Doing the Gentle Thing in an Inhospitable Climate

Beowawe, Nevada: August 15, 2008

Precisely 145 years ago today, 70-year-old widow and wagon train matriarch Lucinda Duncan died of an unconfirmed cause in the harsh Great Basin of Nevada near Beowawe while emigrating on the California Trail with her family. She failed to complete the arduous overland trek westward from Richmond, Missouri, to Galena, Nevada, but her memory survives thanks to unwavering dedication.

“The scene was truly a sad one to leave a beloved mother on the wild and desolate plains,” James Yager reported of her death in his diary entry of August 17, 1863. “A board with the name of the deceased was put up at the head and boulders was laid over the grave to keep wolves from scratching in it.”

The crude grave sat uninterrupted in the desert for five years until Central Pacific stumbled across it while pushing the first transcontinental railroad eastward from Sacramento, California. Respectful railroad employees cleaned the site and enclosed it with a wooden fence. At the behest of a division superintendent in 1871, a cross was erected displaying Maiden’s Grave on one side and Lucinda Duncan on the other.

Fact and folklore often conflict in historical accounts of the West: Lucinda was originally thought to be a teenage girl. Years later, diaries and family accounts verified her advanced age, but the Maiden’s Grave mystique lingered and the moniker stuck.

Central Pacific successor Southern Pacific realigned the railroad in 1906, and finding the grave in the way, carefully moved it south to a mound overlooking the wide Gravelly Ford crossing of the Humboldt River where it is believed she perished.

But compassion for a heroine persisted.

Southern Pacific replaced the aged cross with a larger one made of hefty timber in 1950. Perched on the hill’s edge, the cross stands 20 feet high and is obvious enough to garner the attention of curious railroad passengers, infrequent motorists, and herds of antelope within a half mile of the site. Railroaders and well-wishers repainted the cross and occasionally left fresh-cut flowers in the ensuing years.

Despite the site’s remoteness along a dusty road three miles east of Beowawe and the ceaseless passage of time, devotion for Lucinda endures today. Eureka County now owns and maintains the still-active cemetery. The Oregon-California Trails Association erected an interpretive plaque in 1997 and maintains a watchful eye.

On a frigid, late night visit to the cemetery in January 2006, the intense light of the full moon revealed six inches of fresh snow and a pot containing fake flowers at the foot of the cross. Surely this symbolic presentation was a matter of practicality in an unforgiving environment. While gazing across the broad valley toward a westbound freight train and a patch of pogonip fog hanging over the Humboldt, I realized that the flowers may be plastic, but ongoing reverence for Lucinda Duncan at this extraordinary place is far from artificial.

Endnote: The author makes an annual pilgrimage to Beowawe to pay his respects to the memory of those who possessed the courage to face unspeakable hardships to emigrate west, and most notably, the brave septuagenarian pioneer, Lucinda Duncan.

Sources consulted: The Bulletin (Southern Pacific), May 1958; Crofutt’s Transcontinental Tourist’s Guide by George A. Crofutt; Eureka County Assessor’s Office, Eureka, Nevada; High Road to Promontory by George Kraus; New Overland Guide by George A. Crofutt; Northeastern Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Issue
99-1; Oregon-California Trails Association website; The Pacific Tourist by Frederick E. Shearer