Seney's Boot Hill Cemetery

     When I drive through Michigan towns, I don't just check out tourist attractions, I like to look for the remnants of how people lived in the past. This often leads to old cemeteries. A favorite is in the Keweenaw Peninsula copper mining county where I found a row of tombstones marking the graves of boys about ten years old. The date of death was the same on each grave, leading me to believe they died in a mid-19th century mine accident. In Seney in the central Upper Peninsula, I drove just south of the town of about 300 and found the old Boot Hill cemetery, with mostly unmarked graves. I suspect most were lumber jacks who died in accidents, but you never know in Seney, which around the turn of the 20th century was a booming lumber town of about 3,000. There were many saloons, and fights. Some could have been victims of the violence. A visitor can tell where the graves are because most have sunken in. Some have crosses on them, others not. I try to work such sites into my guide book because it tells readers about a real place.