A little western tour ii

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And so it is with James William Murphy (1871-1901), just 30 years old when he died. The circumstances of his death are, at least to me, a mystery. We do know that Mr. Murphy's family moved away and left little trace of their presence, save this grave, which still sits in a tiny fenced-in handful of stones on a dirt road just south of the tracks in Red Cloud, Nebraska. 

It is well-kept, given its remoteness and the fact that those buried here have no descendants to honor it with faithful upkeep. Clearly, someone paints the fence and cuts the grass to keep ithe place from turning into a jungle.

Who? Someone who admires Anna Pavelka, the resilient pioneer woman named Antonia Shimerda who rises like some glorious mythical earth-mother from Willa Cather's My Antonia. (I'm overstating, but no one whose read the novel comes away with anything but admiration for her). And, you ask, what possible relation does this tiny country graveyard, little more than a plot, have to do with Anna Pavelka, the prototype for Antonia?

Ah, there lies the tale--only one of them. When she was a just young thing, footloose and fancy free, just like Tony; she never missed a dance, never missed a kiss on the back step or elsewhere. Sometime amid her youthful merrymaking, she must have fancied this man, James William Murphy, here and there identified as a railroad employee. There's even a whisper of his taking her with him "out west," where we do know she soon was "in the family way," at which time she returned to Red Cloud to have her baby, her first (of 13), a girl named Lillian, the only one born out of wedlock and fathered by a man not her husband.

So the man buried here, who has no next of kin anywhere near, whose family is long gone, has an infamous life beyond the grave, thanks to Willa Cather's famous novel, because he is an absolute jerk in My Antonia, leaving Tony Shimerda alone, pregnant, and unmarried.

Which is why, 15 years ago, one of my students (okay, maybe their prof put her up to it) is pictured right there, spitting on James William Murphy's grave, when I took a van full of students out on the land where Willa Cather spent her earliest years on the plains of south-central Nebraska. I wanted them to see for themselves where so much of that novel and others Cather wrote had their genesis.   

In the novel, the character who leaves Tony alone and pregnant is a monster, as was James William Murphy, who jilted Anna Pavelka in like heartless manner--and why the printed tour guide keeps taking visitors past this remote set of graves in the cottonwoods along the Republican River on a dusty dirt road.

Can't help but love the inscription on Murphy's stone, a memorial cliche that, given the story of James William Murphy, has a significant additional meaning than it's meant to carry:

"Gone but not forgotten."

Yes. And probably not for some time.