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border have been marked by depressions, or have perennial flowers such as irises growing atop them, planted by loved ones in some cases more than a century ago.
• In Dore, a ghost town that has seen resurgence of industry and population due to an historic oil rush, there are no such clues. The schoolhouse is gone and the area where the Bauer children are thought to be buried is overgrown with waist-deep prairie grass and 10-foot-high tangles of chokecherry bushes.
• Little is known about the children other than they died at a very young

age of an unknown illness, Pelvit and Raffaell said.
• Two attempts to find the children's graves have come up empty due to weather conditions, the women said. Wind on one occasion and excess groundwater on the other made the women's witching sticks perform erratically, moving them every which way, they say.
• The women intend to come back with their sticks to the town that has quickly become a hub for oil activity in the region. They're worried the graves could be covered with make-shift housing for oil workers or unknowingly dug up during the construction of a commercial building or gravel pit.
• Merl Paaverud, superintendent of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, said graves have been accidentally unearthed in the state over the years but none has been reported disturbed from oil production.
• Rural North Dakota has several cemeteries that have been forgotten and overgrown after the towns died and were abandoned, Paaverud said. Scores of other

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