My friends - Another interesting item, taken from the archives of the Kansas Historical Society, concerning S.M.Marshall of Wadesboro in Calloway County, whose lone, hand chiseled grave marker, which laid alone in a field, is now in the Kansas Historical Society. -B +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Westmoreland Recorder, published by W. F. Hill, in the issue of July 19, 1906, gives the following history of the grave : "A grave on the hill a mile and a half north and west of Westmoreland is a relic of the California travel in 1849. The first settlers, when they came to this part of the country, found this grave. An inscription cut on a lime-stone rock<http://www.kancoll.org/articles/otrail/ortrail3.htm#f3>3 and laid at the grave reads: 'S. M. Marshall, Wadesboro, Ky., died May 27, 1849.' Through the efforts of Rev. W. H. Brown, it was learned that Marshall was one of a party of Kentucky and Tennessee gold seekers that left Wadesboro, Ky., early in the year 1849, under the leadership of Ripley E. Dunlap. Marshall took the cholera and died. When dying he requested to be buried facing his old Kentucky home, where he had left a young wife. His relatives learned that he had died on the plains of Kansas, a week's travel beyond Independence, Mo. The inscription was cut on the stone by R. H. Stevens, who died in California. In 1904 R. W. Pirtle, of Cleburne, Tex., a, nephew of Marshall, learned of the location of the grave through the publication of an account of the grave. He said that he and another nephew, James Marshall, of Lafayette, Tenn., were the only living relatives of the deceased gold seeker." It will be noted that Prather and Marshall died on the same day, May 27, 1849. As stated before, all deaths occurred in May, 1849, so far as can be ascertained. A letter from the Hennessy brothers, of Blaine, Ken., says that their father went to California from St. Louis during the gold rush. He went by way of Nicaragua and returned by the Panama route. He moved to Kansas in 1878 and located on a farm in the Clear creek township, Pottawatomie county. The old trail was still used as a highway. The Hennessy brothers state that there is a grave on the east side of the trail on the James Quigley farm, about fifty or sixty rods south of his house in section 4, Rock Creek township. A native stone that once stood at the head of the grave bore the inscription, "Here rests the unknown." Mr. Hennessy knows exactly where the trail ran through Rock Creek and Clear Creek townships, this county. He joins with the rest of the people in the idea that it should be marked while some vestige of it remains. Thus we close tragedies of the Oregon trail in Pottawatomie county. For more than three-quarters of a century Prather, Rouschi and Marshall, and the other and unknown victims of a cruel fate, have slumbered "in the narrow houses appointed for all living."