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Wallace’s lost cemetery
A forgotten cemetery in Wallace, Idaho, figures in the story of Johnny Harris’ fatal mistake.
When I was working on The King of Sandon, I went through every issue of the Wallace newspapers from 1887-92, getting a handle on what Johnny was up to there. Now I wish I’d kept notes on the Evergreen and Nine Mile cemeteries as well.
Johnny got into a shootout on a piece of property that he claimed to own. At the very moment that guns were being drawn, a funeral was underway on the opposite side of Canyon Creek for miners John Tackett and Jake Gordon, who had died of gas poisoning at the Custer mine.
According to the Wallace Free Press of Jan. 24, 1891:
The funeral took place on Wednesday afternoon, the bodies being laid to rest at Evergreen Cemetery, Rev. Mr. Gunn officiating. About the time the procession started from Worstell’s undertaking rooms the Episcopal Church bell sent out its solemn toll. Just as the mourners reached the foot of the knoll on which the cemetery is located Zach Lewis was shot dead on the bench opposite. The pistol shots could be plainly seen.
There’s no record where Lewis was buried, but most likely it was in the same cemetery. Although Lewis was from Minnesota, his son Charles also lived in Wallace — and was also involved in the deadly confrontation that day. Unless there was a family plot somewhere else, Lewis was probably buried at Evergreen, not far from where he died.
John Amonson of the Wallace Mining Museum points to the spot where Johnny Harris got into a shootout with Zach Lewis in 1891, the future site of Providence Hospital. Photo taken in 2005.
I’ve described the aftermath of the shooting in the book and included my source notes on this website, but I didn’t realize until recently how little known Evergreen Cemetery is, at least by that name.
We have a bit of information about its origin. In his book, Coeur d’Alene Diary, Richard Magnuson related on p. 25-26 that the first death in Wallace occurred on July 28, 1887:
On that date the question arose as to where to bury Capt. Fayette Place, who had died after a long illness. Place had been a resident of the district for about two years and was a native of New York. He was 56 and had been one of the first men into the Black Hills. A suitable spot was selected on an elevated tract near where Canyon Creek empties into the South Fork — now known as Buena Vista Heights. The newspaper stated that it offered “sufficient space for the silent city which time will surely build.”
However, it was only in use for a few years. In March 1891, a Wallace newspaper said “every funeral proved to Wallace that another burial place was needed” because the existing one was too small. It also involved a “tiresome climb,” and was above a part of the town “which probably will contain many people. Some of these people were to get their water supply from springs and wells in that locality.”
So health reasons dictated that another spot be found. The Odd Fellows Lodge and the Knights of Pythias bought two acres at Nine Mile from John Clarke for that purpose and the Miners’ Union and other fraternal organizations secured adjacent land.
According to Coeur d’Alene Diary, p. 133-34, the first person buried in the new cemetery was William H. Otto, who was fatally kicked in the stomach by a horse on April 18, 1891. His marked grave can still be seen in the Odd Fellows section.
What happened to the burials at the Evergreen cemetery thereafter is a matter of conjecture. A couple of much later sources say the bodies were exhumed and moved to Nine Mile, but they don’t reveal when that happened or how many there were.
Buena Vista Heights was named in 1909. One of the earliest mentions of the neighbourhood by that name describes it as “the new addition to Wallace which takes in part of the hill that rises on the north west side of Canyon avenue.” There was no mention of the old cemetery.
Even if most of the graves were exhumed en masse, some were missed!
According to the Wallace Press Times of April 11, 1932, Buena Vista Heights resident C. Clayton was digging in his yard when he discovered a coffin containing an unidentified woman’s skeleton: “The property is said to be located on the site of an old graveyard and the coffin is believed to have been overlooked when the site was changed. County and city authorities are attempting to determine who will stand the expense of burying the remains in a proper place.”
A follow-up story two days later said the county commissioners ordered the funeral home to disinfect the remains and “make proper interment in the Wallace cemetery,” i.e. Nine Mile.
A dozen years later, it happened again. According to the Wallace Press Times of March 23, 1944, excavation for a basement under the Von Hammer home on Buena Vista Heights revealed two caskets. One belonged to an adult, while the other had yet to be exhumed. There was no follow-up that I could find, but presumably the caskets were reinterred at Nine Mile.
So if Evergreen Cemetery was in fact exhumed, at least three people were left behind. Were there others? And how many burials were there to begin with? This leads to some guesswork.
A sign at the Nine Mile cemetery indicates it was established in 1885 rather than 1891, which I would dismiss as an error but for the fact that findagrave.com lists 13 burials prior to April 1891. Some of those could have been moved there from Evergreen/Buena Vista Heights. But a few also predate Capt. Fayette Place’s death in 1887, which is especially puzzling. I looked into each of them and present my findings below.
(Findagrave.com actually lists Nine Mile and the Miners Union Cemetery separately, but they’re immediately adjacent to each other, so for my purposes, I’ve combined them.)
Nine Mile Cemetery, seen in 2005.
• Bill Robbins, d. 1883; Antoine Sanchez, d. 1883; Stumpy Wicks, d. 1884. It’s not only unlikely that these three are buried here, they probably didn’t exist at all. Their demise was recounted in an 1884 story by Emerson Hough, a writer of western fiction.
• William (Colonel Bill) Parker, d. Nov. 17, 1886, age 41 or 42. A broken grave marker exists for Parker, who died in Murray. He was said to have been “known all over Montana, Colorado, and the Coeur d’Alene country” and to have “died poor, after possessing millions,” having “lost more big fortunes than any man” in Colorado. How did he end up buried in Wallace, given that Murray had its own cemetery at the time?
• Pauline Mallon, d. June 1887, age 22 months. Pauline drowned in Prichard Creek. Her body was recovered and she has a marked grave in the Eagles section of the cemetery, but the marker doesn’t look like it’s from the 1880s. I’m guessing her body was moved here from the cemetery at Murray to be placed alongside her family (her parents and two of her sisters are also buried here).
• Mable Sophia Iverson, d. Dec. 6, 1889, age eight. By contrast, this grave marker does look like it was made not long after Mable died. I couldn’t find the circumstances of her death but there’s a good chance her grave was relocated here from Evergreen/Buena Vista. If so, I believe it is the only remaining marked grave from that cemetery.
• Percival Sheldon (Percy) Richardson, d. Jan. 14, 1890, age 21. This grave is unmarked and I think it’s supposition that he’s buried here. Percy, who died of pneumonia, lived at Burke, which didn’t have its own cemetery. His parents are also buried at Nine Mile, including his mother, who died in 1930, age 101. Percy was presumably originally buried at Evergreen.
• Gertie Anderson, d. Jan. 16, 1890. Gertie’s grave is marked, but I think her headstone says that she died in 1899, not 1890.
• Adam D. Scrafford, d. April 1, 1890. He was struck by falling rock in a tunnel at the San Francisco mine, about five miles from Burke. The Spokane Falls Review said his body “was taken to Wallace” at the suggestion of the mine’s owner “and given proper burial.” Presumably that burial originally took place at Evergreen.
• Perry M. Atwood, d. Jan. 31, 1891, age 45 or 46. This death occurred ten days after the Zach Lewis shooting. His burial here appears to be based on an obituary in a Nebraska newspaper. If he was indeed buried at Wallace, it would have originally been at Evergreen.
• Abner C. Daggett, d. Feb 1891. Daggett was caught in a snowstorm while walking from St. Regis to Mullan. His body was discovered a month later in a snowdrift as a railway snowplow cleared the track. Like Perry Atwood, his burial at Wallace seems to be supposition, because I can’t find anything about the disposition of his remains. He could have been buried at Mullan instead.
• Bessie and Jenie Andrus, d. 1891. These two share a marker with a handwritten inscription set in concrete, but I haven’t been able to learn anything about them. I don’t know whether they died before or after the Nine Mile cemetery was established.
To the above I will add C.W. Wright, who isn’t listed on findagrave.com. Wright was killed in April 1891 at the Poorman mine in Burke after falling down a ladder — one day before W.H. Otto was fatally kicked by a horse and reportedly became the first person buried at the new Nine Mile cemetery. The Spokesman-Review said Wright was buried at Wallace, presumably also at Nine Mile.
Neither Capt. Fayette Place, nor John Tackett, nor Jake Gordon, nor Zach Lewis are listed on findagrave.com as being buried at Nine Mile, or anywhere else for that matter.
Coeur d’Alene Diary says in addition to Tackett and Gordon, nine other men died at the Custer mine in 1890-91. Among them, William Ferriand (or Ferrind) and James Andrews were both killed in blasts while six men were buried in an avalanche: Daniel Flannery, Michael Flynn, Joseph Galbraith, Tommy Malloy and Ole Olsen. Two other miners, Jack Moriarity and Nelson Olsen, died in an avalanche on Canyon Creek around the same time as the other slide.
Nelson Durham wrote in the Spokesman-Review of April 29, 1890 that three slide victims were Catholic, and “their bodies were taken for burial to the old Mission down the river,” i.e. at Cataldo, although none are listed on findagrave.com.
Durham added: “With the exception of Galbraith, the other victims were buried upon the mountain-side near Wallace.”
So that’s four more burials at Evergreen, even if we can’t be sure of their names. Between them and some of the other people mentioned above, I think there were at least 12 burials at Evergreen between July 1887 and April 1891 and there could easily have been more. A careful review of the Wallace newspapers might produce additional names.
A few final notes about the multitude of names for Wallace’s cemeteries:
• The earliest mention of “Evergreen Cemetery” that I have found is in the Wallace Free Press of Jan. 24, 1891, in discussing the double funeral of the ill-fated miners.
• A story in the North Idaho Press of June 15, 1958 about the Ward Funeral Home offered a different name: “According to legend the original Boothill Cemetery, where the bad men were buried, was located on Buena Vista Heights and several bodies were uncovered while excavating for basements for homes in the 1940s.”
I could find no other references to “Boothill Cemetery” in Wallace, but Wikipedia tells us that Boothill or Boot Hill is a generic name for cemeteries in the western United States, and particularly for pauper grounds. I don’t know about “bad men,” though!
• When Wallace undertaker William Worstell died, the Daily Idaho Press of Jan. 7, 1907 said his “funeral procession wended its way to Evergreen cemetery” and “Interment was made in Evergreen cemetery.” It seems very unlikely this referred to the old cemetery at what would soon become Buena Vista Heights. So what was the newspaper talking about? I don’t know.
In fact, Worstell was buried at Nine Mile, in what’s known as the Worstell section. Seven of his family members were also buried there between 1904 and 1971.
• The first use I can find of “Nine Mile Cemetery” is in 1904, prior to which the burial ground seems to have been known generically as the Wallace cemetery. The Miners Union section was sometimes called the “United Cemetery.”
• There are also references to “Ward’s Cemetery” from 1902 to 1914. At least three people said to have been buried there have markers at Nine Mile, so presumably Ward and Nine Mile were one and the same. Perhaps the Ward Funeral Home was responsible for the cemetery’s maintenance or they owned their own section.
— With thanks to Francie Lane