Into the Gathering Storm 1866

PROLOGUE

Walt Whitman wrote," nothing collapses, and to die is different than anyone supposed, luckier." I thought I knew what he meant. If death was inevitable, and it surely was, maybe what awaits might not be so bad. Whitman saw into the deep meaning of matters, but many times the meaning wasn't important when you were trying to live and withstand the storms coming at you. Survival in the Civil War and west of the Mississippi was doled out sparingly, success even more a premium.

I never worried about dying, I couldn't feel it even when it was all around me. I was sixteen at the start of the war and never tasted battle until Fredericksburg. My first two years in Mr. Lincoln's army were spent working mules and riding courier. I was light in the saddle with a knack for good horses. I looked for speed sure, but wanted strong lean legs with a big chest, figuring speed was good but you never wanted a horse to give out and get run down. Capture was the worst of all outcomes. Rebel troops were thin, ragged, and poorly equipped, if the South couldn't feed her own soldiers, what would she feed prisoners. One of my reasons for enlisting was to eat three meals a day.

FREDERICKSBURG DECEMBER 1862

By the time Fredericksburg was fought I had charge of seventy mules, harnessed to six heavy axle wagons. Once the engineers pontooned the Potomac, I drove one of the wagons across the river. The troops already on the fighting side cleared out the grays and stray sharpshooters, but they couldn't stop artillery coming from the heights. The shells were plunking into the river around the pontoons and troops milling at the landing below the town.

After a time the Rebs turned their artillery onto the long sloping grade the blue lines had begun to advance over. What a racket of gunfire and smoke wafting everywhere, the whole hillside sheets of alternating flame. Then the blues came rolling back down with the ranks thinned. A second wave started forward, stepping over the dead and wounded, and the fire sheets roared again.

I drove the wagon with the mules straining, moving along the river road to a staging below the fighting. Troops ducked for cover as they unloaded me, then a whole battery of shells landed among us, mules, bodies, splintered chunks of wagon and kegs of powder blew, some powder didn't explode at first, but dusted the air igniting low clouds of hissing fire.

My wagon took a direct hit close to half way back, blowing the rear axle off along with a section of the body as though a beast bit into it, shearing the box and leaving jagged wood. I was thrown clear, what was left of the wagon rolled over two or three times twisting the harness and dragging the mules down the hillside. They seemed unhurt but not unfazed, bulge eyed and frantic trying to run in all directions, sliding and stammering sideways. I cut them from the wagon and grabbed the lead harness, starting down the hill at an angle to get an easier descent. They didn't settle and act like mules until they made the river.

I carried a pistol in my belt and was checking my rifle for damage when a big sergeant came up behind and knocked me to my knees with the stock of his weapon. I reached for my pistol, but before I could clear it, his bayonet tipped at my throat. He called me a yellow dog coward for leaving the field and proceeded to march me uphill with a group of shirkers. He just poked me with his big needle at every protest. So that was how as a teamster I ended up in line for the third wave of assaults on Marye's Heights, in December 1862.

Forming up with the troops of General Humphreys, watching the wounded dragged down the hill and through the lines, it was clear nothing had been gained by the first two assaults, just bloody wasted efforts in the open with the Rebs entrenched behind a wall above.

It was sickening to see the wounded up close, but I made a keen observation. The majority of wounds were belt buckle and higher. The Rebs were firing downhill, kneeling behind cover, which made them shoot high. I scanned the ground ahead through the hanging curtain of smoke and saw a broad expanse, but there was some ridging as you made the ascent. I made up my mind to go up, but I wasn't going to march, I would crawl, firing as I went. God knows the field offered plenty of cover with blue clumps strewn all over.