LARAMIE - The three nickels looked like they had been rubbed by 19th century thumbs, roughened by Wyoming winters, until their edges were worn down just a bit from mint condition.

The coins were scattered around the skeleton of a tall man with a silver wedding band and a black rubber mourning ring on one finger of his left hand.

Bullet holes in the skeleton indicated the man, probably about 35 years old, had been felled by a .44 or .45 caliber bullet and then dispatched with a shot to the head.

These clues at a Plains Indian burial site unearthed in 1980 near Lingle led to the probable identification of the man as a white gunslinger named Cy Williams. The story of how it was done will be told in a forthcoming Discovery Channel television program highlighting the work of Wyoming researchers.

The program, the concluding segment of a series called "Mummy Autopsies," will be broadcast early in 2005. Its producers hope also to shed light on the identity of a skeleton revealed in 1996 by shifting sands in a dune field northeast of Rawlins.

The Lingle gravesite was discovered during earth-moving operations on the ranch of Alan Korell, near the old Bordeaux Trading Post, which operated from 1847 through 1868 near the Oregon Trail.

"At first, there were six graves that I kind of cut the tops off of with the scraper," Korell said. "Then I saw the bones lying there and investigated and found they were human."

George Gill, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, was called in to conduct the excavation. The excavators found graves of 14 American Indians, all in pine coffins, and the grave of the Caucasian man, who had been buried without a coffin.

The 5-cent pieces were of 1866 and 1867 issue and, based on their wear, appeared to have been in circulation for not more than two years. This dated the burial as taking place in 1868 or 1869.

The wedding band and mourning ring led to the conclusion that the man was a widower. In a 1984 article in the Plains Anthropologist, Gill and his colleagues concluded that the man was likely of British descent, as wearing black mourning rings was customary in Britain in the Victorian era.

David Darlington, a former student of Gill who is now an adjunct professor at Western Wyoming Community College, consulted a diary kept by early-day rancher John Hutton, old newspaper files and other sources.

"There would be a sentence here and a sentence there," Darlington said. "It was more or less circumstantial, but it appeared there was a gunfight in 1816 in which Cy Williams was killed."

Williams operated a road house on the south side of the Platte River at which meals, lodging and whiskey were provided.

"Williams was considered a bad character and had killed a wagon master by the name of Lewis Simpson at Fort Laramie," Darlington said.

Williams and his partner, whose name apparently was Eli Swallow but who was known as Swolley, hired an 18-year-old half-Sioux youth named Antoine Ladeau to help out at their establishment.

In March 1868, Baptiste quit his job and rode off on the 30-mile trip toward Fort Laramie. According to one source, Williams was said to have told Swolley, "He will never get there." In any event, Baptiste was killed after being chased up the side of a rocky hill.

"Williams and Swolley were suspected from the very first, but denied the murder and were never arrested as there was no civil authority in the area at the time," Darlington wrote in a draft paper on the subject.

On May 30, 1868, Williams was killed in a gunfight with a group of half-Indian teenagers after killing one of them, a 16-year-old boy. The boy, Charley Richards, was the son of John Richards, a trader. Hutton's diary says Williams was killed at a ranch nine miles southeast of the trading post, and Swolley disappeared at the same time. W.G. Bullock, U.S. commissioner at Fort Laramie, reported to his superior about the "shooting affray" at the ranch, and said that "some white men" were acting in "an improper and illegal manner."

"While circumstantial, it is suggested that the white frontiersman in Burial No. 15 from the cemetery at Bordeaux is Cy Williams," Darlington wrote. "Feelings were pretty strong against him, and it makes sense for him to be in a grave without a coffin."

'The Dune murder'

In what London-based Atlantic Productions, the makers of the documentary series, called "the Dune murder," the skeleton was found on Cheyenne Ridge, 30 miles northeast of Rawlins. He had been shot in the head, and a bullet was found 2 feet from his skull.

It is not known who he was. State Archaeologist Mark Miller said it is not known either whether he was buried, or just left where he was shot to be covered up by the sand.

Originally, Gill and his associates focused on Bob Meldrum, an ex-convict who disappeared about 1916. Miller said the crime lab concluded that the man died sometime between 1880 and 1920.

Gill thought Meldrum, sometimes known as "Bad Bob," was a likely suspect. "He was more ruthless than Tom Horn, and killed more people," he said.

Besides, Meldrum jumped off a wagon while in prison and broke his hip. This matched with a hip fracture shown by the skeleton. Both fractures apparently healed.

Gill began to have second thoughts when measurements of the skeleton showed the man to have been 3 inches taller than prison records showed Meldrum to be. "We don't usually miss that far," he said. Meldrum was ruled out when a prison photo showed that his lower face was shorter than the man in the sand would have had.

News of the discovery in the dunes soon spread, and on May 23, 1996, Carlene Bridger read about it in The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho. She and her husband, Horace, had been looking into his family tree, and thought the man might be his great grandfather, William Benjamin Bridger, who disappeared from the Medicine Bow area after 1880.

Horace Bridger said that as far as he knows the family is not connected to mountain man Jim Bridger.

Atlantic Productions has obtained DNA samples from Horace Bridger and from the skeleton for comparison.

The Discovery Channe's Wyoming segment is expected to air in February.

Star-Tribune correspondent W. Dale Nelson can be reached at wdnelson@bresnan.net.