By Ron Franscell
Denver Post Staff Writer

MEEKER - Grafton Lowery died twice.

The cavalry scout was plugged in the head by Ute sharpshooters in the first few hours of the 1879 Battle of Milk Creek near present-day Meeker. His body was piled with other dead soldiers, then covered with canvas and dirt as a breastworks to protect the besieged troopers who had survived the ambush.

Days later, when the decaying corpses were being moved, Lowery miraculously rose from the dead. "What's the matter, boys?" he asked. When the stupefied camp surgeon probed his brain for the "fatal" bullet, Lowery promptly died again and was tossed in a nearby mass grave.

But never in his twice-killed dreams did Lowery imagine another battle
would rage over him and 11 dead comrades more than a century later.

In the end, a bent Army spoon was their only tombstone.

But that spoon led Brad Edwards of Littleton to a macabre discovery in October 2000: two skeletons buried in a sheep pasture where U.S. cavalry troopers fought Ute Indians in the pivotal 1879 Battle of Milk Creek. Among their bones were frontier military buttons, spent bullets, faded fabric and suspender buckles.

Only a few inches below the surface, the old spoon first tickled his metal detector. But the signals kept coming, so Edwards kept digging. Startled to sweep dirt away from two gleaming white skulls only 30 inches down, Edwards snapped a photo and quickly covered them up. But first, he unclasped a small silver cross from around his neck and buried it with them.

Edwards likely stumbled upon the mass grave where Lowery and 11 of his comrades were thrown after the battle; the other corpses, he surmises, are beneath or beside the two he found.

He immediately reported his find to Rio Blanco County Coroner Dr. D.W. Eskelson, who never examined the actual remains but last year ruled them to be the lost troopers from the 1879 battle.

In 15 months 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. Edwards has been forbidden from setting foot on the property, and the ranchers have been as silent as the dead troopers.

Edwards, 44, a genial electrician and self-taught historian who never graduated from high school, now finds himself in the eye of a moral and legal whirlwind. He desperately believes the troopers deserve more respect, but he's been frustrated in his efforts to persuade the Carrolls and authorities to help.

Although ranch managers made him promise to keep quiet about his explorations, the grave discovery changed everything - especially when the ranchers wanted to hush it up completely, Edwards says. He couldn't just leave them in that trench, a dreadful secret required by an unwitting promise.

"This has become my life's work," says Edwards, a former merchant mariner who'd someday like to write a book about the battle and his discovery. "I just can't get it out of my mind that these men died in combat. ... Ideally, they'd have a final resting place of honor, not a sheep pasture."

Edwards has at least one powerful ally in the Army.

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

Bowra, who earned a degree in history at South Carolina's Citadel, is now the senior U.S. military representative to the Netherlands. Introduced to Edwards by a mutual friend, Bowra has
developed a personal interest in the Milk Creek troopers, but he has officially requested the military's Joint Task Force for Full Accounting established in 1993 to recover remains of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam to help exhume, identify and properly rebury the remains.

Almost a year ago, he also wrote a heartfelt personal letter to the Carrolls, asking them to allow professional recovery of the soldiers' remains - a letter that's gone unanswered.

"Generals are a dime a dozen," sniffs their lawyer, John Savage of Rifle. "It was an nice letter on official Army stationery, but doesn't make much sense.... (Bowra) is nothing more than chopped liver on this issue."

But Bowra isn't the only Army general who'd like to see the Milk Creek troopers get a proper burial.

Brig. Gen. John Brown commands the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., an institution that ensures solid history is properly usedin the Army, from war rooms to military classrooms. He says the Army is 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 says. "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 for more than a year, the Carrolls have said nothing. They refused to be interviewed for this story. A request last month by the Colorado State University Center for the Environmental Management of Military Lands to survey the battlefield's surface has also gone unanswered.

"It ain't our problem to solve," says Savage. "(The owners) see it as a working ranch. They are resistant to anything that detracts from that."

Savage says "there's nothing improper about that burial," but says he'll deal with the issue at some point when he's less busy with other work.

"From our standpoint, there's no panic," Savage says. "It's not something that has to be done today. Somebody makes a request doesn't mean we're going to jump on it today. Your emergency is not my emergency."

Savage calls Brad Edwards a "looter" who was never authorized to dig at the site, and says he's only telling his story now to sell artifacts on the Internet and promote a future documentary film about the Milk Creek battle. No matter what happens, Savage says, Edwards will never again be allowed near the site - even if he's the only man who knows the exact spot where the
troopers are buried.

Edwards clearly had permission to explore the site, as many amateur archeologists and treasure hunters had for several years, but "certainly not on that scale," Savage says. Although Edwards dug more than 100 holes in a sheep pasture near a state highway, and some of his trenches were 5 feet deep and several feet wide, Savage suggests nobody knew what Edwards was
doing.

Edwards admits selling five artifacts on eBay for $300.32. Adding $200 from his own pocket, he paid a relative to explore the National Archives for Milk Creek information. But the research proved too daunting and the $500 was returned. It sits unspent in his desk drawer.

He now promises to donate the money to any recovery of Milk Creek remains, and to donate his 832 artifacts to the Rio Blanco County Historical Society, the U.S. Army's 3rd Cavalry Museum in Fort Carson, and the U.S. Army Historical Foundation in Arlington, Va. - all in the name of landowners Charles and Tootsie Carroll.

Furthermore, he vows to donate profits from any future films or books to charities benefiting the families of U.S. soldiers killed in action since Sept. 11 - again, in the Carrolls' name.

"My motivation and actions in this recovery effort are not about personal gain," says Edwards, who estimates he spent more than $10,000 in his explorations at Milk Creek. "Since the discovery of the troopers' grave, (the Carrolls) have been vehemently opposed to discussing it. To them, it should be kept a secret. I sometimes wonder if the Carrolls think they own the soldiers' remains."

In fact, they might as well.

When Coroner Eskelson designated the site a "private cemetery," he deliberately placed all decision-making in the landowners' hands. "Any further exploration of this site must be at the landowner's permission," he wrote in his Nov. 20, 2001, report. Citing health problems, he refused to be interviewed for this story.

State Archaeologist Susan Collins says the Colorado Historical Society's Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation has no immediate plans to examine the grave. "It is on private land, and the landowner has not invited us," she says.

Wyoming State Archaeologist Mark Miller, who wrote "Hollow Victory," a history of the Milk Creek fight, said he believes Edwards' discovery could help flesh out the historical record. But he sees no need to rush.

"If there are human remains that are not threatened by imminent loss,"Miller says, "then their current resting place may be the most appropriate location to keep them."

Doug Sterner of Pueblo, a two-time Bronze Star winner in Vietnam and Medal of Honor historian, said he believes strongly the Milk Creek troopers should be given proper burials - and he has a solution.

Sterner, 52, chairs the Colorado Board of Veterans Affairs, a seven-member state commission advising Gov. Bill Owens on veteran issues. He says the most appropriate place to bury the dead soldiers might be Colorado's new Western Slope Veterans Cemetery in Grand Junction, opening this summer.

"Because of the location of Milk Creek in western Colorado, I think it'd be quite appropriate," Sterner says.

Whatever the outcome, Bowra thinks the worst thing that could be done is to forget the dead soldiers.

"We cannot signal the mothers, fathers and families of our soldiers that we leave our dead on the battlefield and do not recover them," the former Special Forces officer says.



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