AHistory suddenly comes alive in Grafton Cemetery as the ghost town turns into a city of the dead, a city of dashed hopes and dead lives. The story is told through dozens of graves, some with intricate headstones promising Sacred Memory for all eternity, others with simple wooden crosses, others with nothing but nameless boulders. And on almost all graves there are coins, just put there by the fellow believers who were born later as a sign that the dead have not been forgotten. But their toil was in vain, their life without earthly reward, which was ended by tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever – so says a plaque at the entrance to the cemetery – or by the revenge of those who owned the earth, who blessed them with the settlers robbed them of their god in order to turn them into a promised land: “Killed by Indians” was their death sentence.
Butch Cassidy trifft Sundance Kid
Only a handful of buildings remain of Grafton, which was founded in 1859 by devout Mormons from Salt Lake City on the banks of the Virgin River in far southwest Utah and abandoned within a few decades. The main house with the bold bell tower has survived, which served as a school, church and meeting room, two or three log cabins, a latrine, a few fences are still standing, evidence of the hard pioneer life, legacies of a fatal failure, nothing embellished, nothing glorified.
Ghost Town’s Dead: Grafton’s graveyard leaves no one indifferent.
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Bild: Picture Alliance
Destiny is so palpable here that a Hollywood producer bought the ghost town in the 1940s and had it restored as a film set, knowing he couldn’t find a more authentic location anywhere else in the Wild West. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, is the most famous film shot in Grafton, and it’s a mystery that the ghost town didn’t make a third career as a tourist attraction like so many other places that Hollywood has graced . Neither the tastelessness of souvenir stalls nor the banging of cowboy shows disturb the oppressive loneliness of a place that was not fortunate. Alone with the dead we stand in the graveyard and don’t think Sundance and Butch are far away. The sun is burning, the mosquitoes are biting, the wind is whistling the lament of the Mormons, but in the end no diseases and no natives were their undoing. It was the Virgin River that kept bursting its banks, devastating the fields, drowning the cattle, destroying the houses – the river that created one of the most spectacular gorges in America a few kilometers further north in Zion National Park. So cruelly close, that is the final message from Grafton Cemetery to us, beauty and horror sometimes lie side by side in this vast land.