Honoring the forgotten

Today the remains of three African-American soldiers will be buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery, more than 130 years after their deaths.

Army Pvts. David Ford, Levi Morris and Thomas Smith were among the famous “Buffalo Soldiers,” African-American men who served in the military during the Civil War and later guarded the farthest reaches of the West. Their remains, along with more than 60 other sets, were exhumed from New Mexico’s Fort Craig cemetery, after the Bureau of Reclamation discovered extensive looting there in 2007.

The servicemen will receive full military honors at their ceremony, along with new headstones and forensic sketches of what they looked like in life displayed next to their caskets. Finding and honoring them is admirable, especially given how little the general public remembers the Buffalo Soldiers (outside of some very catchy Bob Marley lyrics). So here’s a little history lesson for you:  

The nickname Buffalo Soldiers was given to the men by the Cherokee or Comanche Indians, depending on whom you ask. From 1866 to the early 1890s, the regiments served primarily in the Southwest United States and the Great Plains area, fighting in various Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and the 1916 Mexican Expedition, as well as fulfilling other peace-keeping tasks like building roads and escorting U.S. mail.

One little-known contribution of the Buffalo Soldiers is their role as some of the nation’s first park rangers, serving in Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada. Yosemite Park Ranger Shelton Johnson painstakingly researched the history of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Sierra Nevada after he found an old photograph in Yosemite’s research library:

Johnson discovered that in 1903 members of the 9^th Cavalry built the first trail to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the lower 48 states. They also built the first wagon road in Sequoia’s Giant Forest and built an arboretum at Yosemite.

Like the actions of the Yosemite Buffalo Soldiers, time has weathered away much of what we know about the three men to be buried in Santa Fe. If anything, their remains remind us of how hard life their lives were on the frontier, says Lisa Croft, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Albuquerque deputy manager.

Medical records show that Ford died from a spinal infection, Morris endured an ax wound to the back, and Smith passed away from complications from typhoid fever. The Bureau of Reclamation placed newspaper ads in their hometowns in Kentucky and Ohio in search of any descendants, but so far have had no luck.

Honoring the soldiers however, is a matter of respecting an important part of a forgotten history.

“The act of remembering assigns importance to a story, and the act of forgetting diminishes its importance,” Johnson says.