Tombstone by tombstone, the story of Truckee unspools on a large rectangle of greening grass where for more than a century and a half, gunfighters and botanists, ice harvesters and lawyers, lumberjacks and railroad workers have been buried.
At the Truckee Cemetery, known formally as Sierra Mountain Cemetery, each tombstone marks a life lived, a piece of what the town is today. Woven together, these stories are Truckee’s history. But there are gaps in the narrative — broken tombstones, disintegrated wooden grave markers, tombs without names.
Chaun Mortier is working hard to close these gaps. Starting with tombstone lettering and then investigating census bureau data and yellowed newspaper obituaries, Mortier can resurrect a life, unshroud a mystery, and reclaim a little piece of Truckee’s collective history.
‘They all have a story and that is what I am trying to do — give them back their story,’ Mortier said.
Mortier is a volunteer historian with the Truckee Cemetery District and actively involved in the Truckee Historical Society. Her work, said Cemetery District Board Member Katie Holley, represents a renewed focus by the cemetery board on highlighting and preserving the history of Truckee’s graveyards.
The district will soon be seeking a national historic designation for the cemetery, and Mortier is painstakingly reorganizing all of the cemetery’s records into a computerized database.
The district hopes the work will bring attention to an overlooked historical gem.
Even without Mortier’s encyclopedic knowledge of Truckee’s history, a walk through the white marble headstones and Masonic pinnacles that mark graves between Donner Pass Road and Interstate 80 east of downtown is a first-rate history lesson.
Not all graves at the Truckee Cemetery are marked. A simple wooden sign that reads ‘Jibboom Street Ladies Garden’ marks a plot where the prostitutes from Truckee’s Jibboom Street brothels are buried.
Another unmarked area is the final resting place for many Chinese who came to build the Donner Summit railroad tunnels and operate charcoal ovens. They were originally buried where Interstate 80 and Highway 89 South intersect, but during the construction of Interstate 80 the bodies were disinterred from their burial grounds to make way for the highway. Some were reburied at the Truckee Cemetery; others were taken back to China. Mortier hopes the cemetery district can soon erect a monument on the spot to memorialize these graves.
Another 72 graves are ‘unknowns.’ ‘We know there is someone there, but we don’t know who it is,’ Mortier said.
Truckee was a stopping off point for many hardscrabble workers looking for the physical labor of bucking logs, cutting ice, or hammering railroad ties — and that has led to difficulties in identifying all of the graves in the cemetery.
‘You had a lot of transients. You had a lot of people hopping off the train,’ Holley said. ‘It wasn’t like these people were carrying driver’s licenses.’
The marked graves are a who’s who mix of Truckee history and the blue-collar workers that were the backbone of the town’s early industry. People come to see the graves of notables like former state assemblyman, newspaper publisher, and Donner Party historian Charles McGlashan, but for Mortier, the stories of the lesser-known working families is of more interest.
‘You have the McGlashans and the Keisers, but there are a lot of people buried here who make the town what it is,’ Mortier said. ‘My feeling is this town was built on more than a half dozen people.’
People like Charles Sonne, a native of an island off the coast of Denmark who worked as a Truckee Lumber Company bookkeeper, intrigue Mortier.
Sonne drove a herd of cattle to Virginia City in the 1870s before making his home in Truckee. When he arrived in town, he began exploring the Truckee River watershed collecting and preserving countless plant specimens. Today, numerous Sierra plants are named after Sonne, who is recognized as an early, meticulous cataloger of Sierra flora.
Gunfighters’ Graves
Truckee’s early history was filled with tough men and women. The intense difficulties of 19th century life in Truckee are displayed on each headstone. One early ice worker buried in the cemetery made it only two weeks in Truckee before succumbing to pneumonia. Other undersized tombstones mark the graves of infants or children who died during one of the many flu or fever epidemics that swept the town.
But perhaps nothing epitomizes the rough-and-tumble West in the American imagination as much as gun violence. And buried within a stone’s throw of each other are two lawmen whose bitter feud ended in a cacophony of gunfire in the Capitol saloon one night in 1891.
Jacob Teeter and James Reed were both as tough as nails. Teeter, the town’s constable, had hunted down killers and fugitives.
Reed, when once attacked by a man with a large Bowie knife, picked up a rock and killed the man on the spot. One-time fellow lawmen who worked together, Teeter and Reed’s relationship grew strained as each vied to be elected as town constable, and over disagreements on the role of Truckee’s vigilante group the ‘601.’
One night at the Capitol saloon, the tense feud erupted into gunfire. A whiskey-soaked Teeter pulled a gun on Reed after some heated talk, and Reed pulled his own weapon. Perhaps due to the whiskey, Teeter’s wayward shots riddled the walls of the saloon while Reed’s four bullets met their mark.
But as Teeter died of his wounds, Reed fell into a deep depression. Reed died years later as a long-bearded hermit living alone in an ill-kept Donner Lake cabin. Those that knew him said he never recovered from the gunfight that fateful night.
‘Reed is buried just a few rows down from Teeter,’ said Mortier, who paused for a second and then added, ‘Does the fight continue when the gates of the cemetery close at night?’
Mortier, Holley, and the Truckee Cemetery District Board will continue to work away to unlock some of the mysteries buried beneath the ground in Truckee’s graveyard. The board is considering bringing in a forensic dog team to identify and mark where bodies are buried, so that no unknown graves are disturbed during new burials.
As the evening sun fades, and Mortier walks through the Catholic cemetery — the oldest portion of Truckee’s graveyard below East Jibboom Street — she pauses beside a faded white marble tablet that simply reads ‘John W. Gofabregti 25 days old.’
‘I can’t find anything on him,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’
There is no defeat in her voice, just a determination to investigate another long-finished, untold story that is a piece of Truckee’s past.
