The first non-native burials in San Diego took place on this spot at the Presidio. A record of the earliest burials is kept by the San Diego Mission.


Cemetery The thing about the dead that haunts us, in addition to having lost them, is that they are here, in the ground, bur- ied or scattered, bones or ash. Their remains are marked, her- alded, and sensed, and they are never out of our presence. “To be human,” Robert Pogue Har- rison writes, “means above all to bury.” Elephants haunt the places where elephants die. Mammolo- gists have found that the animals weep and nervously pace over their kind. As do we. In San Diego, we have a couple


of huge tracts where mourners congregate — the city’s grave- yard, Mount Hope Cemetery, with 76,000 internments, and


Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery where more than 90,000, “who served the U.S. honorably in war and peace,” have been laid, beginning in 1846, and overlook the azure crescent of San Diego Bay. Our oldest cemetery is what Juaneño Abel Silvas,


a descendant of the Mission Indians, calls the “oldest European graveyard on the West Coast,” located at Presi- dio Hill, a “post-contact” site. Silvas knows the names of some 250 people — burials of natives, mulattos, mulattas, soldiers, Spaniards, mestizos, Californios, and priests; few were Anglo-Saxon pioneers — in the graveyard next to the original chapel. Complicating history has been the removal of some of these bones and their reburial in the Mission Courtyard of the Mission San Diego de Alcalá. There, not long ago, a stone plaque, which still


appears on Google images, read: “Memorial to Indi- ans California’s First Cemetery Mission San Diego.” This marker, according to Janet Bartel, a volunteer historian at the mission’s Monsignor Halter Library and Research Center, was incorrect and has been removed from the property. Just east of the courtyard is another site, Bartel says, “reserved for American Indians,” and honors the Diegueño people and the neophytes. The latter were native converts to Catholicism who died and were buried in consecrated ground after the 1775 revolt; the bones of a couple army soldiers were identified there as well, in a 1989 dig. Unsaved native people would have been interred elsewhere, according to church practice.


ON THE COVER: 1872 OLD TOWN MODEL RESEARCHED AND BUILT BY JOSEPH C. TOIGO. PHOTOS BY ANDY BOYD.


16 San Diego Reader September 1, 2016


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