Searching for names to honor dead
A Pablo family has finished cleaning up a Camas Prairie cemetery and now wants to make sure the people buried there are honored properly.
Aggie Incashola and her family and friends have been cleaning the cemetery on Camas Creek Road since the end of March and want to make a memorial plaque for those buried in the approximately quarter of an acre cemetery. Incashola said that while cleaning the cemetery, they uncovered about 50 unmarked graves and would like to find as many of the names as they can to put on the memorial plaque. “We might not know where they are, but we can recognize who they are,” she said.
Incashola said that anyone with any information should contact her mother, Dorothy Kuntz, at 644-0002 or people can call her at 675-0696.
The memorial plague will be the finishing touch on a project that steamrolled from a cemetery visit in March. Incashola said that while visiting her stepfather Tony Lamoose’s grave, who passed away over 16 years ago, Lamoose’s daughter Toni Jo was distraught about the condition of the grave site. “She was really, really upset about how it looked. Incashola said that Toni Jo, who has cerebral palsy, was so stressed out about the cemetery that they decided to do something about it. “Basically, we did it for my sister,” she said. “It became kind of a family endeavor.”
Incashola said that Toni Jo was there every weekend they went out to clean the cemetery. “She worked her butt off,” she said. Incashola said that Toni Jo was there the first time they worked on the cemetery with a group of about four people and the sagebrush was taller than she was. Incashola said by their second visit, she had pulled in about a dozen people to help. She said the 12 went back to help on the third visit as well and after spending nearly 10 hours at the cemetery had pretty much finished the job.
“We finished burning the sagebrush and now we just have to go in and fine tune some things,” Incashola said. She said some of the fine tuning, will include: painting the fence, fixing the walk-in gate and decorating the gravesides. “All the decorations will be homemade,” said Incashola. She said her family is building wooden crosses to put near the graves.
Incashola said finding the names of the people buried in the cemetery will serve two purposes; it will honor the dead and also ensure the cemetery will stay in good condition. She thinks that if people have family there, they will visit the grave site and keep it in the proper condition. Incashola said they only know three family names in the cemetery: Lamoose, Plouffe and Stockinghead.
No matter if they find the names or not, the cemetery will stay in good condition, said Incashola. She said that after seeing how happy her sister was seeing the cemetery after it was finally clean, she vowed to make sure it stayed that way. “It will never look the way it did,” she said.
The cemetery on Camas Creek Road is one of three in Camas Prairie and one of many in Sanders County, according to local historian Maurice Helterline. “There is at least 21 that I know of,” said Helterline, who wrote a burial index for Sanders County. Helterline said that the cemeteries can be as small as six to 10 graves and the earliest ones go back to the start of the 1900s. He said even the regular cemeteries have unmarked graves in them and finding the names can sometimes be like finding a needle in a haystack.