DNA Tests Hint of New Vices in Old West

Archeologists combing through artifacts beneath the burned floorboards of this 19th-century mining town are using DNA testing in a way it’s never been used before: to learn new secrets about the Old West.

Some of the tests just down the hill from the Bucket of Blood Saloon might tell a story of the frontier rarely seen in Westerns or on the old “Bonanza” television series that helped make Virginia City famous.

Beneath one small home at 18 North G Street, traces of morphine have been detected on a 125-year-old glass hypodermic syringe. Researchers believe they’ve found either an opium den or the office of a doctor who treated prostitutes and their customers on the edge of the town’s rollicking red-light district in the 1860s and 1870s.

It is believed to be the first time DNA residue has been extracted from historical artifacts other than human remains, according to independent experts and leaders of the joint research by Portland State University and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office.

They say the technique using nuclear DNA testing will help give historians a better glimpse into daily life on the Western frontier, including the racial makeup of the townspeople.

“Hollywood has made us think of Virginia City as a ‘Bonanza’-type setting, and even tourism today has carried that theme,” said Julie Schablitsky, an archeologist in Portland State’s Urban Studies and Planning Department who first presented the findings last month at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s annual conference in Mobile, Ala.

“As archeologists and historians, we need to set the record straight,” she said from Portland, Ore.

“This is an area where people from all over the world toiled hard above and below the ground. . . . Back then you could get morphine and a syringe at the local pharmacy. It was not a big deal,” she said.

In the case of the syringe and six associated needles, the DNA testing confirmed they’d been used by at least four people, both men and women, including at least one black.

Experts say the ability to use DNA to link sex, race and number of people to specific personal items recovered at archeological sites is a breakthrough.

“Schablitsky’s innovative application of DNA analysis opens up an entirely new way of documenting and understanding their lives from the material things that they left behind,” said Donald Hardesty, an anthropology professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, who specializes in the American West.

At its peak in the 1860s, Virginia City was “one of the great mining districts of the world, one of the richest places ever found in human history,” said Ron James, Nevada’s state historic preservation officer and the author of two books on Comstock history.

“We have a very good idea from what was written at the time of what it was like to be white, rich and male in 19th-century Virginia City. But the rest of the story has to be pieced together by whatever means,” James said.

“Any time you can talk about working-class men, women and minorities, that provides a great opportunity to make the picture of history more clear.”

Doug Scott, an archeologist for the National Park Service’s Midwest Archaeological Center in Lincoln, Neb., has used DNA testing of human remains--but not artifacts--in studies of Civil War and Indian battlefields.

“It is pretty exciting to think there is the potential for recovering this type of information, even after 125 years in the ground,” said Scott, who has worked with the United Nations and international human-rights groups to identify remains of victims of war crimes and atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and El Salvador.

“They got some incredible information from those needles and syringe about a very small slice of time,” he said.

“And it’s more complex. It’s not the simple view of the world of how things were in the good old days,” Scott said. “There were people with reasons to be taking drugs, whether it was recreational or they had pain or medical problems.”

Earlier research has established that Virginia City, with a population of 60,000 at its peak, was unusually diverse for its time. Large populations of ethnic groups--including Africans, Jamaicans, Chinese, Irish and Germans--worked area gold and silver mines.

“At any one time, about 50% of the people there were immigrants from other places. It was a mixed racial group,” Schablitsky said.

Most of Virginia City burned during a great fire in 1875, providing a clear mark in the soil that archeologists can use to help gauge the age of various artifacts.

When Schablitsky began digging in the summer of 2000, she expected to find beads, buttons and straight pins used by the dressmaker who once operated a shop there, as well as marbles and children’s toys from the family of British immigrants who later lived in the house.

“We didn’t expect to discover a syringe and needles and an irrigator,” said Schablitsky, whose find left her wondering how she could learn more.

“I started considering my options. DNA is a household name now. We have shows like “CSI”--Crime Scene Investigation. I thought, maybe we can get some DNA off this,” she said.

The morphine on the syringe was confirmed by Dr. Raymond Grimsbo at the Intermountain Forensic Laboratories Inc. in Portland, Ore. He set the tests to recover degraded morphine because historical medical manuals discuss the frequent hypodermic injection of morphine during the 1870s and 1880s.

In addition to the needles and syringe found beneath the floorboards, researchers discovered a urethral irrigator used to treat venereal disease symptoms.

Historical documents indicate the home at 18 North G Street likely was built in the 1860s in the working-class neighborhood between Chinatown and the red-light district.

The dressmaker, Mrs. M.A. Andrews, operated a shop at the location in 1873. But by 1875, a British immigrant family, the Coopers, moved into the home. Thomas Cooper worked as a carpenter and lived in the house with his wife and three children.

Schablitsky said forensic results eliminated Andrews and members of the Cooper family as the syringe users.

One possibility is that during the late 1860s or early 1870s, at least four adults were involved in a social gathering in which morphine was injected for euphoric effects, Schablitsky said. When the needles became dull or damaged, they could have been discarded into the floor.

Schablitsky said a more realistic theory is that a doctor who specialized in treating venereal diseases was operating out of the house.

“People of all different races might have been going to this one doctor,” Schablitsky said. “It could give us a better idea of how people in the past operated with each other at a racial level.”