Boot Hill Cemetery sits on a hillside just above the main street of Virginia City, a short walk from the historic district. It holds the graves of miners, merchants, and townspeople from the gold rush era, many of them young men who came west chasing fortune and died of accident, disease, or violence. The headstones are a catalogue of hard luck: men in their twenties and thirties, deaths by mining cave-in, gunshot, and the generic "fever" that covered anything the frontier doctor could not diagnose.
The cemetery is open and unfenced, with views down over the town and the surrounding Madison Valley. Walking it takes twenty minutes. The older sections, closest to the original graves from the 1860s, have wooden markers weathered to illegibility — bring a camera with good resolution if you want to read them. The hill itself is steep enough that the walk back down to the main street is a genuine transition from the rough world of the graves to the sanitised version preserved below.