Bury me not on the lone prairie....

William Newberry lost his brother Joe almost thirty years ago.
“He smoked three packs a day. I used to smoke too, but I gave them up a long time ago.”
I mentioned Joe Newberry to William after a walkthrough of the Cimarron Cemetery, a true wild west graveyard, located just off Route 50 in Cimarron, Colorado. Sagebrush dominates the lot, and the grave markers are almost impossible to discern among the ragged old weeds. But they were there, including Joe Newberry’s white marble marker, indicating that he had been a soldier in World War II.
William was in the war too.
“Joe went in in 1943 and I signed up in 1944, and ended up in Italy. I wanted to be a pilot or a tail gunner,” he told me. “ But I was a mechanic in dad’s old shop across the way.” William gestured in the general direction of “across the way” and continued. “They gave me a bunch of tests, and after they were all done they made me a…mechanic.” Laughing, he turns serious. “After I saw what was happening to the pilots…their life span was a lot shorter, let’s just put it that way. I didn’t want to be a pilot any longer. I was happy to be a mechanic. It was safer.”
William and his wife have been married for 63 years and run the little store named after his wife and himself in Cimarron. There is also a post office and a gold panning setup there, to attract tourists.
And of course the old cemetery is there as well. I asked William about a strange thing I noticed in the graveyard—five graves, very nicely and recently landscaped and covered with red and white rocks. Of the five members of the Berry family, Rufus, Henry, Lloyd, Audry and Lon, only two of them managed to make it out of childhood, dying at ages 19 and 26. The others died at 2, 11 and 1 day. I asked William about the family, and if he knew them, and what had happened.
“Well, that was the time of the flu epidemic, and it was bad around here. The only kin to them that I know is I.T. and he lives up the road a bit. He comes down and takes care of the graves once in a while.”
I mentioned that there seemed to be a lot of children’s graves there, to which William said that many children back in those days died at birth. Thinking about what a wild and rough place it is even today, out here on the western plains and high desert grounds, it must have been almost unimaginable to modern thinking back then.
Still, it was eerie and sad to walk among the sage and think of how many tiny bodies were under the ground, forgotten to all, except the earth. There were many squared off sections that looked like stones or markers might have been there at one time or another. Perhaps whole families are resting there, with only the prairie dogs and jackrabbits and the hot dry winds to keep them company.
Bury me not on the lone prairie, indeed…..