The cold rain was falling in hard green drops as I rounded the forested corner that hides Big Sandy cemetery.
Cedar trees dripped in the morning mist, and hungry blackbirds were calling near the rectangular sandstone gate.
As I approached the entrance I paused, listening, straining not only to hear but to feel something of the place, confident that its ghosts would reappear.
Indeed, anyone who’s ever visited this place claims it’s haunted.
Ignoring the weather, I shuffled through the wet grass toward the rear of the cemetery plot, intent on visiting some old friends.
And there they were: more than a dozen unmarked pioneer graves with peculiar shapes that when taken together look like rows of teeth lining an open mouth.
The light was almost absent despite it being mid-morning, and the entire space was cloaked in purple shadows.
Unable to resist, I reached out my hand and ran it along the meticulously chipped sandstone surfaces of more than one stone, wishing the gesture would yield up a story from the soft earth below.
I stood for a moment at each one, waiting, smelling the air as it wafted from the nearby creek, which this summer had been exploding with dark red algae blooms.
At first, the only answer was the windy spray of precipitation across my face.
Eventually, though, someone called my attention as he is often wont to do: Josiah Daniel, 1828-1879.
Both he and his father’s family lived in these dark woods once brimming with wild mean hogs and lean black turkeys, to the south of the cemetery, surrounded with hundreds of indigenous people for neighbors.
They lived in an expansive log cabin, the diminished version of which now sits at the Woodson County Historical Museum in Yates Center along Highway 54.
The reconstruction combines pieces of the old Daniel place with the chimney from another cabin belonging to a pioneer named David Askren, and if you know its story you’ll never look at it the same way again.
WHERE others see a quaint and cichy little structure, imagining a warm hearth and “the sweet old face” of Mrs. Eliza Daniel as she pivots in her rocking chair, one can just as easily view a mute witness to epidemic illness and gross injustice.
In short, to hardship and death.
Summer 1864, while Josiah’s father was farming the Big Sandy valley, smallpox broke out among the native tribes who were living there, transmitted to them by whites.
