Six men leased Spiro's burial mound for $300 from the guardian of the heirs, tunnelled in, sold the grave goods worldwide, and tried to blow up the rest

Spiro was built and used from about AD 850 to 1450. Its only burial mound, Craig Mound, held a buried mortuary building with elaborate burials and objects of Gulf shell, copper, exotic stone, feathers, fur and cloth; one grave held about 14,000 shell beads from the Gulf of California. Choctaw and Chickasaw Freedmen farmed the land from the 1870s. In 1933 a man named Evans, maternal grandfather of the Craig grandchildren who had inherited the land, leased the mound for two years for $300. Six men put in $50 each and called themselves the Pocola Mining Company. They hired coal miners to tunnel into the largest cone and broke into the chamber. Beads, pearls, feather capes and weavings were trampled, and human remains were piled up and crumbled. They sold thousands of objects to dealers. In 1935 the Kansas City Star called Spiro the "King Tut of the Arkansas Valley," and the Oklahoma legislature passed a licensing law to protect the site. As the lease ended, the miners packed the chamber with black powder and set it off. They were arrested; there is no record they served time. From 1936 to 1941 University of Oklahoma archaeologists and WPA crews recovered more than 600 burials. Spiro objects are in the British Museum, the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Smithsonian. The Caddo and Wichita both claim Spiro as ancestral.