It's a challenging site that's offering archeologists the chance to use cutting-edge techniques and equipment.
The Original Humboldt site was again under discussion during an event at the Humboldt and District Museum and Gallery (HDMG) last week.
Titled, "This Bud's For You... Uncovering the spirited secrets of an 1885 Military Camp," much of the presentation by archeologists with Western Heritage Services centred around the physical objects dug up at the Fort Denison site on the property, located southwest of Humboldt, last summer.
But nearly as striking as getting an up-close and personal look at a circa 1883 Budweiser beer bottle from what was supposedly a "dry" camp was, something one of the archeologists from Western Heritage Services noted during his presentation proved just as interesting.
The exploration of the Original Humboldt site has archeologists using brand new technology in their research, from resistivity testing, which measures the resistance of the soil to electrodes passing through it (used for mapping) to optical simulated luminescence (OPL) testing, which involves relatively dating soils by determining the last time that soil was exposed to sunlight. Western Heritage Services owns one of just eight OPL machines in the world.
"Everything we're doing here has hardly ever been done at a North American site before," said Jim Finnigan, one of the archeologists with Western Heritage Services investigating the site.
"It's so cutting edge, so there's a lot of learning going on....
"It's an interesting place," Finnigan said of Original Humboldt's Fort Denison area. "It was a very, very short period of time it was occupied. For that short period of time, it was just a hub of activity."
From an archeological perspective, those at the site did some bad things, Finnigan smiled - they lived in tents, so there are no permanent structures to dig up, and they were there a very short time.
"We like sites that were occupied for thousands of years," he said, and buildings with walls metres thick.
"This is a very ephemeral, almost a tease of a site," he noted.
Led by Col. Denison, troops were ordered out to Humboldt in April of 1885. They arrived the first of May, and left in July. They were in Humboldt to protect communications to the east, which went through the telegraph station on the site, during the North West Resistance. The camp they constructed - called Fort Denison - was simple, with a fortified area and bell tents where the soldiers slept.
"It was a big, big military depot," said Finnigan.
There were 342 soldiers at the site, and 27 officers.
Whitecap, a First Nations chief, was also held at Humboldt for most of the resistance.
Then they were gone.
"In historical terms, it's a blink," Finnigan said of the occupation of the site.
When the soldiers departed on July 9, 1885, most of what they had they took with them. And most of the signs of their occupation were out of sight in a few years. The land was farmed for decades, before parts were dug up by archeologists in the 1990s.
It was then farmed again until just a few years ago, when the land was purchased to hold in a public trust as a historical site.
The archeological digs at the site began soon after, mostly focused on the site where the soldiers had been camped.
"They left little behind," Finnigan said. "There's not much of an archeological site (left). There's not much there you can expect to find. That's one of the challenges. And that's one of the reasons we like to work out there. It works our brains quite hard," he smiled.
Conventional archeology - which involves digging - doesn't quite work out at the site, he said.
"It's almost impossible to dig the site without determining the geophysics," he continued.
They have been digging, however, in areas where the geophysics told them they might.
Last summer, they focused their efforts on the can dumps, discovered accidentally while mapping was being done of the site.
They uncovered artifacts like cans and bottles from the can dumps, which tell them a little more about life inside the fort.
They dug two trenches, noted archeologist Karmen VanderZwan, and found a large number of artifacts - canned meat tins, a large, flat square tin, a marmalade can, a Budweiser bottle, a dark green bottle, cartridge cases, pipe fragments, glass and metal buttons, heart-shaped tobacco tags, an oil lamp burner with some wick still inside, pieces of more wine bottles, foils from rye whiskey bottles and bullets.
Nine tins recovered last summer actually still had labels on them, which helped VanderZwan determine what she had suspected - they once contained corned beef.
The labels show the food was from the Armour Canning Company, which carried the slogan, "Everything but the squeal." They specialized in packed meats, but they also made fertilizer and glue in the same factories. The cans were dated to those that would have been common around 1885 by studying how they were constructed. Col. Denison also mentioned eating corned beef in his journal - another clue that they came from the soldiers at the fort.
Another tin contained head cheese, and another, marmalade. The marmalade came from Crosse and Blackwell, a company now owned by Smuckers.
"It may have been special, not part of their rations," said VanderZwan. "But somehow it got to the site."
The heart-shaped tobacco tags were from the WC MacDonald Company. One of the tags was found in 2011, and another in 2012. They date from between 1877 and 1922, and actually became a collector's item.
But it's virtually impossible to find out how the tags looked on the packages as the company never advertised their products.
The bottles found at the site of what was supposedly a dry camp, can be split into three types - export, Apollinaris, and Champagne.
The Budweiser bottle dates from between 1873 to 1883 - they know the end date as the owner of the company at the time the bottle was made went bankrupt in 1883. An export-style bottle, it is one pint in size and originally held beer.
However, VanderZwan believes that's not what it held while at the camp.
"Beer can't last that long, even today," she said of the at least two-year gap.
Because the bottles of this type were so good for shipping pressurized liquids, many were kept for personal use or sold or traded to others.
"So somehow along those lines, the bottle made its way to Fort Denison."
Other Apollinaris-type bottles found at the site would have originally held mineral waters or beer, and Champagne bottles would have, of course, held champagne.
While these bottles could have held liquids as innocent as water or condiments like ketchup, the lead foil bottle seals found at the site show that at least one person was drinking alcohol at the site. The foil seals came from the Hiram Walker Old Rye Whiskey bottles.
"The presence of the seals (show) they were actually opening bottles of whiskey and consuming them right there," VanderZwan noted.
So was it a "dry" camp?
Not a chance, Finnigan believes.
The officers of the camp likely had more access to higher-value goods, he noted, so they probably did a bit of drinking, at least.
Finnigan suspects that once they find some of the hearths suspected to be outside the fortified area, where teamsters on the Carlton Trail likely stopped, they will probably find some more alcohol bottles.
In 2012, they also continued mapping the site, to varying degrees of success, and ruled some things out by studying the soil stratigraphy.
"The work done in 2012 was really highly successful," Finnigan said. "We're starting to get a good handle on Humboldt."
They are starting to get a better idea of where the actual boundaries of the fort were, he said, and while they are still a long way from reconstructing what the entire camp looked like, they are starting to get some really good results.
Some of the data compiled by different mapping techniques has shown an area that looks to archeologist Peggy McKeand like a backfilled trench.
They hope to dig in that area to look at the soil stratigraphy, she said, and see if they can find the edge of the trench, which would help them determine the fortified area of the camp.
Soil stratigraphy was what geoarcheologist Krista Gilliland was studying at the site last summer.
She had some specific questions about the site to answer with her work, which involved thin-section analysis and OSL profiling.
The soil samples she collected at the site over two summers showed that what they thought were evidence of fortifications were not. The theory was that soil disturbed on top of a natural layer of clay might have been evidence of soldiers digging a trench. However, Gilliland believes the soldiers were just digging holes, and stopped when they got to the heavy clay layers.
"This suggests they were working on their beer bellies more than we'd like to think," she joked.
So the clay feature, she concluded, is not the trench they were looking for.
However, her investigation into the layers of material found in the hearth area, excavated in 2011, show that there was more than one period of use.
"There were at least three episodes of use of the hearth," she said, some before and some after Fort Denison, likely during the homesteading period, she noted.
Some work with resistivity testing, meanwhile, has given them evidence of what may be the trench around the fortified area, Finnigan noted.
This summer, he hopes to put in some trenches to see if they can determine that absolutely.
"It's big, enough to be the fortified area," he said. "We're confident it could be the fortified area. But we need to collect more data."
They hope to use some new technology to find the latrine areas, as well. They attempted to use satellite imagery last year, but found the images too coarse.
"The weird thing about archeologists is we really like toilets," Finnigan laughed. "People drop things they really want to get rid of in toilets."
Using a quadracopter, they plan to fly a camera over top of the site to see if they can locate areas which may point to the location of a latrine.
"It's worth a try," said Finnigan.
They also plan to do a little digging, to expose some more cache pits, he said, as they need a bigger sample to try and determine if there was a pattern to the cache pits, and if some were only for officers, and others for soldiers.
"We hope by the end of 2013 to have the sandy knoll (the fortified area of Fort Denison) figured out. It's a tiny area... then there's the rest of the site. But you have to start somewhere," Finnigan said.
