Where Are They Buried? (92 page)

Booth’s remains were sewn up in a horse blanket, wagoned to Belle Plain, then transported aboard the warship
Montauk
to Washington. Though some have maintained that the feds got the wrong man and the corpse was not Booth at all, his body was positively identified by a doctor who knew Booth and was able to confirm an old surgical scar. He also recorded that the corpse’s left fibula had been recently broken. The “J.W.B.” tattoo on his wrist should have erased any remaining doubts, but skeptics remain.

Booth was buried in a cell of the Old Penitentiary in what is now Fort Lesley J. McNair. Two years later the body was exhumed and reburied in a locked storeroom in Warehouse I at the prison. In 1869, Booth was again exhumed and released to his family, who buried him at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland, where it’s expected he’ll remain for a long time to come.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-83 take Exit 6 and follow North Avenue east for ¾ mile. (Don’t mistake Northern Parkway for North Avenue; they’re not the same.) Turn right onto Green Mount Avenue and the cemetery is a short distance ahead on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive under the stone arch to enter the cemetery and turn immediately right. Follow this drive past the long staircase on the left and, as the drive bends right, the vault of a Richard Hardesty Thompson is on the left. Park here and walk up the cement path between the Hardesty and Sherman vaults. After 75 feet, the Booth plot is on the right marked by a tall obelisk. John’s name is engraved into the obelisk, but his grave within the plot is unmarked.

Booth’s co-conspirators were eventually captured and, after being tried by a military tribunal, four of them were hanged (including Mary Surratt), and three received life sentences.

MARCH 31, 1927 – APRIL 23, 1993

Migrant farm worker Cesar Chavez captured worldwide attention by leading the battle to unionize the fields and orchards of California. In a life story that mirrored Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
, he poignantly represented the hardship of migrant farmworker families and founded the United Farm Workers, which sought to end the exploitation of its members. Largely because of his efforts, California in 1975 passed the nation’s first collective bargaining act for farm workers.

Cesar’s early years were spent on his family’s 160-acre farm in Arizona. But after the farm was lost during the Great Depression, the Chavez family, along with thousands of others, picked crops in the arid valleys of California at virtual slave-labor pay rates. In the 1950s Cesar began organizing Mexican-Americans into a political bloc, and by 1965 his fledgling union of 1,700 families had persuaded two growers to raise wages moderately. Cesar’s union joined another, less-successful strike alongside a separate group of workers, and that was the beginning of five years of
La Huelga
—“the strike”—in which the frail labor leader became familiar worldwide as he battled the economic powers of California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Cesar’s style was akin to the methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.: He fasted or invited arrest to call attention to
his battle; he organized protest marches; he held lively rallies and organized boycotts. Church groups, college students, and other unionists supported the exploited farm workers, and in 1970, after losing millions of dollars, growers agreed to union contracts.

Though other successful boycotts and unionizations followed, Cesar ultimately failed to realize his dream of forging a nationwide organization, and the 1970 victory was probably the high point in the union’s history. When some farm workers started organizing under the Teamster umbrella, their plight ceased to be recognized as a social cause and, by the 1980s, farmworker unions were essentially non-existent.

At a friend’s Arizona home, Cesar died of natural causes in his sleep. His coffin, which was carried four miles to a UFW field office after a funeral mass, had been built by his brother and was so heavy that teams of eight pallbearers rotated every few minutes, while some 25,000 people gathered to say good-bye.

At 66, Cesar was buried at the commune-style headquarters of the former union, now the LaPaz Educational Retreat Center, in Keene, California.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Take the Keene exit off of Route 58 and follow Main Street east for a half-mile to a cement drive on the left. Go down the hill and you’ll see Cesar’s grave in the central courtyard.

FEBRUARY 26, 1846 – JANUARY 10, 1917

The legendary life experiences of Buffalo Bill, some real and others imagined or exaggerated, embody the spirit of the
West and fed the national grandiose tradition of frontier life that endures today. Though he certainly led an incredibly interesting and exciting life, over the years his biography has been increasingly romanticized, making it difficult to separate the fact from the fiction. With that, you’ve reached the interactive part of this book; I’ll offer the chronological version of Bill’s life that’s generally accepted, and you can pencil in or scratch out the “facts” as you see fit.

William Cody was born in Iowa and, while still a child, worked for a wagon-freight company as a mounted messenger and wrangler, crossing the Great Plains several times. After his father died when he was 12, he became a trapper and then a prospector during the Pikes Peak gold rush of 1859. At 14, Bill began working for the Pony Express after the company advertised for “skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.”

During the Civil War he served as a scout for the Union Army in Tennessee and Missouri. In 1867 he became a buffalo hunter supplying meat to the Kansas Pacific Railroad and from that experience gained the moniker “Buffalo Bill.” By the next year and until 1872 he was a civilian scout for the Fifth Cavalry, which was fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian tribes. For his efforts Bill was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, though it was revoked in 1917 because he had not been in the military.

In 1869 writer Edward Judson, working under the pen name Ned Buntline, began featuring Buffalo Bill in a series of dime novels; while Bill was earning a real-life reputation, he was also becoming a national folk hero in the popular imagination. In 1872 Buntline persuaded Bill to play himself in a stage production,
The Scouts of the Plains
, and Bill proved a natural showman, winning enthusiastic acclaim. Following a falling out with Buntline, Bill remained an actor for eleven more seasons, and began publishing his own Buffalo Bill dime novels. There would eventually be some 1,700 of these frontier tales, the majority written by Prentiss Ingraham.

In 1883 Bill further capitalized on his fame and organized
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized some of the most picturesque elements of frontier life, including Pony Express rides, buffalo hunts, and Indian attacks. Half circus and half history lesson, the show proved an enormous success and toured for 30 years. Though Bill amassed a small fortune from his show business success, it was lost to mismanagement and his weakness for dubious investments and, in the end, even the
Wild West
show became the property of creditors.

Since 1885 Bill had maintained a ranch on an enormous tract outside of Yellowstone Park given him by the State of Wyoming.
Today that land is the town of Cody and, as Buffalo Bill is its founding father, you’d expect he’d be buried there. But he’s not. At 70 he died of natural causes while in Denver, and his wife, Louisa, maintained that Bill had indeed desired to be buried near Denver, atop a promontory with spectacular views of both the mountains and plains where he had spent the happiest times of his life. So there Bill rests, in a tomb blasted from solid rock at the summit of Lookout Mountain in Golden, Colorado.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
From I-70, take Exit 254 and follow Route 40 east. After 1¼ miles, turn left onto Lookout Mountain Road and then, after another 2½ miles, turn left into the Buffalo Bill Memorial Museum. Bill’s grave is on private property, and there is a gate there that doesn’t open until about nine in the morning. However, people have been known to park outside the gate and visit his grave by strolling up the hill and following the signs.

1451 – MAY 20, 1506

There seems to be a sort of movement afoot to discredit Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. Its proponents contend that Native Americans had considered the continent home for who-knows-how-many millennia, and anyway, the Vikings from northern Europe visited North America as early as the eleventh century. Though both contentions are true, the overall argument is tenuous and based on semantics.

Native Americans merely happened to have had migrated to America over the eons; they had no broad understanding of the land mass and, alternately, no knowledge of Europe—and they weren’t on track to “discover” it in kind any time soon. The Vikings had found only the cold, rocky, wind-swept coast of what’s now Canada and, having enough of that back home in Greenland, they disinterestedly left. On the other hand, Columbus found the lush islands and warm waters of the Caribbean. Though it’s true he wasn’t the first human to know of its existence, he was certainly the guy who leaked the news of it to Europe’s fifteenth-century power club, setting up the endgame for European colonization and migration.

It was Columbus’s plan to reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic, and therein lies a misconception. It’s generally taught that Columbus had difficulty receiving financial backing for his plan
because it was believed that the earth was flat. Though that may have been a popular notion among the uneducated masses, it was evident to the informed people of his day, including other sailors and navigators, that the Earth was spherical. The problem was that nobody agreed with Columbus’s estimate of the westward distance to Asia; he calculated it to be 2,700 miles, while King Ferdinand’s and Queen Isabella’s experts insisted it was about 5,000 miles.

In fact, everyone was quite wrong; the westward distance from Spain to Japan would prove about 12,000 miles. But—luckily for Columbus—the Americas were in the way, making his miscalculation more or less irrelevant.

After aiming for Asia, Columbus’s three fabled vessels most likely made their first landfall at what is now Watling Island in the Bahamas. A couple months later they headed back to Spain with the good news. Word of his discovery of new Asian lands rapidly spread, and Spain’s new hero led dozens of ships and thousands of settlers back to the Caribbean over the next decade. In some of his logs Columbus described the new lands as belonging to a previously unknown continent, but later he retreated to his initial position that they belonged to Asia, and held that conviction to his death.

Of course, Spain was interested in colonizing these new lands, reaping their riches, and populating them with Christians; whether they happened to be part of eastern Asia or an entirely new continent was irrelevant. Columbus appointed himself “Vice King and General Governor of the Islands and Terra Firma of Asia and India,” and it seems that, for a while anyway, Spanish royalty went along with it. But though Columbus might’ve been a pretty good sailor, he was a terribly cruel administrator. Ferdinand and Isabella had specifically instructed Columbus but, ever the renegade, he initiated European imperialism and embarked on a campaign of slavery and genocide, pilfering the natives’ gold treasures. In 1500, after Spanish settlers accused him of mismanagement, he was returned to Spain in shackles, stripped of his appointment.

Columbus next promised the king and queen that he had figured out exactly where the strait to India lay, and he finagled a final voyage in 1502. Heading further west of the new Spanish colonies, he searched vainly for a passage along Central America’s mosquito coast, but he returned empty-handed in 1504, and was no longer welcome in the royal court. Two years later, Columbus died from some manner of heart disease at 55.

But even in death, Columbus has never been able to stay in one place, and his post-mortem journeys have prompted doubts over his final resting place, with rival tombs claimed by authorities in Seville, Spain, and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He was first
interred for three years in Valladolid, Spain, and then in Seville, but in 1542 his son’s will had his cadaver transferred to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo. In 1795 the French took over the Dominican Republic and the world’s most-active bag of bones was moved to Spanish-controlled Havana. Finally, after Cuba became independent in 1898, Columbus used the last of his frequent-boater miles and was interred at the church of La Cartuja in Seville.

But an 1877 excavation at the Cathedral of Santo Domingo unearthed a lead box inscribed, “Illustrious and distinguished male, don Cristobal Colon,” Columbus’ given Spanish name. Dominicans suggested that during the move to Havana the wrong body was selected, sparking an international squabble that simmered for more than a century. Finally in 2006, a forensic team led by Spanish geneticist Jose Antonio Lorente compared DNA from the bone fragments buried in the Seville church to DNA extracted from remains known to be from Columbus’ brother Diego. After an absolute matchup between the two mitochondrial DNA samples, the case was closed and it’s now apparent with 100% certainty that Columbus rests in Seville, Spain.