A Walk in the Cemetery

Jun 8, 2016

The Yankton Community Library and the Dakota Territorial Museum hosted their annual Cemetery Walk through the Yankton Municipal Cemetery Tuesday night. The tour included stops at the graves of six characters from Yankton’s history, where re-enactors shared biographical details and anecdotes from their lives on the frontier. The walk is a fundraiser for the museum. Photos by John Andrews.

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Nelson J. Cramer and his wife Alice (portrayed by Stan Hoffart and Joan Neubauer) lived in Yankton in the early 1870s. Cramer was a lawyer and land proprietor and lived with his wife in one of Yankton’s most historic homes, today known as the Cramer-Kenyon Home.
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Jack McCall (Gerald Dobrovolny) is infamous for murdering Wild Bill Hickok during a poker game in Deadwood in 1876. After being acquitted before a hastily assembled miners’ court, McCall was retried in Yankton, the Dakota Territorial capital, and found guilty. He was hanged in March 1877, and lies today in an unmarked grave somewhere within the cemetery.
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John Lann (Billy Danner) was originally known as John Lanning. He served in the Civil War and was wounded in 1862. Upon recovery, he wasn’t allowed to return to the Army, so he changed his name to John Lann and enlisted in the Navy. After the war, he retired to a farm west of Yankton, and died in 1907.
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William Bordeno (Nathan Johnson) was a member of the Dakota Cavalry’s Company A. He owned the Excelsior Flour Mill and captained Yankton’s first ferry, the Yankton Belle.
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Bertha Jones (Crystal Nelson) died during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. She was 32.
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Local youth portrayed Yankton children who also died in the flu, which seemed to hit young and healthy individuals the hardest.
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Mary Ann Brisbane (Dani Jo Ninke) and her husband, Civil War veteran Thomas Brisbane, moved to Yankton to help their grandnephew, Henry Ash, operate the Ash Hotel. Ninke helped youngsters on the tour understand where the Ash Hotel was originally located. “Now, an establishment stands there called the ‘Burrr-gurrr King,” she said.
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The Yankton Cemetery Association was formed in 1868. The first recorded burial occurred in 1876. It is the final resting place of territorial governors, senators, congressman and other notorious characters from South Dakota history.

Comments

02:05 pm - Thu, September 22 2016

Linda Harwell said:

Hoping to find someone who enjoys taking cemetery photos. Hillview Cemetery in Isabel SD has several requests for photos of individual graves. For details please see this link to the cemetery on Findagrave.com:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=rapList&rapMode=cemetery&rapCemeteryId=97107