HONORING THEIR STORY

Post by Doris McCraw
writing as Angela Raines
Copywrite 2020

 Honoring Their Story

The Headstone that started the research journey
Photo property of the author

Anyone who knows me, knows I spend a lot of time in cemeteries. No, I don’t have a morbid fascination with death. I simply have always been fascinated with the stories told on the stones. So much history, much of it day to day, yet special in its own way. In this post, I thought I’d share one of the stories I’ve found in researching what was written on the stones. Hopefully, the story will resonate with you as it did with me.

This story takes place in Bijou Basin in Colorado. According to enWikipedia, the town of Bijou Basin was situated in El Paso County near the border with Elbert County and looks to have had a train station and a post office that opened in 1869. The area also is known as Bijou Basin, in both Elbert and El Paso Counties was noted for the land that supported cattle and sheep growing.

Additionally Chief Black Kettle, John Charles Fremont, and Kit Carson were also known to have traversed this basin that is bounded by East and West Bijou Creek which meets to become Bijou Creek. This Creek flows north to join the South Platte River near Fort Morgan.

D.M. Holden was one of the first settlers in Bijou Basin along with Steven Holden, and Lewis Hayden who arrived around 1860. This is the story of D.M and his wife Isabel Hayden Holden.

Daniel M. Hayden was born in Antwerp, Jefferson County, New York on August 10, 1833. He arrived in Colorado in 1859, staying briefly in Denver. He died on August 12, 1896. He married Isabel Hayden in November of 1865.

Isabel was born on January 12,1847, in Elkhart, Elkhart County Indiana although other sources have her being born in Iowa. She did live in Iowa for some time before moving to Colorado. Her father was Lewis Hayden.

Photo of cabins near the area - the family may have lived in such a place
Photo property of the author

The couple remained in Bijou Basin until 1882 when they moved to Colorado Springs. They had a ranching concern in the Basin and after moving to town, title to the land seems to have been retained. Mr. Hayden was involved in ranching, banking, mining and owned property in both Colorado Springs and Colorado City. It was said, while no member of a specific church, he gave generously to the building of four different churches in town.

Isabel died in October of 1931 at the age of eighty-five. According to her obituary in the paper, she had six children, ‘lived through Indian troubles and the perils of pioneer life.’

The stories of these early pioneers can be found in newspapers, family journals, city directories and sometimes books. Wherever they can be found, the stories originate with the names and dates on the stones. It is the dashes in between that hold the gold.

These three novels take place in the fictional town of Kiowa Wells
east of the area covered in this post. All can be purchased from Amazon
Amazon

Bijou Basin News Article

Doris Gardner-McCraw -

Author, Speaker, Historian-specializing in
Colorado and Women's History

Angela Raines - author: Where Love & History Meet

Books: Angela Raines Books

Angela Raines FaceBook: Click Here

Boot Hill, Boot Hill, Boot Hill

by Patti Sherry-Crews

Boot Hill, Tombstone, AZ

Did you think Boot Hill was located in a specific place. A spot on a map you could stick a pin in. It’s in one of those fabled Old West towns, right? Tombstone. Or were you thinking of Dodge City? Deadwood? Wait, where is Boot Hill?

Well, you better get a box of pins, because there isn’t one graveyard with a weathered, old sign creaking in the wind. In reality Boot Hills, plural, are a type of place in many towns. Wikipedia lists 40 cemeteries who've earned the moniker Boot Hill scattered across the American west from Tombstone, Arizona to Skagway, Alaska. The reputation being its residents  "they died with their boots on" or in other words, probably didn't die in their sleep in a warm cozy bed with some angel of mercy wiping their fevered brow. If they died with their boots on, they probably didn’t expect dying was on the agenda that day. Fell where they stood.

To put Boot Hills in the context of time and place, understand how towns sprang up almost overnight starting in the late 19th century America. Towns built around the mining or cattle industry swelled with those heading west seeking a quick fortune. Men made up a majority of the tide of people pouring in. Lacking the taming influence of wives and families, though having plenty of saloons and weapons, the scene was ripe for trouble. Things being what they were, people started dropping before you could finish the sentence “do you want to say that to my face?”. Where to put the growing number of bodies?

Dodge City, Kansas, situated on the Santa Fe Trail, claims the first Boot Hill. One day a black man called Tex was minding his own business, watching an exchange of gunfire in front of the saloon, like you do, when for no reason someone shot him dead. The shooter said he did it "just to see him kick". Case in point: tough places, these boom towns. The body lay in the street for a time while folks figured out what to do with this man who left behind nobody to mourn him or pay for his burial.

A nearby hill seemed like a good spot to bury Tex. Other such deaths followed and Boot Hill became a pauper's cemetery. Some bodies, buried without the benefit of even a pine box, suffered further indignity when coyotes dug them up.

But then someone noticed there was a nice view from that hill. Too nice a view to be wasted on dead paupers. The hill suddenly had potential. All the bodies were relocated. But people proved skittish about building on a former graveyard and the land didn't sell according to plan. Instead they put a grade school there (of course, they did. Kids were finding human bones in the playground for years). Today, though the original cemetery no longer exists, the Boot Hill Cemetery Museum in Dodge City is a tourist attraction.

Boot Hill and Hangman's Tree, Dodge City, Kansas

One of the best known Boot Hill cemeteries you can visit today is in Tombstone, Arizona. The rise and fall and rise again of this cemetery in a mining town typifies the cycle of a boom-town and its accompanying Boot Hill in the west.

It was in 1879 when the people of Tombstone starting using a dry, dusty, cactus-filled patch on the edge of town for burials. There was even a Chinese and a Jewish section. Among its most famous residents are the Cowboys who were on the losing end of the conflict known as shootout at the OK Corral. The Cowboys, Bill Clanton and the McLaury brothers, are buried here. The victors, Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers lived to fight another day, moved on, and eventually died to be buried elsewhere.

The last burial in this cemetery took place in 1884. Of those 300 burials, about 40% are of those who died before their expiration date. So noteworthy was a peaceful death that one grave marker reads, "M.E. Kellogg 1882, Died a Natural Death."

Number and causes of “premature” deaths in Tombstone Boothill:

2 Died in childbirth  

5 Suicide                  

7 Apaches                

10 Hanged                

21 Accident (mainly mining related or drownings)

21 Disease                

52 Gunshot, knife, or blunt instrument  

Of course, the cemetery wasn't called Boothill back in the day. It was simply the Tombstone Cemetery. Then in 1884 a new cemetery was built, and that other place with graves was called...the old cemetery. The old cemetery wasn't called Boothill until the 1920's when Dime store westerns became popular.

After the new City Cemetery was built many townspeople with money had their loved ones moved to where they weren’t spending eternal slumber alongside gunslingers and prostitutes. The old cemetery was neglected. The wooden slab markers were taken as souvenirs or used for firewood by vagrants, cattle roamed through, and in general the place became a dump, reverting back to nature.

But then the town of Tombstone got a second wind thanks to the interest in westerns and tourism. In the 1920’s there were enough old-timers around who knew where the bodies were buried. Literally. Well, they remembered where most of them were buried. Some had to have “Unknown” inscribed on the new wooden slabs, but they may have gone to the grave as unknowns the first time around as well.

So the old cemetery was recreated for the sake of tourism and called Boothill (one word here). And I hate tell you this but some of the more colorful epitaphs may have been embellished with the tourist trade in mind.

Not all boom-towns survived the decline of the industries that built them. Some morphed into ghost towns, which are kind of cool in their own way. Towns like Deadwood, Tombstone, and Dodge City with their Boot Hills and remaining structures have value. We can read about the events of the old west in books, but seeing the relics of those days adds a flavor you get from the sometimes dry pages of history. And how a people bury their dead often tells us more about the people who buried the bodies than about the dead themselves. Walking through boot hills you meet not only the major players such as Wild Bill in Deadwood.

But we also meet the lesser characters. Men and women from all walks of life and parts of the world who helped settle the west. People who would otherwise be lost to us such as two from China who died in Tombstone, Arizona a long way from home.

You can find Patti Sherry-Crews books set in the old west and more on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Patti-Sherry-Crews/e/B01C7L8QUU/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_4

Images from Wikicommons