The U.S. Army established the Fort Sumner 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 there. After the Army abandoned Fort Sumner, the War Department transferred the military reservation to the Department of the Interior but excluded the post cemetery, and in January 1884 the U.S. Army auctioned the former Fort Sumner Military Reservation except for the old post cemetery. The War Department retained the graveyard until 1905, when it ordered the military burials relocated to the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. Contractor Charles W. Dudrow completed that work and left the gravesites of known civilian burials, including those of Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, and Tom Folliard, untouched. The Army then turned over care of the cemetery to the residents of Fort Sumner, but because residents built a new cemetery at nearby Sunnyside, about 7 miles north in the present-day Village of Fort Sumner, they did little to maintain the older burial ground. In 1938, new owners of the surrounding land removed the fence and dug a ditch across the graveyard, prompting residents, many with family buried there, to sue. The courts ruled for the citizens of Fort Sumner, holding that the cemetery, like all human burials in New Mexico, was protected by law and belonged in perpetuity to the people of Fort Sumner and De Baca County. Since then, the historic cemetery, now owned by the Village of Fort Sumner, has drawn visitors from around the world to pay respects at the graves of Billy the Kid, some of his companions, and one man he killed. A 1906 map created by Charles Dudrow indicated that a member of Billy's Gang was buried several feet away from the other two, but local citizens who later identified the graves of the three outlaws all agreed that they were buried next to each other, and the truth may never be known.