Santa Fe National Cemetery

You are passing one of the oldest national cemeteries west of the Mississippi, Santa Fe National Cemetery, established in eighteen seventy after the Civil War closed. The land itself came as a gift from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, which donated the parcel to the federal government so that Union soldiers killed in New Mexico Territory could be gathered and honored in a single place.

The reason those soldiers were here at all traces back to eighteen sixty-two, when Confederate General Henry Sibley led a column of Texans up the Rio Grande with a grand ambition: seize the Southwest, capture its gold and silver routes, and open a Confederate corridor to the Pacific. The campaign met its end twenty-two miles southeast of Santa Fe at Glorieta Pass on March twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-two. In a battle sometimes called the Gettysburg of the West, Union volunteers from Colorado, many of them miners who had crossed the mountains on foot, outflanked the Confederate supply train and burned it. Without food, ammunition, or mules, Sibley's army collapsed and retreated back to Texas. The Confederate bid for the West was finished.

After the war, federal officials gathered the dead from scattered field graves across the territory and reinterred them here. The cemetery also received soldiers killed in the Indian Wars of the eighteen sixties and seventies, including Buffalo Soldiers from the units posted to the southwestern frontier. Those campaigns, brutal and contested as they were, left their mark on the graves that stand quietly along these streets.

Today, more than sixty-eight thousand veterans are buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery, making it New Mexico's largest and oldest such site. Among them are soldiers from nearly every American conflict from the Civil War through the twenty-first century. The ground holds the whole arc of the American military experience in the West, the territorial volunteers, the frontier regulars, the veterans of twentieth-century wars who came to New Mexico and stayed. Walk through the white headstones and you walk through a compressed history of the nation's westward reach.