Cavalry remains may stay at ranch
Bodies from 1879 stir modern dispute

Monday, December 09, 2002 - MEEKER - The long-lost skeletons of 12 U.S. cavalry troopers will likely remain in the unmarked grave where they were tossed after an 1879 battle with Ute Indians near present-day Meeker.

Today, they lie under a snowy sheep pasture on the Yellowjacket Ranch in Rio Blanco County, but 123 years ago, it was a bloody, stinking battlefield where angry Utes besieged cavalrymen for six days.

Dead soldiers were heaped in a mass grave and forgotten until an amateur historian accidentally unearthed them two years ago.

Over the past year, some Army brass and veterans have agitated behind the scenes to recover the skeletons for proper burial elsewhere, but the ranchers' lawyer and a spokeswoman for the military's main forensic anthropology lab say there are no plans to recover the remains.

The ranchers are "not interested. (The troopers) are fine where they are," lawyer John Savage of Rifle said recently. "The military has no institutional plan to move buried soldiers in these kinds of circumstances. They know who they are and where they are. It's a battlefield on private land, and they have other things on their plate right now."

Ginger Cauden, spokeswoman for the Army's Central Identification Lab in Hawaii, confirmed last week that the issue had come up, but "we have no plans for a recovery at this time."

In October 2000, amateur historian Brad Edwards of Littleton found two human skeletons he believes were buried after the pivotal 1879 Battle of Milk Creek. Among their bones, he found frontier military buttons, spent bullets, faded fabric and suspender buckles. It's not known how many of the 150 to 200 Utes in the battle were killed or wounded, but none were reported left on the battlefield.

Edwards and local officials believe that he unearthed part of the Army's mass grave; the other corpses, Edwards surmises, are beneath or beside the two he found.

In more than two years since Edwards' discovery, the battlefield on the Yellowjacket Ranch, 20 miles northeast of Meeker, has been locked down by its owners, Charles and Tootsie Carroll of Florida, who didn't like the idea of a government project - perhaps a cumbersome memorial or a seizure of land - on their ranch.

The owners "see it as a working ranch. They are resistant to anything that detracts from that," lawyer Savage said last spring.

The ranchers have approved a future surface survey by Colorado State University's Center for the Environmental Management of Military Lands.

Some military brass have supported Edwards' quest to properly rebury the soldiers, but to no avail.

"The U.S. Army does not leave its dead on the battlefield," Maj. Gen. Kenneth Bowra, a 32-year soldier and decorated Ranger wounded in Vietnam, said last spring. "We owe them more than an unmarked, shallow pit on the prairie, where animals graze over them."

Bowra is now the senior U.S. military representative to the Netherlands. Introduced to Edwards by a mutual friend, Bowra developed an interest in the troopers but could do no more than lobby.

Brig. Gen. John Brown commands the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington. Last spring, he said the Army was very interested in the Milk Creek remains, and "appropriate authorities are working the issue."

"The Army has always sought to recover its dead, and to inter them in a manner appropriate to the era in which they died," Brown said then. "Landowners can fear that they will lose the use of their property to battlefield memorialization, etc. This is never our interest; we already have appropriate cemeteries in which to bury our dead. We virtually always can rely on the patriotic instincts of local citizens in recovering our soldiers."

But as America is poised for a possible new war in Iraq, none of several high-ranking military officials contacted last month - ranging from POW/MIA affairs to the Pentagon's recovery lab - believed the military was inclined to retrieve the Milk Creek troopers.

Although crestfallen, Edwards still hopes the soldiers will eventually get a proper military burial. Toward that end, he's searching for relatives of the dead soldiers.

"We must never lose sight of the fact that the remains I discovered are human beings," the 45-year-old electrician and former merchant sailor said. "Now more than ever, our nation's veterans and active-duty servicemen and women deserve our undying respect and our most sincere gratitude. We must not forget or forsake those who sacrifice their lives in the service of our country."

Ron Franscell can be contacted at rfranscell@denverpost.com .


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