At times American history—and especially American Indian history—takes a dive down the rabbit hole with its twists and contradictions. The 1842 Cherokee Slave Revolt is one of those rabbit holes. The idea the Cherokee, or any tribe, owned slaves is not that alien a concept. For centuries before the arrival of Europeans on the continent American Indians had been enslaving captive enemies, and many tribes continued this practice well into the 1800s, much to the dismay of a paternal U.S. federal government. Each tribe had differing ideas on how to treat captives. Some regarded them, particularly young ones, as extended family members; others considered them disposable property. On an 1880 trip to Alaska with naturalist John Muir, Protestant Missionary S. Hall Young met one Huna Tlingit subchief who confessed to having ritually sacrificed two of his slaves, a husband and wife, in a bid to halt an advancing glacier.

But the slaves at the center of the 1842 revolt were black men, women and children working Cherokee plantations and farms in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The breakout came less than four years after the last group of Cherokees had walked the Trail of Tears from their traditional homeland in Georgia to hinterlands of the southern Great Plains. President Andrew Jackson had ordered the forced march of some 16,500 Cherokees, a quarter or more of whom died en route (estimates range upward from 4,000 to as many as 8,000 fatalities). To transport such a vast number of people federal troops used 645 wagons, 5,000 horses and oxen, and a steamboat. The cost of the Cherokee removal came to $1,263,338 and 38 cents, which the government unabashedly deducted from the $4.5 million in federal funds promised to the tribe as reimbursement for its seized homelands.

Yet, in the midst of this human tragedy, another human tragedy was taking place. The Cherokees, for all their personal suffering, dragged along with them nearly 1,600 black slaves—the mobile human property that had been working their plantations and farms. En route to Indian Territory these slaves hunted game, gathered firewood and performed other chores, in many ways softening the blow of the trek for their Indian masters. Yet neither the Cherokee Nation nor the U.S. government recorded how many of the slaves perished en route.

Cherokee Plantations

The seeds by which the Cherokees would imitate their white neighbors had been laid years earlier in the wake of continuous warfare between them and first the British and then American forces. The wars left Cherokee towns in ruin and disarray, while a primary source of meat for the tribe, the whitetail deer population, crashed due to overhunting. 

George Washington had evinced sympathy for American Indians since his youth as a surveyor on the Virginia frontier. As newly elected president of a nascent nation, he sought to work the concepts of tribal sovereignty and Indian assimilation into his economic plans. As tribal chiefs noted, Washington was a hard bargainer who seemed to covet their land, but not all of it. He also had a reputation among the chiefs as a fair man, and a generation of tribal males grew up with a “George” or “George Washington” in their names in honor of the man.

Washington took direct action to aid the Cherokees. His administration assisted in the rebuilding of their towns and sent agricultural agents to show the Cherokees how to successfully manage domestic animals and a variety of cash crops. 

What changed the dynamics of the Southern economy was Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop to process. But Whitney’s invention eased the labor costs of cotton production. American growers duly increased their crop yield to satisfy European demands for cotton, and the resulting industry boom in the South lasted well beyond the Civil War.

Like fellow Southerners, Cherokee growers went for the money crop in a big way. They increased their tillage, then bought additional black slaves to satisfy the corresponding demand for labor. Soaring profits in turn led more than 200 Cherokees to start their own plantations. 

With the influx of black slaves into their culture, the Cherokees in 1819 passed strict codes to forbid intermarriage with slaves, regulate the buying and selling of slaves, set punishments for runaways and prohibit slaves from owning property. Another period Cherokee law called for a fine of $15 against any master who allowed a slave to buy or sell alcohol.

There were differences between the Cherokee plantations and those of Southern whites. Cherokee plantations had fewer slaves for their size, and the Cherokees themselves worked alongside their slaves in the fields. Their slaves were also permitted to grow food for their own consumption.

Cotton and tobacco were less than ideal crops, as they drained farmland of nutrients. That sparked an increasing demand for virgin land, in turn leading to the rapid settlement of what became Alabama and Mississippi. Before long Southern whites were eyeing the large tracts of uncultivated Cherokee lands immediately to their west. That the Cherokees also had black slaves infuriated whites trying to start their own plantations and farms. After all, slaves were a status symbol denoting economic success.

Starting with Thomas Jefferson, presidents looked for ways to reinterpret Washington’s concept of tribal sovereignty. In 1802 President Jefferson signed a compact with Georgia, paying the state $1.25 million for its western two-thirds (present-day Alabama and Mississippi) and committing the U.S. government to obtain title through purchase to all Indian lands within Georgia itself. No longer would federal power be the shield for tribes it had been. Jefferson then created government trading posts on Indian lands, extending unlimited credit to tribal leaders. Eventually the federal government demanded repayment of such debts in the form of more tribal land. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson viewed the newly acquired region as a place Eastern tribes might be relocated. James Madison continued that policy. James Monroe initially sought to revert to Washington’s vision of relations between whites and Indian societies, though by his last year in office even he was calling for “Indian removal.” John Quincy Adams was likewise torn between the policies of assimilation and outright removal.

Then came the 1828 election of slave-owning Southern plantation owner and land speculator Andrew Jackson. In the colonial era Jackson had fought the Cherokee and every other major tribe in the Southeast and had personally profited from the sale of seized Cherokee lands. In 1830, at President Jackson’s urging, the Indian Removal Act passed the Senate 28–19 and the House of Representatives 101–97. In vain Cherokee leaders repeatedly visited the White House to ask Jackson to safeguard their property rights, including those governing their black slaves. Though the respective parties still needed to negotiate an actual removal treaty, most Cherokees saw the handwriting on the wall. Some 600 moved west to future Indian Territory on their own. Other Cherokees sought refuge in east Texas, in February 1836 signing a treaty with President Sam Houston, president of the newly independent republic. By the time the U.S. Congress ratified the Treaty of New Echota with the Cherokee Nation that spring, the tribe had split into four component bands.

Tensions Rise

Despite tensions between the Cherokees who had preceded most others to Indian Territory and those who later arrived on the Trail of Tears, the tribe as a whole rebounded surprisingly fast. The Cherokee Nation set up schools, a court system and law enforcement as individuals set to work establishing farms.

While most Cherokees lived on farmsteads in simple log cabins, more than 300 families started Southern-style plantations, living in two-story mansions and growing cotton using black slaves. The plantations ranged in size from 600 to 1,000 acres and put to work some 25 to 50 slaves. The Cherokees cultivated wheat, corn, hemp and tobacco and raised cattle and horses. Cotton remained king, however, and by 1840 the nation, thanks to its plantations, boasted a higher standard of living than that of neighboring Arkansas, Kansas or Missouri.

But tensions in the nation were on the rise. For one, it had become common knowledge among the Cherokee slaves that Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. A decade later incoming Texas President Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar drove the Cherokees from his republic. While most fled north into the Cherokee Nation as refugees, others crossed into Mexico. The number of blacks in the nation was also on the rise, not only through the purchase of additional slaves, but also with the arrival of runaway black slaves seeking refuge. Like their Southern white counterparts, however, the Cherokees only responded with a stricter slave code.

Adding to tensions was the manifest disparity between the lot of Cherokee slaves and those held by the Seminole. Seminoles passing through the Cherokee Nation in those years were technically captives from the ongoing Seminole wars in Florida en route to federally allotted lands farther west. Shipped up the Arkansas River from New Orleans, many disembarked at the Cherokee trading post of Webbers Falls to await transportation west. Striding down the riverboat gangplanks alongside their masters were flamboyantly dressed black Seminole slaves, many of whom bore arms. For Cherokee slaves witnessing their arrival, the blurred line between master and slave among the Seminoles must have been galling.

In the summer of 1842, given the rising prosperity the Cherokee Nation was enjoying, Sequoyah—the creator of the Cherokee alphabet, then in his 70s—led a small party into Mexico to find and return home with those Cherokees who had fled from Texas across the Rio Grande. He hoped for the unification of his people. (As it turned out, Sequoyah wouldn’t return home; he died in Mexico of a respiratory infection the next year.)

Whether inspired by the sight of the black Seminole slaves or the reawakened siren song of freedom in Mexico, slaves on the Cherokee plantations around Webbers Falls reached their threshold that fall. In years past black slaves had fled from their Cherokee masters back East and in Indian Territory, but only singly or in pairs. Dozens now waited for a signal.

Daring Escape

In the predawn darkness of November 15 the slaves on neighboring plantations rose quietly, made their way to their respective masters’ houses and overseers’ quarters, and barred the doors from the outside to ensure their occupants did not have an easy time getting out. Then they gathered at a predetermined rallying point for the planned breakout for Mexico.

Most escapees hailed from the plantation of mixed-race Cherokee Joseph Vann. In 1834, after being evicted from his family estate in Georgia, Vann had established a large plantation in southeast Tennessee. Then, in 1837, a year before the main Cherokee removal, he preemptively moved to the newly relocated Cherokee Nation, settling on promising ground around Webbers Falls. On the backs of labor provided by 200 slaves, the Vann family prospered, ultimately holding title to thousands of acres ranging from the Kansas border to the southern boundary of the Cherokee Nation. The rich soil yielded consistently profitable crops of cotton and corn, which Vann plowed back into his ever-expanding holdings of land and slaves. By 1842 he had 300 slaves and even owned a steamboat, named Lucy Walker after a favorite thoroughbred.

On leaving their rallying point, the escapees made their way to Webbers Falls, where they broke into a store for supplies, weapons and ammunition. With the coming dawn many lost their nerve and scattered into the surrounding woodlands. The remaining 20 men, women and children headed southwest into the neighboring Creek Nation on stolen horses and mules. A few were riding Vann’s blooded racehorses.

Meanwhile, back on their plantations, the bewildered Cherokees finally broke out of their lodgings. There was no sign of their slaves. Mounted owners and overseers were soon scouring the countryside. As the patrols drove their wayward property from the woods individually and in small groups, it became apparent many were missing. On questioning the slaves, the Cherokees discovered the fugitives had struck out for Mexico.

Miles to the southwest, soon after the runaway Cherokee slaves crossed into the Creek Nation, 15 slaves from the Bruner and Marshall plantations joined them in the bid for freedom, swelling the party’s number to 35. On their heels galloped some 40 armed Cherokees with dogs, soon joined by a smaller party of Creeks equally determined to retrieve their property.

The combined Cherokee-Creek posse caught up with the fugitives in the Choctaw Nation, 10 miles south of the Canadian River. Spotting their approaching pursuers across the prairie, the runaways sheltered in a buffalo wallow big enough to hold them and their horses. Though few of the slaves had ever fired a gun, they decided to fight it out. In the ensuing skirmish the posse managed to kill two fugitives and recapture a dozen others. Fortunately for the remaining 21 escaped slaves, however, the firefight convinced the Cherokees and Creeks to turn back for reinforcements.

With no time to savor their victory, the fugitives continued their race south for Mexico. 

Pursuit and Capture

The next day, 15 miles from the battle site, the fugitives happened across a pair of slave hunters wholly unaware of the breakout from the Cherokee Nation. James Edwards, who was white, and Billy Wilson, a Delaware, were transporting eight black captives—one man, two women and five children—belonging to a white man named Thompson who had married into the Choctaw Nation. In their own bid for freedom the Choctaw slaves had bolted west, hoping to link up with a Plains tribe, when another white in the nation spotted them and told Edwards and Wilson.

In a reversal of roles, however, the Cherokee and Creek runaways demanded Edwards and Wilson turn over their Choctaw captives. When the pair refused, the fugitives shot them. Though the five additional children would slow their progress, the party welcomed the Choctaws to join them on the road to Mexico. They would need to hurry, as their pursuers were regrouping.

On November 17 the Cherokee National Council authorized a company of tribal militiamen under the command of Captain John Drew to pursue, arrest and deliver the fugitive slaves to Fort Gibson, a U.S. Army post 20 miles north of Webbers Falls. The council also passed a resolution absolving the nation of any liability to the plantation owners if their runaway slaves were killed while resisting arrest. The Cherokee treasury would recompense Drew’s men for supplies and ammunition, while the commander at Fort Gibson loaned the captain 25 pounds of gunpowder. 

Captain Drew left Webbers Falls on November 21 with 87 well-armed militiamen. Arriving at the skirmish site in the Choctaw Nation on November 26, they picked up the fugitives’ trail and soon found the bodies of slave hunters Edwards and Wilson.

Two days later the Cherokee militia finally caught up with the runaways some 7 miles north of the Red River—the border between the United States and the Republic of Texas. Had they managed to cross it, the fugitives still would have had to traverse the expanse of slave-holding Texas to reach Mexico. But they had already run out of supplies and were starving.

The exhausted, dispirited fugitives offered no resistance. They must have picked up additional runaways, as Drew tallied 31 men, women and children, and two men off hunting remained at large. The militia and their captives reached Webbers Falls on December 7. The Cherokee National Council ordered five of the slaves held at Fort Gibson pending investigation into the killings of Edwards and Wilson, and two were tried for murder, though their cases appear to have been dismissed on technicalities. The Choctaw slaves were held until Cherokee authorities had determined Thompson’s claim to them.

The remaining Cherokee slaves were turned over to Vann, who put the runaways to work shoveling coal on his growing fleet of steamboats plying the Arkansas, Mississippi and Ohio rivers. In an instance of poetic justice, two years later a boiler explosion on one of his steamboats killed Vann.

Not the Last Struggle for Freedom

The 1842 revolt inspired other slaves to seek their freedom. Four years later Cherokee plantation owner Lewis Ross, a brother of Principal Chief John Ross, discovered his slaves had been collecting and hiding guns and ammunition. By 1851 nearly 300 blacks had attempted escape from plantations owned by members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole). Most fugitives tried for Mexico, taking their chances with the slave hunters of Texas, while others headed north for the unorganized territory that in 1854 would become Kansas Territory, where slavery was prohibited.

True to form, the Cherokees reacted with stricter slave codes, expelled freedman from the nation and established a slave-catching or “rescue” company to prevent additional losses. Prior to the revolt such units comprised non-Cherokee slave hunters, like the pair killed by the fugitives in 1842. That changed in the wake of the revolt, as economically struggling Cherokees realized the money to be made catching and returning runaway slaves. The nation authorized them to charge any ammunition and supplies used in their hunts to the tribal treasury.

By the 1861 onset of the Civil War the Five Civilized Tribes held more than 8,000 black slaves, representing 14 percent of the population of Indian Territory. Members of the Cherokee Nation alone held 4,600 slaves.

An oddity in the Cherokee slave code held that blacks with even a trace of tribal ancestry were considered quasi members of the nation and thus granted certain rights, such as marriage into the tribe and the possibility of eventual citizenship. In 1847, when slavers kidnapped two such mixed-blood girls—whose father was Cherokee and mother was black—and took them across the border into Missouri, newspaper editorials within the nation demanded their return. Cherokee Sheriff Charles Landrum of the Delaware District took it on himself to enter Missouri with two deputies and rescue the girls before they could be sold. The Cherokee National Council financially reimbursed Landrum and his men for their daring “invasion” of Missouri. 

Other blacks enslaved by the Cherokees weren’t as fortunate, at least until another president emancipated them on paper and hundreds of thousands of Americans spilled one another’s blood to affirm that proclamation. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on the topic author Mike Coppock recommends The Cherokee Nation: A History, by Robert J. Conley, and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Miles Tiya.

It may seem strange that the outbreak of hostilities between warring factions in the Middle East would bring to mind the peaceful, idyllic fields of south-central Pennsylvania, but it is difficult to watch the news coming out of Israel and Palestine these days without recalling the important role that Gettysburg played in 1978 to bring an unlikely peace to that region.

Seldom is there something happening in the world that does not in some way connect to or a least remind one of Gettysburg. I don’t just mean the battle by that name, but the famous address that Lincoln gave there, the decades of struggle over the memory of the place, the evolution of the park into a national park, and much more that falls under the general subject heading of Gettysburg.

In the last century and a half, numerous U.S. presidents have made use of Gettysburg symbolism to further some larger political goal with varying degrees of success. Woodrow Wilson used a speech at the 50th anniversary of the battle to promote his hope for peace. Months later, the world erupted into the War to End All Wars. At the 75th anniversary, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to an estimated 200,000 people at the dedication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, while another 100,000 clogged the roads unable to reach the field. Months later, the world exploded into World War II.

In 1979, however, quite unexpectedly, Gettysburg and a president played a key role in bringing about the end of millennia of hostilities between two long-warring peoples.

carter’s peaceful plan

Jimmy Carter had long been a Civil War buff, and its greatest battle was seldom far from his thoughts. One of his ancestors had fought at Gettysburg, and in 1976, while he watched the results of the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania come in, candidate Carter noticed that he had won the vote in the electoral district that included the battlefield. To his delight, he remarked, “We ought to tell the Georgians that we finally won in Gettysburg.”

Two years later, while sitting at the presidential retreat at Camp David just a few miles southwest of the famous battlefield, his thoughts drifted there again. He was in the fourth day of intense negotiations designed to bring peace between Egypt and Israel — a conflict that predated Moses.

The leaders of both nations were there with him (Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel), but their views could scarcely have been farther apart. On one key negotiating point, Begin had declared, “My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off before I ever agree.”

In Carter’s view the two leaders were thinking in the wrong direction. “I tried for three days to get them to talk about the future,” Carter said. “But all they would talk about was the past.” Faced with the standoff and searching for some way to bring the parties to a different level of thought, Carter first kept them apart for a while, then proposed an excursion. “We went to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg one day,” he later recalled, “and I made them both agree not to talk about the Middle East or about anything that happened since 1865.”

Thanks to the meaning and mythology attached to the Gettysburg story since 1863 (much of it carved in stone in more than a thousand monuments and markers), Carter’s choice of destination was a fertile place for symbolic demonstration and persuasion. Two powers of the same region, grown from the same land but with differing cultural histories, once differed so greatly from each other that they engaged in the bloodiest war the continent had ever known. The worst of the fighting happened on the ground they were touring.

When the war was over, the two powers became one again, healed their wounds, set aside many of their differences, and went on to form the most powerful nation on earth. If North and South could accomplish this, then Egypt and Israel had a chance as well. As he admitted later in his memoirs, Carter wanted to demonstrate the high cost of war and persuade the two leaders to sign the first-ever peace agreement between Israel and an Arab nation.

The Egyptian took to the field right away. As a military student, Egypt’s Sadat had studied Gettysburg in detail and recognized it as the turning point in the Civil War. Israel’s Begin, however, was slower to the mark as he knew nothing about the battle. When the group passed the monument commemorating Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, however, Begin recited it from memory in a thick Yiddish accent, probably adding an Israeli emphasis to the line “that this nation…shall not perish from the earth.”

It took many more hours of negotiating, but less than a week later the three leaders took part in a historic signing ceremony for an agreement that brought peace between the two long-warring nations. Menachem Begin even gave in on his sticking point without losing an eye or his right hand.

lessons from gettysburg

To be sure, many factors helped bring about the Egyptian–Israeli peace in 1978, most of them having nothing to do with Gettysburg. But years after they signed the accords, the participants expressed a belief that the trip to America’s hallowed ground had meant a great deal. Carter said as much in a speech long afterward.

Sadat made one interesting observation. Since our visit to Gettysburg, he had been thinking that Carter, as a Southerner, could understand what it meant to be involved in a terrible war, and also knew how difficult it was to rebuild both the material things and the spirit of the people after a recognized defeat.

For Carter, Gettysburg was a reminder of the high cost of war and an example of reconciliation among adversaries. Sadat, lured by the military aspect of the field, felt the hope and healing in the post–Vietnam era ideas it elicited. Begin was taken with the ideas embodied in Lincoln’s immortal address.

Though perhaps not in the way he intended, Carter’s idea had worked. Both negotiating parties found meaning in the Gettysburg story that, though different from the other, helped inspire their thoughts and actions toward peace.

With war in the Middle East again the lead news story, one wonders if there might not be some magic left in the meaning of Gettysburg and whether a trip to the battlefield might someday encourage opposing leaders to find common ground, even if that ground lies in south-central Pennsylvania.

This essay was adapted from Thomas A. Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (DaCapo, 2003).

“Texas Charlie” Bigelow, a U.S. Army scout, was patrolling Indian Territory when he contracted a fever that left him so weak he could barely open his eyelids. An Indian chief took pity on Bigelow and nursed him back to health using a mysterious medicine he called sagwa. When Bigelow begged for the recipe of this wonder drug, the chief sent five tribal medicine men to accompany the scout to the East Coast, where they created “Kickapoo Sagwa,” the magic elixir sold in medicine shows that traveled America from 1881 to 1912.  

Or so the story goes, as recounted in countless Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company advertisements. But the story—like the medicine itself—was totally bogus.  

Bigelow was never an Army scout and never healed by an Indian chief. He grew up on a Texas farm in the 1850s, then fled the rigors of the plow for a life peddling patent medicines across the West and on the streets of Baltimore. In 1881, Bigelow teamed up with John “Doc” Healy, a former Union Army drummer boy, shoe salesman, proprietor of a traveling theatrical troupe called “Healy’s Hibernian Minstrels,” and the inventor and chief pitchman of a bogus liver medicine and a dubious liniment he dubbed “King of Pain.” When he joined forces with Bigelow, Healy concocted a new product, a fake “Indian” medicine he called “Kickapoo Sagwa.” And he proposed a brilliant idea for promoting it.  

“His plan was to hire a few Indians, rent a storeroom, and have the medicine simmering like a witch’s brew in a great iron pot inside a tepee,” recalled “Nevada Ned” Oliver, a veteran pitchman hired by Healy and Bigelow.  

Healy set up his first Kickapoo showroom in Providence, R.I., then moved to Manhattan before settling in New Haven in 1887. In a huge warehouse decorated with tepees, shields, spears, and other Native American curios, Healy hired Indians—none of them from the Kickapoo tribe—to entertain audiences with songs and dances while stirring huge pots of fake medicine. He advertised his Sagwa as a secret Indian recipe consisting of “Roots, Herbs, Barks, Gums and Leaves,” but it was actually a completely Caucasian concoction containing sugar, a mild laxative, and a dollop of alcohol.  

From their headquarters, Healy and Bigelow dispatched teams of real and ersatz Indians, plus vaudeville performers, and pitchmen posing as doctors to stage shows across America. The shows proved popular and the “doctors” sold oceans of Kickapoo Sagwa, as well as spinoff products—Kickapoo Buffalo Salve, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer. Healy and Bigelow became, as historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in his classic 1959 book, The Golden Age of Quackery, “the Barnum and Bailey of the medicine show business.”  

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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The two partners didn’t invent the traveling medicine show: For decades, patent medicine pitchmen roamed rural America, attracting crowds with musicians and other entertainers. Nor did Healy and Bigelow invent the notion that Native Americans were “children of nature” who possessed a mystical knowledge of healing plants. Throughout the 19th century, Americans bought books purporting to reveal the secrets of Indian medicine—The Indian Guide to Health and The Indian Doctor’s Dispensary, among others. What made Healy and Bigelow rich was their ingenious combination of the age-old appeal of miracle cures with the whiz-bang theatricality of Barnum’s circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.    

Early in the 1880s, Kickapoo shows were modest affairs—a few Indians performing dubious native dances, a few White singers and acrobats and a fake doctor, who sold Sagwa and served as master of ceremonies. One of those “doctors” was Nevada Ned Oliver, who described the shows decades later in a magazine article.  

“The show customarily began with the introduction of each of the Indians by name, together with some personal history,” Oliver recalled. “Five of the six would grunt acknowlegements; the sixth would make an impassioned speech in Kickapoo, interpreted by me….It was a most edifying oration as I translated it. What the brave actually said, I never knew, but I had reason to fear that it was not the noble discourse of my translation, for even the poker faces of his fellow savages sometimes were convulsed.”  

By the 1890s, Healy and Bigelow were dispatching more than a dozen Kickapoo shows across America every summer. The larger troupes played for weeks in big cities, staging elaborate spectacles in tents that held 3,000 seats. Admission cost a dime and shows included a dozen performances, interrupted by three or four pitches for Kickapoo cure-alls. The shows were wildly eclectic. The Indians performed war dances and an “Indian Marriage Ceremony,” and sometimes staged brutal attacks on wagon trains. The White performers included singers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, and fire-eaters. Occasionally, Texas Charlie Bigelow himself appeared, a cowboy hat perched theatrically atop his shoulder-length hair. Billed as the world champion rifle shooter, Texas Charlie demonstrated feats of marksmanship and told dubious tales of his adventures.  

“Later, there were aerial acts, a great deal of Irish and blackface comedy, and such exotic novelties as a midget Dutch comic, the ‘Skatorial Songsters,’ who performed while gliding around the stage on roller skates, and Jackley, ‘the only table performer on earth’ who turned somersaults on a pile of tables that extended 25 feet in the air,” Brooks McNamara wrote in Step Right Up, his 1975 history of medicine shows.  

“If the combination of burning wagon trains and blackface minstrel routines was somewhat eccentric, “ McNamara continued, “no one seems to have cared or even noticed—especially not Healy and Bigelow, who refused to trouble themselves about complex artistic questions so long as the Kickapoo shows continued to attract crowds and sell medicine.”  

The crowds kept coming, and kept buying Kickapoo potions, into the 20th century, enabling Healy and Bigelow to purchase expansive mansions near Kickapoo’s Connecticut headquarters.  

In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the contents and the advertising of medicines—which put a damper on the more…um…poetic claims of Kickapoo’s pitchmen.  

By then, Healy had sold his half of the operation to Bigelow and moved to Australia. In 1912, Bigelow sold the company for $250,000 to a corporation that continued selling Kickapoo Sagwa in drugstores but ended the traveling medicine shows.  

Texas Charlie moved to England, where he manufactured a potion much like Sagwa. He called it “Kimco,” a tip of his cowboy hat to the scheme that made him rich—the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.  

Decades later, the hillbilly characters in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip drank a potent moonshine called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” In 1965, the Monarch Beverage Company introduced a citrus-flavored soft drink called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” It’s still around, and quite popular in Southeast Asia. The company never claimed the soda cures ailments, but it does brag that it contains enough caffeine “to give you the kick you crave.”  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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It was a fear Milton Smith Littlefield Jr. simply couldn’t shake whenever speaking before an audience. Though well-respected, the Presbyterian minister and editor of hymn books agonized about being recognized as the son of Civil War General Milton Smith Littlefield. The younger Littlefield did what he could to squash this controversial legacy, even tearing out, upon his father’s death, the pages of the general’s scrapbook to conceal his crimes from curious readers.

Was General Littlefield really worthy of such shame, however? He had been a rising star in the U.S. Army—a friend of Abraham Lincoln and, during the war, a distinguished commander of African American troops.

The elder Littlefield befriended Lincoln while working as a lawyer and newspaper reporter, and enthusiastically lent his support during the 1860 presidential election. His brother, John H. Littlefield, worked as a clerk in Lincoln’s Springfield, Ill., law office and was later appointed a U.S. Treasury Department clerk.

Elected a captain in the 14th Illinois Infantry, Milton Littlefield Sr. led a company at Shiloh, drawing praise from one of his sergeants for standing “erect in front of his men, during the whole engagement” and escaping “injury, except having about three inches torn from the left shoulder of his coat, by an [enemy] ball.”

In November 1862, Littlefield was aboard the steamer Eugene when it struck a sunken ship and sank in the Mississippi River, about 12 miles above Fort Pillow. While trying to keep passengers calm, the future general was knocked overboard and drifted downriver until rescued by Union soldiers at the fort.

Four months later, Littlefield was sent to South Carolina to organize and lead African American troops. As colonel of the 21st U.S. Colored Infantry, he was attached to Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore’s staff and, during the famed assault on Fort Wagner in July, was among those noted for “doing all in their power to sustain the courage of the troops and urge on reinforcements” while under “constant” fire. Littlefield assumed command of the 54th Massachusetts, replacing slain Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and in November 1864 was brevetted a brigadier general.

Erasmus W. Jones, 21st USCI chaplain, would write that Littlefield’s “unflinching perseverance, united with that perfect moral integrity that have so far elevated him, will soon raise him to higher dignities and honors.” The general’s postwar endeavors erased any chance of that, however.

In 1867, he and George W. Swepson, president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, were involved in a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme. Having fled to Florida, he evaded prosecution despite multiple attempts to extradite him.

After relocating to New York in his later years, he was arrested for other offenses, including grand larceny and misappropriation of a mortgage bond. He died in Vadhalla, N.Y., on March 6, 1899—his burial service lightly attended, no surprise.

Perhaps Milton Littlefield Jr. had his father in mind with this entry in his Hymns of the Christian Life: “Those who never knew Thee, Those who’ve wandered far, Guide them by the brightness Of Thy guiding star….To that heavenly home, Where no sin nor sorrow Evermore shall come.” 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Bullets zipped by him like a thunderstorm gone frenetic, whistling past his ears and slamming into the crumbling walls overhead. Minutes earlier the young Hispanic had bolted across the plaza to hole up in the tiny wood-and-adobe jacal—meager refuge from the coming hail of lead. Over the next 36 hours more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition would riddle the structure, tearing away parts of the house. Eight slugs were later pried from a broom handle.

Yet through it all the teen survived unscathed.

In late October 1884, in a dramatic display of skill, spunk and luck, unimposing 5-foot-7 19-year-old Elfego Baca instigated and prevailed in what was likely the most unequal civilian gunfight in the history of the American West. Certainly, it was the most unusual ever recorded.

Elfego’s Early Life

Many legends surround Elfego Baca, but a few facts are certain. On Feb. 27, 1865, he was born in Socorro, New Mexico Territory, to Francisco and Juana María Baca. The first legend has it his mother was playing las Iglesias, the Mexican version of softball, when her son emerged into the world right there on the field. Another legend claims Elfego was kidnapped in early childhood by Indians who immediately returned the toddler to his family after his screaming disturbed the serenity of the abductors’ camp.

A year after Baca’s birth his parents relocated the family to Topeka, Kan. There, surrounded by Anglos, Elfego grew up learning English and how to defend himself—using his wits before resorting to fists or gunplay, but never backing down. 

Then, in early 1872 an unrecorded illness struck the family, claiming the lives of Baca’s mother, two sisters and a brother. Deciding to return to New Mexico Territory, Elfego’s father, Francisco, brought along eldest son Abdenago but left Elfego in the care of an orphanage. Settling in the small town of Belen, in Valencia County some 40 miles north of Socorro, the senior Baca was soon appointed marshal.

In 1880 15-year-old Elfego left the orphanage and made his way to Socorro, some 75 miles south of Albuquerque. There he reunited with brother Abdenago and other members of the Baca clan, later reconnecting with father Francisco. But it was to be a brief reunion for Elfego and his father. That December in the line of duty Marshal Baca shot into the midst of a drunken brawl in Belen, killing a man. Tried for murder the following spring, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Francisco was being held in the Valencia County Jail, in Los Lunas, awaiting transfer to the Kansas State Penitentiary, in Lansing, when he and three other prisoners were “liberated” by Elfego and 15-year-old accomplice identified only as Chavez.

Newspapers reported details of the jailbreak, but only a few people knew of Elfego’s involvement. After escorting his father to El Paso, Texas, where Francisco could slip across the international border should need arise, Elfego returned to New Mexico Territory. Young Baca worked on his uncle’s isolated Socorro cattle ranch and then for a time in the Albuquerque area, where he transported meat by wagon to Santa Fe Railroad workers. But he always returned home to Socorro.

“Not Afraid”

From the 1880s into the ’90s Socorro was besieged by more than 3,000 miners without benefit of much law enforcement. Sheriffs were stretched thin, thus the town ran wide open 24 hours a day. One day in January 1883 liquored-up Texas cowboys staggered out of a Socorro saloon and rode through the Hispanic neighborhoods in a cloud of dust and bullets. County Sheriff Pete Simpson was in pursuit when he happened across Baca. Mounted and armed, Elfego, weeks shy of his 18th birthday, joined the chase at Simpson’s request. In an interview years later Baca claimed to have shot one of the fleeing horsemen from the saddle at better than 300 yards. Newspapers at the time reported that Simpson had made the shot, but Elfego remained cocky about the encounter. When asked if he knew the name of the dead cowboy, he replied flippantly, “He wasn’t able to tell me by the time I caught up with him.”

Though still wild and reckless in many respects, Elfego took a desk job at age 19 as a mercantile clerk for onetime Socorro judge and mayor Juan José Baca (not a relative), where the teen’s ability to speak both Spanish and English served him well. Though hardly as exciting as being a posse member, it beat being punching cows. Still, Elfego harbored ambitions of being a lawman.

In October 1884 Pedro Sarracino, a county sheriff and saloon owner from San Francisco Plaza, aka Frisco (present-day Reserve, N.M.), rode to Socorro to visit storeowner Baca, his brother-in-law. While there Sarracino mentioned to Elfego that several cattle ranches had sprung up in the Frisco area, and that their hands, mostly rowdy Texans, were running roughshod over local Hispanics. The chaos had recently come to a head when cowboys tortured and maimed a local man in Sarracino’s cantina. Outraged and full of teenage braggadocio, an outraged Elfego declared, “I will show the Texans there is at least one Mexican in the county who is not afraid of an American cowboy.” According to a 1924 autobiographical pamphlet, Baca volunteered on the spot to be Sarracino’s deputy. “I told him that if he would take me back to Frisco with him, that I would make myself a self-made deputy.” Elfego later claimed to have made his own badge. With that, the pair headed to Frisco, 110 miles west as the crow flies in far west-central New Mexico Territory. 

The Legendary Fight

For two centuries before Anglo miners and trappers explored the region that today comprises western New Mexico and eastern Arizona the land supported several hundred Hispanic families. Farming, fishing and hunting kept the people well fed. Long before that, of course, the region had supported various sedentary Indian tribes.

In the 1880s cattlemen arrived from Texas and Oklahoma, daily swelling the population of sprawling San Francisco Plaza, a string of three settlements along the namesake river, which by 1884 had become a staging ground for cross-cultural sparring. Anglos sparred with Hispanics who sparred with Indians, and around it went. Adding fuel to the flames were heated arguments between the various cattle outfits—men who “rode for the brand” and took offense when someone from a competing ranch made an offhand comment. On the heels of the influx of rash young men more than a dozen saloons and bordellos sprang up in Middle and Lower Frisco. The valley was rife with tension.

Soon after Sarracino and young Baca arrived in town, Elfego stepped forward to make his first official arrest. On Oct. 29, 1884, inside the popular Milligan’s Whiskey Bar, drunken cowboy Charlie McCarty brandished his pistol at Hispanic patrons, ordering them to dance, then shot off Baca’s hat. Standing his ground, Baca flashed his badge at McCarty, who hailed from the John Bunyan Slaughter ranch, a notoriously rough Socorro County outfit. Somehow Elfego managed to take the man’s gun. 

Cowboys gathered outside were unhappy to hear that this swaggering, self-deputized Hispanic hero had snagged their partner. Liquored up and ready to fight, the Slaughter cowboys leveled their Winchesters at the saloon, cocked at the ready. As angry shouts, curses and threats from the street resounded off the interior walls, Baca barricaded the saloon doors and windows.

The leader of the mob, Slaughter ranch foreman Young Parham, demanded McCarty’s release even while testing the doors and windows with his shoulders. Parham vowed he and his men would take their friend by force if necessary. Elfego hollered back from inside, threatening to shoot if the cowboys weren’t “out of there by the count of three.” The story goes that the ranch hands had begun to crack jokes about Elfego’s race being unable to count, when they heard him call out in a single quick breath, “One-two-three!” Baca and his “deputies”—friends who’d joined him inside—then fired several warning shots through the door.

In the resulting fusillade Parham had his horse shot out from under him, and as it collapsed, the horse crushed and killed him. Another cowboy caught a bullet through his knee. Out of ammunition and focused on caring for Parham, his horse and the wounded man, the ranch hands retreated, swearing vengeance against Baca and his deputies, who remained holed up at Milligan’s. Early the next morning Slaughter’s hands offered a compromise, vowing to leave be those inside the saloon if Baca would allow McCarty to be tried at a neighboring house. Elfego warily agreed and strolled next door with his ward.

At the speedy trial the justice of the peace fined the sobered-up McCarty $5 and ordered his release. By then, however, rumors had spread among the hands on surrounding ranches that Hispanics in Frisco had gone on a murderous rampage, killing and dismembering Anglo citizens. Seeking to mollify the gathering mob, the justice moved to detain Baca for questioning in Parham’s death.

Unwilling to be arrested, mobbed and undoubtedly lynched, Baca slipped out the “courtroom’s” side door and dashed across the plaza to a crude little jacal whose walls of mesquite sticks and dried mud would almost certainly not stop bullets. Evicting owner Geronimo Armijo and family, Elfego settled in for a siege. While much of the populace fled into the overlooking hills to watch the unfolding drama, some 80 vengeance-seeking ranch hands, using the adobe buttresses of a local church as cover, emptied their weapons into the jacal, reloaded and kept firing until its walls were full of holes. 

Incredibly, none of the bullets struck Baca. All attempts to dislodge the teen were unsuccessful. He refused to come out. In frustration Burt Hearne, of the Spur outfit, rode up to the jacal, leapt from his horse and tried to force the door. Immediately, shots from inside struck Hearne in the stomach. He died within moments. The cowboy soon had company. In the long gunplay four of the vigilantes were killed, eight wounded. Late that evening someone lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it at the jacal. The resulting explosion collapsed the roof and one wall. To spectators and Baca’s attackers alike it seemed no one could have survived the blast. But none of the cowboys was willing to investigate in the darkness. They wisely decided to wait and sift the ruins soberly in the light of day. 

As the morning sun peaked over the Mogollon Rim, the hands who’d spent the night sleeping on the cold ground around Baca’s hideout awoke to the aroma of steeping coffee and fresh tortillas—from inside the jacal. After a hearty breakfast the very much alive Baca resumed his watch. One hungry and enraged cowboy charged forward using a cast-iron shield pirated from a cookstove, only to flee and drop the armor after a slug creased his hairline.

At 6 that evening, a day and a half after the first shots were fired, the battle ended when a bona fide Socorro County deputy sheriff, Frank Rose, persuaded Baca to surrender. Before doing so, Elfego insisted on two conditions: to stand trial in Socorro, and to retain his two pistols (one was McCarty’s). The next morning he rode in the back of a buckboard on the return trip to his hometown. Trailing cowboys were warned not to approach.

Back in Frisco curious onlookers pored over the jacal. Inside, they were astonished to find an intact plaster statue of Nuestra Señora Doña Ana. That Baca had survived was also considered a miracle—until his secret was revealed. The jacal’s floor was recessed 18 inches belowground, enough to have screened Elfego from the incoming barrage. 

Yet Baca did seem to lead a charmed life, for an ambush planned for him on the road to Socorro also failed. Two separate groups of would-be assassins each mistakenly thought the other had carried out the attack. Meanwhile, the lawman arrived safely in custody in Socorro.

Charged with murder in the shooting of Hearne, Baca remained in jail until his trial in Albuquerque in May 1885. Among the items entered into evidence was the door of the jacal, bearing nearly 400 bullet holes. That and Sarracino’s testimony convinced the jury Elfego had indeed killed in self-defense. Subsequently tried and acquitted of murder in the death of Parham, Baca was immediately thrust into the status of folk hero to the local Hispanics.

A Colorful Career

Exploiting his notoriety from the Frisco shootout, Baca officially resumed his career as a deputy sheriff in Socorro. He was later elected county sheriff, with the power to secure indictments for the arrest of local lawbreakers. Instead of having his deputies risk life and limb in pursuit of the wanted men, he sent each of the accused a letter: 

“I have a warrant here for your arrest. Please come in by [fill in date] and give yourself up. If you don’t, I’ll know you intend to resist arrest, and I will feel justified in shooting you on sight when I come after you.”

Most fugitives turned themselves in.

Shortly after his acquittal in 1885 Baca married 16-year-old Francisquita Pohmer. Despite alleged dalliances by Elfego, the couple remained together 60 years and raised two sons and four daughters. 

In 1888 Baca was appointed a U.S. marshal and served two years. He then studied law and in 1894 was admitted to the bar. After working for respected jurist Alfred Alexander Freeman’s law firm in Socorro in 1895, Elfego operated his own practice on San Antonio Street in El Paso from 1902 to ’04.

Around 1910 he moved to Albuquerque, where he worked as both a lawyer and private detective. “Dressed in a flowing cape and trailed by a bodyguard, he stalked the downtown streets handing out business cards,” historian Marc Simmons writes. On the front of the card was printed Elfego Baca, Attorney-at-Law, Fees Moderate, on the reverse Private Detective, Divorce Investigations Our Specialty, Discreet Shadowing Done. As if being a private detective wasn’t exciting enough, Baca also worked a stint as a bouncer in a gambling house south of the border in Juárez, Chihuahua.

That period of his life spawned another legend. One day Baca received a telegram from a client in El Paso. “Need you at once,” it read. “Have just been charged with murder.” Attorney Baca supposedly responded with a tongue-in-cheek telegram reading, “Leaving at once with three eyewitnesses.”

When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, Baca ran for Congress as a Republican. Though unsuccessful, he remained a valued political figure for his ability to turn out the Hispanic vote. He held several other public offices in succession, including Socorro County clerk, Socorro County school superintendent, mayor of Socorro, and district attorney for Socorro and Sierra counties. “Most reports say he was the best peace officer Socorro ever had,” Leon Metz writes of Baca in his 1996 book The Shooters.

Still more adventures, with revolutionary overtones, awaited Elfego.

Another Escape

In February 1913, after a period of unremitting turmoil amid the Mexican Revolution, President Victoriano Huerta wrested control of the republic, though he continued to face challenges from guerrilla leaders in the northern provinces. Chief among them was Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who controlled much of the state of Chihuahua, bordering New Mexico.

In early January 1914, hotly pursued by Villa’s army, Huerta-allied General José Inés Salazar crossed into Presidio, Texas. Almost at once he was arrested and charged with having violated American neutrality laws. Placed in military custody at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, the general was later moved to Fort Wingate, near Gallup, New Mexico Territory.

President Huerta in particular wanted Salazar out of jail, and agents of the Mexican government sought the legal services of Baca, whose reputation had spread across the border. Baca traveled to Washington but failed to gain the general’s release. He then engaged in a series of legal shenanigans that garnered his client an additional perjury charge. On November 16 Salazar was transferred to the Bernalillo County Jail, in Baca’s hometown of Albuquerque, to face the charge. Four days later two masked men entered the jail, overpowered and bound the sheriff and sped off in a car with Salazar. He was last spotted in El Paso, headed south.

Word about town had it Huerta’s accomplices had arrived in Albuquerque beforehand and quietly contacted certain influential residents, providing them with substantial funds to arrange Salazar’s freedom. Some suspected Baca had been the ringleader. Yet Elfego had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the escape; he’d been drinking at the crowded Graham Bar in downtown Albuquerque and had even overtly asked a friend for the exact time so he could set his watch.

Regardless, in April 1915 a federal grand jury handed down indictments charging Baca and three other officials with conspiracy in Salazar’s escape. At their December trial all four were acquitted. Elfego’s reputation only soared among Hispanic admirers.

On Feb. 26, 1940, the day before Baca’s 75th birthday, he boasted to The Albuquerque Tribune that of the 30 people he had defended on charges of murder, only one was sent to the penitentiary. In later years Baca worked closely with longtime New Mexico Senator Bronson M. Cutting as a political investigator and wrote a weekly newspaper column in Spanish praising the senator’s work on behalf of local Hispanics. He even switched parties with Cutting in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944, despite poor health, 79-year-old Baca considered running for governor, but that year he failed even to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for district attorney. 

“I Made ’em Believe it”

For more than six decades Baca remained a lively part of New Mexico’s cultural landscape, relating spirited memories of comely señoritas and political intrigues past. His miraculous deliverance from the 1884 Frisco shootout had earned this man of many facets a reputation as one tough hombre. That reputation followed him throughout his years as a lawman, criminal lawyer, district attorney, private detective, chief bouncer of a Prohibition gambling house and American agent for President Huerta.

On July 13, 1936, Janet Smith of the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, conducted an interview with Baca, the notes from which are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. “I never wanted to kill anybody,” Baca told Smith, “but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.” Full of self-confidence throughout his life, Baca added, “In those days I was a self-made deputy. I had a badge I made for myself, and if they didn’t believe I was a deputy, they’d better believe it, because I made ’em believe it.” 

As befitting a legend, New Mexico lawman Elfego Baca, who’d been born near the close of the Civil War in 1865, died at age 80 on Aug. 27, 1945, near the close of World War II. He is buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Albuquerque. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on this topic author Melody Groves recommends Memoirs: Episodes in New Mexico History, 1892–1969, by William A. Keleher; Incredible Elfego Baca: Good Man, Bad Man of the Old West, by Howard Bryan; and The Lost Frontier, by Rod Miller.

No larger collection of artillery had ever been brought to a war’s battlefields in the Western Hemisphere before the Civil War. More than 200,000 men, trained and educated like no other subset of soldiers in this war of amateurs, handled and operated these big guns.

The story continues that the Civil War changed the standards, rules, and results of artillery use, advancing technological, tactical, and other norms forward from the Napoleonic wars, with their smoothbore guns and inaccurate round shot, toward a present and future determined by rifled guns that could be expected to hit their targets with regularity. Artillery would dominate from here on, and the side that figured out how to use it best would surely be victorious.

Not so fast, says Earl J. Hess. The professor emeritus of history at Lincoln Memorial University and author of 30 books on the Civil War argues in his 2022 study Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield that these advances were overrated in determining the war’s outcome as well as the proper place of its artillery on the timeline of military history.

Let’s get right to the heart of it: The Civil War is often considered the “first modern war.” You argue that it was mostly a traditional one. Please explain. 

Anyone who views the Civil War as the first modern war has a very hard case to prove. In my view it overwhelmingly was closer to warfare during the Napoleonic era 50 years before than to World War I 50 years later. A Napoleonic soldier would have been quite comfortable on a Civil War battlefield, while a Civil War soldier would have been stunned by the battlefield created by the Great War of 1914–18. 

In light of that, what were the differences between the artillery forces of previous wars and those of the Civil War? 

Civil War artillery saw only relatively slight improvement over that used in the Napoleonic era. The biggest difference was rifling, which applied to only about half the pieces used during the Civil War. Yet, because mostly of problems with igniting long-range ordnance and problems with seeing targets at great distances, there is no proof that rifled artillery produced any noticeable results on Civil War battlefields other than the odd long-range shot that hit its target because the gun crew happened to be particularly good. 

What were the main improvements over the past? 

Another difference between Civil War artillery and that of previous decades was adding heavier ordnance to the mix. Six-pounders were phased out during the first half of the Civil War in favor of 10-pounders and 12-pounders. Also, the trend was toward eliminating all decorations and handles on the artillery tube because they caused weak points that could not resist the stress of firing as well. Sleek-looking designs, heavier ordnance, and lighter pieces for easier moving around were the trends evident by the 1850s and 1860s. All this amounts to an improvement on the age-old system of artillery, but not a revolutionary break from it. 

What were the greatest disappointments of Civil War artillery? 

Probably the greatest disappointment was the failure of rifled pieces to prove their worth on the battlefield. Their limitations became apparent to many. That is why about half the pieces used by both sides during the war still were smoothbore. Many gunners were convinced they were at least as good as the new rifles, or better. 

How much did the improvements and disappointments have to do with winning and losing the war? 

Civil War artillery failed to achieve more than a supporting role to infantry. It did not come to dominate the battlefield as would happen along the Western Front during World War I. Even in static campaigns like that at Petersburg, and despite the heavy concentration of artillery pieces along the 35-mile-long trench system at Petersburg and Richmond, the guns failed to provide a campaign-winning edge for either side. That does not mean they were unimportant, by any means. They could and did on occasion elevate their role on the battlefield to something like a decisive edge under the right circumstances. One could argue that Union guns did so on January 2, 1863, at Stones River, and Confederate guns did so at the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh, for example. But far more common was their accomplishment in helping infantry hold a position, a much less prominent, though important, role. 

One of the issues you cover in your book is the conflict over control of the artillery between the artillery itself and the infantry. How important was that, and how did it resolve? 

Artillery was a supporting arm of the infantry, and to a lesser extent of the cavalry. It did not have the ability to operate independently, always needing support from foot or mounted troops. That is one of the reasons army culture considered it best to vest infantry commanders with the authority to command artillery. Batteries were assigned to infantry brigades and were under the infantry brigade commander’s orders and relied on his infantry brigade staff for their supplies as well. 

Some artillery officers complained of this arrangement for several reasons. The most prominent one was that it inhibited the concentration of artillery on the battlefield and thus robbed it of its potential to play a decisive role in combat. But more importantly, they complained that infantry brigade staff simply did not know how to supply batteries very well. Another important reason for their complaint was that dispersing the batteries to infantry units greatly limited advancement for artillery officers, most of whom could look forward to holding nothing higher than a captaincy of a battery. 

While historians have widely accepted the opinion of artillery officers without question, I argue that their complaint has only limited validity. The complaint about the inability to concentrate the guns to play a prominent role on the battlefield does not hold water. The most visible concentrations of guns, at Shiloh and Stones River, took place in armies that practiced dispersion of batteries to infantry brigades. The system was flexible. If infantry officers wanted to, they had no difficulty concentrating batteries for a specific job on the battlefield.

There must have been something to their complaints…

Their complaints were quite valid when it came to administrative control, rather than battlefield control. They needed their own staff to supply the batteries and to constantly train the men. 

By the midpoint of the Civil War, the major field armies of both sides began to group field artillery into units of their own, called artillery brigades in some armies and artillery battalions in others. Between battles, these units were under the control of an artillery officer appointed to his position, and he was responsible for supply and training. But during a battle, control of those units reverted to infantry commanders at the division or corps levels. This was not everything the artillery officers wanted, but it was more than they ever had before in American military history. Moreover, it essentially was the system used during the 20th century wars as well.

In the Civil War this arrangement improved the administration and upkeep of the artillery force, but it did not noticeably improve its battlefield performance, which was as good early in the war as it was later in the conflict. Even though some infantry officers foolishly ordered the guns about even though they knew nothing about how to use them, an equal number were keen students of artillery practice and could use the guns well on the battlefield.

There was a third group of infantry officers who knew little if anything about how to use artillery but were wise enough to allow their battery commanders a completely free hand in operating under fire. In other words, there is not such a clear-cut difference between the dispersion policy of 1861–62 and the concentration policy of 1863–65.

How should we think of the Civil War as it occupies the space between Napoleonic warfare and World War I? 

I do not see the Civil War as a transitional conflict between the Napoleonic wars and World War I so much as a minor variation on the Napoleonic model. The things that made the Great War the first truly modern conflict were largely or wholly absent in the Civil War. If that is transition, then one could say there was a huge leap across a big chasm between 1865 and 1914, but an easy step back from 1861 to 1815.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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On October 5, 1869, just more than four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and 34 years before the Wright Brothers took off, Watson Fell Quinby was granted this patent for a human “Flying Machine.” The contraption used two side wings and a “dorsal wing,” supported by the shoulders and waist, powered by stay-cords attached to the feet, and guided or steered by hand. To our modern eyes, the device looks comical, of course. Had it worked, the old joke, “I just flew in from Newark, and boy are my arms tired,” would have been a reality. And it must have seemed ridiculous to those who lacked Quinby’s vision or foresight in an age without air travel.  

“We hardly think he will be able to compete with the swallows in this harness,” an 1871 article in Scientific American quipped about Quinby’s invention. “We would advise him to start from some low point at first, so that, if he should fall down, it will not hurt him much.”

He did not heed this advice. Quinby, born in 1825 and a successful physician, reportedly built his machine secretly in his carriage house in Newport, Del. When it came time to test it, he donned a skin-tight suit, strapped the machine to his body, and leapt into the air from the roof of a small building. He soon discovered its failings. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and family members who had gathered to witness the flight test, rescued him from the wreckage. Quinby’s dream of flight was undeterred. He patented an improved “Flying Apparatus” in 1872 and “Aerial Ship” in 1879. Neither of those inventions ever took off, either.  

He did live long enough to see powered air flight become a reality, and even become a factor in war. When he died in 1918 at the age of 93, the Wilmington Morning News penned his obituary, and wrote: “From boyhood Dr. Quinby delighted in mechanical experiment, and during his mature life has invented several useful devices since completing his airship, a rotary digger, a method of arch construction without the use of forms and centers, a conduit for underground wires and pipes.”

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Who says living in the past doesn’t pay? Doug Hansen has turned a youthful passion for old-world craftsmanship into an internationally renowned business still rooted on family land in Letcher, S.D. Hansen Wheel & Wagon Shop has restored and built wagons and stagecoaches for museums, theme parks, film and TV productions, collectors, reenactors and people who just plain like to travel by wagon. Working in new and old buildings—the shop’s finishing area is in a former railroad depot—the Hansen team has built wagons and camp gear for such popular productions as Dances With Wolves and 1883, as well as the forthcoming Kevin Costner film Horizons. Hansen has also worked on stagecoaches and wagons for Wells Fargo, Disney, Knotts Berry Farm and Budweiser’s signature Clydesdales. Word has certainly gotten out, as the shop’s history-minded customers include clients in France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Japan and Taiwan—anywhere people celebrate the heritage of fine craftsmanship. 

What inspired you to work on wagons? 

My family gets a lot of credit, because my dad had a nice shop, my mom had a leather shop, and we had horses. My mother is a saddlemaker. My grandfather was a teamster and had worked in his uncle’s blacksmith shop. I was intrigued with old-world craftsmanship as a kid. A wheel needed restoration, so I undertook that. Pretty soon my mother was buying buggies at antique auctions, and I restored them. All of a sudden my hobby got out of control, and I made it a business. We are building those vehicles I’m passionate about. 

Would you rather restore/rebuild or start from scratch? 

When doing restoration, you’re usually just cleaning up, profiling. But in a replication, you have to build everything, and there are specific hardwoods for different components. A spoke is hickory. A felloe [rim] is white oak. The hub is elm. A reach [bearing shaft] is hickory. All your panel wood is yellow poplar. One of the challenges is finding the stock. In today’s hardwood industry most stock is used for kitchen cabinets and furniture. It’s thinner stock. The wagon industry no longer exists, so the heavy stock and specific species are harder to find. We often find we have to custom saw and custom dry, and it’s a long-drawn-out process.

Building a replica is a lot like being a sculptor. You have to rely on your eye and your hand to recreate that. You are sculpting a horse-drawn vehicle, be it a buckboard or a stagecoach. You are sculpting thousands of components. That historical accuracy of the horse-drawn era is form over function. They have to look good. They have to work. 

What type of vehicle do you most like to restore?

The stagecoach is my passion. It is the most complex. The leather thoroughbraces, the pumpkin-shaped vehicle—it is a complex vehicle of industry and artistry. My aptitude is the mechanical, the engineering, and then the artsy side of it. I can easily comprehend the engineering, and I appreciate the design. Like any historical trade, it takes a certain amount of time to understand. You have to get it right historically. It’s not your design; you are replicating a period.  

How do you define your role?

I’m the visionary. I carry chalk in my pocket, and I draw pictures on the ground or a bench, then work with the actual sculptor, the craftsman. 

How do you find or train employees?

It’s not our equipment that builds wagons—we don’t have cookie cutters. It’s our craftsmen, their dedication, skill and passion. All of them have aptitude. Nobody comes aboard as a wainwright or a wheelwright. We bring them on, train them, immerse them in our world. We work as a team—wheelwright, wainwright, blacksmith, coach maker, painter, trimmer and ornamentor. We take wood, iron, pigments, textiles and leather, and poof! you have a vehicle. One day you roll it out, critique it and say, “What can we do better next time?” We strive to be as proficient as the men back in the 1800s. They had all the knowledge. We’re still uncovering lost knowledge. We will never fully understand the process. 

What historical insights have you gleaned?

There’s a difference between a historian who lives it and one who writes it. I can read about a vehicle, I can look at it, but I don’t understand it as much as when I build it and drive it. 

How do you differ from period Old West craftsmen? 

They were forward engineering to meet a need. We are reverse engineering. What we do is a little bit like archaeology. We need to uncover tidbits of information as well as the obstacles. America was built by the teamsters who had the fortitude, ingenuity and desire to get past obstacles. 

Have any projects left you wondering, Why did I agree to do this one?

Can of worms projects we didn’t mean to put that much money into. We try to figure out in advance, Will this be too complex? Then you open the can of worms. All things are obtainable, but not always obtainable by the budget. 

Do any projects stand out?

I enjoy doing conservation and restoration. We’ve learned so much from vehicles with historical content. Now we understand the design, textiles, leathers, pigments and the engineering specifics of the wood species. There’s so much information when you get a historic vehicle like the last stagecoach we worked on, from Annisquam, Ma. It’s like opening a volume of encyclopedias.

The best museum projects would have to be the Oregon Trail replicas we’ve built. It’s an obscure wagon. There were thousands of them, but the emigrants used them up like old trucks. Those are fun. We’ve built covered wagons for trail interpretive centers across the West. Other vehicles that come to mind are the stagecoaches. We’ve restored Wells Fargo coaches that had original content in them—signatures, dates. We even found an upholsterer’s tool. They’re all fascinating. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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The year 1873 saw the introduction of two game-changing firearms—the Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle and the Colt M1873 Single Action Army (aka “Peacemaker”) revolver. What set them apart from the array of available arms was that they were among the first chambered for center-fire metallic cartridges to be used in tandem.

Each firearm initially used its own proprietary round. The Model 1873 was chambered for the .44-40 Winchester cartridge, which went on to become one of the most popular rounds in firearms history. Purpose-built for the U.S. Cavalry, the Peacemaker was initially designed with a 7½-inch barrel, for accuracy at longer ranges, and chambered for use with the hard-hitting .45 Colt round. Not to rest on its own laurels, Colt then offered civilian versions of its revolver chambered for Winchester’s increasingly popular .44-40 cartridge, as well as the latter’s .38-40 and .32-20 rounds, thus sparing anyone who owned both firearms from having to carry two different calibers of ammunition. As attested by the images on the following pages, everyone from lawmen and outlaws to everyday cowhands and shepherds to headline entertainers were soon snapping up both manufacturers’ Model 1873s.

Another aspect that set apart the 1873s was shrewd marketing, including testimonials from famed Westerners of the era. Winchester and Colt each advertised its guns through such motivated Western dealers as E.C. Meacham, of St. Louis, and Carlos Gove, of Denver. Winchester’s 1875 catalog featured praise from Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who wrote the company on behalf of prospective buyers, “For hunting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.” Writer Ned Buntline, whose florid dime novels birthed many of the legends associated with Buffalo Bill, tirelessly hyped both the Winchester ’73 and the Colt Single Action Army. For much of his career Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the man who in 1934 brought outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to ground, carried a Colt Peacemaker he dubbed “Old Lucky.” Bill Tilghman, the famed U.S. marshal out of Oklahoma, was known to carry both a Winchester ’73 and a Peacemaker, as did notorious outlaws Billy the Kid and Pearl Hart, though clearly not to either manufacturer’s detriment. 

Winchester produced a whopping 720,000 Model 1873 rifles through 1923, while Colt rolled out more than 357,000 first-generation Single Action Army revolvers through 1940. By then both companies had claimed the title “The Gun That Won the West” for their respective Models 1873. The Peacemaker is still in production, and modern-day replicas of both firearms remain popular among present-day cowboy action shooters. They’ve certainly earned their reputation. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Finding enthusiastic volunteers to serve was not a problem for the 1st Alabama Infantry at the outset of the Civil War. Young soldiers flocked to fill the regiment’s ranks, with 90 percent of the privates who signed up no older than 25, and its officers averaging 30 years of age.

Organized at Pensacola, Fla., in February 1861, the 1st Alabama consisted of 10 companies, all raised and transported to Pensacola independently. Henry D. Clayton served as the regiment’s first colonel.

During the first few months of the war, the regiment enjoyed relatively easy service. The men occupied the Barrancas Barracks and had their slaves do most of the menial work, including cooking, cleaning, and washing of clothes. They received a daily ration of one pound of fresh bread and another pound of beef, which they supplemented with boxes of provisions sent to them by their friends and families.

Because the men would be paid in gold and silver, the camp was transformed into a gambling den every payday. And, as happened in so many units during the war, disease wracked the regiment not long after it formed, meaning the regiment’s first casualties and deaths were the result of measles, malaria, or typhoid fever.

Although organized as an infantry unit, the 1st found itself initially under the watchful eye of Brig. Gen. Braxton Bragg, who had won acclaim during the Mexican War as an artillery officer, particularly at the Battle of Buena Vista on February 22-23, 1847—famously ordered by General Zachary Taylor to fire “a little more grape, Captain Bragg.” Throughout the war, the 1st Alabama received praise for its ability to seamlessly transition from infantry to artillery and back again whenever needed.

On November 22-23, 1861, the 1st participated in the bombardment of Fort Pickens, Fla. Not only did the Alabamians suffer no casualties, Bragg called the regiment “a well-instructed body of artillery”—high praise from the typically gruff general, who also authorized the 1st to list the date of engagement on its battle flag to recognize the exemplary marksmanship and discipline they had shown.

On March 5, 1862, the 1st was ordered to Missouri. In his official report, Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk referred to the Alabamians as “Bragg’s best artillerists.” They eventually helped at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River. After weeks of intense bombardment, Union forces surrounded the Rebel bastion with superior numbers of men, gunboats, and heavy artillery. With its lines of retreat cut and its ammunition nearly exhausted, the 1st surrendered with the rest of the island’s garrison on April 8, 1862. 

Roughly 400 members of the regiment died from either the fighting or disease during its 27-day defense of Island No. 10.

Victorious Federals sent the regiment’s officers to the prison camp at Johnson’s Island on Lake Erie and the enlisted men to prison camps in Wisconsin and Illinois. In Wisconsin alone, 105 members of the regiment died, and most of them remain buried there today. Survivors of the 1st Alabama still in prison camps were exchanged starting on September 7, 1862. According to one account, young girls pelted the Alabamians with apples along the road, although it is not clear if the girls intended this an attack on their hated enemies or as an act of kindness to hungry men in desperate need of fresh produce.

On October 4, 1862, the 1st reported for duty at Port Hudson, La., on the Mississippi River. The depleted regiment entered Port Hudson with only 700 combat troops and a brass band. Less than half of those men were fit for active duty, the rest being too sick to participate in the fighting. The regiment served in Port Hudson as infantry and as heavy artillery during the siege. A small detachment from the regiment served as the Port Hudson “coast guard” operating small boats in the Mississippi River where they kept a lookout for Union forces. When not busy on lookout, the Alabamians used their small boats to go fishing, occasionally with the aid of artillery shells which became improvised depth charges that provided huge catches of tasty—possibly mangled—fish.

On March 14, 1863, as Union ships ran past the Port Hudson batteries, the regiment played a leading role in battering those vessels. According to one 1st Alabama veteran, Edward McMorries, “the scene became one of indescribable grandeur” as “the river and our line of fortifications looked like a solid sheet of electric glare and flame.” Unable to hear their officers over the horrific racket of artillery, the 1st’s gunners fell back on their training, loading and firing their cannons as quickly as possible without even trying to speak. Every man knew his duty and every man did his part. The Union fleet suffered dreadfully in sailing within range of the 1st Alabama’s expert gunners, and the Yellowhammer State boys congratulated themselves on a job well done.

Union forces returned to Port Hudson several weeks later and launched major assaults on May 27 and June 14, along with countless smaller attacks and constant artillery barrages. Members of the 1st Alabama took great pride in their work at Port Hudson, and one member of the regiment bragged that he and his comrades “repulsed with slaughter” every Union attack on their position. Major General Franklin Gardner, Port Hudson’s Confederate commander, praised the 1st Alabama for its “gallant conduct,” saying it was “deserving of highest praise.”

Despite the 1st’s courage and skill, the Federals slowly ground down the garrison. With Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton’s surrender of Vicksburg, Miss., on July 4, 1863, Port Hudson became the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River.

Alone, surrounded, and nearly out of supplies, further resistance seemed futile. On July 9, 1863, Gardner surrendered Port Hudson and the 1st’s officers became prisoners of war once again, but this time the enlisted men were paroled and allowed to return home until they were exchanged.

On November 10, 1863, the 1st Alabama’s officers were again exchanged and assigned to service with the Department of the Gulf. The Alabamians helped defend Mobile Bay, patrolling the coast, manning the heavy artillery of Fort Gaines, and feasting on seafood that they supplemented with produce from a personal 10-acre vegetable garden. They saw little action, their most noteworthy moment coming when they executed a man they suspected was a Union spy. Confederate forces in Georgia needed reinforcements and the 1st Alabama received orders to stiffen the line. The regiment marched north but left its cannons behind. The men once known as “Bragg’s best artillerists” would serve as infantry for the remainder of the war.

On May 18, 1864, the 1st joined the Army of Tennessee near New Hope, Ga. Sherman’s blue-clad attackers gave the regiment little time to acclimate to its new home, launching a series of attacks on its positions on May 25–27. The 1st played an important role in the Atlanta Campaign, particularly at the Battle of Peachtree Creek on July 20, 1864. Nevertheless, Atlanta eventually fell to Union forces on September 2, 1864.

With Atlanta in Union hands, the 1st remained with the Army of Tennessee during its desperate offensive across Georgia, Alabama, and into Tennessee. The regiment crossed the Tennessee River near Florence, Ala., on November 20, 1864. As the Alabamians shuffled their bare feet across the snow-dusted ground, several ladies stood along the roadside, waving their handkerchiefs and crying. Decades later, a member of the regiment recalled that “their tears revealed that we were without any hope of success.”

At the Battle of Franklin on November 30, the 1st Alabama formed on the Confederate right. The regiment had come within about a hundred yards of the Union position when the Federals unleashed a volley. The veteran Alabamians responded with “rebel yells” and charged forward without waiting for orders or bothering to fire. When they got to the Union breastworks, the Alabamians reached over the works and fired their rifles at the Federals at point-blank range. Without time to reload, the sons of Alabama resorted to grappling hand-to-hand with Federals from Indiana and Illinois.

According to one veteran of the regiment, the Federals vastly outnumbered their attackers, but “men have never been made so brave as to be wholly unmoved by such audacity as the Confederates exhibited.” For a short time, the battle’s outcome hung in the balance at the bottom of a muddy ditch. Quantity, however, proved to have a quality all its own, as the Federals used their numerical advantages to force the Alabamians to retreat with heavy losses. The Union army evacuated Franklin that night , falling back toward Union-occupied Nashville, followed closely by the Army of Tennessee’s shattered remnants.

At the Battle of Nashville on December 15-16, 1864, the 1st again faced heavy fighting, serving near the center of the Confederate line on the battle’s opening day and withdrawing only when ordered to retreat. On the second day, the Alabamians once more found themselves near the center of the fighting. They successfully repelled repeated Union attacks until realizing in horror that the Confederate left flank was disintegrating, forcing members of the regiment to flee to avoid capture. On December 24, after a long and difficult retreat, survivors joined the remnants of the Army of Tennessee just south of the Tennessee River.

In 1865, the 1st Alabama received orders to join Confederate forces assembling in North Carolina for a last stand. Of the more than 3,800 men who had once served in the regiment, only about 100 were left—but those 100 or so answered the call. In what would be the Army of Tennessee’s final battle and the war’s last major clash, the 1st fought at Bentonville, N.C., on March 19-21, 1865.

With the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the collapse of the Confederate government, the war was all but over. On April 26, 1865, the 1st Alabama surrendered along with the rest of the Army of Tennessee. After more than four years of war, the regiment’s handful of survivors returned home to rebuild their lives and their communities.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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It was Shakespeare who wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” The Bard was obviously unfamiliar with our brand of Western history, which inverted that truism. Consider the epitaph of famed Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald: No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’. In a similar vein popular culture tends to paint every Western lawman as a Marshal Matt Dillon, that radio and television paragon of virtue who kept the peace in Dodge City, Kan.

Historian Jay Robert Nash, among others, has debunked the stereotypical image of the Western outlaw-gunman as the sociopathic product of a broken home who despises all authority figures. But few writers have debunked the idealistic stereotype of the Western lawman. Indeed, certain hagiographic historians universally laud them for their courage, dedication to duty and strong family ties. Even Nash refers to such officers “the few good men” who cleaned up the West.

A closer examination reveals a more nuanced view, for many, if not most, officers in the Old West worked both sides of the law, either out of necessity to supplement their meager pay or simply because they were bent that way. It is virtually impossible to name one notable lawman who did not have a few stains on his record. Such men didn’t go through the background checks that are standard today, and their records did not follow them around. Thus, a man could commit bank robbery or murder in New Mexico Territory, yet get hired on as marshal of a small Texas town. Big cities like Dodge did conduct careful searches for their marshals. Regardless, the kind of tough hombre needed to clean up a wild and woolly cow town didn’t figure to be a straight arrow. Just the opposite. The more dangerous reputation a man bore, the more likely he was to be hired for the job. Wild Bill Hickok didn’t earn his reputation with a gun by shooting tin cans.

Nor was it especially difficult to get away with working both sides of the street. The outlaw became a lawman simply by putting on a badge, and the lawman could operate a quiet side business in cattle rustling, extortion or gun-for-hire escapades without anyone being the wiser. The only recognizable difference between them was the badge, and any old body could slap on a tin star and cop an attitude. That became a serious enough concern in Fort Worth that in 1889 the City Council passed an ordinance making it a crime to impersonate an officer. The ordinance is known to have been enforced in only two instances—that fall when a couple of young bravos were fined $10 and $5 respectively in city court for “personating [sic] policemen.”

Lawmen and outlaws had a natural simpatico, derived oftentimes from having been brothers-in-arms in the recent Civil War, or perhaps from having driven longhorns up the Chisholm Trail together. Others were blood relations. Jesse James had no trouble cobbling a gang together from his brother and fellow Confederate bushwhackers after the Civil War. Of course, Jesse never felt moved to put on a badge. He kept to his side of the street. But for so many others the line between good guy and bad guy remained hazy. One wag said the only way to distinguish one from the other after a gunfight was to turn over the corpse and see if it was wearing a badge.

Those who knew such men personally saw past their dime-novel personas. Interviewed in 1931, Kansan Annie Anderson, a former dance hall girl who knew Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and pals, insisted, “They were a bunch of cowards.” Though their actions certainly don’t bear out such an assertion, neither were they regarded as upstanding citizens by much of the population.

Men of Action

The familiarity between lawmen and outlaws was also due in part to the fact both groups comprised men of action. Thus, they had a rough, mutual respect for each other—that is, when not shooting at one another. Hired gun and sometime lawman Jim McIntire, for example, was always welcome in the home of Fort Worth Marshal Ed Terrell. Texas Rangers showed similar courtesy to Fort Worth marshal turned gun for hire Jim Courtright in 1884 when arresting him on a murder warrant out of New Mexico Territory. Tarrant County Sheriff Walter Maddox and Fort Worth Marshal Bill Rea treated the jailed fugitive more like an honored guest than a wanted man, thus it’s no surprise Courtright managed to escape with little trouble. When Fort Worth private detective Heck Thomas brought the body of murderer Jim Lee through Gainesville, Texas, in September 1885, he told a reception party admiringly, “He died game, fighting as long as there was breath in his body.” High praise indeed from the man tasked with bringing in the notorious Lee brothers, dead or alive.

Earlier that year, when U.S. Marshal Harrington Lee “Hal” Gosling was escorting two men to prison, a friend remarked the marshal treated them “more like friends than a brace of the most villainous desperadoes ever consigned to the keeping of an officer.” Gosling’s failure to take routine precautions enabled his prisoners to arm themselves and escape, killing the marshal and two others in the process. A lesson learned the hard way.

Even the worst of outlaws could count friends in law enforcement. An 1892 petition to pardon cold-blooded killer John Wesley Hardin, then serving time at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, bore the signatures of Tarrant County Sheriff John C. Richardson and former Tarrant County Sheriffs Walter Maddox and Ben Shipp. Ironically, the man Hardin had been convicted of murdering was a deputy sheriff.

Conversely, a hard-boiled outlaw might tip his hat to an honest lawman like Sheriff Tom Bell, of Hill County, Texas. In 1898 convicted murderer John B. Shaw wrote to Bell from his Cleburne death cell:

“Tom, [I knew] if I was caught, you would do it or cause it. It makes me love a man for him to rustle hard. I believe if a man is an officer, he ought to be an officer; if he is a thief, he ought to be a thief. I think more of [Johnson County Sheriff] Bill Stewart for rustling hard for me.” 

Shaw signed the note “respectfully” and even invited Bell to come see him before his date with the gallows. 

It didn’t hurt a lawman’s reputation to have a few formidable gunfighting friends he could call on if needed. While sheriff of Ford County, Kan., Bat Masterson benefited from his close relationship to the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday and Luke Short, not to mention brother Ed, a Dodge City policeman. The street ran both ways. When Short ran afoul of Dodge City’s powers that be in 1883, he called on Wyatt, Bat and other pals to back his play. They went down in history as the ironically named “Dodge City Peace Commission.”

The fact is some of the most notorious killers in Old West history wore a badge at one time or another. Edward Capehart O’Kelley is remembered today as the man who in Creede, Colo., on June 8, 1892, shotgunned Bob Ford to avenge the latter’s assassination of Jesse James a decade earlier. A certifiable sociopath, O’Kelley—nicknamed “Red” for his hair color and not his bloodthirsty nature—also happened to be a town marshal in nearby Bachelor, Colo.

Another Jekyll-and-Hyde type was Ben Thompson, who drank, gambled and shot his way across Texas before being elected city marshal of Austin in 1880. Wearing a badge did nothing to moderate the marshal’s violent ways, and he spent more time at the gambling tables than patrolling the streets. In 1882 Thompson killed San Antonio saloonman Jack Harris. Though the marshal was acquitted of all charges, Austin’s city fathers forced him to resign. Thompson’s closest pal, rustler-gunslinger King Fisher, also worked the other side of the law as a Uvalde County deputy sheriff. On March 11, 1884, the two were gunned down in Harris’ San Antonio saloon in a revenge killing. The Austin newspaper Texas Siftings recalled Thompson as “the best city marshal in Texas.” Not all his constituents would have agreed.

Henry Newton Brown was another well-known gunman with several notches on his pistol grips when serving as a lawman in Tascosa, Texas, and later as town marshal of Caldwell, Kan. While wearing the badge in Caldwell, he organized a failed bank robbery at Medicine Lodge, Kan., that got him lynched.

The good people of El Paso and the surrounding county had the bad judgment to make sociopathic killer Mannie Clements Jr. a constable and deputy sheriff. On being booted after his acquittal for armed robbery, he was assassinated in a city saloon in 1908.

David Kemp killed his first man in 1879 when he was but 15. Sentenced to hang, he was granted a pardon by the governor of Texas. In 1890 he relocated to Eddy County, New Mexico Territory, where he served as sheriff before killing his successor, Sheriff Les Dow, on Feb. 18, 1897. Found not guilty, Kemp settled into domestic life as a (thrice) married saloonkeeper.

The appropriately named Baz Outlaw was a member of the vaunted Texas Rangers with a predilection for gunplay when he drank too much, which was often. Though the fed-up Rangers ultimately discharged him, Outlaw parlayed his credentials into an appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal. On April 5, 1894, while on a bender in El Paso, he shot and killed a Texas Ranger before being gunned down by Constable John Selman.

Selman himself was no monument to justice. Before being elected constable of El Paso, he’d rustled cattle and terrorized citizens in Shackelford County as a deputy under crooked Sheriff John M. Larn. In addition to killing Outlaw, the corrupt constable back-shot Hardin, killing him, and engaged in repeated drunken quarrels. One such quarrel, with Deputy U.S. Marshal George Scarborough on April 2, 1896, got Selman killed. Despite his checkered career, his headstone bears the simple inscription John Henry Selman… El Paso Constable.

Another El Paso lawman of questionable virtue was Dallas Stoudenmire. Appointed city marshal in 1881, he spent a year doing a commendable job, which included gun battles with a host of ne’er-do-wells. Unfortunately, Stoudenmire too exhibited a weakness for alcohol, which made him belligerent and quarrelsome and led city fathers to fire him. Months later, on Sept. 18, 1882, he died as so many lawman-outlaws did, in a saloon gunfight.

Best known as a gun for hire, “Killin’ Jim” Miller served at various times as a deputy sheriff, town marshal and Texas Ranger. On Sept. 13, 1896, then Pecos Marshal Miller publicly gunned down former county sheriff and longtime nemesis Bud Frazer in a Toyah, Texas, saloon. It says something about Frazer’s reputation that a jury acquitted Miller. Later advertising his services as a paid assassin, Miller offered to kill anyone for $150.

By his early 30s “Mysterious Dave” Mather had spent much of his young life behind bars in Texas, Kansas and New Mexico Territory. Between jail stints the adept gunhand had no trouble finding work as a lawman. The difference in opinion regarding Mather’s reputation in Dodge City and Dallas, respectively, is mysterious indeed. In 1885 the Dodge City Times hailed him as a “good officer,” while the Dallas Daily Herald deemed him “a notorious horse thief, stage robber and murderer.”

Yet another lawman with a checkered reputation and colorful moniker was Fort Worth’s “Longhair Jim” Courtright, who served three terms as city marshal in the mid- to late 1870s. Depending on one’s perspective, he either tamed the town or tolerated a disgraceful degree of lawlessness. On losing his fourth run for office, he went wholly over to the dark side as a hired gun and extortionist. Courtright, too, died in a shootout, on Feb. 8, 1887—only it was in front of a saloon (Fort Worth’s White Elephant), as the fallen marshal had been gentlemanly enough to call out rival Luke Short for a proper showdown.

A Higher Standard

Not all bad behavior by badge wearers ended in death. On April 3, 1889, Fort Worth officers Jim Rushing and John W. Coker were tying one on in the red-light district known as Hell’s Half Acre when fellow officer Pat Stevens stepped in to arrest the raucous duo. When they resisted, all three men drew their weapons. Stevens fired a shot before terrified onlookers disarmed him, and cooler heads prevailed. It was only dumb luck no one was hit, let alone killed. Initially charged with “assault to murder,” Rushing and Coker were let off with a reprimand. After all, they were officers, and no one had been injured.

Rules governing officers’ behavior came late to Western law enforcement. In 1882 Dodge City Mayor Alonzo B. Webster drew up one of the first such set of rules for a department West of the Mississippi. Borrowed from similar codes back East, it called for officers to be “quiet, civil and orderly” and to maintain “decorum, command of temper, patience and discretion.” A year later the Galveston City Council laid down rules that included this challenge: “Policemen shall not become offended at any harsh or abusive language that may be applied to them, and they will not make arrests in their own quarrels or those of their own families.”

But it took Sam Farmer, who served two stints as Fort Worth marshal (1879–83 and 1887–91), to lay down the law in Texas with regard to using deadly force. Prior to his tenure it was common practice for officers to use whatever force they deemed necessary to do the job. Farmer set a higher standard for his force with 11 rules, including these notable few:

No. 3—Use no more force than absolutely necessary to make an arrest.

No. 4—Never make an arrest merely because someone is saucy toward you.

No. 10—Wear six-shooters out of sight and only use them in self-defense; anything more than that is illegal.

Of course, setting down rules on paper meant nothing if not enforced. And in Fort Worth at least, they must not have been, as the general run of lawmen didn’t noticeably improve after the turn of the century. Things still operated pretty much the same as they had in frontier days. Consider, for example, Captain Tom McClure. For much of his seven years on the force, the captain turned a blind eye to bootlegging and illegal gambling, presumably for a price. Not until 1922 did the police department get wind of things and force McClure into retirement. The city declined to prosecute, likely weighing the public embarrassment certain revelations would have caused. 

Passage of both the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act and the 1919 National Prohibition Act actually spawned new temptations for officers. Recall that many virtually lived in saloons when not on duty—and sometimes while on duty—and more than a few died in gun battles in those same haunts. Others had moonlighted as bouncers or bartenders. It couldn’t have been easy for them to turn their backs on that part of their lives. Likewise, drug dealing had been another way for men forced to make do on the piecework “fees-and-fines” system to supplement their meager income. By 1922 the rumor mill in Fort Worth was rife with reports of “persons in police uniform” peddling illegal whiskey and narcotics. Investigating federal agents found the rumors to be true. The kingpin behind most of the illicit trade turned out to be not some drug lord or bootlegger but a special county policeman.

Sheriff departments also had their share of bad apples. The 1903 year-end report of the Fort Worth Police Department recorded the arrests of four of Tarrant County Sheriff John T. Honea’s deputies on various offenses. None of the cases made it into the newspaper. 

The Power of the Dark Side

Trying to delve into the psyches of men who lived a century or more ago is a challenge. What forces drove lawmen to the dark side? Money issues are only part of the equation. Inner demons? Drink? A thirst for power? Entitlement? Some combination of the above? Forensic psychiatrist R. Gregory Lande argues that the dehumanizing effect of the Civil War, particularly the horrors men had witnessed, was the biggest single reason for the postwar crime wave. Such a rationale also explains a related rise in alcoholism and drug use over the same period.

That said, no one answer fits all. The reasons certain high-profile lawmen went bad are less speculative. For instance, Deputy U.S. Marshals Bob and Grat Dalton decided there was more money to be made robbing trains than preserving law and order, while Mather associate Milt Yarberry, Albuquerque’s first town marshal, was simply a vicious bully who preferred a life of crime to living peacefully. On Feb. 9, 1883, after one of his victims showed up dead with a bullet in the back, Yarberry was marched to the gallows.

Men of Yarberry’s ilk treated the badge as a license to do whatever they pleased, and reform was slow to come. In 1908 Fort Worth mounted officer Hugh Glosson placed his horse in the path of two cars preparing to drag race down Hemphill Street. When their drivers sped past the officer on either side, Glosson yanked and leveled his sidearm at them before ordering the drivers out of their cars. As they were unarmed and had their lady friends with them, the drivers objected to Glosson’s threatening manner and filed a complaint with the police department. At the subsequent hearing Glosson said the cars had scared his horse, and he would only have shot out a tire had the drivers not pulled over. No surprise, the department sided with Glosson, who went on to a long and feisty career in uniform in Fort Worth.

Despite what one reads in today’s headlines, law enforcement has come a long way from the days when a “cowboy culture” prevailed in many departments out West. Professional standards are higher, rules are in place, and the public is less tolerant of official misbehavior. Only when we view Western law enforcement through the nostalgic prism of “the good ol’ days” do we risk buying into the dime-novel version of history. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on the topic author Richard Selcer recommends Texas Gunslingers, by Bill O’Neal, and Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen & Outlaws, by Jay Robert Nash.

For the Union Army of the Potomac and its commander, Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, the early winter of 1862-63 proved extremely taxing. First, they suffered through the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg, fought on Dec. 13. After the army retired back across the Rappahannock River, regimental musters revealed a staggering loss of 12,653 casualties. Nothing had been gained. It had all been for naught. Army morale plummeted, and desertions soared, eventually reaching 200 per day. Tens of thousands of men were listed as “not present”: thousands of others were sick due to inadequate food and the army’s abysmally filthy camps.

Then came Burnside’s infamous “Mud March.” In an attempt to flank the opposing Army of Northern Virginia out of its positions behind the Rappahannock, Burnside ordered an upriver movement via Banks’ Ford. It began on Jan. 20, but that night, the heavens opened up. In the following two-day deluge, small streams became raging torrents. Roads turned into muck-filled quagmires choked with stalled wagons, pontoons, artillery pieces, and hundreds of buried horses and mules. Drenched, freezing, exhausted—feeling as if the very fates were against them—the rank and file dragged themselves back to their encampments at Falmouth. Everyone realized the army was dispirited; many believed it was “all played out.” For the Army of the Potomac, the early winter of 1862-63 was indeed the Valley Forge of the Civil War.

Enter the army’s next head, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Most often remembered as the bombastic commander who lost the subsequent Battle of Chancellorsville (May 1-4), despite outnumbering his opponent two to one, Hooker, nonetheless, possessed admirable administrative and organizational skills. And what’s little remembered is that—in the three months leading up to Chancellorsville—he did a fantastic job restoring the army’s morale and preparing it for the upcoming campaign. Maj. Gen. George Brinton McClellan built the Army of the Potomac, but Maj. Gen. Hooker rehabilitated it.

“The Handsome Captain”

Born in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1814—the grandson of a Continental Army captain—Hooker graduated from West Point in 1837. Commissioned 2nd Lt. in the 1st U.S. Artillery, he first served brief stints in Florida, on the frontier, and as adjutant at his alma mater. During the Mexican-American War (1846-48), Hooker proved an able and courageous staff officer, winning three brevet promotions. It was in Mexico, too, that the well-proportioned six-foot-tall officer first became known as a ladies’ man: the señoritas there nicknamed him the “handsome captain.” 

In California after the war, Hooker served briefly as assistant adjutant general of the Army’s Pacific Division, then, following a leave of absence, resigned his commission to work the land. Unsuccessful as a farmer, he moved to Oregon, where he held the position of superintendent of the territory’s military roads for two years. The last years of the 1850s found Hooker serving as a colonel in the California State Militia. When the Civil War exploded onto center stage in 1861, he raised a regiment of Union volunteers to bring east but was extremely disappointed to learn that California units weren’t eligible for such service. He was determined to travel east and renew his affiliation with the Army, but high living had reduced him to poverty. Thankfully, his friends—among them a San Francisco tavernkeeper—staked him $1,000 and sent him off by steamboat.

In Washington, Hooker presented his credentials to President Abraham Lincoln and 75-year-old Winfield Scott, the Army’s commanding general. But there was a snag. At the termination of the war with Mexico, Hooker had testified in defense of an officer Scott had charged with disloyalty. This had angered Scott, and unfortunately, Scott still remembered. Forced to cool his heels in the War Department anterooms, Hooker nonetheless witnessed the First Battle of Bull Run as a civilian.

Soon thereafter, in an audience with Lincoln, Hooker first complained that, evidently, the Army didn’t want him back. Then he boldly asserted: “I was at Bull Run, the other day, Mr. President, and it is no vanity or boasting in me to say that I am a damned sight better General than you, Sir, had on that field!”

Made a brigadier general on Aug. 3, 1861, his commission backdated to May 17; he was first posted to the fortifications northeast of Washington City, where he drilled his regiments rigorously. In October, Brig. Gen. Hooker was put in charge of a 10,000-man division and charged with defending the lower Potomac River. This exceedingly dull duty involved primarily the interdiction of illicit mail and trade. 

The following year, in mid-March, Hooker’s division was assigned to the III Corps of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Landing on the Virginia Peninsula in April, Hooker’s men dug in opposite the Confederate position at Yorktown.

During the subsequent Peninsula Campaign, Hooker, now a major general, frequently displayed his aggressive and boastful nature—rashly attacking the superior forces of the enemy rearguard at the Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, for example, and later confidently messaging McClellan that he could hold his position in front of Richmond “against 100,000 men.”

Fighting Joe

It was during the Peninsula Campaign that Hooker received his enduring nickname. The standard tale was that a New York newspaper’s compositor accidentally set a telegraphed headline reading “Fighting—Joe Hooker” (meaning it was a continuation of a previous piece) as “Fighting Joe Hooker.” That story now appears apocryphal—several historians have searched archives in vain for said headline. “A reasonable conclusion,” wrote biographer Walter H. Hebert, “is that in some spontaneous manner it was applied to Hooker after Williamsburg.” Perhaps surprisingly, Joseph Hooker was mortified by the name, saying that people would think him “a highwayman or bandit.” (And, to debunk another nickname associated with Hooker: There’s no truth to the story that ladies of the night became known as “hookers” because so many swarmed around Fighting Joe’s encampments. The first known use of “hooker” for prostitute dates to 1845, 16 years before he became a public figure.)

Hooker fought at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 29-30), and when the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River into Maryland—Lee’s first invasion of the North—Lincoln and a few of his Cabinet officers considered appointing him to command the Army of the Potomac. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair ended the discussion, however, with the blunt condemnation that Hooker was “too great a friend of John Barleycorn.”

At the beginning of the Maryland Campaign, Hooker was put in charge of the army’s V Corps, a sizeable 15,000-man force. Soon redesignated as the I Corps of Gen. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Hooker’s command fought at Turner’s Gap (on Sept.14) and the Battle of Antietam three days later. There, during the desperate fighting in the Miller cornfield, Fighting Joe’s divisions were shattered, the general himself receiving an incapacitating wound to the foot. While convalescing, he was visited by numerous government officials, including President Abraham Lincoln. Hearing rumors that he was again being considered for army command, Hooker—never shy about self-promotion—pressed his case by attacking McClellan’s generalship.

Lincoln’s Choice

Instead, of course, Lincoln replaced McClellan with Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, an 1847 West Point graduate with a somewhat checkered battlefield résumé. Taking over in November 1862, Burnside reorganized the Army of the Potomac into four massive “grand divisions,” each comprising two army corps as well as attached artillery and cavalry. Hooker’s Center Grand Division, totaling about 40,000 men, contained Maj. Gen. George Stoneman’s III Corps and the V Corps under Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield.

During the catastrophic Battle of Fredericksburg, Fighting Joe’s Center Grand Division was at first held in reserve, then sent in piecemeal. One of his divisions suffered twenty-five percent casualties in a useless assault against Marye’s Heights (quite possibly the Civil War’s strongest defensive position). On Dec. 13, the Confederates at Marye’s Heights—infantry sheltered behind a stonewall along the base of the rise, dug-in artillery on top—easily annihilated fourteen separate Federal attacks. Seven thousand Union casualties were needlessly lost on this part of the battlefield.

Angered over Burnside’s mishandling of the army, Hooker attacked him unsparingly, telling the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, for example, that the strength of the Confederate position had been well-known beforehand. There had been no excuse for the bloodletting at Marye’s Heights. Burnside, exasperated by Hooker’s numerous machinations—his denunciations, his flagrant self-promotion, and his call for a dictatorship to save the republic—drafted for Lincoln’s signature an extraordinary document, General Order No. 8.18. It stated in part: “General Joseph Hooker… having been guilty of unjust and unnecessary criticisms of the actions of his superior officers… and having… endeavored to create distrust in the minds of officers who have associated with him, and having… made reports and statements which were calculated to create false impressions… is hereby dismissed from the service of the United States as a man unfit to hold an important commission. …” Additionally, two major generals and five brigadiers, accused of similar military indiscretions, were also to be relieved from duty.

In Washington, Burnside presented General Order No. 8, along with his resignation, to the much-beleaguered Abraham Lincoln, asking him to either approve the order or accept his stepping down. Lincoln replied that he needed time to consult with his advisers. During those deliberations, several officers were considered for the Army of the Potomac’s top slot (although all agreed that Burnside was out). In the end—and despite the strenuous objections of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General in Chief Henry Halleck—Lincoln chose Fighting Joe.  

On Jan. 25, 1863, news of Hooker’s appointment reached the Army of the Potomac, where it was fairly well received by the rank and file. They saw him as a fighting general. And, thanks to their fondness for Fighting Joe, they were more than willing to overlook his infighting, intemperance, and reportedly low moral character. Many in the army’s highest ranks, however, were not so sanguine. Two of the army’s grand division commanders—major generals Edwin V. Sumner and William B. Franklin—refused to serve under Hooker and were summarily banished from the Army of the Potomac. Burnside was given a leave of absence.

Fresh Veggies

Soon thereafter, Hooker received the famous Jan. 26 letter from President Lincoln. It opened with a listing of the general’s positive qualities—his bravery, his confidence, his ambition. Then the president admonished Hooker for thwarting Burnside at every turn. Next followed an incredible passage: “I have heard, in such way as to believe it,” Honest Abe had written, “of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course, it was not for this but in spite of it that I have given you the command. Only those Generals who gain successes, can set up Dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The president then promised the government’s utmost support.

On Jan. 28, after a face-to-face with Lincoln in the White House, Hooker returned to his army’s headquarters at Falmouth, just across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, to take command. But, as noted above, the Army of the Potomac was in a deplorable state, both physically and mentally. In letters to their families and hometown newspapers, the soldiers grumbled, detailing their woes. One feared they were “fast approaching a mob.” Another, advocating the army’s breakup, wrote that they “may as well abandon this part of Virginia’s bloody soil.”

Despite the task’s enormity, the 48-year-old Joseph Hooker dove into his new responsibilities with a passion. First, he needed a right-hand man, a chief of staff. In General Order No. 2, dated Jan. 29, Hooker appointed Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield. (His first choice for the position, Brig. Gen. Charles P. Stone, was still under suspicion thanks to his bungling of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in October 1861.)

Although not a West Pointer, New Yorker Butterfield—best known as the supposed composer of “Taps”—had risen quickly through the ranks and was part of Hooker’s inner circle, having led the V Corps in Hooker’s Center Grand Division. He possessed solid organizational skills. Retained as chief of artillery was Brig. Gen. Henry J. Hunt (although he was unfortunately limited to administrative responsibilities). The other staff appointments were adjutants and aides-de-camp from Hooker’s earlier commands.

Early on, Hooker tackled the problem most dear to the men in the ranks—food. Rations for an encamped army were supposed to include fresh vegetables, “desiccated” (or dried) vegetables—derisively called “desecrated” by the soldiers—hardtack, salt pork, and coffee. But much of this good food was being sold for cash by the regimental commissaries to people outside the army. The hungry foot soldiers—even some officers—simply went without. To counteract this profiteering, Hooker ordered that henceforth the men would receive fresh vegetables twice and dried legumes once per week.

Additionally, the new commander ordered the erection of camp bakeries, mandating that his soldiers be issued soft bread, or flour, at least four times a week. Commissary officers who failed to comply were required to file a written explanation. Thanks to this new system of accountability, the men quickly noticed an improvement in both the quality and quantity of their rations. “Whatever they thought of Hooker’s other qualities,” wrote historian Bell Wiley, “soldiers highly approved his competency as a provider.”

Teaching the Men To Bathe?

Orders were also issued to improve the vast camps around Falmouth. When first laid out in early winter, little thought had been given to proper sanitation. The foul odors that emanated from the countless log-and-canvas huts are best left undescribed. Now headquarters required the men to bury their garbage every day and dig drainage ditches around every cabin. Latrines were relocated farther from the company streets. Blankets and bedding were to be aired daily, and the canvas roofs removed often so that the sun, and fresh air, might enter. Unimprovable campsites were abandoned. Attention was also paid to the men’s personal hygiene: They were ordered to cut their hair short, bathe twice a week, and change their underclothing at least once every seven days.

Cleaning up brought about quick and noticeable changes. The army’s medical director, Maj. Jonathan Lettermen, reported that in February, cases of potentially fatal diarrhea dropped 32 percent. Cases of typhoid fever—which had run rampant through the filthy encampments—were down twenty-eight percent. By April, scurvy was almost eliminated. Under Letterman’s direction, army hospitals were aired out and renovated. New hospitals were built. Drunken surgeons were discharged. The ill and the slightly wounded were quickly patched up and returned to the ranks.

As the men’s health improved, Fighting Joe took steps to keep them occupied. A hectic daily regime of drills and inspections was reinstituted. Company, regimental, and brigade officers studied the manuals by candlelight and put their men through the complicated battlefield evolutions the following day. Of course, the men at first complained—one called the drilling “constant and severe”—but they quickly began to take pride in their improved capabilities. The Falmouth drill fields now witnessed large-scale reviews like those once staged by McClellan.

During these special ceremonies, Fighting Joe Hooker would smile approvingly as the infantrymen marched past him in columns of companies—the men in clean uniforms, their rifled muskets bright. “I believe that the army was never in better condition … than it is now,” noted one Bay Stater, “very different from what it was a month ago.”

Hooker went after the horrendous desertion problem with a carrot-and-stick approach. More than anything else, the soldiers wanted to visit their families back home. Now came a new system—the carrot—under which each company was allowed one ten-day furlough at a time. Additionally, President Lincoln issued an order granting amnesty to absentees who returned to the Army of the Potomac by April. Then there was the stick—programs designed to make desertion difficult and more dangerous. Up to this time, homefolks frequently assisted desertion by simply shipping civilian duds to their soldier boys. Now army-bound packages were under the purview of the provost marshals, and none was allowed past without certification from the shipping agent that it was clothing-free.  

Under orders from Hooker, the Army of the Potomac now began stringently enforcing army regulations. Groups of soldiers claiming to be telegraph-repair details needed passes, as did wagons headed north to Washington. Each military unit was ordered to name and physically describe every member who was absent without leave. The outlying picket lines were greatly reinforced—the pickets themselves now ordered to shoot individuals refusing to halt when challenged. Men caught deserting were executed in front of their comrades.

Cheerful Spirits in Camp

Formerly called a “mob,” the Army of the Potomac—thanks to Fighting Joe’s improvements—once again resembled an army. “[C]heerfulness, good order, and military discipline,” wrote one soldier, “at once took the place of grumbling, depression, and want of confidence.” One new development that didn’t sit well with the rank and file, however, was the banishing of liquor from the camps. (And naturally, the officers were excluded from this regulation.) Now the regimental sutlers witnessed booming sales of such items as canned “brandied peaches.” At Washington, bridge guards started seizing five hundred dollars’ worth of alcoholic beverages each and every day.

The most significant structural change to the Army of the Potomac under Hooker was the breaking up of Burnside’s “grand division” formations (of two infantry corps each). As noted above, two of the four grand division heads, major generals Sumner and Franklin, had already departed. (Hooker himself had been another.) The fourth, Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, took leave of the army at this time due to poor health (and dissatisfaction). Now, army headquarters would issue orders directly to seven infantry corps commanders. (The eighth infantry corps, Burnside’s old IX Corps, still fiercely loyal to “Old Burn,” was ordered away under the command of Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, whom Hooker considered a bad influence.)

While historians have called this reordering detrimental to the army’s success—after all, in 1864, the Army of the Potomac would be reorganized into fewer, larger formations—Hooker’s reasoning at the time appears sound. Based on his Fredericksburg experience, Fighting Joe called the grand divisions cumbersome, predicting that the upcoming campaign would prove “adverse to the movement and operations of heavy columns.” Grand divisions also added another layer to the army’s military hierarchy—meaning orders took longer to filter down to the frontlines.

Four of the army’s infantry corps were given new leaders: Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles—another Hooker crony—assumed command of the III Corps; the V Corps head became Maj. Gen. George G. Meade; Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick was transferred from the exiting IX Corps to lead the VI Corps; and Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard eventually took command of the XI Corps. Four new division heads and nineteen new brigade commanders were appointed. Several of these new leaders were controversial, but nobody could deny that Hooker was breathing new life into the Army of the Potomac.

A huge improvement was now made to the cavalry arm. Under previous commanders, the much-maligned Federal horsemen had been frittered away in inappreciable detachments. Outpost duty, dispatch delivery, and the escorting of general officers had been their lot. Consolidated, they now became a powerful Cavalry Corps under the command of Maj. Gen. George Stoneman. Comprising three divisions of two brigades each, supported by a brigade-sized reserve, this force of over 11,000 proved more than equal to the much-vaunted Confederate cavalrymen at the Battle of Brandy Station on June 9. “From the day of its reorganization under Hooker,” noted an appreciative dragoon, “the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac commenced a new life.”

Expanding on an idea first concocted by Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny (who’d had his soldiers wear squares of red cloth), Chief of Staff Butterfield devised a corps badge system that proved immensely popular. Each corps was assigned a unique emblem—a circle, trefoil, diamond, Maltese cross, St. Andrew’s cross, crescent, or star—that the men attached to their caps. Following the colors of the Stars and Stripes, a corps’ first division wore badges in red, the second division white, and the third blue. The system fostered corps pride and was later invaluable for identifying units in combat.

Joseph Hooker’s leadership transformed the Army of the Potomac. Greatly appreciative, the enlisted personnel began cheering him whenever he rode by on his white charger. As one soldier remembered years later: “Ah! the furloughs and vegetables he gave! How he did understand the road to the soldier’s heart! How he made out of defeated, discouraged, and demoralized men a cheerful, plucky, and defiant army, ready to follow him everywhere!”

President Lincoln’s letter of Jan. 26, 1863 had concluded with a brief warning: “Beware of rashness,” Old Abe had written, “but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.” To Lincoln’s great dismay, however, Fighting Joe went forward and gave the nation the Battle of Chancellorsville, the worst defeat ever suffered by the Army of the Potomac. “My God! My God!” moaned the chief executive, his ashen face filled with sorrow and dread. “What will the country say?”

Under Arrest!

The country had plenty to say—especially when the losses, over 17,000, began to sink in. The New York Herald, for example, worrying about the battle’s “fearful consequences,” blasted Lincoln and his advisers for their “ruinous policy of underrating the enemy. …” And Washington was abuzz with wild rumors: Lee had destroyed Hooker’s army and was advancing on the capital; Fighting Joe was under arrest; McClellan would return to command. 

Abraham Lincoln, however, decided to keep Hooker in charge. But when General Lee launched his second invasion of the North and Hooker got into a squabble with the War Department over the status of the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, Lincoln replaced him with Maj. Gen. George Meade on June 28 (only three days before the commencement of the Battle of Gettysburg).

Despite the career black mark that was Chancellorsville, Hooker was sent west to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in command of the Army of the Potomac’s XI and XII Corps. There he performed admirably at Lookout Mountain on Nov. 24, 1863. The two eastern corps were combined in April 1864 as the XX Corps, Army of the Cumberland, and subsequently, under Hooker’s leadership, participated in the Atlanta Campaign. Passed over for promotion, Hooker submitted his resignation to army head Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman on August 27. “I will not object,” was Sherman’s reaction. “He is not indispensable to our success.”

Hooker sat out the rest of the war in Cincinnati, Ohio, in charge of the army’s Northern Department (which comprised the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan). The boredom of this duty—securing the Ohio River and the northern frontier—Fighting Joe alleviated by making speeches and wooing Olivia Groesbeck of Cincinnati, whom he married once the fighting was over. Hooker led Lincoln’s funeral procession in Springfield, Illinois, on May 4, 1865, and was greatly heartened that same year when the report of the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War exonerated him for the devastating defeat at Chancellorsville.

After the war, he oversaw two of the Army’s large administrative districts: the Department of the East and the Department of the Lakes. Retiring on Oct. 15, 1868, he spent his last decade traveling, attending reunions, and threatening to publish his memoirs. Joseph Hooker—the pompous, hard-drinking officer whose leadership, in only three months, completely revitalized the Army of the Potomac—died suddenly on Oct. 31, 1879. He was buried in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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About one-fifth of military-age White men in the South perished during the war—a chilling statistic that reinforces the argument that steadfast devotion to the Confederate cause compelled these soldiers to continue fighting despite the relentless carnage. But before soldiers faced the clang of the battlefield, how did they decide to mobilize, and what part did Confederate law and culture play in promoting military service?

Initially, the cause of secession attracted fervent volunteers. Young men who had forged their convictions during the sectional crisis rushed with friends and neighbors to assert their martial fidelity, chanting songs about defense of home, political power, and slavery. But as 1861 drew to a close without a decisive repelling of Union forces, Confederate leaders looked ahead with uncertainty, as many thousands of volunteer enlistments were to expire by late spring. In December, the Confederate Congress enticed soldiers with a promise of furloughs and cash upon re-enlistment, but with only limited success.

Alongside formal legislative efforts to promote volunteer service, Confederate nationalists did their best to inculcate a spirit of sacrifice and duty in the public consciousness. That would include contributions on the literary front, as artists joined the push to convince the population the war was a defensive revolution and not a slaveholders’ rebellion.

At the forefront of this push was William Gilmore Simms, a novelist, editor, and planter from Charleston, S.C. Despite early opposition to the nullification movement, Simms had become increasingly sectional after 1833, even theorizing that slavery was a traditional and munificent institution. Aware the South had a reputation for lagging behind the North’s literary accomplishments, Simms sought to bolster the intellectual credibility of his section while defending its distinctions, including the sunny agricultural landscape and chivalric culture.

In late 1861, as the Confederate government debated the furlough and bounty system, Simms produced a poem in the Romantic style that exemplified the proper manner for a man of the South. The ballad’s protagonist, however, was no Lowcountry gentleman or plantation prince. Instead, Simms cast his vision of a noble soldier as a backwoods warrior, “The Mountain Partisan.”

My rifle, pouch, and knife!
My steed! And then we part!
One loving kiss, dear wife,
One press of heart to heart!
Cling to me yet awhile,
But stay the sob, the tear!
Smile—only try to smile—
And I go without a fear.

Our little cradled boy,
He sleeps—and in his sleep,
Smiles, with an angel joy,
Which tells thee not to weep, 
I’ll kneel beside, and kiss—
He will not wake the while, 
Thus dreaming of the bliss
That bids thee, too, to smile.

Think not, dear wife, I go,
With a light thought at my heart
’Tis a pang akin to woe,
That fills me as we part;
But when the wolf was heard
To howl around our lot,
Thou know’st, dear mother-bird,
I slew him on the spot!

Aye, panther, wolf, and bear,
Have perish’d ’neath my knife;
Why tremble, then, with fear,
When now I go, my wife?
Shall I not keep the peace,
That made our cottage dear;
And ’till these wolf-curs cease
Shall I be housing here?

One loving kiss, dear wife,
One press of heart to heart;
Then for the deadliest strife,
For freedom I depart!
I were of little worth,
Were these Yankee wolves left free
To ravage ’round our hearth,
And bring one grief to thee!

God’s blessing on thee, wife,
God’s blessing on the young:
Pray for me through the strife,
And teach our infant’s tongue.
Whatever haps in fight,
I shall be true to thee—
To the home of our delight—
To my people of the free!

Although we tend to associate “partisan” with political parties today, the term meant “irregular soldier” or “guerrilla” in the 19th century. Simms, who had begun building his literary bona fides with an 1835 novel The Partisan, hoped to connect Rebel soldiers with their Revolutionary War forebears, including South Carolina partisan heroes Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Henry Lee III.

His 1861 poem joined a wider Confederate effort to make secession seem congruent with the American Revolution and not destructive of the union that struggle had created. Likewise, Simms rendered his volunteer as an idealistic pioneer, an equestrian rifleman on the edge of settlement—one who had slain wild animals to “keep the peace” and was ready, too, to slay Lincoln’s “wolf-curs.” In his absence, the partisan’s wife was to remain sturdy, all while tutoring his heir, maintaining the homestead, and offering protective prayers. Simms wanted to make the compelling national narrative of wilderness conquest and republican motherhood “Confederate,” not American.

When the poem appeared in Southern Literary Messenger in March 1862, it had a new title, “The Border Ranger,” part of a push by Simms to present irregular warfare in a wider national scope—beyond merely South Carolina.

To address the Army’s tumbling manpower levels, Congress passed a conscription law in early 1862 mandating service for most White men ages 18–35, and that April issued the Partisan Ranger Act, pulling independent guerrillas into the Confederate command structure in an effort to maximize the benefits of “partisan” warfare while tempering any of its infamous excesses through supervision by the formal military.

Yet what seemed rational for Simms’ archetypical “Border Ranger” would be harrowing for thousands of men and women on this new borderland of whirling violence. Indeed, the poem’s new title reads not only as an invocation of the frontier spirit, but as a plea for faithfulness from those on the Confederacy’s geographical margins. Partisan warfare on the border produced provocative heroes for the South (William Quantrill, John Singleton Mosby, etc.), but it also blurred into bushwhacking and spurred Union sympathizers to take up arms themselves. Southern Unionists, such as the bridge-burning Tennessee mountain men under David Fry, inflicted their share of partisan terror to preserve the United States.

The effort to inculcate a national feeling for the South by Simms, who died in 1870, did not alter the war’s outcome, but the literary story had just begun. As former Confederates endeavored to explain their subjugation, new myths of untainted chivalry in the coming decades would help to solidify the memory of an honorable cause and an honorable defeat.

Literary works present a challenge for those who love history. Parsing an author’s intentions, the context of the time, the allusions and hidden references, and the representation of the truth can seem daunting. But such literary endeavors also offer an opportunity to scrutinize how contemporaries painted their beliefs and assumptions. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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In the hills 6 miles north of Three Forks, in south-central Montana, the Emerson Mining District had all the potential of being highly productive, but it never quite got going. Ironically, as the adjacent valley contains the headwaters of the Missouri River, the main obstacle it faced was a dearth of water. In the mid-1860s, when placer mining for gold was in style, local rancher and sometime prospector Al Nichols found promising quartz samples in a dry stream bed in these hills. He hauled a sackful of the rocks 4 miles to the Jefferson River just so he could crush them and sift the scree in his pan. The net result was about $4 worth of ore. Given the effort it took, he abandoned the idea as worthless.

Sometime in the early 1870s partners John Emerson, James Aplin, Frank Akin and Samuel Seaman were prospecting the same hills and sank a shaft to a vein of copper quartz they named the Green Eagle mine. The find attracted a cluster of hopeful prospectors, who registered several mines. But as the owners awaited financing from “Eastern moneymen” that never materialized, their claims amounted to little more than holes in the ground. Meanwhile, Green Eagle’s owners came to the realization that to develop a copper mine miles from any railroad or town would require a vast amount of capital, which none of them possessed, and at the time copper was not a valuable commodity. So, they too abandoned their claim. Asher Paul and George Lea had been working a nearby silver mine, though it promised only a small income, given the low grade of ore they found. The devaluation of silver in 1883 killed that operation. 

In 1885 Jacob Hopping took a renewed interest in the Green Eagle and deepened the shaft to 65 feet before the ore petered out. Partnering with Green Eagle co-founder Seaman, he then sank a nearby shaft the pair named the Burlington. Reportedly offered $100,000 for their mines, the partners declined. Given the nationwide financial panic and bank failures in the headlines, they replied tongue in cheek that they preferred to invest their money in the ground. Shortly thereafter they hit a massive fault and lost the ore seam again.

Also in the district, Josh Parker and Al Shedd operated a mine called the Crystal Canon, while Perry Parks and a partner recorded only as Campbell mined low-grade iron ore for a time. They shipped it as flux to a smelter recently built in nearby Toston to handle gold from the Radersburg Mining District. Other less-productive mines frequently changed ownership, either by sale or through relocation (i.e., jumping).

All this mining activity at the tail end of the 19th century gave rise to a settlement residents named Copper City, though the hamlet never amounted to more than a few homes, and there’s no record of a post office. Call it the ghost town that never was.

Finally, in 1905 investors made inquiries toward establishing a paying mine in the district. A year later Herbert G. Dunbar, a prosperous sheep rancher from Logan, and other wealthy partners from the Twin Forks/Bozeman region organized the Three Forks Mining Co. and consolidated a half dozen claims they renamed the Copper Star. “[The company] own six claims in one of the greatest undeveloped copper districts in the world,” the Three Forks Herald reported optimistically, “this being the opinion of several copper experts.” Sure enough, the ledge of ore running through the Copper Star was soon providing 2 to 60 ounces of copper per ton, with trace silver and gold. But then came the financial Panic of 1907, when investment money dried up, and work on the company shafts ground to a halt.

By 1916 Dunbar had a new partner, Jacob Hopping’s son, Carl, and the two of them reopened the Copper Star adits. That April 24 The Butte Miner interviewed Dunbar. “Well, we’ve got it at last,” the mine owner enthused. “We have cut into a vein about 4 feet in width and very high in its percentage of mineral. The assays run between 30 and 40 percent [copper]. We got this below the 350-foot level. Our hoist is good for a depth of 500 feet.” By June the partners had deepened the shaft from 300 to 400 feet, retimbered the original section of the shaft and replaced the old gallows frame with a modern hoist capable of extending to 1,000 feet.

At the outset of World War I the demand for copper had surged to astronomical heights, thus the partners seemed set. But the war and their prospects wouldn’t last. By 1920 the price of copper had plummeted. The downturn made only a small dent in copper production among the Butte mines, but it was enough to close the Copper Star. Around this time an English company took an interest in the district’s iron ore mine, purchased it and then sold it to the massive Anaconda Copper Mining Co., sparking a rumor Anaconda would reopen the district and build a large smelter in Three Forks. Nothing came of it.

All that remains of Copper City today is the concrete pad of the Three Forks Mining Co. building, rusty mining equipment and the dilapidated hulks of what a century ago must have been three substantial homes. Completed in 2019, the 22-mile Copper City singletrack mountain bike trail zigzags across hills potentially still laden with riches. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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The Confederate Congress met in 11 sessions from February 1861 to March 1865. The last seven volumes of the Southern Historical Society Papers, published intermittently from 1923 to 1959, reprinted proceedings of the body’s sessions from February 1862 through March 1865. This book thus fills the void, reprinting proceedings of the first five sessions: February 1861–February 1862.

Following the U.S. precedent, the Confederate Constitution prescribed two senators per state. In the House, population-based representation gave Virginia 16 seats, Georgia and Alabama 12 each, and so forth.

On February 5, 1861, the second day of the Confederate Provisional Congress convened in Montgomery, Ala., Vice President Stephens declared, “This is a Congress of States.” He was being more than metaphorical. First it was a unicameral house (it split into House and Senate in February 1862). Moreover, in floor votes each state delegation got just one to cast.

One of Congress’ first tasks was to devise a plan for a national government, that the people’s “rights and social institutions may be forever maintained,” in the words of Georgia’s Francis Bartow. Congressional members in the first year were essentially delegates to the states’ secession conventions; elections were held in November 1861.

From the start, Congress allowed stenographers and reporters to attend and record sessions. This allows Dr. Carlson to draw not just from the congressional journal (scanty in detail), but also from Confederate newspapers, which frequently carried actions on the floor word for word. Accordingly, in compiling this book the editor has drawn on daily press reports in the Richmond papers as well as The Charleston Mercury, Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, and a few others.

Congress of States concludes with Howell Cobb’s address to the Congress, predicting the viability of the Confederate government, “relying on the harmony of our people; upon the justice of our cause; upon our own strong arms, and the smile of a kind and protecting Providence.”

Congress of States

Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America

Edited by R. David Carlson, University of Alabama Press, 2023

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Hiram Dryer is not a name that readily comes to mind when we ponder leaders who stood out during the Battle of Antietam. He remains largely unknown to all but the battle’s most ardent students, yet the impact Captain Dryer had on the fighting September 17, 1862, should not be underestimated.

A New York native, Dryer was 53 years old at Antietam. Relatively little is known about his early years, but on October 1, 1846, during the Mexican War, he enlisted in the Regular Army. Assigned to the newly organized Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, he rose rapidly in rank to first sergeant, and then earned a commission on July 31, 1848, as a second lieutenant in the 4th U.S. Infantry for gallantry at the battles of Chapultepec and Garita de Belan. He served for a time with future Civil War luminaries Ulysses S. Grant, Phil Sheridan, and George Crook. In 1852, the 4th U.S. was transferred to the West Coast, which required the regiment first to cross the Isthmus of Panama and then journey by ship to the Pacific Northwest. Passage across Panama’s isthmus was a nightmare, as a cholera breakout killed 104 enlisted men and one officer. In November 1853, while stationed at Fort Vancouver in Oregon, Dryer displayed trademark courage in volunteering to lead a supply expedition to a group of settlers trapped by a blizzard in the Cascade Mountains.

Dryer returned with his regiment to the East in the fall of 1861 and was assigned to the Army of the Potomac. The early war period was a time of great change for the Regular Army, its leadership decimated both by officers assuming commissions of higher rank in the U.S. Volunteer service and Southern-born officers who resigned to fight for the Confederacy. Individuals pulled from civilian life frequently filled the resulting vacancies.

The enlisted ranks were also in flux due to the expansion of the Regular Army, featuring nine new regiments of infantry and one each of cavalry and artillery. Some of the noncommissioned officers serving under Dryer were no doubt grizzled veterans, but many of his soldiers had enlisted in 1861. Rigorous training and discipline was what set Regulars apart from most volunteer regiments, and the heightened attention they received in skirmishing and marksmanship would prove particularly crucial.

Dryer, who saw service during the 1862 Peninsula and Second Bull Run campaigns, was his regiment’s senior officer when fighting broke out at Antietam. At about 10 a.m. September 17, Maj. Gen. George McClellan ordered his cavalry commander, Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, to cross Antietam Creek at the Middle Bridge with his troopers and horse artillery in order to provide a diversion and support to the current Union attack on the Confederate position along the Sunken Lane.

A diversion was a sound idea; using cavalry was not. Most Union troopers lacked carbines or training in fighting dismounted, so Pleasonton’s men were forced mainly to hide from enemy artillery either behind Joshua Newcomer’s large barn or on the Antietam Creek bank. This left the horse artillery exposed to long-range fire from skirmishers and sharpshooters. Disgusted that his guns and the others had been sent into harm’s way without proper support, one horse battery commander, John C. Tidball, sought infantry help.

Pleasonton managed to get two companies of the 1st Battalion/12th U.S. Infantry (1/12th) to support his batteries, and then for Brig. Gen. George Sykes, commanding the 5th Corps’ 2nd Division (which included all of the army’s Regular regiments) to send in the entire 2nd/10th U.S. Infantry, commanded by Lieutenant John Poland.

Fierce artillery duels and skirmishing continued well into the afternoon. Worried the Confederates had large reserves concealed behind Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge, Sykes was reluctant to send more infantry across the creek but acquiesced on Poland and the 2nd/14th U.S., and then, at 2 p.m., ordered Dryer to cross the creek with the 4th U.S. and the 1st/14th U.S. and to assume command of all Regular forces there.

Described by a peer “as one of the coolest and bravest officers in our service,” Dryer proceeded to justify such high praise. He first reinforced the Regulars’ skirmish line west of Newcomer Ridge—high ground several hundred yards west of the Newcomer farmhouse. Then, he ordered skirmishers forward on both sides of the Boonsboro Pike, toward Cemetery Hill south of the pike, and Cemetery Ridge, north of it. Unlike commanders who liked to test enemy strength and position by an all-out attack with massed infantry, resulting in extensive casualties—Maj. Gen. William H. French, for instance—Dryer used the superior training, leadership, and marksmanship of the Regulars to probe and press the enemy defenses, his men deployed in dispersed order, offering no inviting targets for Confederate artillery or riflemen.

Backed by plentiful artillery deployed along Newcomer Ridge, the Regulars worked their way forward, advancing on the left as far as the Sherrick Farm lane and on the right, north of the pike, using four companies (at most 130 men) to dislodge Confederate defenders on Cemetery Hill. While forcing the artillery there to withdraw, they advanced within 450 yards of the Lutheran Church on Cemetery Hill’s western slope. But that would be their high-water mark, not because of Rebel resistance, but because of General Sykes. What Sykes saw in Dryer’s advance was an unnecessary risk rather than an opportunity. He found it highly unlikely the Confederate center was simply a hollow shell, only that his Regular infantry faced potential destruction with Dryer exceeding his orders.

Sykes’ orders directing him to immediately withdraw his forces to Newcomer Ridge left Dryer incredulous. Asking if there was any discretion, he was told the “order was imperative.” Gathering up their dead and wounded, Dryer and his Regulars fell back.

At a cost of 11 killed and 75 wounded, they had cleared Cemetery Ridge of Confederates and threatened to capture Cemetery Hill. It would be an exemplary yet virtually unknown achievement. When one considers that the 1st Delaware lost 230 men alone in French’s failed frontal assault upon the Sunken Lane, Dryer’s proficiency in tactics and managing his troops is remarkable.

Dryer went on to receive brevet promotions for courage at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville but, surprisingly, not for Antietam. He apparently lacked political clout, or had no interest in taking a volunteer commission, for there is no evidence he sought or was considered for promotion to higher rank in the volunteer service.

Thrown from a horse in June 1863, Dryer would miss the Gettysburg Campaign. The injury apparently affected his ability to return to the field, for he spent the rest of the war in staff duties. He was remembered by a fellow officer as “always kind and friendly.” We might add that he was also a man of remarkable, daring skill and competence who deserves to be remembered.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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One stipulation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie called for the establishment of a Crow agency running parallel to the Yellowstone River in Montana Territory. The site was to become Fort Parker, named for newly appointed U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ely S. Parker, a Seneca-born Civil War veteran. The construction of the post deposited thousands of federal dollars into the outstretched hands of businessmen in nearby Bozeman, and the flow of government funds only increased. For the period between Nov. 1, 1870, and Nov. 26, 1871, Fort Parker agent Fellows D. Pease submitted a staggering tab of $133,936 (nearly $3.2 million in today’s dollars) for services and supplies from local merchants and contractors. But what of the agency’s Crow wards? Did they share in the boon? 

Bozeman traces its origins to Southern-born pioneer John Bozeman, who amid the Civil War instead ventured to Montana Territory in search of gold. Soon realizing it would prove more fruitful to mine the prospective miners, he forged his namesake trail through the Gallatin Valley and platted his namesake town in 1864. Bozeman set the precedent for merchants to follow.

War’s end marked the starting gun for a flood of inbound travelers on the Bozeman Trail, exacerbating tensions with regional tribes. The Crows held the right to the contested ground, and the 1868 treaty stipulated the government would supply them goods as payment for their seized lands. If things went according to plan, at least they would give up their lives as transient buffalo hunters to engage in peaceful agricultural pursuits.

In 1869 the government commissioned Bozeman businessman Leander Black to build Fort Parker and serve as temporary agent to the Crows until their formal agent, Capt. E.M. Camp, arrived from Washington, D.C. The fort comprised a warehouse, living quarters for the Indian agent, various outbuildings and a billet for a sergeant and a dozen men of Company A of the 7th U.S. Infantry. Stored within the warehouse were flour, sugar, beef, pork, rice, hominy, beans, blankets, kettles, clothing and various and sundry other items for distribution to the Crows. The agency hired local citizens to work at the post and relied on Bozeman merchants to supply its every need. The town’s proximity made it especially convenient for local vendors to bid on government contracts.

Unfortunately, as at other reservations, the wares unloaded on the Crows at Fort Parker were subpar. Chief Sits in the Middle of the Land described worthless tin kettles that burned up in the fire and blankets so threadbare they offered no protection against the high plains wind. Truth be told, the Crows discarded most of the annuity goods. Women poured the flour onto the ground and used the sacks for other purposes. Accustomed to the sweet taste of bison, the Crows were loath to eat the comparatively bland flesh of the “spotted buffalo,” the name they applied to cattle. Other goods they simply had no use for, preferring, for example, their soft tanned leggings, moccasins and hide dresses to the stiff and unfamiliar agency-​issued clothing.

By 1875 Fort Parker had moved east to the Stillwater Valley, in part to make way for the fast-​approaching tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the Crows were on their fourth agent. A change in Indian policy saw Captain Camp replaced by the civilian Pease, who in turn was replaced by his boss, the Rev. James Wright, superintendent of Indian Affairs for Montana. The latter’s appointment followed President Ulysses S. Grant’s direction to select Indian agents endorsed by religious organizations for their high ideals. Wright proved more of an unpopular zealot and lasted little over a year, resigning his post in October 1874.

The June 10, 1875, edition of the Helena Weekly Herald touted the former agent as an “honest and faithful servant.” Even before his departure, however, the good reverend was suspected of bad faith. A subsequent investigation into alleged fraud at Fort Parker revealed a den of corruption under Wright’s so-called oversight. Even his wife was implicated.

Of course, Wright only represented the government side of the equation. Town alderman and serial entrepreneur Nelson Story was at the controls in Bozeman. The full degree of his involvement came to light in a report filed in 1876 by Colonel James Brisbin, newly arrived commander at neighboring Fort Ellis, based on information from a whistleblower at Fort Parker. Brisbin forwarded his report to Lt. Gen. Phil Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. The charges it contained were damning.

Bozeman gristmill operator William McAdow detailed how Story, who had the agency flour contract, had paid him to bag such flour in double sacks. As the agency inspector marked the flour sacks as delivered, Story’s cohorts would remove the unmarked inner sacks behind the agency man’s back and present those for counting. A final tally would record the Crows had received two bags of flour when in fact they’d received but one. Thus, Story was able to deliver half the contracted flour while pocketing the full payment.

Another agency employee, backed up by agency physician Dr. Andrew Jackson Hunter, accused Story of having agency cattle seared with his own brand and then driven to trading posts along the Missouri River, where he sold them for 100 percent pure profit. Though beef wasn’t the Crows’ first choice of meat, in the absence of buffalo they needed the beeves to survive. 

Story’s greed knew no bounds. On opening his own trading post in the Judith Basin, he stocked it with goods meant for distribution to the Crows. Agency employees recounted having witnessed wagonloads of food and supplies rolling out of Fort Parker under cover of darkness.

While Story was certainly the main character in this melodrama, there were plenty of supporting cast members, and through it all the Rev. Wright and others had turned a blind eye. As a result, from 1869 to ’75 the equivalent in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars of more than $30 million filtered into Bozeman’s economy, much of it tainted. While the fraud emanating from Fort Parker clearly helped fuel Bozeman’s growth, the Crows meant to benefit from its operations were literally left out in the cold with subpar blankets.

Neither Wright nor Story was ever brought to justice over his ill-gotten gains. The reverend and his wife retired in comfort back East, while Story became Bozeman’s first millionaire before making a second fortune as a Los Angeles real estate developer.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Artemisia absinthium is a green, leafy plant native to Europe, but one that has since migrated to North America. Commonly called the wormwood plant, its flowers and leaves are the main ingredient of absinthe, one of the world’s most unusual liquors that was first distilled in Switzerland. Absinthe is naturally green in color, and potent, usually 90 to 148 proof.

That potency led many to believe absinthe had hallucinogenic powers, and controversy has plagued the drink since it was first distilled. Before coming to America, it was extremely popular in France. And then, Jean Lanfray killed his family after imbibing the “Green Demon.”

The Lanfray killings happened in Commugny, a small agricultural village in southwest Switzerland, nestled along the border with France. Lanfray was a tall, brawny vineyard worker and day laborer. Like many in the area, he was a born Frenchman; he had served three years in the French Army. At 31 years old, he lived in a two-story farmhouse with his family: his wife and two daughters living upstairs, and his parents and brother, with rooms downstairs.

On August 28, 1905, he woke at 4:30 in the morning. He started the day with a shot of absinthe diluted in water—not uncommon for him or for many Europeans at the time. He let the cows out to pasture, had some harsh words with his wife, and set off to a nearby vineyard to work. Along the way, he stopped for more alcohol: a creme de menthe with water, followed by a cognac and soda. By then it was 5:30 a.m.

Investigating the killings, Swiss authorities established a careful timeline of Lanfray’s prodigious drinking, learning that he would sometimes drink five liters of wine a day. Around noon, he lunched on bread, cheese, and sausage. He also had six glasses of strong wine over his lunch and afternoon break. And another glass before leaving work about 4:30 p.m.

At a cafe on his way home, he had black coffee with brandy. Back at the farmhouse, he and his father each polished off another liter of wine while Lanfray bickered with his wife. Their long-simmering grievances came to a head, and he rose from his seat, took down his rifle from the wall, and shot his wife through the forehead, killing her instantly.

As Lanfray’s father ran from the house seeking help, his daughter Rose came into the room—Lanfray shot her in the chest. He then went to the crib of his younger daughter, Blanche, and killed her, as well. He struggled to kill himself with the rifle, but it was too long to easily aim at himself and still reach the trigger. Using a piece of string, he finally pulled the trigger but succeeded only in shooting himself in the jaw. With blood running down his face, he picked up Blanche and carried her to the barn, where he lost consciousness. Police found him minutes later.

It was a senseless tragedy, the kind that leaves bystanders helplessly grasping at explanations. The fact that a man could get drunk, kill his entire family, and have no memory of it—that may have struck too close to home for Lanfray’s neighbors, who worked in vineyards and drank beside him. No, there had to be something else, something other.

At a public meeting soon after, the people of Commugny railed against the supposedly corrupting power of absinthe. Lanfray was known regularly to drink it (as did many, many others), and had drunk two glasses on the day of the murders (along with liters of wine). A story began to form, an explanation. Lanfray wasn’t simply an angry drunkard; he was an Absintheur.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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It was a story many were ready to hear. Absinthe already had a dangerous reputation, despite its widespread use throughout Europe. Even aficionados cautioned that “absinthe is a spark that explodes the gunpowder of wine.”

Lanfray’s killings provided potent fuel for a moral panic around absinthe that had been growing for decades. Politicians now had a scapegoat—and a crusade. The press feverishly covered “the Absinthe Murder,” putting it on front pages throughout Europe. One Swiss newspaper called absinthe “the premier cause of bloodthirsty crime in this century,” a sentiment echoed by Commugny’s mayor, who declared, “Absinthe is the principal cause of a series of bloody crimes in our country.”

In the region, a petition to outlaw the drink gathered 82,000 signatures within weeks. After an absinthe drinker in Geneva, Switzerland, killed his wife with a hatchet and a revolver, an anti-absinthe petition quickly gained 34,702 signatures. The public, too, had found a villain.

The following February, Lanfray went on trial. His defense hinged on proving him absinthe-mad, consumed by his addiction to that foul drink whose demonic grip had driven him to murder. If absinthe had made him do it, he couldn’t be held completely responsible for his actions.

The argument leaned on a folk understanding of “absinthism,” a collection of maladies supposedly known to afflict the chronic absinthe drinker, including seizures, speech impairment, disordered sleep, and auditory and visual hallucinations. Absinthism was the road to insanity and death; even as millions of people from every walk of life enjoyed absinthe, medical professionals and the press warned of asylums rapidly filling with former Absintheurs, now lost in the throes of madness.

It was known as “une correspondance pour Charenton,” a ticket to Charenton, the insane asylum outside Paris. (It’s unclear whether absinthism actually existed as a syndrome at all, rather than arising from misunderstandings about alcoholism and mental health more generally.)

Not every doctor gave credence to the more lurid claims about absinthism. In Lanfray’s case, however, Albert Mahaim, a professor at the University of Geneva and the head of the regional insane asylum in Vaud, examined the defendant in jail and later testified that “without a doubt, it is the absinthe he drank daily and for a long time that gave Lanfray the ferociousness of temper and blind rages that made him shoot his wife for nothing and his two poor children, whom he loved.” The prosecution, naturally, disagreed.

Whatever the public sentiment toward absinthe, Lanfray was found guilty on four counts of murder—his wife, it turned out, had been pregnant with a son. Three days later, Lanfray hanged himself in his cell.

Less than a month after his death, Vaud, the canton containing Commugny, succeeded in banning absinthe, with the canton of Geneva quickly following. Then it was banned nationwide. Belgium had already banned absinthe in 1905; the Netherlands in 1909. Even France, which consumed more absinthe than the rest of the world, and where it was, as historian P.E. Prestwich put it, “inspiration of French poets and the consolation of French workers,” banned the drink in 1914.

The Green Fairy to its advocates and the Green Demon to its detractors, absinthe was exiled from much of Europe. (The United Kingdom and the Czech Republic were notable exceptions.) While anti-alcohol movements had agitated in countries around the world for decades, absinthe was the first alcoholic drink singled out for a ban. Its outsized, bewitching reputation had been turned against it.

Before the exile, absinthe had a long history in Europe, particularly in France. In its modern form, it likely began as a patent remedy concocted by a French doctor living in Switzerland in the late 1700s. Its name derives from the Greek absinthion, an ancient medicinal drink made by soaking wormwood leaves (Artemisia absinthium) in wine or spirits. It was said to aid in childbirth, and the Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, recommended it for menstrual pain, jaundice, anemia, and rheumatism.

Wormwood persisted as a folk remedy through the ages; when the bubonic plague ravaged England in the 17th and 18th centuries, desperate villagers burned wormwood to cleanse their houses. Wormwood drinks were likewise medicinal—including that early patent remedy.

In 1830, France conquered Algeria and began to expand its empire into North Africa. Soon 100,000 French troops were stationed in the country, where the heat and bad water led to sickness tearing through the occupiers. Wormwood helped stave off insects, calm fevers, and prevent dysentery, and soldiers started adding it to their wine. When they returned home, they brought with them “une verte”—the potent drink with the unique green color.

Absinthe quickly became intertwined with French society, first as a harmless vice of the upper and middle classes. As its reputation (exotic, revelatory) grew, so did its popularity; even among those not looking for a hallucinogenic experience, the high alcohol content proved a key selling point, as you could easily dilute absinthe and still get a great bargain, proof-wise. Everywhere in France seemed to celebrate l’heure verte, the “green hour” of the early evening devoted to absinthe.

Absinthe became intricately connected to French culture and identity. So it is no surprise that when the drink found its way to the United States, the most famous venue for absinthe indulgence would be in a city with a distinctly French flavor: New Orleans, “the little Paris of North America.”

The French sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, and the region’s uniquely French culture became a point of pride. As absinthe took off in France, it also appeared in New Orleans, though without the same fanfare and popularity. In a town already famous for carousing, absinthe was one drink among many.

Following the Civil War, a barman named Cayetano Ferrer, formerly of the Paris Opera House, began serving absinthe in what some clever marketing called “the Parisian manner.” A glass of the emerald drink would be placed on the bar beneath a pair of fountains, and water would slowly drip, creating a milky opalescence in a glass—a process called the “louche.”

Ferrer’s ritual proved a compelling spectacle for the tourists who flocked to the city of sin. The building became the Old Absinthe House. Thought to be the city’s first saloon, it hosted famous luminaries from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to O. Henry and William Makepeace Thackeray. Oscar Wilde, of course, attended. No visit to New Orleans, by then “the Absinthe capital of the world,” could be complete without a round at the Old Absinthe House.

While Europeans of all classes drank absinthe, in the United States it remained a cosmopolitan indulgence little known outside the city. New York had its own Absinthe House, and large metropolitan areas such as Chicago and San Francisco catered to the artists, bohemians, and wealthy, gilded-age poseurs who wanted to associate themselves with absinthe’s dark allure.

Absinthe’s relative obscurity in America didn’t prevent the press from warning of its fearsome reputation, however. Against the backdrop of a growing temperance movement, in 1879, a Dr. Richardson offered his perspective on absinthe to The New York Times. “I cannot report so favorably on the use of Absinthe as I have on the use of opium,” he began, describing rising absinthe use in “closely-packed towns and cities.” He warned that the drink was commonly adulterated, and that frequent imbibers could become addicted. “In the worst examples of poisoning from Absinthe,” he wrote, “the person becomes a confirmed epileptic.”

Later that year, the Times reiterated: “The dangerous, often deadly, habit of drinking Absinthe is said to be steadily growing in this country, not among foreigners merely, but among the native population.” It ascribed “a good many deaths in different parts of the country” to a drink “much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.”

Absinthe, the writer claimed, had a subtlety lacking in other alcohol; addiction could sneak up quickly. “The more intellectual a man is,” the Times cautioned, “the more readily the habit fastens itself upon him.” It had already taken its toll in Europe: “Some of the most brilliant authors and artists of Paris have killed themselves with absinthe, and many more are doing so.” The Times closed by warning that absinthe, previously found only in large cities, had permeated everywhere, “and it is called for with alarming frequency.”

Much of absinthe’s mythology came from an accumulation of confusions, misunderstandings, and motivated lies. Some, though, did try to cut through the green fog and get to the truth—at least as best they could. Valentin Magnan, physician-in-chief at Sainte-Anne, France’s main asylum, saw rising numbers of insane people as a sign of his country’s social decay. (More likely, the increase resulted from improved diagnostic techniques.) Like many, he saw absinthe as the culprit, and set out to prove his case.

In 1869 he published his results. He had arranged an experiment. One guinea pig was placed in a glass case with a saucer of pure alcohol; another was placed in a glass case with a saucer of wormwood oil. A cat and a rabbit also got their own cases and their own saucers of wormwood oil. The animals breathing wormwood fumes were wracked with seizures, while the sole alcohol-breathing guinea pig just got drunk.

This and other experiments convinced Magnan (if he hadn’t been already) that absinthe was uniquely toxic. He extrapolated his results to humans, and claimed that “absinthistes” in his asylum displayed seizures, violent fits, and amnesia. He pushed for banning the Green Demon.

Fellow authorities disagreed, pointing out that guinea pigs inhaling high doses of distilled wormwood couldn’t be compared to humans consuming tiny amounts of diluted wormwood. They suggested that wormwood likely had little effect, and whatever damage absinthe wrought was no different from typical alcoholism. Rhetorically, however, Magnan’s support for the concept of “absinthism,” separate from alcoholism, enabled those concerned citizens who wanted to ban absinthe without committing to full prohibition. Absinthe, after all, posed a unique medical danger, while other alcohol (including France’s beloved wine) was surely fine for responsible adults.

In the United States, absinthe never became the burning social question it was in Europe. The media took occasional potshots, reflecting a general sense of absinthe’s depravity, without ever raising banning it to the height of a moral crusade.

An 1883 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, for example, had the caption, “Absinthe Drinking—The Fast Prevailing Vice Among Our Gilded Youth.” The picture above featured a strapping young man on the left, and on the right a broken, aged specter of dissolution, “after two years’ indulgence, three times a day.” An earlier article in the magazine declared: “Many deaths are directly traceable to the excessive use of absinthe. The encroachments of this habit are scarcely perceptible. A regular absinthe drinker seldom perceives that he is dominated by its baleful influence until it is too late. All of a sudden he breaks down; his nervous system is destroyed, his brain is inoperative, his will is paralyzed, he is a mere wreck; there is no hope of his recovery.”

In the early 1900s, public opinion in Europe began to turn against absinthe, generally as part of the long-simmering temperance movement, and more specifically because of the Lanfray murders. As countries began to ban the drink, Harper’s Weekly reported in 1907 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had begun to investigate “the green curse of France.” Four years later, with little fanfare at the end of 1911, the department’s Pure Food Board announced starting January 1, 1912, importing absinthe into the United States would be prohibited.

Give it a shot!

Tenth Ward distilling in Frederick, Md., is one American distiller now
producing absinthe. Check them out at (tenthwarddistilling.com).

The head of the board told the Times that “Absinthe is one of the worst enemies of man, and if we can keep the people of the United States from becoming slaves to this demon, we will do it.” (The board also announced new restrictions on opium, morphine, and cocaine.)

News reports from the time show that, unsurprisingly, Americans didn’t immediately cease drinking absinthe. In a preview of the Prohibition era, authorities particularly in California seized caches of the emerald beverage. British mystic and provocateur Aleister Crowley wrote his famous paean to the Old Absinthe House, “The Green Goddess,” in 1916, well after the ban. “Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and soul of the old quarter of New Orleans,” he wrote. And he struck a familiar note about the bewitching, destructive power of the Green Fairy: “What is there in Absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally different from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.”

Crowley’s line evoked a demimonde particular to that time and place, but in 1920 the arrival of Prohibition blunted much of absinthe’s mystique in the United States. Jad Adams writes: “The surreptitious nature of drinking in the prohibition era—serving alcohol from hip flasks, barmen squirting a syringe of pure alcohol into soft drinks they were serving—was not conducive to absinthe, which was a drink of display and provocation.”

New Orleans continued imbibing and became known as “the liquor capital of America.” The Old Absinthe House was closed by federal agents in 1925 and again in 1926, the 100-year anniversary of its opening. Yet it outlasted prohibition and remains a fixture of New Orleans culture to this day.

Absinthe, too, persevered. It went further underground, particularly in America, and that burnished its appeal among bohemians and the counterculture. Ernest Hemingway and Jack London fondly recalled their absinthe experiences beyond the reach of U.S. law; Hemingway’s cocktail, Death in the Afternoon, is likely the country’s most lasting and well-known contribution to absinthe culture.

And eventually, like green shoots emerging after a long and punishing winter, the Green Fairy rose again. After nearly 100 years of targeted prohibition, in 2007 the United States once again allowed absinthe to be imported and consumed. The green hour had come back around again, at last.

Jesse Hicks writes about science, technology, and politics. Based in Detroit, his work has appeared in Harper’s, Politico, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

How Do You Drink Absinthe?

(Ask Hemingway)

Well, it requires a fancy slotted spoon, for one thing. The following is the most traditional and common method for preparing the drink. You place a sugar cube on the spoon, and then place the spoon over a glass of absinthe. Pour iced water over the sugar cube so you end up with about 1 part absinthe and 3–5 parts water.

The water brings out the anise, which gives absinthe a licorice taste, and fennel that are also distilled with the leaves and flowers of the wormwood plant. If the mix is correct, the liquid will turn milky and opalescent in appearance.

Ernest Hemingway was a fan of absinthe—why is that not surprising? His favorite way to drink it was a simple cocktail he called “Death in the Afternoon,” the same name as his 1932 book about Spanish bullfighting.

Death in the Afternoon ingredients:

1½ ounces Absinthe

4 ounces chilled Champagne

Hemingway published the recipe in a 1935 book, So Red the Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon, which featured 30 drink concoctions from celebrities. He explained, “Pour one jigger Absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.” Yes. Very slowly.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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1–3. A pistol, a rifle and a shotgun

If you regularly read Wild West, you know better than to expect a rote list of Colts, Winchesters and Remingtons. That said, nearly everyone headed west craved a good pistol, rifle and shotgun. Between 1850 and ’60 the Colt revolver had an especially notable impact on the frontier experience, as did the Winchester rifle between 1870 and ’80. But in life-or-death situations, lesser-known guns could be no less critical. Following are five such pieces.

4. A 10-inch rifled pistol 

From 1810 through ’40—the era of the mountain man, the Santa Fe trade and the single-shot muzzleloader—a rifled pistol with barrel about 10 inches long—could well be a lifesaver. It was short and light enough so that a frontier dweller could carry two or, if he chose, even three or four. Four pistols, providing their owner with four fast shots before he had to reload, could deliver enough firepower to counter most threats. Moreover, the rifling made the pistol nearly as accurate as a rifled long arm. “With such a pistol,” civil engineer Newton Bosworth wrote in an 1846 treatise, “using both hands, I have never thought it a great matter to take a [prairie] chicken at the distance of 70 or 80 yards and have frequently done it at 100.”

5. Blunt & Syms six-shot dragoon pepperbox

Throughout the 1840s and ’50s the principal American makers of multibarreled pepperbox pistols were Ethan Allen and Blunt & Syms. Their products became widely popular, especially in California during the gold rush. While each turned out a .36-caliber “dragoon size” pepperbox, in a now-or-never situation the Blunt & Syms had the edge. As tests show, its trigger pull is smoother than that of Allen’s, and the B&S pistol fires the bottom barrel instead of the top, making it easier to stay on target during fast shooting.

6. A bar-hammer single-shot pocket pistol

In 1837 Ethan Allen patented a single-shot .28-caliber pocket pistol with a double-action, or “self-cocking,” trigger mechanism. Fitted with a top-mounted “bar hammer” (vs. a side hammer), the arm became so popular that at least four other gunmakers—Blunt & Syms, Bacon, Manhattan and Marston—turned out versions of it. Its light weight, double-action trigger and smooth contours, with nothing to snag on the pocket or belt, meant it could be drawn and fired in an instant. Henry Deringer’s pistols, despite their reputation, could not make the same claim. As with other single-shot pistols, users typically carried the bar hammer guns in pairs.

7. An extra-large-bore shotgun

In the late 1850s, when Memphis was an eastern terminus for the Butterfield Overland Mail, a major hardware dealer there, Lownes, Orgill & Co., was selling what it billed as “double duck guns,” with “fine laminated steel barrels—6 to 8 bore, 34 to 40 inches long.” On another occasion the firm advertised duck guns in “7 to 18 gage [sic].” Guns of 6 and 7 gauge (equivalent to .92 and .87 caliber, respectively, while the standard 12 gauge is .73 caliber) could throw heavy charges of .31- or .36-caliber balls—murderous at close range. When used with the popular Eley wire cartridge, a single discharge could be deadly at ranges approaching 100 yards, even against multiple assailants.

8. Lefaucheux 12 mm pinfire revolver

As early as 1859 firearms dealers in California and New Orleans were importing models of this revolver from France. Seemingly taking note, the Union imported more than 12,000 Lefaucheux during the Civil War, a federal inspector pronouncing it “a first-class arm, equal if not superior to the Colt.” It was shorter and handier than the typical big-bore percussion revolver, while its copper-cased, self-contained pin-fire cartridges made it far faster to reload.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Thanks to modern media, Joshua L. Chamberlain is remembered today for his bravery on Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was much more than a Civil War hero, however. A new biopic by award-winning historian Ronald C. White examines the full breadth of the man who went from mild-mannered college professor to Medal of Honor recipient and one of the Union Army’s most respected generals. On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Penguin Random House, 2023) offers a deep dive into Maine’s native son, who spoke nine languages, served as a four-term governor of Maine, was president of his alma mater Bowdoin College, and, yes, had a remarkable mustache. Chamberlain was the real deal: honorable, dutiful, religious, intellectual, compassionate and committed to the ideals of the Republic. America’s Civil War recently spoke with White about his new book and what he learned about the “Lion of Round Top.”

After writing about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, what drew you to Chamberlain?

I was speaking about Grant at the Jonathan Club in downtown Los Angeles and someone said, “What is your next book? And I said, “I’m not exactly sure. Do you have any ideas?” And suddenly this fellow literally leapt up in the back of the room and shouted out, “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain!” Well, I didn’t really know that much about him, so I took it to my editor and publisher. We looked at the things that were already out there and realized there was a need for a full-scale biography—not simply Chamberlain at Little Round Top, which is very important, but an in-depth book. So that’s how it all started. 

What surprised you the most about him?

To me, it was the whole religious story. His father wants him to go to West Point, his mother wants him to be a minister or missionary, so he goes to Bangor Theological Seminary after Bowdoin College. At the end of those three years, Chamberlain receives three calls to Congregational churches in Maine and New Hampshire, but he offers an address at Bowdoin’s commencement. It is so successful they offer him a teaching position. In all other biographies, those three years at Bangor are literally erased. I mean, they were important for him. All the records of the seminary, which was founded in 1814, are at the Maine Historical Society. I realized that if I was going to devote two chapters to Chamberlain’s four years at Bowdoin College, I needed to devote at least one chapter to his three years at the Bangor Theological Seminary. I was able to find things that no one else had ever looked at before. This is part of his formation, part of his shaping, part of the values that he will carry forward. 

Chamberlain has a strong sense of duty and honor. Where does that come from?

As a professor at Bowdoin during the first year of the Civil War, he saw how many of his students volunteered, how many of them were captured, how many of them were killed. He watched as these 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds go off to war. Finally he comes to the conclusion that this war cannot simply be fought by boys. It has to be fought by men of his distinction and substance. He was 33 years of age with a wife and two young children, so no one would criticize him for not serving. Yet he decides he must do this. His sense of duty compels him to do it. 

When Chamberlain volunteers for the Army, he turns down his first commission. Why?

I love that. The governor of Maine said, “I’ll make you colonel.” He responds, “No, I don’t deserve that title. Make me lieutenant colonel. I’m not a military man, but I can learn.” That was terrific. It shows the humbleness of the man. 

What impact did his religious and educational background have on his service in the military?

People went off to the Civil War in those days with patriotic values and Christian values, both of which would be severely tested. They were not at all prepared for what they would encounter in the Civil War in terms of the suffering and death. His strong faith helped him get through a horrible war and gave him the strength to survive a wound that would impact his life for 50 years. 

How important was Chamberlain’s role at Little Round Top? 

It was a very important moment at the Battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain never demeaned—he actually lifted up—the role of Union Colonel Strong Vincent. He gives him incredible credit. Vincent is the one who, before the battle begins, says, “You will hold this line.” The same with General Gouverneur Warren, who was the first to see that Little Round Top was in danger because it wasn’t defended. Years later, Chamberlain will become an important witness for Warren, who was trying to restore his rank after he had been relieved of command by General Phil Sheridan. There’s not just one person who needs to be remembered at Little Round Top. In 1889, Chamberlain is at a reunion of the 20th Maine. He acknowledges that many things had been claimed about that engagement. He said, “We’re all right. We’re all correct.” I thought that was really a statesman-like comment. Years later, there’s no point trying to argue who did or didn’t do that. “We are all right.” That, to me, is Chamberlain. 

When things were dire at Little Round Top, Chamberlain gives a one-word order.

He later said he didn’t have time to give some embroidered command. It was simply, “Bayonet.” That was understood by the men under his command. They were running low on ammunition and knew what they had to do. 

Little Round Top was Chamberlain’s first serious introduction to combat.

This is what surprised many people and why I use “Unlikely Hero” in the title of my book. You wouldn’t think of a mild-mannered college professor being willing and able to act with courage and be so daring in battle. When I was at West Point a few years ago, several members of the faculty told me they believe Chamberlain is an embodiment of what military leadership should be all about. My friend David Petraeus [retired U.S. Army general and former CIA director], who thinks Grant is the greatest general of all time, also thinks Chamberlain is a great, great military leader. So it’s not just me, someone writing a biography, but it’s military people themselves who are validating Chamberlain’s leadership. 

Chamberlain is given the nickname “Lion of Round Top.” Does he deserve it?

I think it is well deserved. He earned it. Chamberlain led by example. When the 20th Maine rushes down the hill with bayonets, Chamberlain is out front with them. He confronts an officer with a sword and a pistol [Lieutenant Robert H. Wicker, 15th Alabama] and he convinces him to surrender. That’s an amazing story. He was not afraid to face death. 

What happens to Chamberlain at Petersburg in June 1864?

He almost died at Petersburg. Chamberlain was shot through the hip and it caused severe internal damage. It was a horrible injury that would plague him for the rest of his life. He had several surgeries and suffered terrible pain and infections until the day he died. He never, never complained and never really talked about it. He earns the nickname Bloody Chamberlain that day. He suffered a terrible pelvic wound that probably would have killed another man, then he’s leading his troops again less than a year later. His mother says to him, “Have you not given enough of yourself? You’ve done more than enough. Let other people do it.” He answers, “No, I have yet to finish this job.” The record is not clear, but Chamberlain may have used a catheter for the rest of his life. With the Civil War, we often focus on amputations as a big thing. What I learned from several scholarly articles was that it was really these invisible wounds hidden from sight that were the most prevalent and the most terrible. They went on for the rest of your life. You never got rid of them. Chamberlain finally dies, ultimately from the infections from his wounds, in 1914. He is considered the last Civil War veteran to die from his injuries. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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His wound likely caused incontinence, constant pain and maybe sexual dysfunction. How does he endure this?

Again, he never talks about it, but you have to imagine what this meant for his entire life, for 50 years after the Civil War. That’s a long, long time. I think his faith enables him to accept it. I was surprised to learn that several people would see him in pain and ask why he never talked about it. He was not the kind of man who would do that. Not at all. 

Chamberlain, a strong Unionist, did not believe in the Confederate cause. Yet he does something unusual during the surrender at Appomattox.

This, to me, was so much the essence of who Chamberlain is. He never accepted their cause, but he always applauded their courage by ordering his troops to salute the surrendering soldiers. This can be difficult for contemporary audiences who are revisiting Confederate monuments and wondering if Robert E. Lee was a traitor. I want to emphasize he never, ever accepted the cause of slavery or the cause of disuniting the Union, but he never gave up his compassion for the courage of these men. He could hold both of those views at the same time.I don’t think the salute was a planned thing. I would argue that like his actions at Little Round Top, this all ultimately grows out of his whole set of values. It’s understandable because this is who he was. His whole idea of wanting reconciliation with the South as just a part of his faith, his values, the formation of his life. 

Some historians claim Chamberlain embellished his Civil War record, but you don’t think so. Why?

I found confirmation for several of his claims. For example, John Brown Gordon, the Confederate general who surrendered at Appomattox. He and Chamberlain were really on the same page about what happened. That discovery was quite fascinating. Chamberlain was also accused of changing his speeches. After the war, he was reading all these regimental histories. When he got new information, he put that into his addresses. It says a lot about who he is. I think it is a great quality that he wanted to set the record straight. 

What do you want readers to take away from your book? How do you want them to remember Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain?

As a rediscovered hero of America who has the kind of values that we need to have in our society today. And what is the source of those values? It’s both his classical education and his Christian education. And I think he is a great example of what a person can do, even facing immense difficulty with his wounds for 50 years. He perseveres and becomes not simply the Civil War hero, but the governor of Maine, president of Bowdoin College, and one of the great speakers about the values of the American democracy in those decades after the Civil War. No one spoke more eloquently than Chamberlain about what it meant to be an American in the last part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. I wish we had people like him around today. Chamberlain had integrity and duty and loyalty. Those were the bedrock values in his life.

On Great Fields

The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
By Ronald C. White, Penguin Random House, 2023

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