[Announcer] "The Lost Grave of James Coryell" is made possible in part by a grant from The Summerlee Foundation.

[gentle music] - The mystery still remains about whether or not it's the body of a Texas Ranger who has been lost in history for over 150 years.

[Reporter] James Coryell was killed by Indians... ♪ ♪ - Our story begins nearly 200 years ago.

It takes place in a forgotten part of early Texas history, and it winds its way to the present.

- Finding this particular location was an accidental find.

[Jim Bruseth] All right, we'll start with this right now.

[John Crain] There were a pile of rocks, and we said, "Oh my, we think we have something here."

[Jim] I'm gonna look at this.

I'm seeing some positive signs.

Archeology, technology, and the memories of a formerly enslaved man guided our journey into the past.

[gentle music] A combination of legend, science, and discovery helped solve a mystery that had been dormant for decades.

Where was the lost grave of Texas Ranger James Coryell?

[tool scraping] [John] This is something that has meant a great deal to us, making a story come to life.

[gentle music] [upbeat music] [Storyteller] Back in the 1830s, the late 1830s I'd say, we were livin' a good life on the edge of the Texas frontier.

It was a quiet place, just up from the falls of the Brazos River.

[birds chirping] A settlement we called Sarahville de Viesca.

The Texas Republic was a newborn at the time, and there was talk of this place bein' named the capital.

Sarahville was founded by Sterling Robertson, who was the leader of the colony beginnin' back in 1834.

It was a rough outpost, built as a jumpin' off place into the wild country.

It was also where Fort Milam was built to protect the pioneers.

The plan was to bring in 800 families to settle the region.

In January 1836, Roberston became captain of a company of the newly minted Texas Rangers, and our job was to keep the peace, keep the townsfolk safe.

[upbeat bluegrass music] We were men who looked for adventure and freedom along the edge of the frontier.

We rode like vaqueros, and we fought like the devil.

[men shouting] [gunfire] During the Texas Revolution, we were scouts and couriers.

We even escorted the settlers runnin' away from Santa Anna's Mexican armies after the fall of the Alamo in March of 36.

[military drumming] By 1837, a year after we defeated Santa Anna in San Jacinto, there was about 200 folks livin' in Sarahville, mainly farmers.

Like most of us, they were comin' to Texas lookin' for a better life.

[Rider] Good boy.

[Storyteller] At that time, Robertson's Colony had its own company of soldiers at the fort, and we Rangers were a tight-knit group.

My friend James Coryell was one of 'em.

Anyhow, I doubt you've heard the story of James Coryell.

Like I said, he was a friend of mine, and we spent many a fine day ridin' out together, fightin' the good fight.

So, I'm gonna tell ya the story.

It ain't pretty, and it still makes my blood boil to think about it.

But hopefully, somebody'll write it all down now, and maybe, one day, James will get his deserved spot in some of them history books.

[gentle music] Coryell was a restless type, a man who spent his life pushin' the frontier forward to new horizons.

He was a frontiersman, a marksman, and a brave soldier.

We all liked and admired him, and he would prove his courage one last time on May 27th, 1837.

[fire crackling] Now, we had had some problems off and on with some of them Indians 'round about, and I can't blame them for bein' upset with all us outsiders movin' in on land when it really belonged to them.

But there was this one tribe, they'd been friendly to us.

In fact, one day they helped us round up a bunch of our stray horses that had got loose.

Unfortunately though, [sighing] they had been recently bushwhacked by some other settlers over a misunderstanding or somethin', and some of them Indians got pretty badly hurt in that scrape.

Well, Michael Castleman and I, we decided to venture forth from the post.

Coryell, he'd been feelin' poorly, but he came along with us anyhow.

[upbeat music] We found a bee tree and cut it down to get at the honey.

We were relaxin' and enjoyin' a peaceful, quiet moment, partakin' of that sweet honey when we heard a twig snap.

[branch snapping] We turned around and saw a dozen angry Indians comin' right for us.

Coryell told us he was too sick to run, but he stood up to draw fire from the Indians.

[gunfire sounding] That allowed for Michael and me to escape and run back to the fort.

The Indians shot Coryell, and he fired his gun at them too as he fell.

When we looked back, we saw they were scalpin' him.

We hightailed it back to Sarahville.

Told everybody what had happened.

James, he was still out there.

We had to get him.

So, we organized a rescue party and went to bring Jim back.

When we found him, he had sure enough been shot and scalped.

He was a bloody mess, but he was alive.

So, we carried him back to Miss Ann Cavitt's house where he'd been stayin' on account of she said she wanted to take care of him.

[gentle music] [Ann] My heart just broke when I saw what had been done to James.

His head was covered in blood, and he'd been shot through the chest.

He was moanin' in pain, and I tried to comfort him.

I cleaned the wounds as best I could, and then I fixed up a dressin' of tobacco and spread it over the top of his head where he had been scalped.

I wrapped a bandage around his head to hold the dressin' in place and fastened it with copper pins at the top.

I washed his face, gave him water, and talked to him all through the night.

I had heard tell of people who survived bein' scalped, and I prayed that James would be one of those lucky ones.

I tried so hard to save him, but he died two days after they brought him home.

♪ One last flat smile of pleasure ♪ ♪ Across his pain-wracked face did spread ♪ ♪ A dark and dusty shadow ♪ ♪ And the Ranger boy was dead ♪ ♪ With his saddle for a pillow ♪ ♪ And his gun across his chest ♪ - He was laid to rest in Texas dirt, the soul of a new and growin' country that he loved and gave his life for.

[birds chirping] [gentle music] [Jim] In the late summer of 1837, the Ranger Garrison was disbanded.

The settlement of Sarahville became known as the town that died overnight.

♪ ♪ Sixteen years passed until some new arrivals came to the area.

A man named Churchill Jones established a plantation nearby bringing with him around 150 enslaved workers.

Jones gave the workers their own cemetery called Bull Hill located about a mile from the old Sarahville town site.

♪ ♪ And it was here where the mystery of James Coryell's lost grave would begin to unravel.

[Sharon] Another half century went by.

The Jones plantation declined after emancipation, but most of the formerly enslaved families stayed on the property and worked as sharecroppers.

They still had ties to the land and their traditions, especially to Bull Hill Cemetery.

[Jim] Sharon Stiles is a native of this area.

She had begun piecing together the fragmented history of her family's roots.

Sharon's research led her back to the Bull Hill Cemetery, where she discovered many of her ancestors had been buried.

- And I began to wonder what was happening in the lives of those individuals as they worked here, and toiled here, and lived and died here.

[Jim] During her research, Sharon discovered an oral history from 1937 by a family member named Ned Broadus.

Ned had been an enslaved worker on the Jones plantation, and he told the story about a Texas Ranger's grave located close to Bull Hill.

It was said to be the final resting place of James Coryell.

[Sharon] Over time, the grave had caved in.

The enslaved African Americans carried stones from a nearby spring to fill in and cover the grave so the spirit of Coryell would be at ease and not disturb their loved ones resting in Bull Hill Cemetery.

[birds chirping] Descendants of the Jones plantation enslaved people continued to use Bull Hill Cemetery to bury their dead until the 1960s, when the cemetery was closed.

Once again, the vestiges of the past disappeared into the landscape, and once again, the stories of the people who lived there long ago were in danger of being lost forever.

[Jim] But, in 2006, everything changed.

[Sharon] The present-day Churchill Jones family no longer lived in the area and knew they would never return to the land.

So, they decided to sell it.

Fortunately, Jones sold the property to the Summerlee Foundation.

- We have a mission, and one of our program areas is Texas history.

So, it was natural for us to wanna be involved as a partner with the descendants from Bull Hill Cemetery and to work together to do as much research as possible on who is here.

[dramatic music] I am very impressed with the research that went on to document each name on this list.

[Sharon] Pearl Snead Paul was my great-grandmother.

[John] My goodness.

- She was the last one buried here.

The words of that song, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I'm found."

Those words made me think about my history had been lost, and now it's found.

My ancestors had been lost, and they were found.

The cemetery had been lost, and now it's found.

- John Crain recognized the significance of Sharon Stiles' research, and he reached out to us at the Texas Historical Commission.

Bull Hill was an important historic cemetery, and we thought there had to be descendants from the people buried there in the community nearby.

James Coryell's grave was still lost, but thanks to the clues left behind by Ned Broadus, the exact location of Coryell's grave was beginning to narrow.

[wind blowing] I think we're gonna do these two to start with over here.

I guess the first thing we can do is just kind of shovel off all the fluff.

We started our search by using a magnetometer to see beneath the ground.

This instrument detects magnetism from any iron metal fragments in the grave.

Using this technology helped us to define the bounds of the cemetery.

[upbeat music] At the same time, we sent our colleagues into the nearby town of Marlin to find the Bull Hill descendants.

[Jim] We were able to interview many of the family members.

We also kept in mind the oral history given by Ned Broadus, along with his description of Coryell's grave.

So, we were on the lookout for a pile of stones as the land was cleared to build a new fence around the cemetery.

Then, we had a lucky break.

- I remember this experience like yesterday.

We were working on putting a new fence in, and at that time we had heavy equipment on site.

And I heard a, [equipment rattling] bang.

One of the pieces of equipment had hit a rock.

I realized right then and there that this might be the grave of James Coryell.

[dramatic music] ♪ ♪ [Jim] We know from the historical accounts that rocks were put on top of the grave by slaves who lived in the area in the 1840s.

Here we have the rocks directly over top of the grave shaft.

Bull Hill, I've always wondered how it got the name, but you can see a little hill here.

And the highest points were the Coryell grave.

We had a location fitting the description of Coryell's final resting place.

So, we dug down about a foot to see if we could find evidence of a grave below the rocks.

Right along here is the edge of the grave shaft.

People had been looking for this grave site for 180 years.

Everything fits perfectly.

What we're gonna do now is we're gonna remove the rocks, and we're gonna start excavating on down and find who is buried in this grave.

All right, we'll start with this right now.

I think that's perfect.

- We still needed to confirm whether or not there was a body actually in the grave.

We decided to put a test probe on the western end of the unit where we felt there was the greatest chance of encountering the head of the individual in the grave.

[tools scraping] - We're at 56 inches.

[Brad] After about six feet, sure enough, we came down on what appeared to be the remnants of a human skull.

[people cheering] - We have it, yay.

[Brad] We now needed permission from a family member to investigate the remains that were in the grave, but who would we contact?

Coryell was a bachelor, and he had no direct descendants.

- After skeletal remains were found buried in a slave cemetery in Falls County, the mystery still remains about whether or not it's the body of a Texas Ranger who has been lost in history for over 150 years.

- James Coryell was killed by Indians in May of 1837.

- Then, we got another lucky break.

The media coverage of our discovery had been seen by a Missouri man named Stanley Coryell.

He gave us permission to excavate the body in the grave, but we still needed DNA from a female descendant to confirm the identity of the person buried here.

- Mary Coryell Kieger?

Doing genealogy work is like being a detective.

[Jim] I contacted Jean Ann Ables-Flatt, a top-notch genealogist, to help us find a female relative of James Coryell.

- You're having to track down and trace their ancestors.

You go from one generation to the next and find documents that connect those people.

[Jim] Jean Ann located a 91-year-old lady named Ara Ogden who was a direct descendant of the Coryell family.

Miss Ogden agreed to give us a sample of her DNA to compare with the body in the grave.

Meanwhile, the excavation of the gravesite continued.

[playful music] [John] It's gonna be cold, real cold.

- We were working in terrible weather conditions.

The temperatures were at freezing or below the whole time.

[shovel banging] - Because of the weather, we built this shelter over top of it so we have an all-weather capable excavation down inside.

Amy, any empty buckets?

[Archeologist] I don't think it's bone.

[Jim] Yeah, we're not quite deep enough, are we?

[Archeologist] No.

[Jim] We invited Dr. Doug Owsley, a forensic anthropologist, to come help us with the excavation.

Doug, you wanna check that one out?

- I think part of this is informing Texans of their Texas history.

So, if it encourages a younger generation to get involved, they are going to go on to answer questions that we're not even thinking about.

[Archeologist] Yeah, you wanna brush it off?

[Doug] Oh, fantastic.

That's wonderful.

This is all about asking questions of the past, not just accepting what little is known sometimes doing different types of investigations to piece things together, and it's just, it's a fascinating field of study.

- The things that we are finding right now are part of the leg bones.

We're finding part of the skull.

[upbeat music] [Archeologist] 53 centimeters.

He's pretty spread, isn't he?

Sixty-four inches.

- About 5' 4", 5' 5", so he's not a real tall guy, but he, his bones are fairly sturdy.

[Archeologist] That's a pretty robust bone there.

- We also found shirt buttons and a small piece of flatiron located in the ribcage that could be part of an arrow point.

All the evidence indicated that this was Coryell.

We were in the right place.

The person was the right age, and the characteristics of the grave matched the story.

But we knew that we needed to see if there was more evidence to prove that is was Coryell.

- What we're doin' now is we're beginning to remove the human remains from the grave shaft.

We're especially interested in the femur bone because there we think we have the best chance of DNA analysis.

Okay, that one's ready to come out.

- Maybe DNA could provide the confirmation that we needed.

Unfortunately, the results came back that the material was too degraded to get any usable DNA.

It appeared that modern science had taken us as far as we could in our investigation.

[wind howling] [clock ticking] [Jim] The mystery continued unresolved for another eight years.

Then, in 2019, I got a call from Doug Owsley at the Smithsonian.

He said he had made an unexpected discovery.

A re-examination of the skull remains revealed evidence of a bandage and two copper pins that had been applied to the scalped area.

[Ann] I cleaned the wounds as best I could, and then I fixed up a dressin' of tobacco and spread it over the top of his head where he had been scalped.

I wrapped a bandage around his head to hold the dressing in place and fastened it with copper pins at the top.

- All right, so here is the first box.

- Okay.

- In here are the fragments of the cranium where they discovered the evidence of the poultice.

And it really is incredible that it was preserved based on how poorly the rest of the remains survived.

- And what is truly amazing is that the skeletal remains, the cranium piece, and the tobacco here is only preserved because they used two copper pins to fasten the bandage together.

And copper deters bacterial growth, and that's what preserved it.

If it wasn't for those two copper pins they used, all this would be gone, and we'd have no evidence to prove that this was James Coryell.

But, what we had here shows that this individual was scalped.

This is the burial of James Coryell.

[Brad] It's amazing it preserved it all.

[Jim] Yeah, that copper is just antibacterial, and it just resulted in this bein' this miracle of preservation happening where we have the actual bandaging of the scalped part of the skull.

[Brad] We haven't been asked lately about when we're gonna rebury him.

- We look at multiple lines of evidence.

Not everything.

A lot of times people think all answers will come from the DNA.

There's so many different lines of evidence, and we piece them all together.

And it is through those multiple lines that then you come to the conclusion as to who is this individual?

[dramatic music] - We're gonna dig down just deep enough to find the grave shaft.

We don't wanna go any deeper.

[shovel scraping] All the evidence indicates that we had indeed found James Coryell, but our work at Sarahville de Viesca continues.

[Brad] This stuff's right there.

[Jim] That's the edge, I think.

We've gone back to answer the question of why James Coryell was buried in this particular spot a mile from the town site.

We think his grave is part of the old Sarahville Cemetery.

If that's the case, we should find more graves close to Coryell's.

I'm gonna look at this.

I am seein' some positive signs.

We made some shallow excavations nearby, and sure enough, we discovered the outlines of two more grave shafts.

Good news, great news.

After an 11-year journey, our story is finally complete.

We've confirmed that Coryell's grave is in the original Sarahville town site cemetery located right next to Bull Hill.

This once-forgotten part of Texas history has been rediscovered.

- Well, it's, it's gettin' late.

I gotta get up early.

Gotta get to town for [sighing] some supplies.

♪ ♪ But I appreciate you allowin' me to tell you the story of my good friend James Coryell.

He dedicated his life to Texas, and he's in a good place.

And I look forward to the day we can hook back up and ride out again together for Texas.

[inspirational music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Announcer] "The Lost Grave of James Coryell" is made possible in part by a grant from The Summerlee Foundation.