Whit --

Thanks for the kind words. You're doing what you need to do overseas; we'll do what little we can here.

Perhaps someone familiar with Fort Smith as it existed during the war can answer your question. I would expect that volunteers, hospital staff, slaves and other laborers hired by the government buried soldiers who died at the hospital. The hospital itself was probably a church, school or warehouse aquired for this purpose, and burials would have been someplace nearby. Of course there were no stonecutters available to create markers (or budget to pay them), so grave markers would've been made from pieces of scrap lumber.

As hokey as it was (and it was hokey), the final scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly gives us some idea about typical wartime cemetery markers.

Wasn't this film made in Spain?