They might also have been deposited there because that’s where the trash was deposited. Modern trash disposal is in many areas a pretty recent thing. (Most of the rest of the trash would have been organic, and is probably not at this point distinguishable by the average house demolisher from the other organic contents of the pit. ETA: and there wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much of it as most modern households produce.)
And you probably wore a hat,
There was a news story recently about a woman in Alaska who was bitten by a bear while she was using the outhouse. The bear was under her.
I probably didn’t, as I was a child (and hated the things); but my mother certainly did.
She kept wearing hats (she liked them.). Somewhere in the late 1990’s I came up behind a woman in the grocery store and called her ‘Mother’, which startled her as she wasn’t my mother. She was, however, wearing a similar hat; and hat wearing had gotten uncommon enough by then that I’d pretty much assumed that the woman wearing a hat in warm weather to do the grocery shopping was my mother.
Yeah, there’s an even simpler reason for them though. All the outside (flush) toilets I’ve ever known were in the places where the outhouse used to be. Because when you’re putting plumbing in an existing house, just putting the new toilet in the old toilet’s place is way easier than trying to find a space in the house for it, especially if it’s not a big house in the first place
Did you electrify one on the reservation? 
Yeah, my buddy had two, one was connected to the garage, one was next to the pool.
As a boy I loved “The Great Brain” series of books about life in Utah in the 1890s.
One of the escapades involved the family installing the town’s first indoor toilet and the boys charging admission to see “The Magic Water Closet that Doesn’t Stink”
I think they ordered it from Sears, like everything else back then.
You mean wire a head for a a reservation?
My father told me that joke (about Thomas Edison giving a speech for Native Americans and helping them out by putting lights in their bathroom) when I was a lad.
Huh?
And why are you claiming this had anything to do with reservations?
And if you turn that picture upside down, you’ll understand old references to the German army’s “coal-scuttle helmets”.
I remember going with my sister’s first husband to buy coal in the ‘60s. He’d back up to one of the piles of coal and start shovelling it into the back of the pickup, then drive to his parents’ house and start shovelling it into the coal chute. (Don’t know what kind of coal it was, though it definintely wasn’t lignite.)
Don’t recall showering in junior high, but they were required in high school (late '60s-early '70s) no matter what the class was doing. Don’t remember about regular classes, but guys who took swimming in summer school had to shower before going into the pool. Boys swam in the nude; girls were given what I understand were very ugly green suits. (I never saw one – in fact, it wasn’t until it was being discussed on Facebook 5-70 years ago that I realised they had had suits.)
Ditto, though we called it a “gym suit”.
In the mid '60s we lived in a house that had no plumbing – the well was maybe 25 feet from the back door, and the outhouse was fifty feet or so down the hill.
At least they had them the right way around!
But that fifty feet or so was really something, in a Michigan winter.
It is a joke, see above.
I found one of those in college. Used it as a wastebasket.
That fifty feet or so was really something in a Derbyshire UK (‘The High Peak’) winter in 1957. I had to carry a little paraffin (kerosene) lamp in the dark. The shack was made of wiggly tin, with a gap under the door. The bucket had ‘Elsan’ fluid in it, and twice a week my Dad had to carry it down the field to bury the contents. You kids don’t know you’re born!
In the late '60’s I carried one of these for a short time.Eight bricks at a time.
You kids, etc…