lovely letters. lousy human beings.

Dear Sister, Forgive us for not writing sooner. Your letter was the first to reach us and sad news it was. We had been talking a great deal and talking about dear Mother. Her death was not unexpected but it was hard to bear to think we never can see her again... That filled us with grief, believe me. Dear Sister I think that we can truly sympathize with you. We saw our own dear children fade and die, three of them in less than one short month. Oh it is hard to bear but we must be resigned and hope to meet them where parting is no more.... - Polly Ingalls Quiner to Martha Quiner Carpenter, 27 November 1884, Harney City, Pennington County, Dakota Territory

Last week, Wisconsin Historical Society finished scanning and putting their Carpenter-Quiner letters online HERE. The collection contains niney-one pages from letters dating 1861 to 1910. A portion of a letter from Polly and Henry Quiner is transcribed above. (Please note that there are mistakes in the WHS listings of who wrote several of the letters, and when they were written; the archivists are aware of corrections that need to be made and will update the site as soon as possible.)

Ruby, Charley, Lillian, and George Quiner, four of the children of Polly and Henry Quiner, died in the early 1880s and were buried in a now-abandoned cemetery oustide of Keystone, South Dakota. Within a few years, both parents would join them. The graves were marked with a large family marker and smaller footstones with initials. Due to vandalism in the cemetery, the larger Quiner marker is now on display in the Schoolhouse Museum in Keystone; the smaller stones were left in place. The photograph above shows historian Robery Hayes examining Ruby's footstone several years ago.

A couple of weeks ago, four of us who were in Keystone for Holy Terror Days went to the cemetery to again take photographs. While there are still a few headstones in the cemetery, the Quiner stones are gone! The foundation for the larger Quiner marker is still in place, so it's easy to determine where the stones should have been, based on old photographs. The footstones were neither covered nor buried. They were gone.

It's probably the sad reality that someone actually took them.


[Update: To get to the cemetery, take First Street [40] northeast out of Keystone a couple of miles to Playhouse Road; turn right. A very short distance on Playhouse, you'll turn right again across a cattle gate and be heading towards the water treatment plant. There will be cows roaming freely. The cemetery is a short walk up the hill into the Black Hills National Forest to your south, just past the turn off Playhouse. There should be one or two faint paths leading into the cemetery; look for the three weathered fenced-in family plots to find your way. If you walk directly towards the most ornate of the fenced areas (shown at right in the photo above), you will cross the Quiner graves prior to reaching the fence; look for the square, gray stone flat on the ground. The flat white stone on the ground does not mark the Quiner graves. If you are adventurous, you continue driving on Playhouse Road and go all the way to Custer State Park!]
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:17 PM