They were soldiers the military stationed at Fort Craig or women and children who sought medical treatment there. All received burials in wooden coffins in the sandy desert following their deaths. All lay in a cemetery with no grave markers — a cemetery that was supposed to be empty. 

In 2007, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area Office exhumed 65 full or partial remains from the Fort Craig Cemetery in New Mexico. The military left bodies behind when it closed the fort and moved graves in 1878 and 1886 after reporting the graves were empty. The military built the fort in the 1854 to protect the area from Apache raids. The fort played a significant role in the Civil War and Indian wars. The cemetery became Reclamation property around 1910 as part of the federal government’s acquisition of land for Elephant Butte Dam and Reservoir.

The possibility that the military had left bodies behind came to light in November 2004. A retired federal historian came into Reclamation’s Albuquerque Area Office to review documents and casually mentioned seeing the mummified remains of a buffalo soldier in a friend’s home. He said the body came from Fort Craig Cemetery in the 1970s.  The historian said his friend was dying and he was trying to talk him into turning in the remains before his death.

Reclamation archeologists Jeff Hanson and Mark Hungerford’s visit to the cemetery revealed signs of looting.

The man accused of removing the body from the cemetery and displaying it in his home is referred to around the Albuquerque Area Office as the “Gravedigger.” He died in December 2004 just as a formal federal investigation was about to begin.

By February 2005, the historian’s tip to Reclamation had the attention of federal agents from the Bureau of Land Management, and they opened a criminal case.  BLM handled the investigation because Reclamation does not have a full-time investigator in Albuquerque. On April 25, BLM investigators asked the Reclamation archaeologists to meet them in a field next to “Gravedigger’s” home. An anonymous drop of remains was to take place. Hungerford and Hansen arrived to see that someone had left a skull in a brown paper bag. The historian identified it as the same one he had seen in the Gravedigger’s home. He wondered aloud about the whereabouts of the rest of the body. To this day, no one has been able to answer that question.

The archaeologists believe the skull is that of Thomas Smith, a 23-year-old farmer from Butler County, Ky. He had enlisted in the 125th infantry in 1864. After the Civil War, he headed to Fort Craig with his unit. Smith’s death records state his cause of the death as dysentery and the date of his burial as Nov. 24, 1866. Witnesses identified the skull as Smith’s. They also told investigators that the Gravedigger had the plot map for Fort Craig and that Thomas Smith’s name on the map had a circle around it. Reclamation efforts to get a copy of the map from the National Archives have been unsuccessful. Smith’s name does not appear on any of the re-internment rolls for the cemeteries that accepted the remains the military had moved from Fort Craig when it exhumed the cemetery twice before.

Federal agents executed a search warrant on the Gravedigger’s home on April 27, 2005. The search revealed artifacts from Fort Craig and other historical sites. A flowerbed was lined with potsherds (broken pottery from excavations) and iron artifacts. Agents found a box of buttons with the label “Fort Conrad and Fort Craig” and buckets containing hundreds of Civil-War-era bullets and cartridge casings. They could not seize many items in the home because the warrant was specific to documents and artifacts related to Fort Craig.

The criminal investigation of the Gravedigger ended in 2007. He was dead, and nobody connected with the case would undergo prosecution.          

Throughout the investigation, the archaeologists continued to examine the cemetery for signs of additional bodies. Although an initial excavation revealed only bone fragments, ground-penetrating radar revealed evidence of at least 17 bodies. Reclamation had previously attempted to fence the cemetery, which is located in a remote area between Socorro, N.M., and Elephant Butte Reservoir. Vandals destroyed the fence. Suddenly, it wasn’t a question of water management or energy production that faced Reclamation managers and staff. It was a question of proper protection and honor for the soldiers and civilians that time has forgotten.  They determined that the only way to ensure this was to move the remains to a properly maintained national cemetery.

Reclamation began a full excavation of the cemetery in August 2007. That is when archeologists exhumed the bodies of 36 adult males, 2 females, 26 children and a surgeon’s pit.  Rochelle Bennett, a physical anthropologist with Reclamation’s Technical Service Center in Denver, has spent weeks at a time in Albuquerque performing full osteologic examinations to try to identify the bodies. Reclamation expects to turn the remains over to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs next summer for burial at the Santa Fe National Cemetery.  

For many in the Albuquerque Area Office, especially the archaeologists, this case has become very personal.

“This is one of the most important things I’ll do in my lifetime,” Hanson said.

Tears filled his eyes one day as he described the partially mummified remains of a child in one of the coffins that remained completely intact during the excavation.

During breaks from assisting with the analysis, Hungerford and Hanson answer calls from concerned veterans groups. They answer e-mails from the public on whether they can assist with headstones or other honors for these people.    

“History left these people behind,” Hanson said. “They need not to be forgotten, and it’s our obligation to do everything we can to make sure that happens.”

Hungerford and Hanson hope that through the analysis process, they might identify some of the remains. They have left open the possibility of doing DNA comparisons if anyone comes forward with a strong connection that matches one of the remains.           

Reclamation excavated the cemetery with funds from the Albuquerque Area Office and the Technical Service Center’s cultural resource program.  Reclamation selected the project as its Heritage Education Project of the Year for 2008. Reclamation Cultural Preservation Officer Tom Lincoln has provided much support to the Albuquerque Area Office on Fort Craig. He is also helping as Reclamation moves forward with a documentary on the project.

Hungerford and Hanson now use the case involving the looting at Fort Craig as an educational tool in their lectures. They talk of archaeological community’s irresponsibility, noting some professionals and government employees knew of the looting and failed to report it or take action against it. They also lecture on the damage looters do to cultural resources.

“Once you loot a site, once you take a shovel and start digging into a prehistoric hearth or a room block or even a grave or coffin, you are destroying it in a way that can never be reconstructed again,” Hanson said.

Hanson and Hungerford realize that many archaeologists will never see a project of this magnitude in their entire career. “It’s a story I will tell my grandchildren,” Hungerford said.