Boot Hill

You’ve all seen it. 

Maybe it was the opening scene from “The Magnificent Seven” as Yule Brenner and Steve McQueen climb onto a horse drawn hearse and take a dead man up to the cemetery; or the scene with John Wayne looking down from a lonely pinnacle of rocks into the cemetery as his mother is buried in “The Sons of Katie Elder”; or any number of western movies where the cemetery plays a crucial role.

Boot Hill. 

The name alone whispers visions into the long ago center of your mind and scratches shivers into your bones. 

Wind and dust swirling among gravestones and cheap wooden crosses.  The final resting place for those slow on the draw or struck down by the plague.  Here and there, even an old-timer who passed of natural causes.  A place desolate and forlorn.  Outside of town; close enough to be a threat to the unwary, far enough for the burgeoning sensitivities of the gentle folks.   

There really were such places back in the 1800s; out in the west.  Here and there across the west you can find them still.  Outside St George Utah is one in the small ghost-town of Grafton decimated by locusts and Indian raids, and finally abandoned.  Or in what was once gold rich Bode on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, an explosive town that came into its own in the late 1860s and died a quiet death within a few short years. 

Ramshackle and rundown, weed choked and squirrel infested, those cemeteries still host the dead from the Wild West that really was.   

I would know. 

Originally the Livermore Valley was a large cattle ranch begun in 1840.  Back then, with too few Spanish in the area, the beef had no value, but the hides and tallow could be shipped and were worth about $3 a cow.  Then The Gold Rush happened.  And gold miners began to stream through the valley in 1848 and 1849.  Beef became valuable for the meat both for travelers and to drive up to the mining country.  Fortunes were made.  The Livermore Family, the Mendenhalls, Holdeners, MacCleods, and others put down roots in the valley and slowly a cow town was born.

A cow town.  Like Abilene and Dodge City.  Supplies for the ranches, and spirits and girls for the cowboys. 

And out on the western edge of town.  Boot Hill rises some 50 feet above the surrounding terrain.  Out in the middle of the valley.  Miles from the hills, ridges and mountains that define the valley.

Boot Hill stands alone.

I was born in Livermore California in 1958 over a hundred years after Livermore sank down roots, and buried men and women on the hill.  Originally the Mendenhall family cemetery plot, sandwiched between two Mendenhall brothers’ property lines, the cemetery was later named Oak Knoll Cemetery for the gnarled oak trees that shaded the final resting places.  By my time, it had long since been dubbed Boot Hill by locals.

And shortly after I was born, Boot Hill was abandoned to the fates.

Wind blew across the face of the graves.  Tugging and pulling at the wooden crosses.  Rain pelted the earth, causing the dirt to shift and gravestones to lean.  Sun baked color out of wood and stone alike.  Weeds grew to mask the borders and fences of the plots, vines pulled down whatever they could that was standing erect. The gnarled trees continued to twist and deform. Dropping limbs and acorns, and shade.

My brothers and I were naturally drawn to the hill.  Visions of “I’m callin you out” gunfights and Indian raids fed on the fertile imaginations of our young minds.  We went to play, to ride bikes, to run and slide.  We always climbed the hill from the west, cause the eastern side, the side facing towards town, was a sharp steep drop down into the arroyo.  The hill stood directly in the path of the running water and forced it to turn northward.

But best of all was to trap birds, rabbits, and squirrels.

Many a day we three trooped across town to Boot Hill carrying a stick, a long piece of twine, a wooden fruit box, and some seed or fruit.  We would scout out a good hiding place, tucked down behind a leaning marker and set the box up open side to the ground.  Prop one end up on the stick, tie the twine to it, scatter the seed or fruit, then duck back behind the marker to try and patiently wait out some critter’s coming.

A quick yank on the twine and the box would fall; sometimes scaring the critter, once in a while actually catching one.    

Some days, instead of a box trap we carried homemade newspaper kites instead.  Two thin strips of wood, tied together in a cross, with a string running around the “outside edge” to form the shape of a diamond.  Sized so that a full sheet of the “Livermore Hearld and News”, or the “Independent” newspaper could be carefully folded and pasted over the strip all of the way around, forming a diamond shaped skin for the kite.  A bit of string to make the cross piece bow, another for an anchor point; strip of cloth for a tail, and we could soar into the skies over the valley below us. 

We spent a lot of days up on Boot Hill prowling around.  Dreaming up ghost stories and “remembering” gunfights that certainly never happened in our lifetimes, if ever.

Then in the late 60’s during a particularly wet rainy year, the arroyo cut far enough into the bank, collapsing shear sheets of hillside.    Old graves on the edge of the hill were exposed.  And Boot Hill was no more.

Oh, Oak Knoll still stands, weathered and trimmed by the rushing waters of the arroyo still some 40 years after the last time I played on it.  But in the late 60s, the graves were removed, the bodies disinterred and relocated to other cemeteries in town.     

I was in Livermore a year back on a beautiful sunny day.  One like those my brothers and I would have spent flying kites, or trapping rabbits.  I stopped and climbed to the top.  The sign there now reads “Oak Knoll Pioneer Memorial Park”. 

It was nice I suppose, but it wasn’t Boot Hill.

And there weren’t any kids playing there either.

Copyright © 2013 Marty K Vandermolen