I drove along the vast stretch of I-80, the flat Nebraska plain stretching to the horizon endlessly like an old man’s last breath forever drawing out as if the end would never come. Like the Pioneers who traveled westward to find their riches I soon found my progress abated at Boot Hill Cemetery in Sidney Nebraska.
Sidney Nebraska’s Legacy
Sidney Nebraska’s Boot Hill Cemetery wasn’t on any grand tourist map; it was a whisper, a ghost of a memory from the days when men lived and died by the gun. The road was a straight shot, monotonous and dull, the kind of drive that makes you question your own sanity. Dark, ominous, towering clouds appeared to my north presenting a contrast to the forever blue skies I had suffered through from a day of uninspired driving. A swirling dust devil spun madly, crossing immediately beside my Honda Accord, buffeting my wheels before dissipating into the violent, rumbling threat of an impending afternoon thunderstorm.
But there, tucked away unceremoniously in an out-of-the-way nook below a rise in the landscape, beside a public works storage depot where gravel and rock and sand was stored, where road crews drove their dump trucks and their front-end loaders to make their day’s wages, was Boot Hill Cemetery—a graveyard of stories, where the past lay buried beneath the dirt and the dust and the ceaseless passage of time.
Testament To a Sordid Past
Boot Hill wasn’t just a place; it was a testament to an era when life was cheap and death was a constant companion. The headstones stood like crooked teeth in a mouth too old to care, each one marking the spot where another poor soul had bitten the dust, laid to rest in the restlessness of this harsh Nebraska plain.
I wandered through the rows, feeling the weight of history pressing down on me, the ghosts of cowboys and outlaws and curators of brothels where whiskey and women were slung with similar abandon, whispering their tales into the wind. This was no ordinary cemetery—it was a relic, a reminder of the harsh realities of life on the frontier as canvas covered wagons pulled by dreary horses, pots and pans clanging, made their way westward in a gold rush, a quest for the fortunes all men desire.
A Graveyard Dedicated to the Rough Men and Women
As I stood there, I couldn’t help but feel a strange connection to those who had come before. They were rough men and women living in rough times, and Boot Hill was their final resting place. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t quiet, but it was real, and in a world full of plastic and pretense and noise, that was enough for me.
The constant commotion of nearby road crews was appropriate for this cemetery full of those who lived their lives with their own commotion, their own turmoil, their own eventual ends dying with their boots on as a fitting finality to the legend of Sidney’s moniker of Sin City. The noise and the dust was barely a distraction as I walked among the graves, letting the stories of the dead wash over me like a grim lullaby, each one a reminder that we all end up in the ground eventually, no matter how hard we fight to stay above it.
