Saturday, February 21, 2009, 18 people met at Bay City Public Library to begin the Red Bluff Project. Most were Mangum family members with the landowners and a couple of Matagorda County Historical Commission members mixed in.

We spent about 2 hours at the cemetery site, looking, surmising, probing, digging, etc., but did not find any markers. When this date was originally planned two months ago, we assumed there would be rain to soften the ground by the 21st, but that didn't happen. The probes, in most cases, had to be hammered into the ground. It will truly be a needle-in-the-haystack operation. A phone call was even made to California to a previous landowner to try to pinpoint the last two markers that were visible.

We are going to wait for a good rain and meet again.