The Torturous Graveyard Journey of The Historian's Family

December 14, 2024

   To be a proper historian is to torture your family by making them visit a whole bunch of graveyards they have very little interest in. 

Evidently someone is

buried in this graveyard that is tangental

to the Jesse James story*

The guy who would know, Mark Lee Gardner, standing at the grave of John Newman Edwards outside some obscure town in Missouri*

   Occasionally there is the side benefit of a pretty sky, but that's about it for enjoyment.

Storm Over Robert Ford's lonely Grave*

   Still, we persist.

"You will enjoy visiting graveyards

or I'll put you in one!"

—Historian's Tiresome Mantra

    There is a lonely grave just west of Datil, New Mexico and I look for it every time I travel through that country. It's off to the south side of the road and appears to be a family plot with a tall, proud headstone.

Flashback Whip Out: "The Lonely Grave"

(August 26, 2009)

The actual gravestone is more ornate with tall columns, but I wanted to emulate the old fashioned headstones I have seen and sketched at the Quemado cemetery, which is also in the same area. To me it speaks to the temporary nature of people on the desert. First we are dwarfed by it, and then we are swallowed by it (that's why the grave is tilting, on its way to being reclaimed by the earth).

"You will never become a popular painter. You are too much of an individual for that."
—Robert Henri

* Clell Miller is buried in the Muddy Fork Cemetery outside Kearny, Missouri

* John Newman Edwards is buried outside of the town of Dover, Missouri

* Robert Ford is buried in Richmond Cemetery, in Richmond, Missouri