Piece By Piece, Town’s Story Told Workers Meticulous At 19th-Century Mining Site

As white string crisscrosses the open space in the alpine meadow, marking off 50-square-foot lots, two people per quadrant measure and record the location of every piece of tin, pottery shard, glass or ceramic.

They are looking for any hard evidence that might help archaeologists piece together the story of this mining town on the west bank of Beaver Creek, a tributary of the Salmon River south of Stanley.

Volunteers from all walks of life came to record bits and pieces left from a time gone by.

They are working with the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Idaho to document the history of the small town.

They are working in an open meadow with few remnants to go by. Sometimes the only evidence is a slight berm indicating a former foundation, a few crumbling logs, bits of trash or a cemetery with a few unmarked crosses.

It is estimated that more than 1,200 people worked the hard-rock silver mines in the vicinity of what was Sawtooth City, an active mining town from 1878 to 1895.

Levi Smiley and T.B. Mulkey staked the initial claims. Then in 1879 a toll road company was formed that later would build a road over Galena Summit.

With completion of the toll road in 1880, access to the silver mines was easier. By 1881, the town had a sawmill, daily stages and a postal route.

“It’s detective work. It’s important that they map the location of each artifact then carefully replace that artifact in its exact position. There are relationships between the artifacts, so many clues that can help us put together the picture of what life was like in the old Sawtooth City,” said Donna L. Turnipseed, project leader and historical archaeologist with the University of Idaho’s Alfred W. Bowers Laboratory of Anthropology.

“It isn’t guesswork. We only infer from hard evidence,” Turnipseed said.

The Old Sawtooth City archaeological expedition is part of the U.S. Forest Service’s Passport in Time program, which lets individuals and families work with professional archaeologists and historians on historic preservation projects.

This project is in its third season, and volunteers have ferreted out the location of a blacksmith shop. It was partly inferred because of the presence of clinkers, a composite of sand and charcoal melted into glass blobs by the heat of the smithy’s forge.

Shauna and Dennis “Zeke” Robinson mapped out the lot last season. “We concluded that the blacksmith worked and lived out of his shop, evidenced by the clinkers, tin cans and tin plate,” Shauna Robinson said.

Volunteers also have found the site of a butcher shop and an ice house.