ALBUQUERQUE — Until a few years ago, the memory of three African-American soldiers was buried beneath the desert in New Mexico, their remains left behind by the military and to the mercy of looters.
With some investigating and modern forensics, government archaeologists excavated the remains and identified them as Army Pvts. Thomas Smith, David Ford and Levi Morris. They were among the famed Buffalo Soldiers, African-American members of the U.S. Army who served at remote outposts on the Western frontier.
On July 28, more than 130 years after their deaths, they will be laid to rest with full military honors at the Santa Fe National Cemetery.
They will have named headstones with birth and death dates, and forensic sketches of what they looked like when they were alive will be displayed alongside each casket during the hour-long service.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Julius Parker, one of the Army’s highest-ranking African-American military intelligence officers, will deliver the eulogy while members of the Tucson-based Arizona Buffalo Soldiers Association, dressed in period uniforms, will serve as pallbearers.
The ceremony marks the end of an exhaustive project by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which exhumed more than 60 sets of human remains of men, women and children in 2007 after widespread grave looting was discovered at the historical Fort Craig cemetery in southern New Mexico.
Fort Craig protected settlers from American Indian raids in the late 1800s. Union troops stationed there fought the Confederacy as it moved into New Mexico from Texas in 1862.
The soldiers were identified using high- tech equipment and Army enlistment and medical records from Fort Craig.
Medical records showed that Morris died from an ax wound to the back, Ford succumbed to a spinal infection and Smith suffered complications from typhoid fever.
