Gravely Speaking

While volunteering in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Bloomington, Indiana, I came across a gravestone that was broken into two pieces and partially buried.  When I inspected the top part of the tablet, I noticed the inscription, “KILLED BY LIGHTNING.”

Nearly everyone has used the expression, “you are more likely to get hit by lightning,” to explain how rare something might be.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, your odds of being struck in any given year are less than one in 1.6 million.  However, your lifetime risk is only about one in 20,000.  Oddly enough, males are four times more likely than females to be struck. 

Unfortunately, Alfred Patton didn’t beat the odds.

According to the experts, July and August are peak months for lightning strikes—and two out of three happen between noon and 6 pm.  Two-thirds of all deaths are of people engaging in leisure activities like fishing, boating, and soccer.   

So be careful out there!

The dusty, rock-laden graveyard in Tombstone, Arizona, was originally called the Tombstone Cemetery—not very creative but accurate and to the point.  It was only “active” for five years from 1879 to 1884 and contains about 270 burials. When the Tombstone Cemetery closed burials moved to the newly opened cemetery on Allen Street.

After decades of neglect, Arlington Gardiner, a town booster and secretary of the Tombstone Commercial Club, coaxed a Boy Scout troop to clean up the city cemetery in 1923.  Every attempt was made to identify as many graves as possible, as many of the markers were made of wood and in a sorry state of decay.  Relatives were contacted and city officials poured over cemetery records to accurately mark the graves of the people buried inside the cemetery.

Though not accurate, the cemetery had gained a reputation over the years as a place where only cowboys, villains, gamblers, and gunslingers were buried, in part because the three men killed in the shootout at the OK Corral are buried there as well as several men who were hanged back of the courthouse.  But that reputation helped the cemetery get a “re-boot” of sorts.  The cemetery was renamed Boothill, likely after the infamous Dodge City cemetery of the same name, (spelled Boot Hill) after Tombstone’s cemetery was popularized in an article in the Saturday Evening Post by writer Frederick Beckdolt in 1919. 

Gradually a tourist trade of sorts began to develop.  The notoriety in magazine articles and dime novels helped gin up interest in not only Tombstone but Boothill.  This is where myth and marketing combine.  Several markers carry epitaphs that are clever and helped build up the reputation of the Old West gunslingers with quick trigger fingers:

Moore, as the claim goes, worked as a Wells Fargo Station Agent in the tiny town of Naco, Arizona, a little more than 30 miles from Tombstone sitting directly on the U. S.—Mexico border.  A dustup occurred when a dissatisfied customer, Hank Dustan, picked up a package.  Unfortunately, the packaged arrived at the Wells Fargo Station mangled.  Dustan was disgusted by the state of his package and complained loudly.  The argument with Moore turned heated very quickly and both men reached for their guns and shots rang out.  When the smoke cleared Dustan was killed with a shot to his chest and Moore was mortally wounded, too.  Moore’s body was taken to Tombstone for burial at the Boot Hill Cemetery where some wag painted his grave marker with what is perhaps the most famous epitaph in the Old West.  The gunslinger’s grave marker “poetry” reads: “HERE LIES Lester Moore, FOUR SLUGS FROM A 44, NO LES, NO MORE.”

Then there is the story of George Johnson who reportedly purchased a horse that had been stolen.  When Johnson was found with the horse he was accused of horse theft, a crime punishable by hanging in the Old West.  He was hanged despite making his case that he had not stolen the horse but instead had purchased it.  According the the epitaph, mob rule won out. This epitaph is more myth and marketing than true.  There is no record of a George Johnson being hanged in Tombstone in the 1880s. 

But the myth mixed with a little frontier poetry was great marketing and the tourists still come.

EVA MAUD

Dau. of

N. D. & E. H. BARNES.

BORN Aug. 12, 1878.

DIED Sept. 7, 1898.

You are not dead to us,

But as a bright star unseen.

We hold that you are ever near,

Though death intrudes between.

In the small country Ellison Cemetery in rural Harrison County, Iowa, is the gray marble gravestone of Eva Maud Barnes, who died just after her 20^th birthday. 

Her epitaph describes Eva as a “bright unseen star.”  That star is repeated as a symbol on the gravestone just above the barely visible incised design of open gates. An angel can also be seen reaching upward toward the Heavens between the open gates. 

The gates here represent a passageway from one realm to the next.  The gates are the portal for saved souls to make their passage from the Earthly realm to the Heavenly realm upon Christ’s return.

The drapery on top of the gravestone represents a shroud symbolizing death and sorrow. The drapery can also be a motif that again represents the veil that separates the Earth and Heaven.  

The last line of the epitaph has two words that are a constant fear for all—”death intrudes.”

BEN. T. CLARK

SEPT. 15. 1867

OCT. 28. 1935

MY FAULTS WRITE THEM UPON

THE SANDS OF THE SEA;

MY GOOD DEEDS WRITE UPON

THE TABLET OF THY MEMORY.

ERECTUM AD MEMORIAM ME AM.

Alongside Alternate Route 58 in Abingdon, Virginia, is the historic Sinking Spring Cemetery established in the last quarter of the 18^th Century.  Buried within the gates of the cemetery is the discolored marble gravestone of Benjamin Thomas “Ben” Clark.

In the top third of the gravestone is a bas-relief of a stag standing proud. The deer can have several different symbolic meanings in the cemetery.  The deer sheds it antlers, a symbol of the decay of the physical body—yet, the antlers regrow representing the eternal nature of the soul.  Those same antlers can also represent a “crown” signifying victory over death.

On closer look, the stag stands on an angled stone mimicking The Benevolent Protective Order of Elks statues that can be found in many cemeteries throughout the United States.  The B. P. O. E. is one of the many fraternal organizations in the United States, was originally a drinking club called the Jolly Corks founded in 1866 by a group of actors, who evidently liked to drink.  The club members made the fateful decision to change their organization’s name and increase their mission from frolic to public service. 

This gravestone carving may represent a crown and victory over death or more likely Bejamin Clark’s membership in the Elks.  You decide.

The Clear Creek Cemetery is the burial place of Joseph August Bruner.  His gravestone is a non-descript red granite block that in no way indicates the monumental piece of granite he worked on for part of his stone carving career.

Joseph August Bruner, a French-born stone carver, met Gutzon Borglum in 1938 in Marietta, Ohio.  Borglum invited Bruner to come to South Dakota to help carve a mountain. Mr. Borglum was working on the monumental Mount Rushmore project which included four 60-foot tall, sculptured heads of the American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.  Bruner accepted the offer and became one of the more than 400 carvers who worked on Mount Rushmore until its completion in 1941.  Not only did each of the men who worked on the mountain have to be a skilled carver but they did so dangling from ropes on the side of the rock face to do the job—carver meets acrobat!

Most often, the gravestone marking a person’s grave does not give anything away about the person’s past exploits, careers, or loves, but maybe, just maybe, his small piece of granite that makes up Bruner’s gravestone is a nod to his work on a granite mountain side that pays tribute to America’s history.

The barren town of Tombstone, Arizona, was a rough and tumble outpost.  The city witnessed the notorious shootout at O.K. Corral and countless other killings that have become infamous.  The colorful epitaphs in the Boot Hill Cemetery are a testament to murders and shootings that took place on the streets and in the saloons of Tombstone.  The sheer number of people who were described as killed on their markers in the Boot Hill Cemetery can leave the passersby stunned. 

Lester Moore worked as a Wells Fargo Station Agent in the tiny town of Naco, Arizona, a little more than 30 miles from Tombstone sitting directly on the U. S.—Mexico border.  A dustup occurred when a dissatisfied customer, Hank Dustan, picked up a package.  Unfortunately, the packaged arrived at the Wells Fargo Station mangled.  Dustan was disgusted by the state of his package and complained loudly.  The argument with Moore turned heated very quickly and both men reached for their guns and shots rang out.  When the smoke cleared Dustan was killed with a shot to his chest and Moore was mortally wounded, too.  Moore’s body was taken to Tombstone for burial at the Boot Hill Cemetery where some wag painted his grave marker with what is perhaps the most famous epitaph in the Old West.  The grave marker reads: “HERE LIES Lester Moore, FOUR SLUGS FROM A 44, NO LES, NO MORE.”

No one knows where Dustan was laid to rest.

Buried beneath a wooden and hand painted grave marker in the dry, dusty, and famed Boot Hill Cemetery in a rocky grave is William Floyd “Billy” Claiborne/ Clayborne and a mystery. 

Clayborne was born on October 21, 1860, in Yazoo County, Mississippi, and was known to be a miner, outlaw, gunfighter, and cowhand. However, he is largely remembered for surviving what was arguably the most famous shoot out in the Old West—the legendary Gunfight at the O. K. Corral in the desolate hamlet of Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881.  Clayborne did not survive the shootout by heroics and superior gunplay but by ducking into the C. S. Fly’s Boarding House and Photography Studio to hide out.  His Cochise County Cowboy companions, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers, however, were not so lucky and were killed in the melee against the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. 

A little more than a year after the infamous shootout, Clayborne publicly accused gunslinger Frank “Buskskin” Leslie of killing his friend Johnny Ringo, whose death had remained a mystery and remained unsolved.  On November 14, 1882, just outside the Oriental Saloon, a drunk Clayborne confronted Leslie.  Clayborne shot the first volley from his rifle but missed.  Leslie quickly returned fire and struck Clayborne directly in the chest.  Clayborne’s last words allegedly were “Don’t shoot me any more, I’m killed.” Clayborne survived six hours after the incident and was laid to rest in the town’s Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone.

There are some who say there is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the man buried under that wooden marker is William “Billy” Clayborne of Yazoo.  There is a marriage record that a William Floyd Claiborne married Hattie Barnton on January 27, 1887, in Yazoo County, Mississippi, and that that same Claiborne appeared on the 1910 Census as a widower with his children.

Leslie did shoot and kill a man named “Billy”, but was it William Floyd “Billy” Clayborne?  Another mystery of the Old West not solved to everyone’s satisfaction.