Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Special Places To Visit: Grave Sites

   Cathy can attest to my interest in the graves of historical western characters.  She has put up with my quests to see some of these graves and I thank her for it.  Previously I told you we visited the graves of some of the Ingalls and Wilders family.  Well I will now detail a few more graves that I have visited.

   Buffalo Bill Cody is buried on Lookout Mountain on Lookout Mountain Road in Golden Colorado.  Now this is just my personal opinion, but this should not have been where he should have been buried.  In my opinion he should have been buried in the town that is named after him, Cody Wyoming.  There is great controversy surrounding how he got buried there and I would not mention this in Cody.  They are still very upset about the circumstances.

 

    Jeremiah "Liver Eating" Johnston , born John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston, is buried in the mountain man graveyard in Cody Wyoming.  You might not recognize the name, but the movie loosely based on his exploits is called "Jeremiah Johnson" and starred Robert Redford.  You will find his grave in Cody Wyoming at the Old Trail Town.  This is an interesting place to visit.  The town was created with some historical buildings from the area and some other buildings saved from destruction.  The buildings are filled with some very nice items and museum articles.  From a web site: Robert Redford was so taken by Johnson's story that he starred in a film very loosely based on his life in 1972. Two years later, Johnson, now a posthumous celebrity, was dug out of his California grave and reburied in a small Wyoming cemetery that was created as part of a Western theme town attraction. The attraction claims that over 2,000 people attended Johnson's reburial, "probably the largest burial service in the history of Wyoming."
   My opinion only. When they decided to rebury Jeremiah in Cody from California, the never considered how Cody would grow as a town.  The Old Trail Town when I visited it in the 1990's was set off from the town and could be seen from the road.  Now the town has encroached so much on the area that it is difficult to see the place from the road.  The sprawl of Cody has really turned the spot into a congested area and not an open area that I think Jeremiah would have liked as his last resting place.  I think it would have been better to bury him on a mountain overlooking Red Lodge Montana, where he once was a sheriff.


Statue and Grave of Liver-Eating Johnson.
https://www.oldtrailtown.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/old-trail-town-home-bg10.jpg 

    Just off Interstate 70 in the town of Glenwood Springs Colorado is the grave of Doc Holliday.  You will have to walk up a hill about a quarter of mile, but it is well worth the hike to see where this historical character is buried, at least the area he is buried in.  You see once my son Logan and I got to the grave site we read the sign that Doc Holliday was buried somewhere up there.  The reason for this was they wanted to keep his grave a secret from anyone wanting to dig him up for looting or souvenirs. I cannot even begin to count the number of movies that depicted Doc Holliday, some accurately and some very very loosely.  Glenwood Springs was where the hotel was located that Doc Holliday died in from consumption/tuberculosis. 







   In the town of Deadwood South Dakota there is a cemetery call Mount Moriah. There you will find many former citizens of Deadwood buried.  Some happily buried after a long life and some that would have wanted a few more years of life.  One of the latter is James Butler Hickok, aka Wild Bill Hickok.  Hickok was shot from behind and killed while playing poker in Nuttal & Mann's saloon in Deadwood by Jack McCall, an unsuccessful gambler.  This from WikiPedia:

In the early years of Deadwood, there were two graveyards: The Ingelside Cemetery, which was part of the way up Mount Moriah and was filled quickly in the first few years it was open, and the Catholic Cemetery. Many prospectors, miners, settlers, prostitutes and children were buried within the Ingelside Cemetery, alongside Wild Bill Hickok and Preacher Smith.  In the 1880s it was determined that the land where Ingelside Cemetery was located could be better used for housing. Most of the bodies there were moved up the mountain to Mount Moriah and re-interred. However, since many graves were unmarked or unknown some were not moved. Today it is not uncommon for people working in their garden or remodeling a basement or shed to find human bones as a leftover from the Ingelside Cemetery days.

   If you venture to see Wild Bill's grave you will see close to him the grave of Martha Jane Cannary aka Calamity Jane.  She has just as colorful past as Wild Bill and she even claimed to be married to Wild Bill.  According the the Mount Moriah WikiPedia site:

It has been reported that Calamity Jane was buried next to Hickock, according to her dying wish. Four of the men on the self-appointed committee who planned Calamity's funeral (Albert Malter, Frank Ankeney, Jim Carson, and Anson Higby) later stated that, since Hickok had "absolutely no use" for Jane in this life, they decided to play a posthumous joke on him by laying her to rest by his side.

   The Mount Moriah Cemetery is a great place to just roam around and see quite a few historical characters of the west and of Deadwood South Dakota.

 

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