Civil War vet to receive military burial

Eric Leake

Friday, May 27, 2005 | 6:04 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

May 28 - 30, 2005

Two men traveling through the Valley of Fire the evening of June 30, 1915, noticed what appeared to be a man sleeping beneath a buggy along the trail.

The headlights of their Ford runabout fell upon a horse, seemingly sleeping at its tether. The man beneath the buggy appeared to turn toward them as they approached.

One of the men smelled something and looked closer, as recounted in the Las Vegas Age, July 3, 1915.

"As he came near in the darkness and about to speak the stench again smote him. Lighting a match, he approached the quiet figure beneath the buggy and as the rays lighted up the face he saw the busy stream of bugs moving in and out of the staring eyes and realized that he was face to face with another of the almost numberless desert tragedies."

The dead man was 72-year-old John G. Clark. He was determined to have died, along with his horse and dog, of thirst and exhaustion as they crossed the valley. Clark's badly decomposed body was buried where found without ceremony.

Clark was a Civil War veteran, a sergeant in the Union Army, and this Memorial Day Clark will finally receive the military funeral honors entitled him.

"He was never properly buried," said Donald Hotchkiss, who will conduct the ceremony this morning. "We're going to give him a proper Civil War era send off. We're just 90 years late."

Hotchkiss is a chaplain of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Clark's funeral, he said, will include a 21-gun salute, a bugler and honor guard in Civil War uniform.

"We're going to go out there, do it right," Hotchkiss said. "It's appropriate that we put this man to rest."

The Sons of Union Veterans will place a bronze marker at the site.

Decoration Day, the observance that became Memorial Day, was created in 1868 to honor and tend to the graves of fallen soldiers of the Civil War.

Clark is finally receiving his honors in large part because of Diane Greene, a collections specialist with the Boulder City Hoover Dam Museum.

Greene said she was going through records and came upon a photo of a marker at Clark's grave. Intrigued, she tracked Clark's through newspaper accounts, the genealogical library in Salt Lake City and the U.S. National Archives.

"It was fun," Greene said. "It's just like putting together pieces of a puzzle."

Greene learned that Clark was a Canadian-born farmer. He served during the Civil War in infantry and calvary units from New York. During a battle at Harpers Ferry in 1862 he was shot and lost all the fingers and thumb of his right hand.

Clark headed west after the war, living for a time in the territories that became Oklahoma and Arizona. In 1915 he settled in Bakersfield, Calif.

Clark had contracted typhoid fever during the war and suffered from bouts of malaria.

The Bakersfield Californian described him as otherwise "hale and hearty considering his years." When Clark felt the approach of a malarial attack, he would embark upon lengthy journeys to live in the open air.

Clark was on his way from Bakersfield to Salt Lake City when he took the hot, dry trial through the Valley of Fire.

Park Supervisor Jim Hammons said the state park can still be a treacherous place, with summer temperatures as hot as 114 degrees.

"You don't want to be here in the summer," Hammons said. "When you're talking about 114 degrees, you're talking about 114 degrees in the shade."

Hammons said that Clark had probably trekked through the worst of his trip, braving the summer Mojave Desert. Cooler temperatures were ahead at higher elevations and in Utah.

The extreme dry heat can sap a man of energy and distort his thinking, Hammons said.

"Dehydration will take your frame of mind. You'll go into a mania type of situation," he said. "Your blood starts thickening and your brain stops functioning."

Clark was found with dry canteens. A coroner's report notes that footprints marked where Clark left his buggy, searched roughly two miles for water, and returned faint.

Only a half mile in another direction was a spring.

The Las Vegas Age reported that at the end dehydration may have cost Clark his sanity.

"The man's clothing and blankets were torn to strip as though he had died in a frenzy of delerium (sic). The ground where the horse was tied was torn up as though the animal had also struggled to escape his fate."

A new bronze marker has been erected to mark Clark's burial, a few miles east of the visitor's center on State Route 169.