On Saturday, the remains of Mormon pioneer Rebecca Winters will be put to rest for the second time in the Nebraska prairie where she died 143 years ago.
Members of a handcart pilgrimage making their way to Utah along the Mormon Trail in 1852 buried Winters when she died of cholera as the group passed through Nebraska's Panhandle region. They marked her grave, near what is now the intersection of U.S. 26 and S. Beltline East, with an iron wheel off one of the wagons.Over the decades, the rusty, half-buried wagon wheel has identified the gravesite for tourists and scholars visiting the grassy site near the Burlington Northern Railroad. BNR officials exhumed Winters' skeleton in early September, fearing for the safety of visitors who train conductors reported were venturing too close to tracks just 6 feet from the grave.
The woman's remains have been in a local funeral home's custody while officials got approval for a one-person cemetery about 300 yards from the train track.
"We would've preferred they not move her at all. We thought maybe they could move the markers, but leave her there," Shirley Phelps, Winters great-great-granddaughter, said from her home in Hoytsville. "But we know there were safety concerns, and since she had to be moved, we are glad she's going to be moved into a little park of her own."
Phelps said the move satisfied the curiosity of family members who wondered whether Winters was truly buried below the marker so long ago. "Some said there probably wouldn't be anything there, nobody could know for sure."
After the 4 p.m. ceremony Saturday, a small park, monument and the wagon wheel familiar to many Utah tourists will mark the gravesite, visited by an estimated 15,000 travelers retracing pioneer tracks along the Mormon Trail each year.
The railroad has been helpful and respectful, contacting Winters' descendants and paying for a new casket and vault, said Rita Webster, Winters great-great-granddaughter. Webster joined 50 distant relatives when she traveled from Sandy to Nebraska for the exhumation in September.
"They've always had this area set off from the grave, but it hasn't been kept up too well," she said. "Now they'll keep it up nice."