For years afterward, explorers and travelers on their way west stopped by Fenton to see the bones, say local archaeologists. The skeletal remains became a tourist curiosity, and Fenton residents were said to have charged people to see them. They were located in what is now the Old Towne area of Fenton, near the banks of the Meramec River and just north of the Old Gravois bridge.

The so-called pygmy bones and graves were mentioned in the Missouri Gazette of March 24, 1819. An expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains by Major Stephen H. Long describes Fenton as "a place where great numbers of graves have been explored and have been represented to contain the bones of a diminutive race of men."

The burials are known today as stone-box graves, so called because the Indians of that time buried their dead in stone slabs. Some of those same stone slabs later were used as the foundations of farm houses. Eventually, people began to understand what they were seeing, says David Browman, a professor of anthropology at Washington University.

The people buried in the ancient graves at Fenton weren't a race of pygmies at all, of course. It was simply the burial technique used by early Indians, says Browman. It was their practice to expose the bodies of the dead until only the bones remained. The bones would then be bundled into short graves.

At some point, Fenton residents grew tired of the hoopla and converted the graves into pastureland. An early traveler, Edmund Flagg, visited Fenton in the summer of 1836 and reported: "This cemetery is now enclosed and cultivated, so that the graves are no longer visible. Human remains, ancient pottery, arrowheads and stone axes are daily thrown up by the plowshare."