Seventy Years on the Frontier

by Alexander Majors

Those five historic cemeteries, where thousands from the East and South died and fill unknown graves, are the Missouri River, and the Santa Fé, Oregon, California, and Pike's Peak trails. The trans-Alleghany, and later the trans-Mississippi pioneers, followed, in the main, the water-courses. There was no prairie-farming, and hence the term, "backwoodsman." It was a kind of a Yankee trick in the West, in later years, to leave the forests and begin plowing the prairies, and save the time that had been hitherto used in log-rolling and clearing the river-bottoms for agriculture. The early trappers, hunters, and fur dealers followed up the Missouri River and its tributaries. Only with great difficulty could a corpse be concealed from wolves and coyotes, the latter animal always having been known as the hyena of the plains country. Hence many an old hunter, when far from the borderland of civilization, has buried his "pard" in the Missouri River! Landsmen and plainsmen with a seaman's burial—a watery grave! The body wrapped in a blanket—when the blanket could be spared—and tied to rocks and boulders, was lowered from the drifting canoe into the "Big Muddy," as that river is commonly known in the West. Many an old hunter and trapper has been buried in the mighty rushing waters of the great Western river, even as the faithful followers of De Soto lowered his remains into the bosom of the Mississippi. When it was necessary or convenient to bury the dead on land, the greatest precaution was taken to protect the body from wolves and coyotes, which were especially dangerous and ravenous when off of the trail of the buffalo. Rocks and large pieces of timber were placed on the newly made grave, but often these hyenas of the plains could be seen scratching and growling at this debris before the comrades of the dead man were out of sight. With these facts so well known, it is not strange that many in those early days preferred a burial in the rivers to that of the land. It seems almost paradoxical to thus find in the old trapper some of the instincts and traditions of the sailor. Far out on the plains cactus was often put in the grave, just over the corpse, as a protection against the wolves and coyotes.

The earlier expeditions starting from St. Louis went up the Mississippi a few miles, to the mouth of the Missouri River, and then followed the latter stream. For some time the old Boone's Lick country, now known as Howard County, Mo., and Old Franklin, was the frontier commercial head.

The town of Old Franklin, where was the original terminus of the old Santa Fé trail, when Kit Carson was only an apprentice to a saddler and harness-maker, is now the bottom of the Missouri River, for there a current of seven miles an hour has cut away the old town site.

But the pioneers became bolder. Instead of following the river they began to venture out from St. Louis overland, about the time of the old Boone's Lick settlement. It was considered a brave and hazardous journey to start from St. Louis overland in those days, for it was a village town, and all of the country to the west was a wilderness. It was about the year 1808 that the Workman and Spencer party started from St. Louis, and far out on the plains, before reaching the Rocky Mountains, one of the party sickened and died.

The Indians rendered what assistance they could in bringing herbs and such crude medicines as they used for fevers. The poor fellow died, and they dug for him a grave, which was among the first, if not the first, burial of a white man on the great plains of the West.

It was a novel sight for the Indians to see the hunters and trappers wrap up their dead comrade in a blanket, and put the body into a deep hole they had dug. They piled up brush and what heavy things they could find, and placed on the grave, carved his name in rude letters, and went on their way. But they had hardly resumed their journey before the wolves began to dig at the grave.

Were it not foreign to the purpose of this article, it would be interesting to relate at some length the fate of this expedition. The most of the party were slain in battles with the Indians, and Workman and Spencer are reported to have gone through the grand cañons of the Colorado River to California in 1809, but that remarkable feat is discredited by some, leaving honors easier with Major Powell, whose expedition through these cañons was in more modern times.

This lonely and desolate grave dug by the Workman and Spencer party is supposed to have been somewhere in what is now Kansas or Nebraska. It was the beginning of making graves on the plains and in the mountains, but time, wind, rain, and sand made them unknown.

Many thousands perished on the old-time trails to Santa Fé, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Coast. Exposure, sickness, thirst, starvation, and massacre were the dangers the immigrants had to face. Many of their graves were marked with slabs, but the inscription was soon effaced. These graves are as unknown in the great ocean of plain, prairie, and mountain as though the pioneer dead had been buried at sea.