Pioneer cemetery nearly forgotten
BOISE – To Korean War veteran Holbrook Maslen, the Idaho pioneers buried in the century-and-a-half-old Fort Boise Military Reserve Cemetery have become buddies.
There’s Sgt. Peter Vogel, who survived the battles of Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg during the Civil War, only to be shot outside a Boise brothel.
Indian Wars veteran Sgt. Lawrence O’Toole met his end with two arrows in his back in a battle near the Owyhee River in the state’s southwestern corner.
Maj. Patrick Collins lost his children to scarlet fever, a scourge in the West more than a century ago; he died two years later, his head run over by a wagon wheel.
On Memorial Day, Maslen will be thinking about these men whose final resting place is this lonely spot in a sage-scented gulch just north of Idaho’s capital city, where wandering coyotes and foxes outnumber visitors, most mountain bikers ride blithely past and the only sound the inhabitants have for company is the thin clink of the halyard as it hits the cemetery’s flagpole in the wind.
“They’re kind of abandoned here,” Maslen told the Idaho Statesman. “I wonder if 100 years from now, someone will come by and talk to me.”
The cemetery was opened in 1863 at a different location but was moved to this hillside – body-by-body – in 1907 because an overflowing creek had the unfortunate propensity to disinter the corpses.
The most recent burial in the cemetery, which includes 250 graves, was in 1913.
Obituaries of those buried here are included in Wilda Collier Dillion’s book, “Death and Burials: Boise Barracks Military Reserve.” One death notice – headlined “Whiskey, remorse, death” – details the pulley system Sgt. Oliver Plunket rigged to hang himself after a drinking binge in 1897.
An 1869 obituary describes Sgt. Vogel’s demise: “Upon being informed of a disturbance in one of those low and wretched dens of infamy which have so long disgraced our city, … (he) hastened thither to his duty and was killed upon the threshold in vainly pleading for the life of a companion.”
Vogel’s grave is marked by a weathered obelisk.
Some people who move to Boise, one of the West’s fastest-growing cities, stumble upon the cemetery as they explore.
Paddy Page, a Los Angeles transplant, stopped at a broken stone marker with the names of five children, none older than 9. On top were toys and trinkets left for the long-dead kids. Page found the Collins children’s story in local newspaper archives: One died in infancy; four died of scarlet fever within a week in 1877.
“I couldn’t sleep at night,” Page said. “I just wanted to know what had happened to those kids.”
Two years later, their father, Maj. Collins, died after jumping from a runaway horse-drawn ambulance, his head crushed by a wagon wheel.
There’s no city water and no electricity in the valley.
That means an American flag flies over the cemetery only seldom because custom requires the standard be lighted at night if it is to remain unfurled.
Some people are upset by the cemetery’s state of disrepair. Weeds grow between headstones, and the elements have chipped away at the stone monuments so that many are impossible to read.
Dillion, the book’s author and a volunteer for the Idaho History Center library, wants the city to irrigate the land and plant grass, trees and flowers – as it does at its other historical cemeteries, including Morris Hill, where the famous Idaho Sen. William Borah rests.
“It should be taken care of,” Dillion said.
Maslen, the Korean War veteran, just wants people to remember the soldiers who helped settle the region. When he was younger, Maslen would jog by the cemetery. Now, at age 72, he walks the Fort Boise Military Reserve trails and rests by the gravestones.
Gophers ate the daffodils he planted last year. He’s planning to plant more again this year.