026
THE STRANGE AFTERLIFE OF THE KENTON MUMMIES
The caves of Kenton, in Cimarron County, were excavated by archaeologists from the late 1920s onward. After the official excavations ended in the early 1930s, however, the caves acquired a rather less scientific vocation: they became a popular picnic spot and a convenient place for local souvenir hunting.
It was in this somewhat improvised archaeological environment that, in May 1933, Mrs. I. W. Mathews discovered the naturally mummified body of a small child in Cave 34Ci-50 during a school outing from Keyes.
Shortly afterward, three local men — Merrill McGee, John Tharp and Pard Collins — found two adults in the same shelter: a mummified man and a partially mummified woman.
The child, apparently about three years old at the time of death and possibly several thousand years old in mummy form, had been buried in a semi-flexed position beneath a heavy stone. Around the neck was a necklace of 16 Olivella shell beads, while beneath the legs lay a woven grass bag containing ears of corn.
The child appears to have been naked, apart perhaps from a loincloth, suggesting that death occurred in spring or summer. A later examination by the State Medical Examiner’s Office found no obvious cause of death. X-rays showed that the body had essentially become a remarkably well-preserved shell of skin and bones, with the internal organs gone.
But the most remarkable part of the story came after the discovery. For years, the little mummy seems to have enjoyed a remarkably itinerant existence, passing from one private owner to another with virtually no institutional oversight.
The three mummies were divided among the principal discoverers. The child was reportedly kept for a while under J. R. Butler’s bed, then moved to John Tharp’s garage, and later to Pard Collins’s home. At one point, it was even hanging on the back of an upstairs door at the Kenton Hotel.
The female mummy had an equally chaotic afterlife: she reportedly spent more than 15 years in the attic of the Kenton Hotel before being transferred to an improvised “museum” in Brownie Collins’ house. In the 1950s, Willis Stovall is said to have acquired the adult mummies, which subsequently disappeared and have never been located since.
As for the little mummy, the exact date on which it was donated to the No Man’s Land Historical Museum in Goodwell remains unknown. None of the sources I have been able to consult gives a precise date. We only know that the donation took place after its years of wandering through private hands, probably sometime between the 1940s and the 1950s.
Today, the child remains in the collection of the No Man’s Land Historical Museum in Goodwell but apparently is no longer on public display. Given its extraordinary state of preservation and the strict environmental conditions required to protect such a fragile specimen, this is hardly surprising.
After spending years under beds, in garages, private houses and even hanging behind a hotel door, the little mummy has finally been granted something resembling proper conservation. One might say that it took archaeology about half a century to discover the concept of “please don’t hang the mummy on the door.”
