Boot Hill Cemetery - Ogallala, Nebraska

Boot Hill Cemetery - Ogallala, Nebraska

The old time burials in Boot Hill cemetery were generally with their boots on , thus the name “Boot Hill”. The bodies were buried in canvas sacks and laid on several boards. The dirt was then thrown in and the grave marked with a wooden marker. Boot Hill is unique in that within its sod there lies imprisoned many stories of the early days of Ogallala. Some of these stories will never be told, but Boot Hill will always be a reminder of early Keith County History. 

There are stories about the young boy that was on his first trail ride when he woke up one morning behind the Crystal Palace Saloon between "two fellows with their heads bashed in."  They probably were buried in Boot Hill.  Then there was Robert Webster, a drover, who was taking a bath in the North Platee River when he was shot to death in August of 1875.  Another of Boot Hills burials.

In the stirring days of 1875, when the present city of Ogallala was an infant town on the Union Pacific Railroad; Old Boot Hill Cemetery, which is located northwest of Ogallala on a rise, was the burial place for settlers, transients and others who participated in the building of the little prairie.  Some of the graves were moved to the present cemetery in town from Boot Hill during the 1880’s.  With age and weather most of the markers are gone so there are no graves marked exactly today.

Boot Hill was Ogallala’s only official burying ground during the "end of the trail" decade from 1874 through 1884. A hundred or more people were rolled in canvas and dropped into a shallow grave during that time, a remarkable death rate for a settlement that never exceeded 130 permanent residents.

In May, 1867, the first bodies were buried on the hill. They were three Union pacific tracklayers killed in an Indian raid a mile east of what is now Spruce Street.

Location: West 10th and Parkhill Drive (West of the Mansion on the Hill)