Boot Hill

The burial list runs well beyond gunfights. Keith County's NEGenWeb history of the hill records three Union Pacific tracklayers buried here in May 1867, killed in a raid east of town, and more than 100 burials while this was Ogallala's only official burying ground, from 1874 through 1884. Ida Alice Aufdengarten, four, died of snakebite; Cynthia McCey of consumption; Gertrude Fisher and Birdie Smith, teenagers, in the typhoid of 1884 and 1885. A Northern Cheyenne of Dull Knife's band, who died on the flight north in 1878, was buried here for $5 paid by the county.

What the plaque says

Boot Hill Boot Hill was the final resting place for many early westerners who helped make Ogallala a booming cowtown in the 1870's and 1880's. These people, the cowboys, settlers, and drifters, came to Ogallala when the railroad and the Texas Trail opened a new market for the Texas Longhorn. Although one of the first burials here was a mother and child, many came by running afoul of the law -- some for stealing another man's horse. Others were killed by re-fighting the Civil War or for questioning the gambler's winning hand. In July of 1879 three cowhands were buried in a single day, victims of the sheriff's guns. Another man, "Rattle- snake Ed", was buried here after he was shot down over a nine dollar bet in a Monte game in the Cowboys Rest, a local saloon. Most were buried with their boots on, thus the name Boot Hill. Their bodies, placed in canvas sacks, were lowered into shallow graves and marked with a wooden headboard. Some of the bodies have since been removed--only the unknown or the unclaimed remain in this western cemetery. Keith County Historical Society Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam — 5.6 mi
  Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.
• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 24 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.

More markers nearby

• Cowboy Capital — 0.2 mi
• Escape of the Northern Cheyenne — 5.4 mi
• Ash Hollow: Gateway to the North Platte Valley — 6.4 mi
• Ogallala and the Platte Valley — 6.4 mi