Long forgotten, but remembered

I was scouting the location for my next PhotoCrawl, Idaho City, and was wandering through the Boise County Pioneer Cemetery just on the outskirts of town. I've been here before and it's one of the more peaceful and natural cemeteries I've visited. Situated on a hillside, now within a healthy Ponderosa Pine grove, some graves no longer bear the markers of their inhabitants while others are being restored or markers replaced with stones that have a definitely more modern look.

As I wandered through looking at the names and dates I wondered how many of these people still have descendants in the area, how many receive visits from relatives and not tourists from down in the valley. I wondered what their life was like in the early 1800s in the mountains of Idaho. The area looked much different then, almost bare of trees (now a thick forest) and the land worked hard over nearly every square foot as miners and prospectors dug and scraped for gold. Men and women from all over the U.S. and the world lived here. Chinese and other nationalities working and prospecting, creating and operating prosperous (and not so prosperous) businesses; avoiding injury and death from mining accidents, disease and plague, and mean individuals who were quick to pull a trigger.

A hundred + years after my death, who will be wandering through a similar plot of ground wondering the same thing?