TMH - Spirit of Fort Cummings Traditional Cache
thoehn: I am getting old, slowing down, and not traveling far from home so I am archiving this distant cache. Tom
TMH - Spirit of Fort Cummings
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This is the cemetery of historical Fort Cummings north and east of Deming.
There is an official plaque outside this cemetery that provides historical information about it.
Fort Cummings Cemetary
Cemetary Ridge was the site initially selected by a board of officers for the location of Fort Cummings. The hill next to the stage station, however, did not offer sufficient level space for the proposed fort which would also have been vunerable to enemy fire from an adjacent hill.
The Fort Cummings' cemetery is enclosed by the remnants of a thick stone wall, constructed in a square approximately 150 feet on each side. The cemetery was established, soon after the military occupied Fort Cummings, when stage passengers complained of numerous human skeletons being visible from the road. Soldiers were detailed to collect the remains which were probably buried in a common grave. The surrounding wall was erected in 1867 by the Black soldiers of the 38th Infantry. The wall building project may have been a punishment detail as a result of an alleged mutiny by several of the enlisted men.
David and Maria Schrode stopped at Cooke's Spring on September 26, 1870, on their way from Texas to California, with their eight children and nearly 1500 cattle. Maria, who had turned 44 on June 20, recorded in her diary: "Arrived at Fort Cummings, visited the graveyard. It was walled in with rough stones about 5 feet high, white washed, with a folding gate. Some of the graves are walled in with rock. I noticed 6 of them had been killed by the Apache Indians. There was (sic) only about 20 graves in all."
In 1892, or perhaps a little later, the remains were allegedly transferred to the National Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for reburial. Indications were that 74 bodies, including 25 unknown, were exhumed. Other official records indicate that there should have been a total of 80 burials with 36 whose identity had not been determined. Fort Leavenworth records, however, show no reinterments from Fort Cummings.
The only headstone in the cemetery, placed at a later date, records the deaths of four privates from Company G of the 1st Veteran (reenlisted) Infantry of the California Volunteers. Thomas Ronan, L.S. Hunter, Charles Devin, and Thomas Daley were killed by Apaches on January 17, 1866, while on a wood cutting detail a few miles from the fort.
The Fort Cummings military cemetery lies adjacent to the old Butterfield Stage Station. It is perhaps fitting that Taps, the haunting music played over all military burials and memorial observances, was composed by John Butterfield's son David in 1862 at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, while recuperating from Cival War battle wounds.
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