An Indigenous Burial Site Exposed by Rains
Heavy winter storms have unearthed a historic burial ground on the Walla Walla River, revealing items from the Hudson Bay era and beyond.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
While Charles Boylan, a prominent farmer on the Walla Walla river, was walking through his field last Saturday, he noticed several human bones protruding through the surface of the ground. Closer examination showed it was an old Indigenous burial ground. The soil is light and sloping, and recent heavy rains washed the earth away, leaving bones and skeletons scattered. Over a year ago, Mr. Boylan collected several relics while plowing, including an antique English plow and an early cap-and-ball pistol. The recent exposure drew a large crowd Sunday. Diggers found items indicating contact with white settlers: medals purportedly from the Lewis and Clark expedition, knives, Hudson Bay Company military buttons, beads, nails, and even the reeds of an accordion placed at the head of a corpse. Remarkably, the metal items remain in a perfect state of preservation. Burial methods varied, with remains found in wagon boxes, bark, blankets, or wooden coffins. One skeleton was discovered in a Hudson Bay Company military coat, the bones stained green by the copperas chemicals in the garment's dye.
“The recent find created a great deal of interest along the Walla Walla river and a Statesman representative who visited the Boylan farm last Sunday afternoon found a very large crowd around the graves of the one time Indian warriors.”
This event highlights the fraught history of settler-colonial expansion into Indigenous lands along the Walla Walla River. Today, such discoveries are handled under strict federal and state laws, such as NAGPRA, to ensure the respectful treatment and repatriation of ancestral remains, rather than as public curiosities or collections of artifacts.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.