Tales Behind the Tombstones Read online

  Carrie Nation d. 1911

  “Men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils.”

  —CARRIE NATION, 1887

  The barroom at the Hotel Carey in Wichita, Kansas, was extremely busy most nights. Cowhands and trail riders arrived by following the smell of whiskey and the sound of an inexperienced musician playing an out-of-tune piano inside the saloon. Beyond the swinging doors awaited a host of well-used female companions and an assortment of alcohol to help drown away the stresses of life on the rugged plains. Patrons were too busy drinking, playing cards, or flirting with soiled doves to notice the stout, six-foot-tall woman enter the saloon. She wore a long black alpaca dress and bonnet and carried a Bible. Almost as if she were offended by the obvious snub, the matronly newcomer loudly announced her presence. As it was December 23, 1900, she shouted, “Glory to God! Peace on earth and good will to men!”

  At the conclusion of her proclamation, she hurled a massive brick at the expensive mirror hanging behind the bar and shattered the center of it. As the stunned bartender and customers looked on, she pulled an iron rod from under her full skirt and began tearing the place apart.

  The sheriff was quickly sent for, and soon the violent woman was being escorted out of the business and marched to the local jail. As the door on her cell was slammed shut and locked, she yelled out to the men, “You put me in here a cub, but I will go out a roaring lion and make all hell howl.”

  Carrie Nation’s tirade echoed throughout the Wild West. For decades the lives of women from Kansas to California had been adversely affected by their husbands’, fathers’, and brothers’ abuse of alcohol. Carrie was one of the first to take such a public, albeit forceful, stance against the problem. The Bible-thumping, brick-and bat-wielding Nation was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The radical organization, founded in 1874, encouraged wives and mothers concerned about the effects of alcohol to join in the crusade against liquor and the sellers of vile drink. Beginning in 1899, prior to Carrie’s outbursts, the group had primarily subscribed to peaceful protests.

  Carrie had been born Carrie Amelia Moore on November 25, 1846, in Garrard County, Kentucky. Her father was an itinerate minister who moved his wife and children from Kentucky to Texas, then on to Missouri and back again to Kentucky. Carrie married in 1866. Her husband was a heavy drinker, and after their wedding she pleaded with him to stop. After six months of persistent nagging, Carrie’s husband still refused to give up the bottle. With a child on the way, she left him and returned home. He died of acute alcoholism one month before the baby boy was born.

  Not long after this death, Carrie remarried, but David Nation possessed the same love for alcohol. He was a lawyer and a minister who did not share in what he called “his wife’s archaic view” about liquor. Their differences of opinion not only interfered with their personal life but wreaked havoc on David’s professional life as well.

  The Nations moved to Texas, and Carrie immediately joined the Methodist church. Her outlandish beliefs and revelations prompted the members of the congregation to dismiss her. Carrie then formed her own religious group and held weekly meetings at the town cemetery. In 1889 Carrie insisted that David move her and their children to Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Kansas had a prohibition law, and Carrie believed the fact that liquor was outlawed would stop David from partaking of any libations.

  Determined Kansas residents found ways to drink and so did Reverend Nation. Drugstores and clubs sold whiskey in back-rooms and alleys, calling the liquid medicine instead of alcohol. Carrie was outraged. Not only did she chastise members of her husband’s assembly in Sunday service, but she also scolded those whom she knew drank when she saw them on the street.

  Carrie believed the Lord had called her to take such drastic action against alcohol. According to her autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carrie Nation, she felt it was her duty to defend the family home and fight for other women locked in marriages with excessive drinkers.

  At the age of fifty-three, she marched into a drugstore on the main street of Medicine Lodge and preached the evils of drink to all the customers. She was tossed out of the business, but a crowd of women who had gathered to inquire about the excitement applauded her efforts. Their response and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union members spurred her on. She continued to visit liquor stores until all the bars in town were effectively forced to close.

  Carrie waged a one-woman campaign against saloons across Kansas and into Oklahoma. There were times she entered barrooms with a hatchet and smashed tables and bottles of beer. She was arrested on numerous occasions and spent several nights in jail. Her demonstrations made the front page of newspapers from Boston to Independence. She was recognized as a heroine by women everywhere and hailed as a courageous fighter for the cause.

  David Nation was unimpressed with his wife’s devotion and tried to convince her to abandon the quest and settle down. She refused, sued for divorce, and turned to the lecture circuit as a way to support herself and her children. Her following was substantial, but when she took to appearing in vaudeville-style shows and selling souvenir hatchet pins, many of her supporters turned against her. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had a change of heart about her, as well, and withdrew their endorsement of her.

  The last public assault Carrie waged on a tavern occurred in Butte, Montana, in January 1910. Her hatchet was poised to do damage, but the owner of the business, a woman named May Maloy, stopped her before she could strike a blow. Not long after the humiliating incident, Carrie retired from hatchet marching and dedicated her time strictly to speaking engagements.

  She passed away on June 9, 1911, after collapsing during a speech at a park in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, at age sixty-five. Although her methods were considered extreme and unpopular by saloon owners and consumers of alcohol alike (one bar owner hung a sign on the front door of his establishment that read ALL NATIONS ACCEPTED EXCEPT CARRIE), her ideas about public reform did not go unnoticed by government officials. Her unconventional stance on drinking helped lay the groundwork for the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned “intoxicating liquors.” The controversial bill was ratified in 1919, nine years after Carrie’s death.

  In her memoirs, published in 1905, the determined prohibitionist predicted that her anti-alcohol campaign would “eventually bear fruit.” In Carrie’s words, “this movement will help carry a nation.”

  Carrie Nation was buried at the Belton City Cemetery in Belton, Missouri, a location where she had spent a great deal of time in the final days of her life. Dual funeral services were held in Kansas City, Missouri, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for mourners who wanted to pay tribute to her memory. The tombstone over Carrie’s grave, erected by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1924, reads FAITHFUL TO THE CAUSE OF PROHIBITION, SHE HATH DONE WHAT SHE COULD.

  Rosa May d. 1911

  “I hope business is good with you, darling and that you are happy. If you’ll believe me I’ll think the world of little Rose.”

  — THE CONTENTS OF A NOTE FROM ONE OF ROSA MAY’S

  CUSTOMERS IDENTIFIED ONLY AS JACK, DECEMBER 12, 1876

  Several hundred yards away from the weather-worn fence surrounding the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Bodie, California, a single tombstone stands alone in the brush. The crude markings on the rock grave are of a cross and the name of the person buried underneath. There are no dates or sentimental verses etched on the stone. It simply reads ROSA MAY.

  Rosa May was a prostitute who moved to the wild, gold-mining camp of Bodie in 1891. The thirty-year-old “sporting woman” was born in Pennsylvania. She came west at the age of twenty with the hope of making a fortune off the gold and silver miners. Prostitution was the single largest occupation for women beyond the Mississippi River, and Rosa May was a success in that line of work. She settled first in Virginia City, Nevada, but had a business in Carson City, Nevada, as well.

  Although she had regular customers in every
location she worked, her heart belonged to bartender Erni Marks. She followed her lover to Bodie, where he served drinks at a saloon owned by his brother. Erni would not call on Rosa May during the day for fear of soiling his reputation, nor would he openly admit an association with the petite beauty.

  While he adamantly denied having a relationship with Rosa May to his family and friends, behind closed doors he professed his love to her. She returned the sentiment and dreamed of the day they could leave the area and marry. But both Erni and Rosa May struggled with various debilitating illnesses that shortened their life expectancies. Rosa frequently suffered from chills and fever, a condition that originated when she lived in the cold, flimsy parlor houses in the East. Erni was hampered with gout and had contracted a venereal disease.

  Erni promised to handle her funeral arrangements and see to it a monument was erected at her gravesite if Rosa May were to die before him. In 1911 Rosa contracted pneumonia and died at the age of fifty-seven. Erni’s always bleak financial situation prevented him from purchasing the headstone he assured Rosa he would buy. What’s more, attempts to have her buried within the cemetery were thwarted. Prostitutes were not allowed to be “laid to rest” alongside members of “polite society.” Erni was forced to inter Rosa May in what was referred to as the “outcast cemetery.” A wooden cross marked the spot.

  Erni continued to work at the bar until 1919, when Prohibition drove him out of the saloon business. Relatives back East supported him until his death in 1928.

  Legend has it that he asked to be buried next to his “little girl,” Rosa, but he was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, far away from the outcast graveyard located in the Basin Range, east of the Sierra Nevada, thirteen miles east of U.S. Highway 395 in central California.

  In death as in life, Erni was publicly distant from Rosa May.

  Stagecoach Mary d. 1914

  “God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.”

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  A well-traveled trail rests peacefully between the rich forested hillsides around the town of Cascade, Montana, and snakes seventeen miles west to St. Peter’s Mission. The road, as well as the mission itself, was the hub of activity in 1895. Back and forth along the route, Mary Fields, a former slave from Tennessee, drove a stagecoach carrying mail for people in the central area of the state. Mary was the first African American to deliver the mail and the oldest woman to ever take on such a job.

  Fields was born in 1832 and lived with her parents on the Dunn Plantation in Hickman County, Tennessee. Shortly after the Civil War ended, Mary became a free woman. At the urging of her good friend Dolly Dunn, Mary headed west to Montana. Dolly had become a nun and founded a boarding school for Native Americans called St. Peter’s Mission. She invited Mary to visit and consider staying on if she liked.

  Once the tough, six-foot-tall Fields arrived, she discovered the mission to be in a state of disrepair. She organized a team of men to work on the school and make repairs and improvements. One of the workers resented a black woman telling him what to do and in a fit of rage backhanded her across the mouth. Just as he was going for his gun, Mary pulled her own six-shooters out first and shot and killed him. The altercation led to her being asked to leave the mission.

  Mary then applied for work as a mail carrier on a new route opening into the Cascade Mountains. After proving she could defend herself and her cargo from highwaymen and demonstrating her talent with horses and driving a stage, she was offered the job. She was sixty years old.

  Stagecoach Mary, as she would come to be known, transported letters and packages to and from pioneers for five years. She left the United States Mail Service in 1900 and opened a laundry business in Cascade. The business was a huge success, and she spent a portion of the profits treating herself to whiskey and cigars at a local saloon.

  Mary Fields is recognized by the United States Postal Service as being the second woman in history to drive the mail across the Western frontier. She and her mule “Moses” delivered important correspondence that helped to advance the land-claim process and bring about the development of a considerable portion of central Montana.

  Sometimes referred to as “Black Mary,” Fields proved a woman could do anything a man could do in the untamed territories beyond the Rockies. Among her many admirers were actor Gary Cooper, who knew her when he was a little boy growing up in her neighborhood in Cascade, and sculptor, illustrator, and painter Charles M. Russell. Russell made a pen-and-ink drawing of the pioneer in 1897. The image, entitled “A Quiet Day in Cascade,” features Mary being knocked down by a hog and spilling a basket of eggs.

  Mary Fields was a proud, independent woman who never wanted to be an inconvenience to her friends and neighbors. When she became seriously ill in 1914, she snuck off to a tall, grassy area outside her home and lay down to die. Children playing in the area found her and she was taken to the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, where she died of liver failure shortly after being admitted. The numerous townspeople she had befriended over time escorted her casket to the graveyard.

  She was eighty-two years old when she passed away. A simple wooden cross marks the place where she was buried. Friends and admirers laid her to rest at the Hillside Cemetery near Cascade, Montana, located at the foot of the trail that leads the way to St. Peter’s Mission.

  Thomas Jonathan Jeffords d. 1914

  “I found him to be a man of great natural ability, a splendid specimen of physical manhood.”

  — THOMAS JEFFORDS’S DESCRIPTION OF

  APACE INDIAN CHIEF COCHISE, 1873

  The wind howled through the massive rock monuments of the Chiricahua mountain range near Tombstone, Arizona, like troops of demons on their way to war. A tall man with sloping shoulders walked with great purpose into the imposing scene. His granitelike visage was partly hidden by an iron-gray mustache that curled around to meet his thick sideburns. As he glanced about, the heads of several Apache Indian warriors emerged, and they eyed the daring traveler as he proceeded into the labyrinth of stone and cactus.

  Cochise, the leader of the Chiricahua Apaches, slowly appeared on the path where the man was walking. Behind the chief stood several armed braves. The man nodded to Cochise and introduced himself as Thomas Jonathan Jeffords. “I’m here to speak with you personally,” Jeffords explained in broken Apache.

  Impressed with his boldness and attempt to speak the Apache language, Cochise welcomed teamster Thomas Jeffords into his camp. The two men talked about the wagon pass that ran through Apache land. Several teamsters hauling supplies to southern Arizona settlements had been killed by Cochise’s men. Jeffords operated the stage line, and fourteen of the twenty-one drivers the Apaches had gunned down had worked for him. His goal was to convince Cochise to allow his wagons to go through without assault. The meeting proved to be a success in more ways than one. Not only did Cochise agree to stop the raids on Jeffords’s supply line, but the two became lifelong friends. “He respected me and I respected him,” Jeffords wrote in his journal in 1878. “He was a man who scorned a liar. He was truthful in all things. His religion was truth and loyalty.”

  Cochise’s acceptance of Jeffords led the Chiricahua tribe to approve of the frontiersman. They called him Tyazalaton, which meant sandy whiskers. Cochise gave him the name Chicksaw, or brother.

  Jeffords was born on January 1, 1832, in Chautauqua, New York—a long way from the western landscape he would eventually call home. His formative years were spent piloting steamboats up and down the Mississippi River. In 1859 he traveled across the plains to the New Mexico Territory to work as an army scout. He pursued hostile Natives bent on killing white invaders on their land. Jeffords was also an excellent hunter and road builder as well.

  A skirmish between white settlers and the Apaches over an unauthorized trail through Native land ended in the Indians’ withdrawal from the area. The withdrawal was only temporary, however, and a war ensued. Jeffords participated in the Battle of Apache Pass an
d helped establish a military post to protect pioneers from being ambushed by the Indians. Once the post was completed, Jeffords turned his attention to being a teamster. He hauled food, meat, and mail over the wild terrain along the Rio Grande, from Mesilla, New Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona.

  When the situation between the Apache Indians and the U.S. government erupted into the Cochise war in 1871, again because of uninvited settlers on Native American soil, Jeffords was called upon to help. Fort Bowie’s commander, General Oliver Howard, was aware Jeffords was friends with Cochise and asked him to arrange a meeting with Cochise to talk peace. Jeffords agreed and his efforts resulted in a treaty being drawn up between the United States and the Chiricahua Indians.

  The terms Cochise agreed to included a provision that all the Chiricahua Apaches had to be moved to a reservation. Cochise consented only after Jeffords was named Indian agent for the Apaches. Jeffords held the post for four years until 1876, two years after Cochise died, he was released from his duties. He went on to serve as a scout for the army and helped with the apprehension of Geronimo.

  Thomas Jonathan Jeffords died on February 19, 1914, at a mining camp outside of Tucson, Arizona. His twilight years had been spent prospecting for gold in the Tortolita Mountains. He was eighty-two when he passed away from natural causes and was laid to rest at the Evergreen Cemetery in Tucson.