Forest Cemetery Walking Tours (Museum of North Idaho)

The story

In 1900, when the U.S. Army decommissioned Fort Sherman, officers were tasked with digging up the post cemetery and relocating the dead to Fort George Wright in Spokane. Thirty-seven bodies—soldiers and their family members—were unburied, boxed, and shipped west. Army records officially checked off the task as complete. Except they missed someone. Private Timothy Shea, an Irish immigrant from County Kerry serving with the 4th Infantry, died in 1898 and was left in the ground. If you pull federal military archives today, they will tell you Private Shea rests in Spokane. If you walk the grass in Coeur d'Alene, his marker is still right there where the Army left him.

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a proclamation handing the old one-acre military plot and roughly 20 surrounding acres over to the city, creating Forest Cemetery. The grounds hold the cemetery's very first 1881 burial—23-year-old Marion Gutches—alongside local heavyweights like steamboat pioneer Captain Peter Sorensen, timber magnate Frederick Blackwell, and Edward Pulaski, the forest ranger who saved 40 men during the Big Burn of 1910. Yet Shea remains the cemetery's quietest clerical mystery: an official military transfer on paper that never happened in real life.

Rather than leaving these gravestones to fade into vague local haunting rumors, the Museum of North Idaho runs seasonal walking tours—including nighttime flashlight walks—through the grounds. Guides take small groups through the headstones to trace the documented, often grim paper trails of early North Idaho's founders, lawmen, and scoundrels.