Yosemite Cemetery
Megan Curran is a librarian who works with rare books in the history of medicine and finds herself often musing about mortality as a result. She is also an amateurish photographer and took the photos in this post.
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I couldn’t wait to get away from it all — the city, my work, my quotidian preoccupations. I had just gotten back from the Archivists & Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences conference the night before, where I communed with my fellow historians of medicine (truly my people, that lot). As much fun as I had, I was more than happy to put it all behind me and hit the winding road for Yosemite National Park. But sometimes, like the spectre of death itself, those preoccupations catch up with you just when you least expect them. But probably unlike death, sometimes their untimely approach can be quite welcome. So was the case when I happened upon this sign.
The sign.
Of course, I had to indulge my morbid curiosity and go traipsing about this beautiful, secluded cemetery and (never one to leave a gravestone unturned) learn a little about the place after the fact. A death nerd is a death nerd, even on vacation.
Pioneer graves were scattered across the Yosemite Valley in the 19th century when the park was still maintained by the nascent state of California. Abraham Lincoln declared Yosemite a national park in 1864, and graves were moved to this cemetery roughly five years later, though the fences weren’t erected nor the cedars planted until 1906.
The Miwok tribe native to the Yosemite area did not actually bury their dead, but practiced cremation via elaborate ceremonies where mourners would singe their hair and wail until midnight; elder women streaked their faces with the char from burnt laurel berries. The name Yosemite comes from the western Miwok words “yohemite” and “yohometuk,” a warning about their neighbors in the valley: “some of them are killers.”
In keeping with the Miwok’s warning, some of those in Yosemite Cemetery were, in fact, murdered. There lies Justice of the Peace Leonidas G. (“Dick”) Whorton, shot in 1887 by a tough customer named Abel Mann. Mann later tried to kill his wife by slitting her throat, and eventually ended his own life when he was backed against a wall by a posse howling for his blood. Poor George Ezra Boston was burned to death in his toll booth by the area’s most notorious murderer of the time, Piute George, who eventually died in San Quentin after a lifetime of misdeeds.
"A Boy," said to be the first buried in this cemetery.
But most of the denizens of Yosemite Cemetery did not meet such dramatic ends, at least, as far as history can tell us. Many are rendered anonymous, either because they died while camping or passing through and were left there unidentified, or they didn’t live long enough to be named in the first place. The grave that reads simply “a boy” is said to be the first to be buried in this cemetery. There’s something touching about the juxtaposition of the the unusually large redwood headstone and the plastic flowers with which it is adorned.
Pioneer James Mason Hutchings buried next to his daughter, Florence.
Others interred in Yosemite Cemetery are some of the most famous pioneers to live on this land. Early land custodian James Mason Hutchings brought tourism to Yosemite in 1855 and popularized its beauty in his book In the Heart of the Sierras. His daughter Florence, the first white child born in Yosemite (1864), is buried next to him with a granite headstone that mimics the craggy rocks that peak overhead.
Florence Hutchings, courtesy of Yosemite Online Library
Florence Hutchings (or Floy as she was known around the valley) led a remarkable, though all too brief, life in the wild Yosemite Valley. Just a brief walk from the cemetery is the chapel where she spent most of her days, strewing it with flowers, keeping the pews tidy, and communing with God and nature.
The Chapel
The reverent but lively teenager expressed her feelings about this beautiful place in poetry:
‘Beautiful, Wonderful’ how come you are?
for what has nature caused this
awe inspiring deep canon and high towering
peaks for it is to remind one there is a
God, and that his works are the works of
nature? that his works are wonderful beyond
comprehension.
A fall killed the beloved daughter of the valley at only 17, and Mount Florence was eventually named in her honor.
Effie Maud Crippen's headstone
By far the most beautiful grave in Yosemite Cemetery belongs to another teenager who succumbed to a fall. Effie Maud Crippen was aged “14 years 7 mos 22 days” according to her tombstone, when “she faltered by the wayside and the angels took her home.”
For being from 1881, the typography and artfully distressed wood of Effie’s tombstone is eerily stylish at the present time. It looks like a sign that could have been purchased in Silver Lake yesterday. The years have not treated other gravestones there so kindly, however. Some wooden grave markers are sunbleached and decayed to the point that they are totally unreadable. Mosses and fungi cover a number of the stone markers at the site, obscuring their inscriptions. But it’s this beautiful decay surrounded by the grandest natural beauty that makes Yosemite Cemetery such a serene setting. One can certainly imagine worse places to spend eternity.
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Physicists at Funerals, and Why I Need Them.
Physicists are turning out to be one of the greatest, most sense-making allies in the new way of looking at death. When you advocate for green, natural burials, as I do (for example: here) you run up against people who tend to think of the concept as tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, anti science. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
There is a fantastic article from a blog called Sagan/Sense, which advocates for having a physicist at your funeral. I couldn’t agree more.
“You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world.”
“…the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.”
Those gems of comforting scientific death knowledge are also probably what Neil Degrasse Tyson (another physicist) would say at a funeral. Tyson is travels the country dropping bon mots left and right about how awe inspiring and fascinating science is.
At a Q&A session, Tyson is asked how he can possibly make peace with his own death without believing in a God. The video labels the guys asking the question as a “religious troll,” which is a shame because it’s actually a pretty great question.
Tyson, of course, kills it: “I would request that my body, in death, be buried, not cremated, so the energy content contained within it gets returned to the Earth, so that the flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life.”
The point of all the sciency-talk is that your energy shooting back into the universe can be incredibly comforting in the right light. Every part of our body belongs to a universe that giveth and taketh away. Provides a single person with atoms and energy for a time and then kindly asks for their return at our death. Lovely.
Tip of Death’s hat to Erin Winkler for the Sagan/Sense article.
Roadkill (Poem + A Recipe!)
A poem by Order contributor Bethany Pope on the ways in which people on the fringes make use of death. Scroll down for a recipe for roadmeat stew from the fellow featured in verse below. Photos by Sam Bickle, who serendipitously shared these photos with me within days of Bethany sending this poem. ROADMEAT: it’s on everyone’s mind.
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Early this morning on the way to the gym I got off my bike to examine a dead fox kit. I was prodding it, observing the fracture and the incredibly soft fur when this happened:
Roadkill
A man left over from 70′s punk,
cutoff jeans and old leather jacket
With skull scraped free of pelt ,
joined me where I stood, bent
over the kit. A life suspended,
caught in amberlike time.
The puppyish fox with spattered
brains appealed to me;
its large, soft paws
and feathery tail,
the milky smell of it,
made something clench.
This infant psychopomp
lolled its loose head against
my leathered toe. I shifted its body
from tarmac to grass;
it needed that much consideration.
The old man took it further.
His fingers glittered between
the studs on his gloves,
he scooped it by the white-ended
brush. ‘I let nothing waste.’
The corpse vanished into a hidden
pocket. There is no wasted flesh.
Not on this road.
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Incidentally, he had already collected three rats and a small spaniel and he informed me that they were delicious in stew. He gave me the recipe and offered a pull from his 2-liter bottle of scrumpy (alcoholic cider). While I don’t think I would be willing to eat city-dwelling roadmeat myself, if only due to the pollution, I can think of worse things.
This is what I wrote down after I parted ways with the punk:
Roadmeat Stew
1 lb. found meat, deboned
3 medium potatoes
1 cup fennel leaves
1/2 teaspoon pepper
pinch of salt
1 medium swede (rutabaga)
1 pint scrumpy (alcoholic cider)
I’ve tried it with turkey (I’m too chicken to scrape flesh from the road) and it is pretty good. Chop everything up, brown the meat, simmer for a couple of hours. Fox should taste like gamey dog, so it is probably actually better than it was with turkey.
Happy scavenging.
A Corpse a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Apparently, books on the use of human corpses as medicine are all the rage! Which is wonderful because my Facebook feed told me that duck nails are all the rage.
Duck nails are gross. Taking medicines made from dead humans is also gross, but if something’s going to be “all the rage” I’ll take the corpse medicine.
Book one is Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture and book two is Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. During the 16th and 17th century “many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy.”
So even though cannibalism was thought of as a “savage” practice of “natives” (this being the golden age of Euro colonialism), it was still fine to grind up an ancient Egyptian mummy to stop internal bleeding.
“Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate.”
If you know what’s good for you you’ll read the entire Smithsonian article about this practice because I’m not even scratching the surface of how fascinating this practice was.
News You Can (In No Way) Use
Deathlings, far and near.
I will admit that I have been distant the past month. The warm, chummy embraces of mortality you have come to expect have been few and far between. I promise I will be much more dedicated to the blog/video projects in the foreseeable future.
In the meantime I present a totally random assortment of things that have been happening the past month, perhaps to act as penance (read: excuses) for my absence.
First, I married one of my best friends! By married, I don’t mean got married, I mean I literally performed the ceremony. I am now legally allowed, by various government licenses, to both marry and bury people. Love and/or death for all! Eros and Thanatos, etc.
I’ve also been at work on several LARGE-scale projects, larger than the Order has e’er seen the likes of before. They must remain hush-hush as of now (although I hate to be one of those people who posts sad lyrics on Facebook with no context so their friends will be like “Oh my god, what’s wrroonng?”) I tell you this only to prove I haven’t been sitting on my bed eating chocolate bon-bons and watching Masterpiece Theater… although, to be fair, I’ve totally been doing that too.
I also did two lectures, one at Cal State Los Angeles and one a panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center. The Cultural Center has the memento mori art collection of Richard Harris up until July, and GOOD GOD if you have not been you must must must. Is my emphasis clear here? I will write more on my time in Chicago very soon.
The cultural center and the fine organizers MeMo did very nice things like bring me in for this panel and describe me as a “L.A. based alternative mortician and activist” in the promotional literature. I feel like a real person, Mom!
A lot of you have inquired after the next Ask a Mortician episode. In a snarky voice, I answer you, “Why don’t you ask the trackpad on my Macbook?” That is to say, my shit is broken. I shot the episode, but now it lives on the dusty editing shelves of my computer until I can drag myself to the horror that is The Grove shopping center in LA and go to the Mac Genius Bar. Fie.
Order photog Darren Blackburn (with his fancy new website here) did another shoot of me, half for publicity things, half for being ridiculous. Here’s one of the raw shots.
Ah, nature corpses.
Vive la muerte until we meet again… which will be soon… omg I promise ok geeeeez get off my BACK you guys. xx