Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Bodies from Civil War-era New Mexico graveyard will be reburied away from looters

Scott Sandlin ©2009 The Albuquerque Journal

Used by permission

Toward the end of the Civil War, former slave Thomas Smith joined the 125th United States Colored Troops unit in Butler County, Ky.

Within two years of his 1864 enlistment, he was dead at age 23. The surgeon listed the cause as inflammation of the bowels from cholera. He was a private at Fort Craig, an Army post along the Rio Grande south of Socorro.

Well over a century later, a brown paper grocery bag containing the buffalo soldier's skull was handed over to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation archaeologists at a meeting in Peralta, with a Bureau of Land Management agent, a historian and a member of the medical examiner's office.

"We're standing looking into this bag on the back of a truck. It appears to us to be of archaeological interest ... It had been identified by the looter as Thomas Smith, and this guy was a very good researcher," said Mark Hungerford, one of the archaeologists involved in a remarkable tale of looting, intrigue and ultimately deliverance for Smith and others buried at the cemetery.

"It was a pathetic ending. That guy served his country," Hungerford said, "and here he is on this bumper."

With that delivery in 2005, Hungerford and Jeffery Hanson, a fellow Bureau of Reclamation archaeologist in Albuquerque, were fully launched on a quest that has involved extensive archival searches, two archaeological excavations and laboratory analyses by federal agencies from Honolulu to Washington, D.C.

The investigation will soon be chronicled in an hour-long documentary still in production.

And come July 28, the remains of more than 60 people who died at Fort Craig will be reburied — this time with pomp and ceremony — at the Santa Fe National Cemetery.

Following the looters

The first glimmer of what the archaeologists were getting into came with word in the fall of 2004 about a mummified body that was in a private residence.

"First, we think 'Who's got a mummified body?'" Hungerford recalled.

He and Hanson set out for the Fort Craig cemetery site on Bureau of Reclamation property (the Fort Craig historical site is on BLM land), where they found unmistakable signs of looting. Next, they put in motion a contract for a cemetery survey using a ground-penetrating magnetometer to assess what might still be there.

In April 2005, BLM special agent Noel Wagner got a tip about the dropoff of the skull on the Peralta property of Dee Brecheisen, a history enthusiast and researcher believed to have taken the skull and the mummified body of another buffalo solider 35 years earlier. Brecheisen died in December 2004.

With archaeologists at hand, the bag containing the skull — intact with hair and skin — was retrieved, and law enforcement conducted a search of Brecheisen's by now mostly vacant home.

"Now we know it's a reality," Hanson said of the looted remains. "Before it was just theoretical."

The archaeologists were particularly interested in trying to find a cemetery plot map, because Brecheisen had told people that with it, he was able match up burial registries and determine whom he'd dug up.

Army personnel at the fort between 1854 and 1886 were mandated to maintain such a map — and sometimes criticized for the sloppiness of their record-keeping — to keep tabs on who was buried there. The Army had exhumed remains in 1876 and reburied them at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, and again in 1886, and reburied the remains at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Hanson believed there weren't any bodies left in the cemetery.

"(Reburial) was common in the West at the time after the Indian wars had ended," he said. "Forts were closed, soldiers were moved and centralized into national cemeteries."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Albuquerque was looking hard at a criminal prosecution, based on theft of government property or potential violation of archaeological protection laws, even though Brecheisen had died.

To do that, "we had to have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the skull that was retrieved was from Fort Craig," Hanson said.

Focused on a potential criminal case, the archaeologists decided to conduct focused excavations — not an easy undertaking given the soccer-field dimensions of the graveyard.

They didn't know where to dig until an anonymous source offered to lead Wagner to a spot in the cemetery where a stake was marked, "buffalo soldier."

"You can't make this stuff up," Hanson said. "That gave us a place to start digging."

Emotional finds

With an excavation team that included volunteers from the FBI, State Police and the sheriff's department, the archaeologists put in a trench — an archaeological sampling technique.

Initially, they found coffins with no bones and a handful of artifacts. Looters had hit every corner of the cemetery, leaving behind items over the years that became artifacts themselves: a 1973-vintage Pepsi can, plastic cigarette filters dating from the 1960s and a plastic cup featuring then-Baltimore Colts player Bubba Smith.

Eventually, the sheer volume required diggers to bring in a backhoe. They took out about 23 coffins, a number of small finger and toe bones, and artifacts like leather shoes, buttons, bullets and cartridge cases.

But no complete skeletons.

Samples of those remains were sent to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, which is responsible for bringing back and identifying remains of service personnel from past conflicts — though most are far closer in time.

"It was within their mission, even though these soldiers were from the 1870s and 1880s. They volunteered to do the DNA analysis," Hanson said.

The researchers were persuaded the skull was indeed that of Thomas Smith based on interviews with witnesses who'd seen documentation while Brecheisen was alive, but they weren't able to locate living relatives to compare the sample to.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Katherine McCulloch decided there wasn't enough evidence to bring a criminal case against family members who had dismantled the estate or others who had been in Brecheisen's home and seen "museum quality" artifacts — and the mummified remains of a second buffalo soldier — and never reported it to authorities.

Meanwhile, the remote sensing report suggested a likely 18 to 30 burials still in the cemetery.

"That presents a management issue, since we know there's looting out there," Hungerford said.

Hanson and Hungerford constructed an electronic slide show to educate management about what was there, and how much it would cost to excavate.

BOR Public affairs specialist Mary Perea Carlson said it was a matter of getting supervisors on board with the reality "that these graves couldn't be protected where they were."

By August 2007, an archaeological contract firm had been hired and was on site to excavate areas indicated by the remote sensing techniques. In two days, they had five bodies. At the end, they had more than 60 full or partial human remains: 25 small children or infants, four women and 34 adult men. Bone analysis by a Bureau of Reclamation osteologist in Denver determined that five of the men and one woman were African-American.

"I have to tell you, this was not fun," Hanson said. "One of the infant coffins came out with the studs intact. Whoever made that coffin took great pains with it."

When it was opened in Reclamation's Albuquerque office, there was a mummified child with eyelashes, lips, combed hair, gown and tiny hands folded across the chest that held desiccated flowers.

"As an archaeologist, you can isolate yourself from emotion, but with the children, it was aaahhh," Hungerford said, letting loose a deep sigh.

'Nobody paid for it'

Archaeologists then had plenty of human remains but no way of identifying them. The original plot map that Brecheisen had shown people over the years as he removed burials was nowhere to be found in government archives.

"The archival police — they actually have them — are looking for that map. I wish them luck, because we have no clue where it is," Hanson said.

There are positives from what Hanson has lectured about at archaeological conclaves as the "Incident at the Fort Craig Cemetery."

Extensive, detailed photos and notations about the artifacts, bones and other remains will provide a wealth of information about medicine at a critical transition period, when procedures like hand-washing weren't common even among surgeons.

The people whose remains were uprooted from the cemetery will be reburied in new, handmade coffins at a national cemetery.

The Fort Craig cemetery, now devoid of burials, has been backfilled, regraded and reseeded with native grasses.

But the experience has been a bitter one for the archaeologists, who are angered by the lost dignity for the people taken from their graves and by the loss of any information about them — and by the knowledge that those aware of the looting looked the other way.

"There's no justification for taking human graves for any reason," Hanson said.

To Hungerford, one of the tragedies is that a large group of people was forgotten by history, then their history was obliterated.

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