By Robin Gilliam
Five small white headstones enclosed by an iron fence rest in the NRHC historic park under the shade of a tree near the Jowell House. No actual burials exist in the historic park, but the markers remind visitors that our ancestors suffered trials and deprivations far worse than lack of electricity and indoor plumbing.
Life and Death on the Frontier
Early settlers married, looked forward to having a happy family and expected to lose one or two of their children. Statistics on 19th-century child mortality suggest one farm child in five would not survive until the age of six. Death was an unhappy fact of life on the Plains, something pioneers, ranching folks and rural townspeople had to deal with the best they could. Doctors were few and far between, even into the 20th century.
In his 2002 book “The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on an American Frontier,” psychology professor Louis Fairchild explored the effects upon early West Texans of numbing loneliness and the loss of friends and family members to accident or disease. Despite the assertions that the pure air out West was healthy, people hardly ever died a natural death. Graves appeared near solitary cabins as well as along the hazardous routes of cattle trails.
A century or more ago, a huge number of issues could easily take lives. They ranged from now-curable childhood diseases, cuts that became infected, rattlesnake bites, falls from a bucking horse or catching fire while cooking.
Frontier Gravestones
To ensure the burial place could be identified, mourners wanted some kind of marker—if not a traditional carved headstone, then perhaps a pile of rocks, a rough cross fashioned from tree branches or a board removed from a wagon and crudely carved with a name.
As in the old cowboy folk song “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” the hope that neither loved ones nor oneself would be forgotten was often repeated in poignant memoirs and humorous anecdotes included in Fairchild’s book. “They could not imagine anything that could be worse than their remains being placed out on some lonely hill on the frontier where nobody would ever come by,” Fairchild said.
Because undertakers were rarely available, fathers built simple little coffins while mothers tenderly dressed the child for the last time. When death struck while out moving cattle, an unfortunate cowboy might be wrapped in his blanket and “planted” by a few hands who didn’t even know the deceased’s real name. His friends might say some scripture at the burial or say nothing at all in the cowboy’s stereotypically strong and silent manner.
Despite plans to leave the desolate Plains for the comforts of their previous hometown, the need to maintain contact with a child’s final resting place was occasionally so great that the family grimly stuck it out rather than forsake the grave of their infant. Though it was heartbreaking to lose several children over a short span of time, knowing the children were together in a family cemetery probably lessened the grief. This might have been the case for the children of the Brooks family when six of them were buried near each other in Palo Pinto County, Texas.
The Brooks Family Plot
Victoria Jowell Brooks lost six of her 12 children after she and her husband settled on the frontier in the late 19th century. Lambs carved on stone markers above the names of her children help remind 21st-century visitors that deprivation, loss and isolation were a high price to pay for settlement west of the Mississippi.
Victoria Jowell Brooks was the sister of George R. Jowell, who built the 1872-73 stone house that now stands in the NRHC historic park. Victoria married Daniel C. Brooks and bore him 12 children. Six of the 12 Brooks children died young. Five infant or toddler boys and one young girl passed away in the 1870s and 1880s without reaching the age of 10. Every headstone has a lamb carved at the top of the stone above the child’s name.
So how did the weathered headstones of Franklin Cicero, James Preston, Joel Welborne, Euell Homer and Lona Belle Brooks come to rest at the NRHC within a few feet of their uncle’s stone house? Years after they died and were buried in Palo Pinto County, the youngest of the living children had new memorial markers made to replace the weathered stones of her deceased siblings. The old original stones went to the home of another sibling and were later discovered by the next generation of the Brooks family.
One stone was too damaged to save, but D’lyle Brooks Blackmon and her son took the other five markers home to preserve for posterity. Many years after the NRHC acquired the Jowell House, Mrs. Blackmon contacted the NRHC to ask if the headstones might be donated to help interpret the history of her Jowell/Brooks ancestors.
Because it is right to memorialize pioneer family children, the NRHC joins other historic homes, villages and museums in recognizing the value of including a reminder of death’s irresistible power. A few historic sites have cemeteries containing real burials, but others have taken the “stones but no bones” approach.
D’lyle Brooks Blackmon’s efforts to preserve her family history also allowed the NRHC to copy Jowell family letters, genealogies and photographs from a notebook compiled by a relative. One of the transcribed letters was written by George R. Jowell just before his death in 1912. In answer to a granddaughter who asked about early family history, he wrote the following:
“We had several more distant relatives and some not so ‘distant’ only in point of miles in length of road between us. It might seem hard for you to understand how easy it was for friends and kinsfolk to become separated and the children grow up and forget each other—no R.R. and few roads of any other kind—with few postoffices [sic]—before the days of postage stamps.”
Robin Gilliam was the NRHC Curator of Historic Structures in 2004 when the tombstones were added to the historic park.
This article appears in the Spring 2022 issue of the Ranch Record. Would you like to read more stories about ranching life? When you become a member of the Ranching Heritage Association, you’ll receive the award-winning Ranch Record magazine and more while supporting the legacy and preservation of our ranching heritage. Become a member today.
