Elden Johnson was born in Brookings, South Dakota on October 24, 1923. Throughout his childhood his family moved often, following his father's job in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They lived in many locations including Pierre, South Dakota, Denver, Colorado and Albuquerque, New Mexico where Elden finished high school.
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, 18 year old Johnson joined the United States Army Air Corps and was sent to pre-flight training at Bakersfield, California. He received his wings early upon graduation in 1943. During the war, he flew sixty-four missions with the First Flight Group, first in North Africa and then in Italy.
After being discharged from the army in 1945, Johnson enrolled at the University of Minnesota because his father had taken a job as the Regional Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the state. While there he was turned on to anthropology during a course on acculturation, taught by Richard Beardsley. This proved to be the stimulus that started him on his career in Anthropology.
During his undergraduate years, Johnson began working at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He was put to work sorting and cataloguing an attic full of ethnographic gifts. After this he was sent to Browning, Montana to sort and catalogue the Great Northern collection of ethnographic material, consisting mostly of items of Blackfoot material culture. His primary anthropological interests turned to Cultural Anthropology and the Indians of the Great Plains.
Elden Johnson received his Bachelor’s Degree in 1948, then he completed his Masters Degree in four quarters. During this time he did fieldwork at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. After this, he took off to Yale University to perform his graduate study in the fall of 1950. He did fieldwork in Chile, Thailand and Cambodia. His fieldwork was disrupted by a anemic dysentery and the out-break of the French Indo War. After eight months of frustration and discouragement, Johnson returned to Minnesota where he began full time at the Museum and taught a course or two each quarter at the University of Minnesota.
With the increasing importance of cultural resource management, Johnson began to devote a greater proportion of his fieldwork to contract surveys. The most extensive of these surveys was in the Headwaters Lakes area: (Winnibigoshish, Gull, Leech, Pine River and Pokegama). Besides his extensive research schedule, Elden also served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota for ten years, as an Advisor on the Board of Historical and Archaeological Institutes and Journals in the Midwest. While maintaining his teaching schedule at the University, he assumed the Directorship of the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology. Along the way he managed to find time for a survey of Paleolithic sites in Pakistan.
Elden’s serious involvement in archaeology earned him a two-year grant from the Hill Fund for an archaeological and ethnographic study of Spring Lake Park just south of St. Paul on the Mississippi River. Through this he began a regional statewide survey. His initial surveys in the Red River Valley and northwestern Minnesota were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Minnesota Resources Commission funded additional regional surveys.
Elden Johnson is more actively involved today in western Great Lakes Archaeology as Director for the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology while teaching, chairing the Department of Anthropology, and attending the numerous meeting that are an integral part of academic life at the University of Minnesota.
Elden Johnson was the first archaeologist to initiate regional surveys, plan long term and intensive anthropological-oriented investigations of circumscribed regions, to promote resource management changes, and to open communication with Native American communities. Minnesota was a leader in many of these areas because of Elden Johnson’s commitment and continuing interest in Cultural Anthropology and the welfare of Native Americans living in the state today.
Added http://www.fromsitetostory.org/sources/papers/mnhistory/mnhistory.asp (September 2006)
Written by: Andrew Mielzarek