Mystery surrounds unmarked graves

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

SANDPOINT — There were no mourners standing over the simple pine box when Tommy Meagher was lowered into his grave a few hundred yards up the road from the Sandpoint township.

Every inch the hard-drinking, brawling Irishman, “Steamboat Tommy” made his usual rounds the night before, tossing back shots of whiskey and sharing a laugh with the boys in the saloon before heading over to the gambling hall to fatten up his bankroll.

At the card table, he shifted a clay pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, grimacing as he pushed back his bowler hat to scratch behind his ear. Meagher’s antics thoroughly convinced the man sitting across from him — an easterner who had stepped off the train just that morning — that his opponent was both rattled and confused by the game at hand. In response, the stranger raised the stakes until the pile of money on the table had drawn a crowd.

From the railing upstairs, Trixie Edwards watched with interest. Tommy was about to win big, she knew, and after a few more drinks, he would undoubtedly pay her a visit. If he fell asleep in her room — as he often did — she would rummage through his pockets and relieve him of a bit more of his winnings than he had planned to spend.

Meagher was a friend, but business was business.

The stranger slid another stack of coins to the center of the table and sat back. Looking more rattled than ever, Tommy slid his hand behind his ear, scratching and grimacing all the more. No one saw the palmed seven of hearts that traveled up with that motion, or the queen of diamonds that emerged just as deftly to become part of his hand.

“Full house,” the stranger said, fanning out his cards with a smile. “Tens and aces.”

Tommy heaved a sigh and shifted his pipe. Slowly, he spread the cards out before him.

“Full house,” he repeated. “Queens and aces.”

The room erupted into cheers and backslapping as the Irishman stood quickly, raked up the pile of money and stuffed the pockets of his jacket and trousers with it. He left the visitor sitting open-mouthed at the card table and retired to the bar for a few celebratory drinks. What he forgot to do was use the ruckus and confusion as an opportunity to retrieve his queen and slip the seven back into the deck.

It proved to be the death of him. From behind, he heard the stranger’s voice announce to the room: “It’s a strange game of poker you play here in Sandpoint, using a deck with three sevens and five queens.”

Tommy let his right hand drop to the pistol in his waistband, an old Army Colt. He turned and drew in one motion, but a flash of light and a pounding noise diverted his attention. Next thing he knew, he was looking up at the ceiling and the surprised look on Trixie’s pretty face.

Strange, he thought to himself, that they’d be turning down the lamps this early in the evening. Can’t they see how dark it’s making the room?  How’s a man supposed to order a drink in this blackness?

There were no last rites for the Irishman, just a plain, wooden marker in the cemetery by the creek that read: Tommy “Steamboat” Meagher; Died March 14, 1892.

The four graves came as a surprise to the archaeological team digging at the original Sandpoint town site. Their work was as meticulous as always, even given the time constraints involved. Within months, the Idaho Transportation Department planned to roll in with its heavy equipment and begin construction of the Sand Creek Byway.

The archaeological survey that preceded the work would prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of dig.

Already, the grids in the restricted district had turned up thousands of artifacts from beneath the Chinatown area and the barrooms and brothels nearby. Historical archaeologist Bob Weaver — one of only a few such specialists in the nation — was focused on the materials associated with the period between 1881 and 1920. His colleague — Sandpoint archaeologist Bob Betts — was interested in “prehistoric” artifacts dating back to before David Thompson came to the region as an agent for the Northwest Company.

No one, however, expected to find human remains in unmarked graves. When the Humbird Mill needed room to expand in 1893, it paid to have the remains in Sandpoint’s first cemetery moved to a new location farther up Sand Creek, to what then became known as the Humbird Cemetery.

“But our dig encountered four bodies that hadn’t been relocated when the mill expanded,” Weaver said. “One of the people missing from the move was ‘Steamboat Tommy’ Meagher, who was killed in a bar fight. One of the skeletons we found had ground down teeth on both sides of its mouth that perfectly matched the shape of clay pipes from that era.

“Did we find Steamboat Tommy,” Weaver asked, “or is he still missing out there?”

Questions such as this are all in a day’s work for archaeologists, who, according to Weaver, attempt to pin down dates using a combination of “hypotheses and ideas.”  It’s the ideas that spin yarns in their heads as they work.

Could one of the several broken clay pipes recovered along Sand Creek have belonged to the Irishman?  What about the children’s toys found in the bordello district?  Did the working girls raise families in that sordid environment?  Bob Betts believes the archaeological evidence points to the fact that they did.

“To me, the brothel artifacts were amazing, because the ladies who worked there had exotic perfumes from Paris, fancy colognes and cut-glass mirrors, combs, hairpieces, broaches and jewelry — an amazing amount of stuff,” he said. “One of the things that surprised us was artifacts related to children at the brothels. Porcelain doll parts, marbles and things like that. So the ladies obviously had children there with them.”

The dig at Sandpoint represented a school of archaeology that has become increasingly rare in the United States. Instead of artifact discovery and removal, most projects have been geared toward site preservation over the past 40 years.

Except, that is, in cases where a highway will permanently cover the site in tons of crushed rock and layers of asphalt.  

After more than a half century of public wrangling over the issue, the ITD was itching to get to work on the bypass and saw Sand Creek as an open field run all the way up to the junction of highways 95 and 200.  

“They’d been seeing a clear corridor, because everything that had been there before had moved out,” Weaver said. “I came in and said, ‘You’ve got a whole town site you’re blitzing through — I can pin down the locations of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.’”

Once ITD gave him the green light, Weaver and the other archaeologists found all of that and more. The drug store, the jeweler, the Chinese laundry and blacksmith shop were located, along with the courthouse jail and the saloons, brothels, and opium dens that kept it busy.

“This dig has been the best experience I’ve had in my career, which covers about 40 years of archaeology,” said Weaver. “And this collection is probably one of the more valuable ones I’ve ever seen.”

In Weaver’s line of work, sifting through the rubble of more modern residents turns up both trash and treasure. His team found opium pipes in Chinatown, an 1860 Army Colt black powder pistol near the saloons and gold jewelry where the ladies of the night set up shop.

Mixed in with it all was the smaller collection of prehistoric artifacts Betts was contracted to locate at the township site.

“In archaeology, context is the most important thing — it gives you a pattern of what was going on,” he said, explaining that the tools and projectiles he specializes in finding usually are found a layer below the cast-offs and lost items of later residents. “Here, everything was mixed up. It was not a natural stratigraphy.”

That was because, as residents dug holes and sunk their pilings to build out over Sand Creek, they disturbed the soil from Native American camping spots and fishing grounds. Things became even more jumbled when the railroad raised its grade through the town site and the Humbird Mill expanded its operations.

Still, Betts managed to find about 125 prehistoric artifacts — from fire-cracked rock to arrowheads, fishing net weights, scraping tools and knives — that pointed to much earlier inhabitants along the shores of the lake and the banks of Sand Creek.

“There were certainly thousands of years of activity here,” he said. “We found projectile points from as recent as a couple hundred years to as long as 5,000 years ago. Most of them were between 2,000 and 4,000 years old.”

His favorite find was a nephrite adze, most likely used for woodworking and other scraping tasks.

“There are no sources for nephrite in this area — the closest is up in British Columbia,” the archaeologist said. “So raw materials were obviously being brought in and that tells us there were trade networks covering a broad area.”

Trade really took off with the arrival of David Thompson in 1809 — the date that marks the “contact period” between native people and the first explorers in the region and also delineates “prehistory” from the work of “historical archaeologists” such as Bob Weaver.

The main collection of artifacts from the Sandpoint town site dig will be kept at U of I, where items will be available on loan to the Bonner County Historical Society Museum, Weaver said. In addition, the archaeologists plan to put together teaching kits containing  “secondary artifacts” that are no longer needed and make them available to schools in the region.

In the end, the discoveries at the historic Sandpoint town site — now buried completely beneath the new bypass route — might shake up the field of archaeology. The scope of the project and the sheer number of items it turned up could change the way archaeologists look at the kind of work Weaver and his small handful of contemporaries consider their specialty.

“Historical archaeology is a relatively recent discipline and there aren’t very many of us trained in it here in the Pacific Northwest,” Weaver said. “In the past, people have wanted to move the artifacts we’re interested in out of the way in order to get at the arrowheads. But anything older than 50 years actually needs to be considered as part of our history.”