By Phil Roberts
Traveling across Wyoming was perilous in the covered wagon days of the Oregon-California trail. Yet, even when rail travel made it faster and easier to go back and forth across Wyoming, there were significant numbers who never made it.
Perhaps one of the best examples was W. W. Piper, celebrated Oregon architect, who jumped (or was pushed) from a speeding passenger train as it passed through Medicine Bow in 1886, en route to visiting friends in Ohio (and a main character in Phil Roberts’ novel Wind Shifts).
Former Medicine Bow Post publisher and long-time journalism educator and novelist David L. Roberts walks and shoots photos of mostly nature subjects in and around Macon, Missouri, where he now lives. One time, his walk took him to the quiet solitude of Oakwood Cemetery in that town. In the course of his walk, he noticed an imposing old tombstone with “Died in Cheyenne, Wyoming” carved on it. Naturally, as a Wyoming native, he was intrigued. The monument marked the grave of 41-year-old Alf Bennett.
Alf Bennett was a prominent insurance agent and leader in Missouri’s state Odd Fellows Lodge when he took a trip for the Phoenix Insurance company, an Eastern-based business insurer. Cheyenne was a bustling place at the time, businesses forming or expanding almost daily from the open range ranching prosperity and expansion of Union Pacific Railroad operations centered there. The sales potential for insurance naturally drew agents and brokers from throughout the region (and beyond).
Just two years later, Cheyenne’s fortunes waned with the severe drought of 1886, followed by wave upon wave of snowstorms that swept across the formerly parched plains from the first of November through, almost continuously, until May of the following year. The Capitol was completed just before the blizzards; the massive new UP Depot, under construction in good times, was not completed until 1887.
Despite his financial prosperity, Alf Bennett had suffered a personal tragedy the previous year (May 1884) when the 40-year-old native of Utica, N.Y., became a widower on the death of his wife, Lucetta A. (Decker) Bennett, in Kansas City. (She is also buried in Oakwood).
He was left to care for two minor children, Maude, 12, and Alfred, Jr., 8. But he could not stop traveling for his employer, leaving on occasion, the children in the care of his sister Amanda, married to local businessman J. A. Wilson, and mother of a young daughter Bertha.
He was in Cheyenne in October, 1885, a month notorious for its changing weather. Early in the month, while he calling on business customers on behalf of the Phoenix Insurance Co., he was staying in Cheyenne’s most prominent hotel, the Inter-Ocean. He became ill.
It must have been serious almost from the start because, later that month, his sister Amanda Wilson and her husband came to care for him. Observers expected he was making a recovery when he suddenly “took a turn for the worse” and died the next day, Oct. 26. Cause of death was listed as “chronic dysentery” even though there had been just one report of the infirmity in the previous two months, but had ended favorably.
His sister Amanda and husband joined a delegation from the Cheyenne Odd Fellows Lodge to accompany his body to the train depot, two blocks from the hotel.
His brother, Charles D. Bennett, owner of the opera house in Brookfield, Mo., was named co-executor of his estate, along with a friend from the I.O.O.F Lodge, Amos Field. For several years, they disbursed $70 per month to Amanda, his sister, to help with the care of Maude and Alfred, Jr.
They also paid out $25 per term for Maude’s tuition charged by her school. (There was no similar payment for Alfred, Jr., so presumably he attended public school). Maude’s education expenses were listed when in 1898, it was noted that Fred, Jr., was made sole beneficiary as “Maude had received those payments.” (Co-executor Amos Field moved to Omaha. Nebraska, in Feb. 1890, resigning as co-executor that required state residence in Missouri. He was replaced by lawyer Milton Welsh).
The estate purchased the imposing grave marker, paid in 11 monthly installments of $200 until the end of 1886. It is not known how much Lucretta’s stone cost, but it is assumed that Alf paid for it soon after her death.
The annual accounting, submitted to the court by the executors, is held in the probate files of Missouri. In sum, the estate was substantial for the time. It held numerous promissory notes from borrowers along with 320 acres of land in Chase County, Kansas, and a business lot in the town of Council Grove, Kansas.
Charles Bennett died in 1892 or 1893. His wife Hattie took over as executor. Payments to Amanda Wilson stopped completely when Alfred, Jr., came of age and was declared sole beneficiary. The estate was wrapped up in 1920, still holding about $14,000 at the time. (Included was additional real estate in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas).
Alf’s daughter Maude married; his son moved from the area. Amanda Wilson died in Peoria, Ill., in 1931 and is buried there.
Alf and Lucretta’s tombs still intrigue viewers in Oakwood Cemetery in Macon, Missouri, tempting them to ask what brought about Alf’s demise at 40 years old in the young pre-statehood days of Wyoming territory’s capital city.
Sources: Cheyenne Daily Sun, Oct. 27, 1885, p. 3; Cheyenne Democratic Leader, Oct. 27, 1885, p. 3; Missouri Probate Case files, Alfred Bennett estate, items 1195-1738