The cemetery was used from the start of Missoula's settlement until the early 1900s. Both White and Chinese citizens were buried there.
The Rattlesnake area of Missoula may seem like the ideal Montana neighborhood, but beneath its soil is a buried history of the city.
The paper, titled"Verily the Road was Built with Chinaman’s Bones: An Archaeology of Chinese Line Camps in Montana," mentions the remains of Chinese residents buried beneath the Rattlesnake neighborhood. Part of the racist sentiment towards the Chinese population in Missoula meant some White citizens no longer wanted to be buried next to a Chinese person. All the remains of White people in the Missoula gravesite near Mount Jumbo were exhumed to where the current Missoula cemetery still stands. According to Max Cumming, director of"The Bodies Beneath Us," many of the Chinese people buried near modern-day Cherry Street expected to one day be returned to their families.
This summer, Kim fought at the city council for an official memorialization of the cemetery near Cherry Street. One argument that"The Bodies Beneath Us" crew is trying to make in their documentary is that there is a connection between the racist sentiments during the turn of the 20th century and the political rhetoric seen today.
Newspaper articles from the 19th century describe the"robust" Chinese population there, including large burial ceremonies and notable characters like Cranky Sam. Much of that history, however, has been forgotten over the past 100 years. Anyone deemed unfit, unworthy or too injured to work was sent to the poor farms in the 19th Century, where conditions were deadly. In fact, during the poor farm fire of 1936, residents in the surrounding area could hear the ‘pop’ of bed bugs from the building, according to Dylan Yonce, producer of"The Bodies Beneath Us."
Yonce grew up in Missoula and went to Rattlesnake Elementary, where a memorial structure now sits near the playground. One of Yonce's most valuable sources on the poor farm was her own grandfather, a journalist who interviewed a nurse from Pineview Hospital. He died in April, shortly after his interview for"The Bodies Beneath Us."
Similar to the story of the Chinese cemetery, Kim hopes to connect the Missoula County Poor Farm with modern politics.
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