A Rabbit's Review 10/28/2010

Pioneer Cemeteries Sculpture Gardens of the Old West, By Annette Stott
2008
University of Nebraska Press 404 pp.$36.95
978-0-8032-1608-2

Review by LisaMary Wichowski

I’ve been known to complain about the interest in American burial themes being far too centered on New England, or even the East Coast more generally. I {may} have to stop now. Annette Stott’s Pioneer Cemeteries; Sculpture Gardens of the Old West goes a long way to filling that gap. This is a book about cemeteries, but more still, it’s a book about the Rocky Mountains, as a cradle of women’s entrepreneurship, as a remote, as a place where the self-made imposed their rule.

Stott is an art historian by training and brings this toolkit to use in understanding frontier cemeteries as sculpture gardens and often the only public art available in the Western towns. She focuses on community cemeteries in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana as a distinct region, as the Rocky Mountain west has a unique culture and has been inflected by Spanish Catholic, Native American, Asian, LDS and other American Pioneer groups.

Western frontier towns evolved differently than towns and counties back East. The mixing of the traditions created a distinctive regional culture where a village green was no longer the primary community space but rather where burial ground functioned as ritual, political and artistic space. The burial places reflect the growth of mining camp to mercantile center in their shift from “boot hills” to more polished “fair mounts.”

Impeccably researched, her work in the business and newspaper archives brings to life what was unique about life reflected in commemoration in the region. She uses to good effect newspaper accounts, business archives and legal documents to follow the roles of women as community members and as art objects. The discussion of Mary DeVille Rauh and the M. Rauh Marble Works does both. The business and its artisans produced works which trace the artistic development of memorials from deeply masculine scaled down miner’s cabins to idealized female figures as mourning increasingly became the domain of women. The story of Mary DeVille Rauh, on the other hand, illustrates exactly how difficult it is to parse the role of women in a community. Rauh herself is apparently a self-made woman, arriving in Denver in 1870. By 1877 she had married, had her husband declared violently insane and remarried. The assets she gained in marriage helped build M. Rauh and for twenty years she was signatory of documents of the business that carried her name. What role was played by this woman in growing a business that flourished among the middle and upper classes of Denver? It’s a shame we can never know.

Stott is willing to explore the shifts in manner of commemoration as well as the growth of any given cemetery are reflective of a community’s development. She also skillfully illustrates how memorializations, or the lack of them, can play conflicting roles between the public and the private. In essence she is discovering what audience a memorial is primarily playing to, and how that audience may change over time.

All of the black and white images, plus well over 100 color images used to illustrate key concepts are available online (www.annettestott.com) helping to make this resource a valuable teaching tool for courses on visual or material culture. The images on the website have certainly given me a list of new cemeteries to visit and new communities to explore.

As thorough as Professor Stotts’s book is, it cannot be comprehensive. She acknowledges leaving out cemeteries related to institutional settings and those of communities not intended for permanent settlement. That said, it sets a very high standard to those continuing to work in the West. Opportunities for similar studies of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian Rockies still exist and I can’t wait to read them.