Old West Symbolism - Crosses
The simple cross marking the grave of a deceased person, usually on a hill, has often been cinematic shorthand for the harshness of the American West, and it's no myth, these tombstones were prominent in the West.
In early colonial American life, gravestones were simple, stone markers with rounded tops and only occasionally had symbols carved in them. Unless the deceased was Roman Catholic, crosses almost never appeared on the stones as a motif. However, a lack of access to stone and a common need to bury people quickly and inexpensively caused the residents of the American West to invent a new way of marking graves — when they bothered to mark them at all. During times of lawlessness in places like Tombstone and Deadwood, the local residents regularly wound up with bodies that they needed to bury cheaply and quickly, and often without a funeral. Improvised graveyards, called Boothill Cemeteries, sprung up on the outskirts of towns. If someone bothered to fashion a marker, crosses were simple to make and could be fashioned from spare wood or whatever materials happened to be around.
Eventually, these communities became more settled, and more formal cemeteries with traditional stone markers sprung up. Yet it was the makeshift Boothill Cemeteries that were used in dime novel illustrations and later in the movies. Today, people can visit Boothill cemeteries, but the crosses are often the sturdier replacements of the long gone originals, which were never really meant to be permanent.
