LAND OF THE DEAD

     The fabled nineteenth-century migration to the American West was filled with peril and despair. Death was a constant companion, and the promised land proved as lethal as it was fickle.

     This book explores how the demands of survival and adaptation during Westward Expansion changed the way we have buried and grieved for our dead in America. That custom was only one of many transformations an outlier adolescent culture wrought upon the nation that spawned it.

     Nowhere did these changes play out more dynamically than gold rush "instant city" San Francisco - the only major metropolis to execute a complete eviction of its dead - an event that led to the formation of nearby Colma, the largest necropolis in America.