Byway dig reveals a colorful past

(This is the first in a series of two articles about recent archaeological finds at the site of the original Sandpoint township along Sand Creek.)

SANDPOINT — Trixie Edwards was as proud as she was good-looking. Stepping out onto the ramshackle patchwork of wooden planks that doubled as a boardwalk, she breathed in the morning air. Clean smells from the Chinese laundry mingled with wood smoke as bird song embroidered the edges of what promised to be a fine spring day.

Across the creek, to the west, there was nothing but forest. Here on the east side, a few homes and hotels huddled side-by-side with merchants’ storefronts and a train depot, forming a long line that was hugged on one flank by Sand Creek and on the other by a vast lake that bore the lovely French name of Pend d’Oreille.

On the southernmost tip of that line and a little apart from the rest of the town site — sitting like a dot at the bottom of an exclamation mark — was the collection of saloons, gambling halls and “rooms to let” where Trixie and a few other girls plied their trade.

It had been a long road from her native France to this place — little more than a whistle stop on a spit of sand along the Northern Pacific Railroad — but business was good and getting better. She cared not a whit about the parsimonious, church-going women who judged her for the way she made her living. As the township grew, Trixie’s reputation as the best dressed, most sought-after woman in Sandpoint grew right along with it.

Even now, as she walked up to visit the druggist on her way to the grocer’s shop, she watched a small group of townswomen huddle like ruffled cluck hens and whisper as she passed.

She relished such moments, when she could float by knowing her dress was more expensive, her hat more beautiful and her jewelry more priceless than anything these common citizens would ever own.

To make that point perfectly clear, Trixie looked directly at the women and reached up to finger the dainty pendant around her neck, all fleur de lis and golden and … gone! 

A hundred yards away, sunlight sparked across a heart-shaped bit of gold on an unclasped chain before it was trampled deep into the mud by churning hooves that pulled a freight wagon north toward the railroad depot.

A hundred years away and then some, a man knelt on the east side of Sand Creek and carefully peeled back layers of time. He was part of an archaeological team that would explore Sandpoint’s original town site for the last time before it was buried and sealed forever beneath the Idaho Transportation Department’s Sand Creek Byway project. He used ever-smaller tools and brushes to unearth a tiny, heart-shaped object. An object that, once cleared of the mud and clay surrounding it, shone like gold in the sunlight.

“That’s a pretty little thing, isn’t it?” asked Bob Weaver, a historical archaeologist visiting the SWCA Archaeological Research Laboratory in the Spokane Valley. Weaver held the pendant between his thumb and forefinger and turned it in the light. After a moment, he placed it back on a table and lifted a small packet of folded paper.

“This is fragile,” he explained, unwrapping the folds. Inside was a dark metal object about the size of a thumbnail, with another, smaller piece nestled beside it. On closer inspection, both pieces were shaped like miniature turtles. Weaver turned the larger of the two over, and gently placed the smaller version into a hollowed-out cavity in its back.

“Nesting turtles,” the archaeologist said. “The Chinese made these. There were usually several of them that fit one inside the other.”

Sandpoint’s Chinatown — which Weaver described as “really just a couple of shacks” — delivered a surprisingly rich storehouse of artifacts during the dig. Broken opium lamps and ceramic pieces, toys, charms and unbroken rice bowls were recovered from what was only about a 15-year chapter of the town’s history.

“Sandpoint was founded in 1881 or thereabouts and the Chinese were there from the mid-1880s until about 1900,” the archaeologist said. “They probably weren’t Northern Pacific workers. There’s evidence that they came over earlier — possibly as part of the gold rush down in Orofino — and followed the development of the Sandpoint township.”

And so it went for the next couple of hours, with Weaver moving from room to room, side-stepping staffers who hurried by with banker’s boxes or storage tubs piled high with neatly labeled artifacts in plastic bags. Each box contained bits of history that would be entered into the lab’s database, bearing designations such as bone, glass and metal, but also including information about where each item was found.

With the former town site now lying well beneath the new layers of fill and grading for the byway route, the archaeological team is recreating that environment in a virtual setting, reconstructing early Sandpoint grid-by-grid on computers.

“The stories these things tell are more interesting than the artifacts themselves,” said Weaver, ducking into a storeroom piled high with boxes and reappearing with a small, green bottle.

“We have hundreds of these Mum’s champagne bottles that came from the area of what I consider to be the poor man’s brothel,” he went on. “It was almost as if it was a requirement for the customers to buy a split of champagne before they could go up and see the girls.”

Since much of early Sandpoint was built on pil ings over the creek, the archaeologists were robbed of one of the best places to dig for artifacts.

“You’re looking for the richest deposits and, typically, one of the richest you’ll find is the outhouse holes,” Weaver said. “We didn’t get to have that in Sandpoint, because you had some of the world’s first flush toilets there — the outhouses all dumped right into Sand Creek.”

The time frame covered — or uncovered, in this case — by the ITD’s archaeological project was roughly 1881, when the first non-native residents began moving in, until 1920, when the Humbird Mill was in peak production.

Most of the history encountered during the dig, however, took place in the quarter century or so that ended in the early 1900s after the township was literally buried by its own progress.

“The first town site lasted until the railroad raised the grade in 1904,” said Weaver, explaining that the ground was churned up and covered in crushed stone ballast as part of the construction process. “That’s when everybody moved across the creek to the newly platted town site.”

Although exploratory trenches were dug as far north as the Humbird Mill site, Weaver and the other archaeologists had to concentrate most of their attention on what once was known as the “restricted district” — the naughty rat’s nest of brothels, saloons and even opium dens located immediately south of modern day Bridge Street on the east side of the creek.

“What’s frustrating is that I don’t know how much of the mercantile area north of Bridge Street we got,” he said.

“We could actually see an artifact zone under the trees and we tunneled in for some of it,” he added, mentioning the stand of cottonwoods that were dropped to make way for the highway. “But we had to stop there when the ITD was ready to remove them.”

That the team got to dig at all is unusual in itself, according to the historical archaeologist. The catalyst was the same thing that drove local residents into a factional uproar of the “fer its” and “agin’ its” — construction of the Sand Creek Byway. Before the first dozer could move, the ITD was required to perform environmental and archaeological surveys.

That opened the door for Weaver & Co. to embark upon a project that may well become the poster child for historical archaeology in the 21st century.

“We don’t get too many opportunities, these days, to actually do a dig like this,” he said. “In the 1970s, the emphasis shifted to identifying and preserving sites.

“Nobody gets to dig anymore — unless you’ve got a highway blitzing through the site.”

In Sunday’s Bee: More stories behind the artifacts and a mystery surrounding the question of whether one of the unmarked graves uncovered down the road from the town site held the remains of Steamboat Tommy Meager. And what do the prehistoric artifacts found by Sandpoint-area archaeologist Bob Betts tell him about the people who were here thousands of years before David Thompson arrived in 1809?