Diggers find Cinnabar history

There's a good yarn in the old privy at the abandoned town of Cinnabar, a few miles north of Gardiner.

An archaeology field school from the University of Montana and Montana State University has spent parts of the past two summers excavating the town, which was abandoned in 1903. One of the first places they started poking around was the outhouse.

UM graduate student Dave Dick rattled off a list of curious objects he found clustered at one level of the loo. There were whiskey and beer bottles, of course. But there was a girdle cinch, too, alongside a suspender clip. And most curious of all was the stopper from a vial of holy water.