EPISODE · Jan 14, 2020 · 6 MIN
Cheesman Park
from Bivouac Recording SC · host Terence LLoren
August 2, 2019 /1:59 pm /39.731833, -104.987887 / Cheesman Park / In 1858 General William Larimer created the Mt. Prospect Cemetery on land that still legally belonged to the Arapaho tribe / In 1861, under the Treaty of Fort Wise, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were pressured to cede most of their land, including all of present day Denver, in order to make room for white settlers who were arriving as part of the gold rush / By 1890 the cemetery had fallen into disrepair and the city planned to turn it into a park / Families were given 90 days to move the bodies of their loved ones who had been buried there, but few came / The city hired an undertaker to dig up the bodies and place them into new coffins to be reburied elsewhere / Since he was paid by the coffin, the undertaker quickly realized he could distribute one set of bones out amongst several coffins, along with some extra dirt, and receive two or three times as much money for the work of unearthing each body / The city canceled his contract and began construction of Cheesman Park in 1894 with an estimated 2,000 bodies still buried underneath that still remain today / In the 1910s my great grandmother Katharine Constant lived just a few blocks away from the park in a large house with her family / She wrote letters every day to her fiancee who was finishing his degree in Illinois / In this recording I walk along the east side of the park and read a letter she wrote in September 1914 after walking through the same part of the park //
What this episode covers
August 2, 2019 /1:59 pm /39.731833, -104.987887 / Cheesman Park / In 1858 General William Larimer created the Mt. Prospect Cemetery on land that still legally belonged to the Arapaho tribe / In 1861, under the Treaty of Fort Wise, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were pressured to cede most of their land, including all of present day Denver, in order to make room for white settlers who were arriving as part of the gold rush / By 1890 the cemetery had fallen into disrepair and the city planned to turn it into a park / Families were given 90 days to move the bodies of their loved ones who had been buried there, but few came / The city hired an undertaker to dig up the bodies and place them into new coffins to be reburied elsewhere / Since he was paid by the coffin, the undertaker quickly realized he could distribute one set of bones out amongst several coffins, along with some extra dirt, and receive two or three times as much money for the work of unearthing each body / The city canceled his contract and began construction of Cheesman Park in 1894 with an estimated 2,000 bodies still buried underneath that still remain today / In the 1910s my great grandmother Katharine Constant lived just a few blocks away from the park in a large house with her family / She wrote letters every day to her fiancee who was finishing his degree in Illinois / In this recording I walk along the east side of the park and read a letter she wrote in September 1914 after walking through the same part of the park //
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Cheesman Park
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