The following excerpt is taken from a book called A Personal County, written by A.C. Greene. Greene was originally from Abilene, Texas and lived from November 4, 1923 to April 5, 2002. He is remembered as a memoirist, fiction writer, historian, poet, and influential book critic in Dallas.
“The men who subdued West Texas are buried through the land in dozens of now secluded graveyards, their names slowly fading from the recognition of the country, but each an excitement to the contemporary Western historian who comes across it unexpectedly, perhaps one of the Hittson (or Hitson) boys, a Carter, a Gholson (or Gholson), a Grounds or Loving.
Oliver Loving, who died in New Mexico of wounds from an Indian fight, was an older man who didn’t really want to be as adventuresome as he had to be when he and young Charles Goodnight were breaking the Goodnight-Loving trail through West Texas, out along the old Butterfield pathway, up into New Mexico and Colorado.
Young Goodnight admired him so, felt so keenly close to the older partner, that he refused to leave his body “laid away in a foreign country,” as Loving had termed it just before he died.
A few months later, Goodnight had Loving’s body exhumed and put in a box. He had a huge, tin casket soldered together and put the boxed body inside, packed in several inches of charcoal. The tin casket was sealed and the whole affair crated up in thick lumber. He took a wagon box off the running gear and mounted this sad burden on the wheels, to pull it back through hundreds of desert miles, this being 1868, in a desolate, dangerous journey so that Loving could repose at home in the Weatherford cemetery. They wanted an identity with the soil where they lay and sometimes their bones are what gave it its identiy. But I always feel sadder when I contemplate the unheroic and modest graves of the women, most especially the young wives.
There they are, and I prefer (male-like)) to think that they are all pretty girls, put in the grave by a grieving young husband who had scarcely discovered the exciting wonder of living with the opposite sex. And their wonderful names like Rexanna, Tamsey, Purnia, Fluvanna, and Tempie! I tell you, I can come closer to crying when I walk among them and read the efforts to hold something that grief said could never be lost —- the headstone of a young wife in the old Dennis cemetery which says “Love is Love Forevermore,” because that is how he felt when he buried her after four years of wedded life; but then, he lies a little way away from her, beside the second wife who shared his bed (according to their gravestones) for fifty-five more years. But love is love forevermore in more hearts than we think, and I will not accept the notion that the frontier invariably bleached out emotions or reduced its lovers to mere partnerships.”
