Welcome to the Historic Fort Sumner Cemetery

Welcome to the Historic Fort Sumner Cemetery. . Welcome to the cemetery at Historic Fort Sumner. The U.S. Army established this post cemetery in 1863, shortly after opening the nearby fort and the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. Between 1863 and 1869, 22 soldiers and officers, along with several civilians, were buried in the cemetery. After the Army abandoned Fort Sumner, the War Department transferred the military reservation to the Department of the Interior, excluding the post cemetery., In January 1884, the U.S. Army auctioned the land that once comprised the Fort Sumner Military Reservation, with the exception of old the post cemetery. The War Department retained the graveyard until 1905 when they ordered the military burials relocated to the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. Contractor Charles W. Dudrow completed this work and left the gravesites of known civilian burials, including those of Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, and Tom Folliard, untouched during this process., At that point, the Army turned over care of the cemetery to the residents of Fort Sumner. Because residents constructed a new cemetery at nearby Sunnyside (about 7 miles north in the present-day Village of Fort Sumner), they did very little to maintain the burial ground. In 1938, the land surrounding the cemetery passed to new owners who removed the fence and dug a ditch across the graveyard.. Residents, many of whom had family buried in the cemetery, sued the new owners. The courts sided with the citizens of Fort Sumner, ruling that the cemetery, like all human burials in New Mexico, was protected by law and, as such, belonged in perpetuity to the people of Fort Sumner and De Baca County., Since that time, the historic cemetery, now owned by the Village of Fort Sumner, has been visited by countless people from around the world eager to pay their respects to some of the Wild West's most colorful and infamous characters, including the graves of Billy the Kid, some of his pals, and even one man he killed., To learn more about the history of the Fort Sumner Cemetery and the lives of those buried here, please scan the QR code below to access the comprehensive audio tour. We also invite you to visit the nearby Bosque Redondo Memorial and the former site of the Pete Maxell's house where Billy the Kid was shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14th, 1881., The map created by Charles Dudrow in 1906 indicated that a member of "Billy's Gang" was buried several feet away from the other two. Local citizens who identified the graves of the three outlaws later all agreed that they were buried next to each other. The truth may never be known.