In 1863, a short distance from here, seven passengers on the Overland Stage were murdered during a robbery and were buried on this hill. James Thompson, a station guard, blamed the crime on the infamous outlaw Jack Slade, but Slade’s involvement was never proven and the case remains unsolved because there were no surviving witnesses and the dead have not yielded their secrets. Slade had come west as Division Superintendent for Ben Halladay’s Overland Mail, and in 1862 he relocated the North Platte and Sweetwater Rivers portion of the mail route to this point, supervising construction of the stage stations, including the Rock Point or Almond Station within sight of this cemetery. His life was recounted in numerous history books and two Hollywood films. After abandoning his job with the Overland Mail Company and turning outlaw, the hard-drinking Slade was lynched in Virginia City, Montana, in 1864. Mark Twain recounted meeting Slade in Roughing It, writing, “He was so friendly an so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of his awful history. It was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the raw-head-and-bloody-bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified their children with.”