Every month we feature an interesting headstone or marker and the person who lived the life remembered.

John Wesley Iliff was Colorado's and the West's first great Cattle King. After opening a small general store in Denver City in the spring of 1859, Iliff began to purchase from the daily arriving immigrants their gaunt, footworn and trail-weary cattle, hoping that somehow the animals could be fattened on the grasslands surrounding Denver and eventually sold to the various mining camps in the district.

To his surprise, the experiment worked and Iliff found himself in the cattle business. At the time of his death in 1878, John Wesley Iliff controlled a vast cattle kingdom stretching 100 miles upstream along the South Platte River from Julesburg, owned more than 35,000 head of cattle, employed some 50 cowboys and had amassed an estate valued close to $1,000,000. Later, in tribute to Iliff s strong religious convictions, his widow, Elizabeth Iliff Warren, founded the Iliff School of Theology and strongly supported the growth and development of the University of Denver.

The bronze statue below the Iliff monument is the Daly Memorial, an original artwork sculpted by Denver's Robert Garrison. Other Garrison works in bronze include the two mountain lions at the doorway to the State Office Building and the children on sea lions in the Civic Center fountain.

To your left stands the William J. Barker mausoleum. A pioneer in 1860, Barker became mayor of Denver (1874-1876) and later acquired considerable property in the city. Note the inscription, "Pioneer," above the doorway. Wherever this appears, it means that the person memorialized arrived in Colorado no later than January, 1861 and was a member of the Colorado Society of Pioneers, a highly prestigious and exclusive organization. To be a member, one had to play a noteworthy role in the growth of early Colorado.

On the hill behind the Barker mausoleum near the Chapel is the Smails Mausoleum. This large structure, built in 1916 at a cost of more than $50,000, is fashioned out of Vermont Barre granite. Inside, the sarcophagi are modeled after that in Napoleon's tomb in Paris and were made from solid blocks of granite. The lid of each sarcophagus weighs 7,300 pounds. North, to the extreme right of the Iliff monument on the corner, is the mausoleum of John Galen Locke, the leader of the Colorado Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. In 1926, during a federal investigation of Locke's tax returns, the Locke mausoleum was broken into by persons seeking the Klansman's missing tax records. The records were never found and Locke was eventually sentenced to prison for contempt of Court.

On your way to post 3 look for the Gove monument on your right, halfway down the drive in Block 1 under the big oak tree. Aaron Gove, after whom Gove Jr. High School is named, was superintendent of the Denver Public Schools for many years.