Letters to My Sons
Michael Shannon
To be remembered is a universal human desire. In whatever fashion you leave your mark the secret desire, probably unconscious is to a memory.
The incredibly ancient dwellings that have survived millennia are marked by grafiti. So are rail cars. Mankind seeks to leave some kind of mark that reminds us that they lived.
“Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here.” A note scratched into the plaster of the gladiator barracks in Pompei or a lines scratched on the interior wall of tombs in ancient Egypt’s Valley of the Kings by a visitor from India four thousand years ago.
Remembrance is like ripe fruit pulled, plucked from the limb, held in the palm. Who was that person? How did they get here, what did they do. What circumstances led to this particular point in their time. Every thing that man has wrought signifies the simple act of being.
Some, a simple act of love and kindness hold memories of the lost. The Oregon trail where as many as 20.000 emigrants died has just a handful of verified grave sites. You can count them on the fingers of one hand.
Typhoid and Cholera were the great killers. Lack of sanitation and bad water killed quickly in the days before any kind of medical help was yet available. Diarrhea killed in hours. Accidental gunshots, kicking mules and horses. falling under the moving wagons and contrary to celluloid history perhaps only forty or fifty deaths from Native tribes. Arguments over trivial matters led to shootings which in the days before any kind of medical help was slightly useful were nearly all fatal. Rare was the train that carried a doctor. You were lucky to have a midwife. In it’s peak years the trail killed about one in ten.
Because graves had to be made quickly to keep the wagon trains moving, most were hastily buried and left deliberately unmarked to prevent scavenging animals or vandals from disturbing the remains. When possible, folks were buried in shallow graves wrapped in a blanket in the center of the trail so the passing livestock and wagons would tamp the soil and erase all traces of the grave to prevent Coyotes, Badgers and Wolves from digging up the remains.The trains rarely stopped, miles had to be made before the snow flew and blocked the passes in the Rockies and the Sierra.*
One of the pioneers who never made it past Scotts Bluff was Rebecca Burdick Winters. She was born in Cayuga New York state in 1801. Her father was Gideon Burdick a veteran of George Washingtons’ Continental Army. He had served as a drummer boy enlisting when he was just fourteen. The Winters family had moved west to Illinois where both had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints and had been on the receiving end of a great deal of persecution by their Christian neighbors. In 1851 they had decided to join a Mormon wagon train bound for Salt Lake City in the self proclaimed State of Deseret.**
Preparations were made to sell their property and chattels and join a train to cross the Great American Desert to what was to become Utah. The Winters party of ten wagons pulled out of the Mormon city of Nauvoo in Illinois headed west. They trailed along southern Iowa, crossed the Missouri at Council Bluffs entering what was the unorganized territory,*** and headed northwest up the Platte River.
Rebecca bagan showing simptoms of Cholera as they traveled along the banks of the river. Little was known about the cause in 1852 it didn’t yet have a formal name. Sometimes called Gastric Fever or Slow Fever because it started with a low but ever increasing fever and could last weeks. It was also called Pythogenic fever a term meaning “generated by filth or putrid matter.” The emigrant trails were well traveled and their was little to no sanitation. Contrary to general belief the trails weren’t necessarily two wagon ruts because in the search for grass for the livestock the pioneers had created parts of the trail that were as much as a mile wide. In the ground ahead was offal from dead animals and even humans. There was urine and excrement from the travelers who didn’t bury it and when traveling by a river the river itself was polluted by the trains ahead. People knew the dangers but could simply not avoid infection. Dysentery, Cholera and Typhoid fever cause somewhere around 30,000 deaths out of the 350,000 travelers in the peak years along the trail. Rebecca was one.
According to several journals kept by people in her train she fell ill and lingered for a few days, a slow-developing misery lasting less than a week, characterized by a rising high fever, severe fatigue, delirium, and explosive Diarrhea. The loss of fluids which could not be replaced killed her. There were no IV fluids available in 1852 and they knew the water was contaminated. They could do nothing to save her. Rebecca lay in the wagon bottom on a bed of quilts and slowly slipped away. Other ladies on the train did their best to keep her comfortable but she slowly slipped into a confused state and died soon after the train passed Chimney Rock. Rebecca was the fifth person on the Winters train to die after leaving Council Bluffs. One every 90 miles or a death about every three days. These were not strangers but someone you knew well, a neighbor, a family member. Sister Rebecca was one of the vast numbers that died right along the beginnings of the trail as it ran along the North Platte river.
Great number of pioneers that died were buried in the center of the road, perhaps ten to twenty per mile over the life of the trail. A shallow grave would be scraped out, the body wrapped in a blanket and a few shovel fulls of dirt would cover the hole. The hitches of mules or oxen would be led over the grave to tamp the earth down and fianlly the stock hitched up to the Studebaker or Murphy built wagon and the entire train would roll over the dead, tamping it down in an attempt tp keep the wildlife from digging it sup. No headboard or any other marker would grace the spot that marked someones resting place.
To prevent the disease from spreading, and perhaps for the comfort of his wife, Hiram pulled his company off the trail. Three days later, from his camp thirty-three miles east of Fort Laramie, Captain Snow sent a note to Hiram, imploring him to “not delay on account of sickness” as he believed it would exacerbate the situation. The messengers met Winters’s division on the way and learned that Sister Winters had died at one o’clock the previous afternoon. Rebecca Burdick Winters, a wife to Hiram and mother to his children, never reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake.
On the fifteenth of August, 1852 she slipped away to the place whence none returns. She was 53. She no longer felt pain, the fatigue of the trail or loneliness of the prairie stretched before her in seemingly table flat emptiness that made no day seem different than the one before, but Hiram, her husband of 24 years and Alonzo, Hiram, Rebecca, Hellen, Elizabeth, and Hetta, her children did.
He could not bear to leave her alone, one of the nameless disappeared who paved the trails west. She would have a proper resting place. The train stopped. Rebecca was the first and not the last but because of the love of a husband she would be remembered.
Hiram walked to the center of trail between the ruts and started to dig. His shovel moved in the age old rhythm, push, lift, throw as he went deeper and deeper. The wives washed and cleaned Rebecca, dressed her in her finest clothes, rolled her in her quilt then took turns at sewing her shroud closed. As the hole grew deeper William Fletcher Reynolds, a family friend, salvaged a broken wagon wheel from the brush removed the spokes and pounded the iron rim into an oval then carved her name and age into an iron wagon tire. She was laid gently in her grave surrounded by her family and her friends. Uncomfortable with the idea that she would be covered by dirt, planks were laid beneath her, the body lowered and more boards placed over her and the grave shoveled full. Once the livestock and wagons completed their work the iron tire was partially buried over the grave to mark her final resting place. This marked the gravesite.
The rest of the Winters family arrived in the Salt Lake Valley five months later in October, 1852, and they eventually settled in present-day Pleasant Grove, Utah.
Following wagon trains saw the tire and simply went around it. In 1869 the completion of the transcontinental railroad put an end to wagons on the Oregon/Mormon trail and after nineteen years Rebecca’s grave sat in lonely isolation in the valley between Chimney Rock and Scotts bluff. Only an occasional cowboy looking for a lost steer came across the tire and wondered who.
Hiram and the children never forgot Rebecca and went back to visit her in the years following. The family carefully watched her resting place to make sure it was not disturbed. The farmers and ranchers kept a respectful distance and made sure no one bothered her..
Almost fifty years would pass before an advance survey crew laying out a new line for the Wyoming and Western Railroad building up the Platte Valley came across the isolated grave. No one on the crew knew who Rebecca Winters was but out of respect they rerouted the tracks from the original plan to avoid disturbing her. When the railroad was finished the tracks ran right next to the old wagon wheel tire for almost 100 years, A crewman or passenger might see it in passing and wonder how it came to be.
Nearly a century later, in 1995, the railroad which by that time the Burlington Northern approached the descendants of Rebecca Winters and worked out a plan to move the gravesite to a safe and accessible location. In the presence of more than sixty of her descendants, a team of archeologists worked to exhume Rebecca’s remains that autumn. Rebecca Burdick Winters’s body, now in a mahogany casket, is buried a mere one hundred yards from its original location.
Rebecca Winters’s reputation as warm, caring, and selfless makes it unsurprising that her gravesite was marked with permanence. Asa S. Hawley, who traveled with the company, wrote that many in their camp had died from cholera, but that “the most sorrowful to him was the death of Sister Winters, one of God’s noble and courageous women.
Rebeca Burdick Winters has lingered purely through luck and the kindness of others who never knew her but understood that she had lived and deserved those kindnesses by simply having been.
So when you are traveling stop and take a moment. Turn down highway 24 from Scott’s Bluff, toward Rebecca Winters Memorial Park, stop and walk over to her grave and say a prayer for the good woman.
*Dithering, a late start and simple human hardheadedness killed the Donner party by arriving too late to the mountains passes.
**Utah territory was incorporated by the Federal Government in 1850 but did not become a state until 1896.
***THe future states of North and South Dakota, Nebbraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Oklahoma.
****In June 1996, hundreds of Winters’s descendants gathered for the dedication of the Rebecca Winters Memorial Park. The grave remains the only known marked graves among the approximately 6,000 Mormons who perished crossing the plains.
