Faithful Unto Death: Read an exclusive excerpt from a book on unusual pet memorials
Humans mourn animals in a myriad ways. Here, an animal grieves. Meet Shep, a dog who showed up at a railway station in Montana, and met heartbreak every day.
No one knew where the scruffy-looking dog came from, the one that showed up on an autumn day in 1936 at the Fort Benton, Montana, railroad station. He had walked in of his own accord and sat down as if he were waiting for the incoming train. Looking on expectantly, he scanned the passengers as they disembarked, and then turned and left in dejection. If that weren’t odd enough, he did the same thing the next day, the day after, and the day after that. The staff didn’t know what to make of it, but they did know that he was getting thinner each time he came. And a watchman had seen the dog walk over a mile to the river just to get water. Whoever he was waiting for, the poor dog shouldn’t have to go hungry or thirsty, so they started leaving table scraps and bowls of fresh water for him. And when they realized he had been sleeping under the depot, they gave him a bed by the fireplace since Montana nights can get awfully cold.

They also gave him a name, Shep, since he was mostly shepherd, mixed with a bit of collie. Eventually, a crew member was found who mentioned how the dog had watched while they placed a casket onto an eastbound train. It contained the body of a sheepherder, and apparently the dog had been his. No one knew the man’s name, he had been a real loner, and he and the dog were all the other had. After they loaded the casket, the dog tried to board behind it, but the crew pushed him off. He whined piteously as the door slammed shut, then trotted down the tracks in pursuit as the train departed. And now he was back at the station, waiting on every new train, looking for a master who would never return.

The basic outline of Shep’s story isn’t unique. It is the story of the mourning dog, the loyal canine that waits pitifully at the last place a human companion was seen, or withers away at his lost friend’s grave. While they have long been a staple of canine lore, such stories became especially prominent in the second half of the 19th century, as a kind of flipside to the love humans were developing for pets. The first generation of pet cemeteries provided a clear public statement that we were capable of mourning animals. But if that love was true, they would mourn us too, and images of grieving animals started to become popular. George Jesse’s History of the British Dog, for example, included an image of a dog wasting away over a grave. “Where thou diest, will I die” read the caption, to further emphasize the point.
And it wasn’t fiction. In Edinburgh, Scotland’s most famous Skye terrier, Greyfriars Bobby, created the modern archetype when he mourned his way into history at the grave of John Gray, but there are plenty of other cases. In Luco di Mugello, Italy, Fido used to walk to the bus stop each morning when his master, Carlo Soriani, headed off to a factory, and then meet him when he returned. But this was during World War II, and one day the bombs came and Carlo never again got off the bus. But that didn’t stop Fido from waiting for fourteen more years. The most famous of them all, Hachiko, waited nearly ten years for Hidesaburo Ueno, a university professor who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, to return to Tokyo’s Shibuya Station.
If the basic outline of Shep’s story isn’t unique, the details are, and as for his grave, it is unlike any other. As his vigil was picked up by the newspapers and printed across the country, Shep became the biggest celebrity in the city, if not the whole state. It was still the Depression back then, and maybe that’s why; maybe people whose lives had been mercilessly uprooted could better empathize with a dog that refused to forget a man who the rest of humanity had forgotten. Passengers began routing their tickets through Fort Benton just to meet him. And he was always there, waiting on every train that pulled in.
It’s easy to misunderstand Shep’s story. If Hollywood were to write it—one might imagine it as a Disney movie—everyone would love Shep and he would love them back. He would bound towards each incoming train through a maze of hands that offered pets and scratches, as if all these strangers were his new best friends. But this would be far from the truth. In no measure is Shep’s a feel-good story. Rather, it is the tragic tale of a broken-hearted dog. He was not friendly, especially towards strangers. Many well-meaning people had offered him their homes, but he refused all of them. The attention he received only made him nervous, and he tolerated it because there was one thing in the world he wanted, the station had taken it away and he prayed that the station would return it. That hope kept him waiting and watching every day for nearly six years. But on each of those days, with every train that came, his heart broke anew.

Shep’s vigil ended on January 12, 1942. He was by then old and deaf, and didn’t hear the 235 as it barreled around the bend. Eventually he sensed the vibration of the tracks, but he slipped on the icy rails into its path and suddenly it was Fort Benton’s turn to mourn. They buried him high on a bluff, with an obelisk placed over the grave. And lest memory fade, they spelled out Shep in big letters and placed a silhouette of him alongside. A spotlight was installed too, so that travelers at night would still have an opportunity to see Fort Benton’s famous dog as they pulled into town. And as they looked up at his visage, maybe they would ponder whether somewhere in the Big Sky, as they call it in those parts, where the days are as blue as lapis and the stars shine like crystals, the faithful dog got his reward, finally found his reunion.
(Excerpted with permission from Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion by Paul Koudounaris, published by Thames & Hudson; 2024)
