The Unknown Mason

In 1998, a construction crew digging a waterline trench in El Paso, Texas, unearthed the skeleton of a man who had been in the ground for well over a century. He carried no name, no papers, no marker - only a smoking pipe, a tin of percussion caps, and the physical signs of a hard life on horseback. Forensic examination would eventually place his burial around 1858. His location told the rest of the story: he lay in what had once been El Paso's first Masonic cemetery, a burial ground so poorly documented that when the Masons relocated their dead to Concordia Cemetery in the 1870s and '80s, they left him behind.

Nearly a century and a half later, the Grand Lodge of Texas decided this forgotten man deserved a name, even if they couldn't give him one - so they gave him a title instead: the Unknown Mason. What followed was a full Masonic funeral, complete with bagpipes, pallbearers, and more than 150 Masons who traveled from lodges across Texas to bury a stranger with the honors of a brother.

The Unknown Mason traces this story from the earliest burials on El Paso's frontier - including Kit Carson's half-brother and a judge killed in an 1870 gunfight - through the forensic detective work of Dr. H. Gill-King, a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology who would later work the World Trade Center site, to the 2001 ceremony that finally laid an unidentified man to rest in Fort Worth with the full honors of the fraternity he was believed to have served.

It's a story about memory, brotherhood, and what an organization owes to a member it can never confirm it had - told with the cooperation of Clair Billington, the Mason who oversaw the burial and whose own unpublished account forms the spine of this book.