A walk through Nevada’s pet cemeteries
LAS VEGAS — Next to a dry desert lakebed off the Searchlight highway is the sound of metal tags clinking on a collar.
Is there a dog running between the scrub brush? Is the mind playing tricks?
Here is an unmarked grave. Protruding from it is the post of a wooden cross broken to pieces after years of unforgiving sun and wind.
Here is the source of that clinking collar sound. On the cross flaps a metal number – “2” – from the year this companion passed and ended up here.
There’s no name. No indication of what animal lies here. Born: 1945. Died: 1962.
On this patch of desert between Boulder City and Searchlight, highway sounds and dusty silence blow through the final resting places of countless beloved pets.
There’s Foo Foo and Boots. Ted and Ginger. Buddy, Rocky and Lucky.
These are but a few of the residents at Boulder City Pet Cemetery, where families have been informally burying their furry friends for almost 60 years.
The smell is hard to ignore. Dust and dander.
In the mid-1950s, Boulder City didn’t have a trained veterinarian.
Instead, the city had a man named Marwood Doud. He worked for the Bureau of Reclamation but practiced veterinary medicine on the side until a veterinarian came to town. He and a friend at the Bureau of Reclamation named Emory Lockette hatched a plan for the cemetery over drinks.
“One night we were at Marwood’s house and were drinking, and Marwood said some person had had a dog that died and they was just burying ‘em in the backyard of this place and that place,” Lockette said before his death.
“And some guy came up and said, ‘Marwood, why don’t you start a cemetery or something?’” he said in an interview with historian Dennis McBride.
They picked out a little plot of land about four miles south of Railroad Pass on Searchlight Highway, just off an unmarked access road near a dry lakebed.
The earliest reference to the cemetery in a newspaper appeared in 1962, but Doud and Lockette operated there as early as 1957, according to McBride.
It remained the pet cemetery for Boulder City for decades. But people from Las Vegas eventually began burying their pets there as well.
“It became a word-of-mouth type of thing,” McBride said. “It wasn’t publicized, but it was just known as the place in Southern Nevada to take your pet to be buried.”
The land Doud and Lockette chose belonged to the federal government.
“They just sort of squatted their cemetery on it without asking permission,” McBride said. “And Emory at least was earning money for the burials.”
For a fee, Lockette gave deceased pets a proper funeral.
Out of wood he built coffins and planted fence posts painted white to separate graves.
“We figured for a small dog, $25 to go into Vegas and get ‘im and bury ‘im,” Lockette said. “This included makin’ a plywood box. And if it was a larger dog, we charged $35 to go in and come back. And then you always had to take time after you went in to pick up the dog and buried ‘im, the people had to make an appointment so you could meet them down there and show ‘em where the dog was and put a cross on (the grave). It was really a whole (thing).”
Walk through the cemetery today, and you’ll find Lockette’s work. But most of it has been damaged by harsh desert conditions.
“The government made a little stink about it from time to time,” McBride said, “but they never really made any serious or concerted effort to put a stop to it.”
Among the graves are chew toys, milk dishes, ceramic statues of dogs and cats.
Most of the plots offer few clues as to what breeds are buried there. Others include hints that make it easier to tell.
The grave of Chip has a tiny pink turtle painted on it.
The grave of Honey Hilton includes a portrait of the good girl.
Today, the pet cemetery is surrounded by a wire fence with a locked gate.
There’s a sign: “Stop! Pet Burials Prohibited.”
Drivers passing on the highway would miss it, as the graves blend into the desert’s browns, yellows and tans.
The burials here may seem informal. Until you take the winding dirt road past the Valley View Cemetery – 400 miles north in Yerington.
At the top of a hill above Valley View Cemetery, there’s a fork in the road that branches again and again.
Sometimes hard-packed dirt, sometimes loose sand and rocks, the roads wind through fields of sagebrush, homemade shooting ranges and boulders tagged with graffiti.
Tucked between the sagebrush and boulders, homemade crosses and rock cairns stand guard over the remains of some of Yerington’s most beloved residents.
Molly. Annie. Macey. Cocoa. No last names recorded.
“This is where people come to bury their pets,” said Lyon County Manager Jeff Page. “There’s places all over the desert where people bury animals.”
For those unfamiliar with twisting desert roads, finding the cemeteries is no easy task.
At the top of the hill above Valley View Cemetery is the old county landfill. It serves as a marker for finding the burial grounds southeast of Yerington.
Before it closed, the landfill accepted usual household and yard debris – as well as dead pets and livestock.
“They called it the ‘dead animal pit’ and it smelled something fierce,” Page said. “I can remember seeing cows out there from the dairy laying on their backs all bloated. We’d take our .22’s out and shoot them to watch them explode.”
The landfill closed in the early 1990s, but people didn’t stop burying their animals there. Dozens of graves dot the hillsides.
Crosses are made from wooden sticks held together with twine or simple piles of rocks. Some are draped with pet collars.
Strewn around some plots are pieces of favorite toys or blankets.
Some dirt patches are sunken into the landscape. Those are likely graves of pets whose owners forgot to pile up rocks or cement over them.
“If you don’t,” Page said, “the coyotes will get them.”
At Doud and Lockette’s pet cemetery outside Las Vegas, the love felt for the pets buried there is palpable.
You can feel it in the sentiment of messages written on their headstones.
The sweetness of their memories is still alive in words left to remember them.
• Chico Hamilton, September 1963 – September 1970.
“He gave only love.”
• Scooter Littlefield, November 1956 – October 1970.
“She gave her love unselfishly.”
• Marcel Jung, January 1957 – October 1968.
“Those were the days, my friend.”
• Trey Amante, 1949 – 1966. “The best pal I ever had.”