Stories of Relocated Cemeteries in the state of Kansas
KANSAS
Garrison Cemetery, Topeka, Kansas
The Topeka (Kansas) Daily Capital on Monday July 22, 1957 reported on Page 1 that preliminary voting of cemetery boards to relocate the Garrison Cemetery had been held. The cemetery was scheduled to be the first moved in the Tuttle Creek dam inundation area. Transfer of the graves were set to being the following fall, officials said.
Boot Hill’s Lost Dead: The Story That Won’t Stay Buried
Dodge City, Kansas—once called the “Wickedest Little City in America”—was a place where a man could live fast, die young, and be buried the next morning on Boot Hill. Gunfighters, gamblers, buffalo hunters, drifters… and at least one woman, Dora Hand, all found their final rest on that windswept rise.
Or so the story goes.
By 1879, Dodge City was ready to grow up. A school was planned for the Boot Hill site, and the city paid Coroner John W. Straughn $100 to remove the dead. The remains—estimated somewhere between 30 and 43 individuals—were relocated to a nearby burial ground known as Prairie Grove Cemetery. Many had been buried quickly, often in their clothes, sometimes without coffins. Straughn reportedly remarked that in some cases, “the boots are still on the bones.”
That should have been the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Prairie Grove did not last. A prairie fire destroyed markers and records, erasing what little identity those buried there still had. By the late 1880s, the cemetery itself was abandoned. The land was eventually subdivided for housing, and the remains were reportedly gathered once more and moved—this time to Maple Grove Cemetery—where they were placed in an unmarked or mass grave, remembered only collectively as the “Souls of Prairie Grove.”
Clean. Orderly. Respectful.
But history is rarely that simple.
In 1982, Dodge City historian Vic Hull challenged the official version. He believed the original Boot Hill remains had never made it all the way through those tidy transitions. Instead, he argued that after their first relocation in 1879, they were left behind when the land changed hands—ultimately ending up beneath what became private residential property.
In Hull’s telling, the dead of Boot Hill were not resting in honored ground at all, but lying forgotten beneath backyards—still wearing their boots.
The truth is difficult to pin down. Records were lost. Graves were unmarked. Most of those buried were never formally identified in the first place. A handful of names surface again and again—Dora Hand, Jack Reynolds, Alice Chambers, “Tex,” Jack Wagner—but the majority have long since slipped into anonymity.
And perhaps that is the heart of the matter.
Boot Hill was never meant to be permanent. It was a resting place for the unknown, the unwanted, and the unclaimed. In death, they became symbols of the Wild West—larger than life, easier to remember as legend than as individuals.
Today, visitors walk past the recreated storefronts of Front Street and the memorial Boot Hill Cemetery, drawn by stories of gunfights and rough justice. The official version tells us the dead were respectfully moved, accounted for, and laid to rest.
But another version lingers.
A quieter one. A more unsettled one.
The kind that suggests Dodge City didn’t just build over its past… it buried it.
And somewhere—beneath a yard, a street, or a memory long forgotten—the boots may still be on the bones.
Sources, among others: The Topeka Sunday Capital-Journal April 20, 1982 Page 55.
History | Dodge City, KS - Official Website at www.dodgecity.org/442/History