By Joe Livernois
Not much is known about Jesús Comache except that he miraculously survived Mexico’s black plague in the 1880s. He immigrated to the United States, where he was a trusted vaquero for a South Monterey County cattleman for nearly 30 years. When he died in 1923, no one knew how old he might have been.
Except for this fleeting mention in a modest Substack post, Jesús Comache is largely forgotten.
So is the mysterious, well-dressed man that a couple of Marina residents found washed ashore on the beach in early 1929. His body was badly decomposed, and law enforcement initially thought it might have been a missing homicide suspect. After checking dental records and laundry marks, the Monterey County coroner was unable to identify the corpse, and he was listed as John Doe.
And then there is Julian Madini, who at the time of his death in 1911 was 84 years old. The Salinas newspaper noted that he died “friendless and alone.”
Comache, John Doe and Madini are each buried under the high grass on what is now an otherwise nondescript sloping weed patch adjacent to one of the busiest intersections in Salinas. The patch of land, surrounded by a high chain-link fence, is the old county cemetery, with a current population of about 800 souls, more or less.
The unmarked cemetery is known as Potter’s Field, the popular name given to final resting places for indigent, unidentified or unclaimed corpses. It is literally where the bodies are buried.
For nearly 130 years, the 3.4-acre site at the corner of Natividad Road and Laurel Drive was the burial site for unfortunate citizens without the money, an identity or the family to pay for a “proper burial.” The cemetery is on a bluff with a view of the flatlands of Carr Lake.
The place is as anonymous as its inhabitants, all of whom took memories of the loves and the laughs and the sorrows of their lives to their sad little graves.
A crook named Bat Ferris tried to break into a Salinas milling company early one morning in 1917 but was shot dead by a watchman. Ferris was apparently very popular with women, according to one newspaper, which reported that a “large number of (them) called at the Salinas undertaking parlors to view the remains” after his death. “One woman who reviewed the remains failed to find any sleep last night.”
At his inquest, witnesses pointed out that Ferris had “as fine a physique as can be found.” Though not exactly a handsome man, his powerful body was smooth and in perfect condition; “a gift given to but few.”
His death at the hands of the night watchman apparently closed a number of burglary cases for police in Salinas, but even then he didn’t have enough money to pay for a funeral or burial. He is buried in that Salinas lot.
The county cemetery hasn’t been maintained in years, other than an occasional mowing of tall grass. Many of the modest markers have been pulverized by the weather or stolen by human ghouls. For a period, a farmer was allowed to grow barley over the graveyard.
It has mostly been forgotten, though occasionally a kind soul will comment that the souls of the departed deserve better than what they’re getting on this mortal coil.
In January of 1958, a Prunedale activist/gadfly named Douglass Allmond wrote an eloquent letter to the editor that chastised county officials for letting Potter’s Field go to pot. “The fact that those who are buried there were of less fortunate circumstances in worldly goods than others of their fellowmen does not lessen the fact that they were human beings created in the image of our Maker,” he wrote. “Therefore does it not cast a dubious reflection upon us as a people, and the county officials in particular, who are responsible for this spot’s further descrecration …”
Allmond’s plaintive message caught the attention of the Board of Supervisors, which almost immediately ordered a study of the situation. County officials concluded that they were doing the best they could, under the circumstances, and the extra income the county received for the barley crop helped offset the cost of burying the bodies. Also, county prisoners were occasionally sent to clean up weeds and trash from the property.
The general consensus among previous generations was that getting buried in Potter’s Field at the government’s expense was an ignominious outcome for the unfortunates. It is among the reasons why, once upon a time, citizens joined fraternal organizations, memberships of which came with the promise that members would receive proper burials in respectable cemeteries.
Sometimes, local friends and neighbors raised funds to prevent a friend from the eternal shame of the county cemetery. In early 1957, for instance, a 20-year-old German woman died with her husband in a vehicle accident on Old Stage Road near Salinas. Lieselotte Patterson’s husband, Frederick, was a soldier stationed at Camp Roberts, and because he was with the Army his body was shipped back home to Rhode Island for burial. The Army was not obligated to ship Lieselotte anywhere for any service.
It appeared that Lieselotte Patterson’s body was destined for burial in Potter’s Field. Her surviving mother, back home in Germany, was unable to pay the cost of returning the body. A local mortuary received a telegram from her husband’s family in Rhode Island that read: “Do not wish to claim body of Lieselotte Patterson. Dispose of body as you see fit.”
Lieselotte had few friends in the area — she was young and had been living in the United States only 18 months — but the few friends she did have didn’t want her to become a county obligation. They pooled their money in less than a day, and managed to arrange a funeral at Paul’s mortuary and burial in the Catholic cemetery in Monterey.
The first known reference to a “Potter’s Field” comes from the Bible. In the story of Judas Iscariot, the master of betrayal, Matthew noted that the chief priests took thirty pieces of silver from Judas “and gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord directed,” after his own death. The paupers’ graveyards were named “Potter’s Field” because bodies of indigents and undesirables were placed in the holes conveniently already dug in the clay earth by potters.
The term was picked up in 19th-century New York, and then throughout the rest of the country. “The biblical veneer of the term was perhaps an antidote to one of the distressing costs of life in the chaotic new democratic city,” according to Common Place, an historic website about life in early America. “At least, in Potter’s Field, they lay under a vague biblical cope.”
Many of those buried at the county cemetery were older men and women who had been consigned to the county hospital off Natividad Road for various medical maladies, ranging from tuberculosis to old age.
Among those who were carried across the street from the hospital to a pauper’s grave was Jesús Vásquez, reputedly one of five brothers of Tiburcio Vásquez. Tiburcio was the bandit of legend and lore, but records don’t show what his little brother Jesús did for a living. He apparently spent most of his life in Monterey County and died at the ripe old age of 93, in October 1925. He had been a patient at the county hospital for six years before his death.
Nobody claimed his body or showed up to arrange a funeral, so he is buried somewhere near the intersection of Natividad and Laurel. A newspaper account of his passing noted that Jesús Vásquez enjoyed telling tales of the Old West. But, unlike his brother, “Jesús Vásquez was always peaceful and law abiding.”
Also dying at the county hospital and sent to Potter’s Field was George Priestly, who had been a patient — “a decrepit, senile old man” — for three years. One evening in 1909, at the age of 73, Priestly rose from his hospital bed, took a seat in a nearby chair, lit his pipe and died where he sat. The smoldering pipe set fire to the linen on his bed. The smoke eventually awakened another patient, who called for help. Priestly’s face, according to a headline in the Salinas Californian, was “burned to a crisp.”
Years after Douglass Allmond raised a fuss about the condition of the cemetery, a Salinas resident named Ila Gypsee Gaze wrote annual letters to the editor at the Salinas Californian to complain about the place. She noted that most of the graves were missing their markers.
After the third letter, published in 1977, a couple of stories appeared in the Californian that explained the county’s position on the old cemetery. That position — which apparently remains county policy— was that the county doesn’t really have the money to keep the place up. It was noted that the county did make a nominal improvement a year earlier when a chain-link fence was erected to keep dirt-bikers out.
During the widening of East Laurel Drive more than 60 years ago, an effort was made to disinter bodies in the right-of-way and move them elsewhere in the cemetery. Apparently a couple of them were overlooked, because in August 1964, workmen digging a pipeline on Laurel unearthed two coffins beneath the pavement of the road. County officials pulled out the bodies and relocated them, but the empty coffins remain buried beneath the pavement.
Around 1977, the county ran out of space at the cemetery so they started cremating the remains of the sad poor souls who otherwise would be resting in the weed patch overlooking Carr Lake. The last burial in the cemetery was an unceremonious affair on Aug. 3, 1977. The person was not identified, but the marker reads “No. 808.”
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