Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story

Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story by McCann, Dennis. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780870204517.

The bodies are buried, but the stories are not. From the ornate tombs of Milwaukee beer barons to displaced Chippewa graves and miniscule family plots, Badger Boneyards: The Eternal Rest of the Story unearths the stories of Wisconsin. Football great John Heisman is buried here, as is the states smallest man, a woman whose tombstone names her murderer, and the boy who would not tell a lie and paid the price. Even in a graveyard, peace proves hard to come by: Wisconsins Native American tribes have fought for undisturbed grounds and proper burial. A patch of Belgian graves now resides beneath a parking lot while the headstones cluster nearby, and the inhabitants of a Bayfield cemetery were unearthed by a raging flood. Sometimes the dead are recalled with only a first name, and sometimes no name at all. Following the clues in tips from readers, unusual epitaphs, and well-worn stones, Dennis McCann finds the melancholy, the humorous, the tragic, and the universal in Wisconsins cities of the dead.