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May 5, 2006
Pioneer graves excavated in PVHUMAN, ANIMAL REMAINS FOUND
By ROBIN FLINCHUM
Out on a lonely stretch of land south of town along Highway 160, a couple of sunken holes were long abandoned and unnoticed. But Ford, president and founder of the Pahrump Valley Museum, remembers a time only 30 years ago when at least one of these sinkholes was surrounded by a picket fence. "It was a pioneer grave, everyone knew that," Ford said. It was something he learned in his childhood and never forgot. So when a developer purchased the land and proposed to begin construction on a shopping center there, Ford thought the valley's pioneers deserved something better than being ground under the wheels of progress. Together with Don Hendricks of the Pahrump Historical Society, the two began planning to exhume the graves and, if there were still bodies buried there, relocate them to the Chief Tecopa Cemetery in Pahrump. It was 1877 when a frontiersman named Joseph Yount detoured from a plan to move to Tombstone and settled in the sparsely inhabited Pahrump Valley with his wife, eight children and a son-in-law named Harsha White. They farmed a large tract of land known as the Manse Ranch and remained in the valley for several generations. Today, the Yount and White families are remembered as some of the principal pioneers of the area. Ford had always believed that at least one of the graves in the tiny pioneer cemetery was that of young Thomas Yount, 18-year-old son of Joseph and Margaret, who had either accidentally shot himself with a rifle when dismounting from a horse, or had been accidentally shot by another individual around 1880. Surviving documents from the time when the Yount family pioneered the Pahrump Valley are scarce and little information survives. Another grave believed to be located at the site was that of an infant boy named Edward, belonging to one of the Yount daughters. But the Pahrump Valley was an outpost far from civilization and official record keepers. Deaths and burials were sometimes only marked in family bibles and the only reference to it came from the daughter's obituary written many years later. So when Ford and Hendricks set out on their task, two sunken impressions in the dirt, vague newspaper accounts and handed down oral history led them to believe that, if they found anything, it would be the remains of Thomas Yount and the infant Edward. The small family cemetery had gone unprotected and unremembered for decades and probably experienced some disturbance during road construction and other projects in the vicinity. Ford said he would not be surprised to find that the graves had been plundered, or even possibly emptied by the families long ago when they relocated from the valley. What Ford and Hendricks actually did find there came as a surprise to all involved. The dig was done with all the precision science could invoke, beginning with a ground penetrating radar machine operated by Dr. Katherine Snelson, assistant professor of geosciences at UNLV, who scanned the surface and identified three possible gravesites. Then, with archaeologist Barbara Holz of the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas on hand, the dig began with slow, shallow scooping and sifting of dirt. Pahrump Town Manager Dave Richards loaned a town backhoe and an operator to the effort and museum volunteers helped sift through every shovelful brought forth from the sites. In the end, after several long days of digging and poring over the rubble, what came to the surface were not the bones of an 18-year-old and an infant, but those of two pet dogs, most likely buried in the mid-1900s in what appeared to be a common grave, and one very old man with a spent bullet resting among his deteriorated bones. "We don't know who the heck this is," said Pahrump Museum Historian John Weisser of the body that was recovered last month, but they do have an idea. From his extensive newspaper files on Pahrump maintained in the museum, Weisser found an article about an 80-year-old man known only as "Old Man Finley," who passed away and was buried at the Manse Ranch in December of 1905. Finley died of the lingering effects of a cold, according to the article, and there was no indication that he'd been shot. "But he could have had that bullet in him for years," said Weisser. Archaeologist Holz examined the old bones in space donated by the Pahrump Mortuary and found that she could determine only a few things for relatively certain; that the man was Caucasian, more than 50 years old, had lost all his teeth and was buried with an upper denture, and suffered from severe arthritis. There was no evidence that a bullet had impacted any of the bones, though she said it could have been lodged in soft tissue. The time frame of the man's death or what killed him she could not yet determine, though the possible 1905 date seemed within the realm of possibilities given her preliminary research on some of the buttons found with the body. A variety of buttons and the denture plate will probably be the best indicators of the dates the mystery man lived, said Holz. No remnants of clothing survived and the casket he was buried in was so deteriorated that the largest surviving piece measured no more than 3 by 4 inches. Photos of the plate are now circulating among dental experts and Holz hopes to find someone with knowledge of the materials used and when that particular style of dentistry would have been in use. The bullet was no help in dating the remains, Holz said, because it was of a common .38 caliber size that is still used today. The man's bones were found in a separate site from those of the small pet dogs, who appeared to have been buried more than 40 years ago, Holz said. Also among the detritus recovered from that site were several random large animal bones and bits of melted glass, which were also a mystery, Holz said. While the bits and pieces of the mystery man's accessories that survived the ravages of time circulate among experts in an effort to uncover his identity, his remains are being held at the Pahrump Family Mortuary. When all efforts to solve the mystery have been exhausted, the remains will be buried in the Chief Tecopa Cemetery in a plot donated by the Town of Pahrump and the museum will organize a small ceremony. |
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