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GENERAL PHILIP KEARNY
Introduction
There is fine line between bravery and foolishness, one that Civil War hero General Philip Kearny consistently straddled during his career. His heroics have made him the stuff of legends, but he was flesh and blood, and subject to the same temptations, weaknesses and fears as the rest of us. His record on the field of battle was unblemished, but off the field was another story entirely.
Here now is the true story of New Jersey's most famous fighter, General Philip Kearny.
Kearny le Magnifique
If Phil Kearny's father and grandfather hoped to extinguish his yearning for the military, they were unsuccessful. And on September 3, 1836, grandfather John Watts made a fatal error. He died at the age of 87. In his will he made the 22 year old Kearny a millionaire in his own right. He was now a legal adult with no financial worries and his father's control over his life was a thing of the past. So when junior Kearny announced he was joining the army, there was nothing the senior Kearny could do. Kearny called on the assistance of his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, as well as the even more prestigious General Winfield Scott, who he had met and impressed while in school. The newly commissioned second lieutenant reported to his uncle at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, on June 10, 1837, and served with the First Dragoons for the next two years protecting settlers and pioneers traveling west. Kearny was a popular, if eccentric officer. He was, of course, a fine horseman, and was quick to praise and reward those under his command. His fellow soldiers could never understand why someone of his wealth and background would volunteer for the rigors of army life, but they enjoyed the benefits of serving with him, as he often used his tremendous wealth to ensure his unit was the best outfitted and supplied one in the United States Army. After a few years in the field he was assigned as an aide-de-camp to the military district commandant, Brigadier-General Henry Atkinson. Kearny may not have been too happy about his new assignment, but it did have one important benefit; the commandant's beautiful sister-in-law, Diana Bullitt.
There was an instant attraction between Diana and Phil, and soon the two were inseparable. The assumption by most was that a marriage would soon occur. Kearny, however, had other plans. To the shock of everyone (including Diana) he accepted an assignment overseas. At that time France was considered to have the finest cavalry in the world. The United States government decided to send three young officers there to study cavalry tactics the French forces. Kearny was one of those chosen, perhaps due to the fact that his uncle Stephen made the selections. He arrived in France in 1839, just in time to join the Duke of Orleans Expeditionary Force to Algiers. At last Kearny had the chance he had been waiting for; the chance to actually go to war and fight. With the permission of the Secretary of War, Kearny traveled to North Africa where, of course, he performed brilliantly, earning the nickname 'Kearny le Magnifique.' He was offered the French Legion of Honor, but he was forced to decline the award because he was an officer of the United States Army. In 1840 he took what lessons and tactics he had learned home with him (along with many honors and gifts) to resume his military career...It was at Churubusco that the legend of Philip Kearny began. On August 20, 1847, General Scott confronted the enemy at this heavily fortified village, a suburb of Mexico City. Kearny and his men were finally allowed to fight. Leading about 100 cavalrymen across a causeway he slammed into the retreating enemy at the very gates of the city. Although vastly outnumbered, Kearny and his men fought valiantly. He charged into the thick of the Mexican forces swinging his saber like a madman. A bugle sounded retreat and many of his men gave way, but Kearny and a few dozen continued the fight. Finally they were overwhelmed and Kearny raced back over the causeway on foot and quickly mounted a rider less horse. The enemy fired at the now retreating cavalry, and one bullet found its mark on Kearny. His left arm was badly wounded and later that day, as Brigadier General Franklin Pierce (later President) held him down, his arm was amputated. "I forsaw this," Kearny told him. Kearny received his brevet at a terrible cost, and was granted a battlefield promotion to Major...
What Am I If No Longer American
Major Philip Kearny spent the next six months at home in New York, but he did take the honorable discharge the army offered. He was given a hero's welcome and for the next three years served as recruiting chief in the city. This time, however, his wife Diana did not so easily forgive what she considered desertion on his part. As Kearny rehabbed and learned to function with only one arm, their troubles escalated. Not even the birth of another daughter could stop the constant bickering between them. Finally almost exactly two years to the day of his wounding in Mexico, she left New York. Although it was thought at the time to be temporary, they never again lived together. After only eight years of marriage, she had had enough.
If the loss of his wife affected Kearny he did not show it. He continued his recruiting duties and rehabilitation, and eventually was able to overcome his disability, even riding a horse with his old abandon holding the reins in his mouth while he used his right hand to hold his sword. His dissatisfaction with the army continued unabated. He complained that he was never rewarded properly for his heroism in Mexico, and now he felt shunted aside unable to get back in the field. Finally in July, 1851, Kearny received orders to rejoin his old command in California, just in time to confront the Rouge River tribe that had gone on a rampage attacking farms and settlers. Kearny marched his men to Oregon and routed the warriors ending hostilities.
If Kearny expected to be rewarded with another promotion for his labors he was sadly mistaken. By now the army was fed up with him and his temperament. Never an easy man to deal with, he had become increasingly hostile and ambivalent to his superiors, openly questioning their judgment and qualifications. It may not have helped matters that his estranged wife was the sister-in-law of the respected, late General Henry Atkinson. Not even his mentor and friend, General Winfield Scott could assist him with his ambitions. Finally, Kearny admitted defeat and resigned his commission in October, 1851. It was promptly accepted. "I had hoped for at least a token murmur of demurral," he later wrote.
Kearny's military career may have been over, but he was still young (36) and rich. He immediately began a world tour which eventually culminated in his beloved Paris, where he had so enjoyed himself a decade earlier. His heroic reputation there, first formed from his adventures in Algiers, had only increased with the news of his courage in Mexico and Oregon. It was there he came upon a young twenty year old engaged woman by the name of Agnes Maxwell. She was visiting Paris from her home in New York City. Kearny forgot about his wife and four children, and Agnes forgot about her husband-to-be, and they began openly living together in Paris. His legal and embarrassed wife, Diana, angrily refused a divorce when he visited her in 1854 to request one. By 1855, Agnes and Kearny had left New York to settle in his new mansion, Bellegrove, overlooking the Passaic River in what is now Kearny, New Jersey. They had come here to escape the disapproving tongues of New York society. Bellegrove was located only a short distance and across the river from his family's old manor in Newark. In 1858, Diana finally acceded to his demands for a divorce, but so angry was she at her young replacement, she stipulated in the divorce decree that he could never marry again as long as she lived. As soon as the divorce was granted, Kearny began to look for a way around Diana's unusual stipulation. He found it when his lawyers argued that it was only valid in New York State, and Kearny was free to marry Agnes in New Jersey where they now lived. However, New York did not agree with this interpretation, and for a time Kearny would avoid his native city for fear of arrest on the charge of bigamy.
Of course the quiet life of a country squire did not suite Kearny for long. In 1859 he traveled to France again and volunteered for the campaign against Austria that year. He fought with tremendous courage and distinction and when again offered the Legion of Honor, he accepted becoming the first American so honored. He stayed in Paris until 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War back home spurred him to action. He was recruited by the South to join their cause and lend his support as an officer when the war erupted. Although he may have sympathized with many of the South's concerns, and was friendly with many of their military leaders, he told them, "What am I, if no longer American." Kearny returned home to offer his service to the Union.
It Is a Sweet and Pleasing Thing to Die For Ones Country
Philip Kearny arrived in Washington ready to serve in whatever capacity the government needed. Since so many seasoned military leaders had joined with the Southern cause, the Union was desperate for skilled leadership. Yet amazingly, Kearny was ignored. His reputation for difficulty seemed to overshadow his reputation for courage and leadership. Also, the Agnes Maxwell scandal outraged many in the War Department. When he realized he was not going to be granted a commission in the army he tried to join as a lowly private, but was again rejected because of his infirmity.
Kearny headed home to Bellegrove angry and disappointed. His disappointment would not last. In July, 1861, New Jersey recognized the War Department's folly and commissioned him as a Brigadier General, and placed him in command of the New Jersey Brigade stationed near Alexandria, Virginia. He found his new brigade barely trained and undisciplined. He immediately began to change that with constant drills and marches while awaiting the seemingly never to be fought battles. He was tough, but he was fair, and he always looked out for his men, making sure they were properly fed and outfitted even at his own personal expense. He urged General George McClellan, head of the Union forces to attack Richmond, the Southern capital, and possibly end the war quickly, but McClellan held the army back. The longer McClellan hesitated, the more frustrated Kearny became, finally culminating in series of published letters criticizing the commander. The army was again outraged. But what made the army hate Kearny, made his men love him. They too were clamoring for battle.In late August the army began to push towards Manassas, Virginia, for the disastrous second battle of Bull Run under the command of General John Pope. On August 29, Kearny led his division on a desperate charge at the Confederate left at Groveton. He almost won, but was forced back by superior forces. The following day, Stonewall Jackson battered the Union lines on all fronts and as night fell only a few troops fought on. Kearny's men were one of those few. As even they finally retreated he was heard shouting, "Are there only imbeciles to lead us?" The South continued the pressure the following day as a terrific rain storm raged. As night approached the Confederate troops tried to flank the Union army at Chantilly. Kearny, who often acted as his own scout, rode out to survey the area ahead. He galloped straight into a Southern outpost. The order was given to halt and surrender, but Kearny had escaped from more difficult situations. Rearing his horse he galloped away as the soldiers fired after him. Witnesses remembered him shouting, "They can't hit a barn!" A single bullet proved him wrong. It entered the base of his spine and ended his life....Years earlier in New York, when he was presented a sword in honor of his charge in the Mexican War, Kearny said, "I must ever so strongly bear in mind that in a Republic particularly applies the motto, "It is a sweet and pleasing thing to die for ones country." He died as he would have wanted, a hero recklessly fighting for his nation. The man had become a legend.
Epilogue
While there was no truth to the rumor that Philip Kearny's son by Diana, John Watts Kearny, had tried to join the Confederate Army so he could shoot at his father, there was no love lost between them. The son sided with the mother during the divorce and rarely, if ever, spoke to his father after it. Despite this, upon Philip's death, it is said he received the largest inheritance in the history of the United States to that date. Eventually he settled in Bellegrove, and the estate stayed in the family's hands until it was torn down in 1926 to make room for a real estate development. A statue of Philip Kearny, which originally stood at the State House in Trenton, was dedicated at Military Park in Newark in 1880. The ceremony was attended by Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and the then Governor George McClellan. But even Kearny's statue caused controversy. In 1925 it was moved to another part of the park to make room for the "Wars of America" monument. In 1961, the statue was reset on the pedestal facing west, its back to the Passaic River and the town of Kearny that was his home and was named in his honor. The argument between Newark and Kearny continued on and off for over 30 years. Finally in the 1990's the statue was taken down for restoration and in a compromise, an exact copy was made for the Township of Kearny which was unveiled in 1994 in front of the Kearny Post Office. Some of the bricks recovered from Bellegrove were used in the base of the statue. In a famous Hollywood movie there is a line, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So has the true life of General Philip Kearny been forgotten. There have been numerous biographies of him, but most gloss over his fallacies in both war and peace. Some never even mention his second marriage and the scandal it created, or Kearny's sometimes pompous and ingratiating attitude. As John T. Cunningham wrote, "Each [biographies of Kearny] in his own way failed to clarify a life. Rather, both drew tighter the web of legend." When Kearny died he took much of the truth with him. Although there are many statues and plaques honoring him, and even a town in New Jersey named for him, little remains to tell his true story. "This life can be told straight - and it must soon be told, lest Phil Kearny escape forever into mythology," wrote Cunningham, "Phil Kearny, you see, was not really a legend." - New Jersey History's Mysterys http://www.njhm.com/kearny.htm
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Following Geronimo's surrender to Gen. Crook, on the way back to Arizona, Geronimo changed his mind and
again escaped. As a result on April 1, Crook resigned his Command and was replaced on the 11th by
Gen. Nelson Miles. After three months of unsuccessful pursuit, Miles determined to send an officer who was personally known by Geronimo to meet with the chief. This decision must have been particularly galling to Miles, as it meant a reversion to the tactics of George Crook. The only officer who personally knew Geronimo and his men was Lt. Charles B. Gatewood, known to the Indians as Bay-chen-daysen, "Long Nose." Gatewood would later
serve at Fort McKinney, Wyo., at the time of the Johnson County War and was injured in the bombing of the barracks by the so-called "Red Sash Gang."Gatewood, tall, thin, and sickly, at first refused the assignment into Mexico because of his ill health, but he was finally induced to undertake the mission by a promise of being appointed Miles' Aide de Camp. While on the mission into Mexico, Gatewood's health continued to visibly deteriorate, but he was refused a requested medical discharge by Leonard Wood. On August 25, after a month's search, Gatewood, with a contingent comprised of interpreters Martine (a Nednihi Chiricahua), George Wratten, Jesus Yestes, and Tom Horn; a soldier; and four Apache Scouts, came into contact with Geronimo's band at a bend of the Bavispe River.
Some question exists as to the identity of the persons in the photo. A handwritten note with the photo identified the individuals as the party that captured Geronimo. If so, the individuals would include Charles Gatewood, Martine, George Wratten, Jesus Yestes, Tom Horn, Kayitah, and possibly Tex Whaley and Frank Huston. An identification has also been made left to right: Groves, Mr Stevens, Chino, Stugh (front), Funston??, Tony, Furgerson, Leonard Wood.
After anxious moments, Geronimo appeared armed with a Winchester. Setting his weapon aside, Geronimo greeted Gatewood and inquired after Gatewood's obvious sickly appearance. After a full day's negotiation, the next morning Geronimo agreed to surrender to Gen. Miles, based on Gatewood's personal promise that Miles was honorable and his word was good; and on condition that Gatewood would personally travel with Geronimo's band to the place of surrender. American troops were to travel separately. It was agreed that the Chiricahuas would keep their weapons until they reached the place of surrender. Thus, the two bands separately traveled to Skeleton Canyon on the American side of the border. On the course of the journey when the two groups camped near each other, Lt. Abiel Smith in charge of the American unit, proposed to disarm the Apache in violation of Gatewood's agreement. Word of the proposal reached Geronimo, who, fearful that the Americans planned on murdering his band, again threatened to flee. Only intervention by Gatewood with Geronimo, and an angry confrontation by Gatewood with Smith and Leonard Wood, saved the situation.
Assignment Geronimo
(As depicted in the Movie: Geronimo: An American Legend - 1993, A story being told by Lt Britton Davis. When Lts Charles Gatewood and Britton Davis are bringing in Geronimo the first time, Davis asks Gatewood if he is just going to come in and give himself up. Gatewood replies that that was what he promised. Gatewood then goes on to say that a Chiricahua doesn't give his word much but when he does he keeps it. In his book the "Truth About Geronimo" Britton Davis's own assessment of geronimo is as follows. "this indian was a thoroughly viscous, intractable and treacherous man. his only redeeming traits were courage and determination. HIS WORD, NO MATTER HOW EARNESTLY PLEADGED, WAS WORTHLESS." Davis also is depicted with Gatewood leading up to his meeting with Geronimo..he had in fact already resigned from the army. The Seiber character as portrayed in the movie is nearly all fictitious, including his death by gunfight, and not deserving of further comment.
Some Davis quotes:
"Kay-E-Ten-Ae - not a chief but a leader of the more turbulent spirits amongst the younger element. Even the chiefs were afraid of him. He was pure devil and began making trouble as soon as he arrived on the Reservation. When the Indians had all come from Mexico (they came up in several parties at intervals of several months, Geronimo's band being the last to arrive) General Crook sent me with them to Turkey Creek about 16 miles SW of Fort Apache, where I established camp. Beyond Sam Bowman (a half breed negro and Chocta) Mickey Free and a young Mexican interpreter, there were only Indians in the camp - all Chiracahuas or Warm Springs. Kay-E-Ten-Ae lost little time. The camp was hardly more than settled when he gave a tizwin party to a number of the most unruly young bucks, at which he prosed that they kill me and return to their old haunts in Mexico. The motion was amended to wait until they finished the drunk. A tizwin drunk usually lasted three days. The proposal was reported to me the same night by one of my secret service scouts (a woman). I arrested Kay-E-Ten-Ae the next morning and sent him to San Carlos for trial. He was convicted and sent to Alcatraz prison, where two years of confinement tamed him and he subsequently gave valuable aid to Gens Crook and Miles in ridding northern Mexico and our s.w. of the Indians who left the Reservation in the Spring of 1885 with Geronimo. The details of his arrest would be typical of the risks our officers ran in dealing with the Indians. Statement by Britton Davis.
Geronimo was not a chief - not even a sub-chief. He made some pretensions to being a medicine man, but was not a success even at that as the Indians universally disliked him. He was extremely crafty and suspicious, but a man of very strong character and unusual ability as a warrior. These latter qualities account for his leadership. When he came on the Reservation in 1884 he brought with him a squaw who had been for several years a captive of the Mexicans and had lived for a time in the City of Chihuahua, This woman, Huera, had great influence over him and was a thorn in Britton Davis' side in dealing with Geronimo. For some reason she had acquired a deepseated hatred of the Whites and was a prominent factor in the outbreak of May 1885, when about one-fourth of the Chiracahuas and Warm Spring left the Reservation - one hundred and forty-three men, women and children out of a total of five hundred fifty-odd. Geronimo is reported to have said that Micky Free and Mr. Britton Davis was responsible for his leaving the Reservation. If he made such a statement, it was simply a lie to save his face. Micky Free had nothing whatever to do with it and the cause of the outbreak were matters entirely beyond my control. - Britton Davis" - http://gallery.unl.edu/picinfo/5744.html
"We have heard much talk of the treachery of the Indian. In treachery, broken pledges on the part of
high officials, lies, thievery, slaughter of defenseless Isdzan and children, and every crime in the catalogue of man's inhumanity to man, the Indian was a mere amateur compared to the `noble white man.' His crimes were retail, ours wholesale." --U.S. Army Second Lieutenant Britton Davis
Here is an outstanding review by Kosto Barry Granlundof The Truth About Geronimo by Britton Davis
Good as it goes, better than most
Here is the point of view concerning a particular portion of the late Apache/Euro conflict involving the last rag-tag remnants of the Apache tribes and the United States Army units involved in trying to keep them subdued. Its an enjoyable read because the author gives a first-hand, eye-witness account of the series of incidents known as "The Geronimo Campaigns" and he does so without injecting the slobbering Politically Correct dogma that has become so common in present day literature dealing with frontier history (of course, Davis lived at a time when Political Correctness didn't exist, so naturally his book wouldn't contain any!)
A book like this easily destroys the sky-pie nonsense found in sob-story exercises such as Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and blatantly absurd and Politically Correct motion pictures like "Dances With Wolves" and "Geronimo, An American Legend". In fact, its a very nice counter weight to the drivel out there that seeks to leave unaware people with the impression that the American Indian was some sort of Red Aristocrat or Feathered Philosopher/Sage who was unfairly victimized by unreasonable invaders.
However, I have even better works to offer you if you are sincerely interested in FACT and Truth concerning the White/Indian conflicts. These are all available right here at amazon.com, and the titles to look for are; THREE YEARS AMONG THE COMANCHES ( a first-hand narrative by a Texas Ranger who was captured by Comanches and how he was brutally and sadistically treated, how he escaped, and how he evaded re-capture.) LIFE AMONG THE APACHES ( a first-hand narrative by John Cremony of the famed California Volunteers, who dealt with Apache, Comanche, Kaddo and other hostiles at a time BEFORE the United States Army had even a small force in the southwestern region of North America.) and lastly, SCALP DANCE ( a book consisting of detailed military and civilian/settler accounts of the chilling, blood-curdling wars with Southern Cheyenne, Comanche, Arapaho, Sioux, and Kiowa on the high plains). These three books will serve to provide you with an excellent AND HISTORICALLY ACCURATE overview of frontier history, and an antidote to all the Politically Correct dogma out there that is being passed off as "fact" by glib leftist "educators", self-proclaimed "experts" and psuedo-historians. Read them all, none are dry or boring, and all are of the "couldn't put it down" type of literature.
After you've finished THREE YEARS AMONG THE COMANCHES, LIFE AMONG THE APACHES, and SCALP DANCE, get "Indian Wars" by Robert Utley. By reading these books in this order, you'll grasp the gravity of the incidents that Utley superbly, but only generally deals with, and you'll not only appreciate Utley's work even more, you'll also appreciate the fine line a genuine historian like Utley has to walk while trying to make a living within the Politically Correct jungle that surrounds the academic slums of so-called "modern education".
and another by Lynda "OAD CAM"
In 99.9% of all books written by whitemen about American Indians it is hard to find even a grain of truth or fact. This book is the exception that proves the rule! While nothing is glossed over, the author does not attempt to sway the reader with sensationalism. He tells about his experiences and gives the good with the bad. He exhibits an almost unheard of ability to set aside any preconceived notions and actually see clearly both sides of the conflict AND views the American Indian as a human being, not some sort of subspecies. An exceptional view of reality that should be required reading in all American history classes from junior high/middle school through the college level.)
Lt Davis & Apache Scout Vignette - PEACHES
The Reluctant Warrior
Kosto Barry Granlundof's commentary on the movie concludes this vignette:
"POLITICALLY CORRECT NONSENSE: Once again, Hollywood takes a series of incidents in frontier history AND several people who were involved in these incidents, and reduces them to a mess that can accurately be described as one ounce of fact diluted in a gallon of hogwash! They couldn't even film this trash in the correct locations! Instead of southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and choice locations in Mexico, they do the filming in UTAH! As for the movie's content, well, there's a list of falsehoods a mile long I could mention, but if you're really interested in finding out just how absurd this movie is, read Geronimo's autobiography and see for yourself....And I really don't care about the performances of Duval or Hackman or anyone else in this "production" either. What I can't stand is the Politically Correct slant it was given AND the blatant distortion of history that Hollywood once again trys to "educate" the mindless movie goers with.
I am so sick and tired of this sort of movie - the "Dunces With Wolves" variety of PC rubbish - that I just had to write this review. Now, for those who want more than Hollywood's "entertaining" version of the past frontier, I recommend reading SCALP DANCE and THREE YEARS AMONG THE COMANCHES and LIFE AMONG THE APACHES and of course, things like GERONIMO,by S.M.Barrett Read all these and then re-watch this movie and DUNCES WITH WOLVES and you'll see exactly what I mean in this review.
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Emmet Crawford was in overall charge of Apache scouts after General George Crooks's return to the Department of Arizona in 1882...born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 6, 1844. He had enlisted in the California Volunteers at the outbreak of the Civil War and had risen to the rank of First Lieutenant of Volunteers. At the end of the was, deciding to make the army his career, he accepted a commission as a Second Lieutenant when the war ended. In December 1870, by then a First Lieutenant in the 3rd Cavalry, he had come to Arizona. Early in 1872 his regiment had been transferred north to fight the Sioux, and a decade passed before he returned to the desert Southwest. By then he was a Captain and was detached from his regiment as military commandant at San Carlos. He led his scouts into Sonora in 1883 and aided in forcing Chiricahuas back to reservation.
At San Carlos he concentrated on teaching his charges how to farm, and in the process they learned to trust him. Britton Davis, a lieutenant serving under Crawford, later wrote of him: "Crawford was born a thousand years too late. Mentally, morally and physically he would have been an ideal knight of King Arthur's Court. Six feet one, gray eyed, untiring, he was an ideal cavalryman and devoted to his troop, as were the men of it devoted to him. He had a keen sense of humor but something had saddened his early life and I never knew him to laugh aloud. Modest, self-effacing, kindly, he delighted in assigning to his subordinates opportunities and credit he might well have taken to himself - a very rare trait in an officer of any army. His expressed wish was that he might die in the act of saving the lives of others." - http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ecrawford.htm
Charles Bare Gatewood First Lieutenant, United States Army
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Captain Emmet Crawford was killed in Mexico on January 18, 1886, after his command of Third U.S. Cavalry had chased Apache Indian raiders across the border and was attacked mistakenly by Mexican soldiers.
For northwest Nebraska residents Crawford's death brought back memories of his 1870s service at Fort Robinson. They named their new town, which had sprung up near the fort, in Crawford's honor.
Elsewhere Nebraskans expressed their sense of loss. Z. T. Crawford lived in Kearney, and his brother's body, hastily buried in Mexico, was exhumed and brought to Nebraska for burial. The Kearney New Era, April 17, 1886, detailed the elaborate ceremony and its Victorian setting:
"[T]he funeral service . . . was one of the largest and most imposing held in the State. . . . Model Opera house was draped in a becoming manner. Crape [crepe], flags and evergreens formed the drapings. . . . At the back of the hall was placed a large catafalque [a wooden framework], draped with black and white nun's veiling, upon which was perched a large gray eagle, draped stars and stripes. At the front and in the center of the catafalque was placed a large photograph of Captain Crawford. . . .
"The casket was of bronze and a facsimile of the one in which President Garfield was entombed. The floral decorations covering the casket were well arranged. . . , while the pillow presented by the same company [of the Colorado National Guard] and composed chiefly of Calla Lilies, Marchiel Niel roses, maiden fern and Artillery plant, was one of the most beautiful floral decorations of its kind ever seen in this portion of the state."
In 1908 Crawford's body was reburied in Arlington National Cemetery. A five-foot obelisk of white marble marks his resting place. - http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/timeline/crawford_emmet.htm
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Shortly after Crawford's murder, the U.S. government officially protested to Mexican officials, who in turn ordered the state of Chihuahua to investigate the incident. On February 11, 1886, a district judge in Chihuahua City opened hearings on "the armed collision that took place between an American force of Indian auxiliaries and a Volunteer force from Guerrero." By May of that year more than thirty individuals had testified. Finally, in February 1887, the Mexican government offered to return the mules and equipment which Lieutenant Maus (Medal of Honor) had been forced to give the nacionales. No apology was forthcoming.
Gen Crook paid the most fitting tribute to Crawford. He maintained that, had Crawford lived, the renegades would all have surrendered in January of 1886, thereby saving almost eight more months of pursuit and death. - http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ecrawford.htm
Captain Emmet Crawford Captain, United States Army
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FREDERICK ELISHA PHELPS: Born in Ohio, he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1870. He was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to the 8th Cavalry. He was promoted to first lieutenant 1879, and served at Fort Davis with Company F of the 8th Cavalry from October 1887 to May 1888. He was promoted to captain in September 1889 and retired in 1891.
Description of hardship & privation of troopers on extended excursions:
"I had lost my blouse, the back of my blue shirt (the only one I had left) was missing, my long hair reached almost to my shoulder, my beard untrimmed for three months, fell on my breast, and I had on a soft wool hat, the crown of which was missing entirely and the brim had been town at various time to help kindle a fire..I trotted up to my quarters and found Mary (his wife) standing on the porch. I dismounted and said "hello, old lady." She looked me up and down and then, turning to the orderly...she cooly said, "Orderly, is that my husband?" The grinning orderly touched his cop and said "Yes, mam." "Take him down to the creek and wash him, " was her unexpected reply." - pp.206-21. - Reeve, Frank D., ed., "Frederick E. Phelps: A Soldier's Memoirs," New Mexico Historical Review, XXV. cited in Clendenen, Clarence C.: BLOOD ON THE BORDER - The United States Army and The Mexican Irregulars, 1969.
In describing "quarters," while "...at Fort Bayard in those years, Lt. Frederick E. Phelps, recorded the conditions which the men endured at the time. Phelps lived in a 10-foot by 12-foot room with a kitchen. He described it as:
One wall was built of stones picked up on the adjacent hillside, one was of "Adobe" (sun dried brick), one of pine logs, set on end, and the fourth of slabs from a saw-mill. The floor was of rough boards, a foot wide; the ceiling of canvas, the roof of mud, the front door of two boards on wooden hinges with a wooden latch, one window with four panes of glass, the sash Immovable --this was the parlor (Phelps, Capt. FE, unpubl., pp. 1-2)
Other terms used by Phelps to describe the fort include "desolate, jumping off place, everything undesirable." He described the living quarters as huts of logs and round stones, with flat roofs that leaked in the summer and brought down rivulets of liquid mud, and in winter were the hiding place of the tarantula and the centipede.
An 1872 report showed some improvement in living conditions for the 300 men stationed there. Quarters for the officers and men continued to be of hewn logs but with mud roofs. Houses for the quartermaster and commissary departments were built of adobe. The hospital was built of adobe and the guardhouse of stone. A corral 148 feet by 230 feet housed the post animals. The walls surrounding the fort were 6 feet high and built of adobe on a stone foundation." - http://www.zianet.com/whisperingcanyon/fort_bayard.html
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Vanished Arizona
Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman by Martha Summerhayes
also at
Recollections
John Wyer & Martha Summerhayes - Arlington National Cemetary
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FReeper Foxhole Remembers the Campaign to Capture Geronimo (Jul - Sep, 1886) - June, 13th, 2005
Assignment Geronimo
Apache Devil (1933) - Edgar Rice Burroughs
ARIZONA APACHE WARS
Utley - Frontiersmen in Blue
Utley - Frontier Regulars.htm
or see 7th Cav Vignettes
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The next year Wood left military service after he was admitted to the Oregon bar. He began a law practice in Portland that would span 35 years. Instrumental in founding the library and art museum, he became a leading figure in Portland's cultural scene. Meanwhile, he wrote both poetry and prose. His Poet in the Desert became a literary success soon after it was published in 1915. Ironically, while Wood was an avowed social anarchist, he served as attorney for one of eastern Oregon's biggest land monopolies. He argued a major land claim related to the old military wagon roads across Oregon and won a million dollar law fee.
Wood spent the last 25 years of his life with his second wife, poet Sara Bard Field, in the Los Gatos, California, retreat that they called "The Cats." Here he authored works that brought him national recognition. Among them was his satirical drama Heavenly Discourse, published in 1927, which soon became a bestseller.
Wood was a fascinating and polished personality, as at ease in a banker's drawing room as he was at a gathering of Wobblies. He drew friends from contrasting corners of society, including such well-known figures as Chief Joseph, Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Ansel Adams, Robinson Jeffers, Clarence Darrow, Childe Hassam, Margaret Sanger, and John Steinbeck.
Wood died in Los Gatos, California on January 22, 1944.
Also see Wood's firsthand account The
Pursuit and Capture of Chief Joseph documenting the
1877 retreat by Nez Perce Indians.
source - http://bluebook.state.or.us/notable/notwood.htm
Charles Erskine Scott Wood led an extraordinary life, long, varied, and vital. Soldier, port, attorney, satirist, philosophical anarchist, reformer, bon vivant, boon companion, painter, art patron, bibliophile, and pacifist--C.E.S. Wood was all of these. Approaching the Renaissance ideal of the universal man, he packed into nearly 92 years of living three distinct careers and a remarkable variety of experiences, exhibiting a rare capacity for savoring life and a stunning diversity of talent, including a protean, at times profound, facility for the literary arts.
An early impression derives from a large camera study of Lieutenant C.E. Scott Wood in his mid-twenties. he wears the uniform of an infantry man in the United States Army. He is seated on a rough-hewn chair, casting a level gaze at whatever crosses his line of vision, a revolver held loosely on his thigh. The youthful face is handsome-straight nose, resolute mouth, strong jaw.
In his later years, Colonel Wood (a militia title conferred by an Oregon governor years after Wood left the military) looked like an old testament prophet, with long snowy hair and full-flowing beard, but still the level gaze, the deep-set blue eyes. In a portrait by Ansel Adams, he looks far into the camera's eye, his face remarkably unwrinkled, except around the eyes where the lines seem etched by wisdom.
Between the handsome lieutenant and the snowy-haired sage lies almost a century of U.S. history, from the Wild West to the Second World War. Wood's life and writing chronicle and interpret many aspects of American life: westward expansion, the Progressive movement, women's fight for suffrage, isolationism and the Anti-imperialist League, The "Wobblies," Victorianism, Christian Socialists, the anarchist movement, Social Darwinism, and others that are faint in our cultural memory. Literature professor James Caldwell summed it up in a single phrase when he described his father-in-law as n "era and a realm." In the sparkle of Wood's exceptional character and vision lies a literature of some distinction, capable of grace, wit, delight, and righteous fire.
C.E.S. Wood lived intensely, often extravagantly, in terms of money, emotion, and engagement in the arts. He drew friends from contrasting corners of society: Mark Twain and Chief Joseph; anarchist Emma Goldman and James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railroad; Robinson Jeffers, California poet, and Clarence Darrow, prominent defense lawyer; Bill Hanley, Harney County cattleman, and Childe Hassam, American impressionist painter; Margaret Sanger and Mark Van Doren; Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Teddy roosevelt's sister, and Langston Hughes, Black Poet; John Reed and John Steinbeck--to name a few. Described by a contemporary as a man of "vitality, magnetism, charm, wit, and teasing irreverence, "Wood was a complex, contradictory, and unique man who forged a distinctive and refreshing lifestyle and projected, as well, a vision that illuminates the American West. His life and work can be seen as taking Jeffersonian values--that "all men are created equal...endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--and passing them through the crucible of what the historian of the American West Frederick Jackson Turner called, "the ennobling experience...the fierce love of freedom...furnished to the pioneer."
There was a rugged dimension to Wood's character and vision, the result, no doubt, of his frontier experience and his years on the Pacific slope. He put it bluntly in 1902 at the Manhattan Club when he spoke to a large gathering of Eastern Democrats:
I come from the West where the illimitable mountains lift up their heads to the very silence of God. Where the vast wilderness sits in silent brooding on the truth. I come from the West, where in a civilization founded on the mine and the camp, we believe that the saloon and the theater has as good a right to be open on Sunday as the church and the school. I come from where we think that it is the right of every American to go to hell and be damned if he wants to. That is not humor--it is the truth.The rangy defiance ringing in that statement, coupled with the conviction that freedom salted with knowledge will solve society's problems, ran through most of his life. In addition, Wood had an aesthetic side, a deep love of beauty and a sensuous appreciation of the good things in life--fine wines, pungent cheeses, exotic stones, and rare art objects. this, as well as his reading in classical literature, tempered his broad-shouldered western individualism, lending an urbane and learned flavor to his western verse and anarchist sallies.
The overall impression of Charles Erskine Scoot Wood is of an expansive and singular man of engaging personal growth, deeply and articulately responsive to both the world of nature and the injustice of the world, with a rare capacity for moving easily and without affectation between the sophisticated sphere of business, the professions, and high society, and the simpler circles of workers and artisans.
C.E.S. Wood was born February 20, 1852, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the second son of seven children (six boys and a girl) of Rosemary Carson and William Maxwell Wood, a navy surgeon, a Whig, and a friend of Zachary Taylor. Erskine, the name Wood preferred, remembered a stern father who imposed naval discipline upon his sons and a loving mother with deep violet eyes who insisted on strict observance of the Sabbath--no whistling, laughing, or "kicking down the leaves." Though descended from Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, founders of the "New Kirk" movement, a religious rebellion in Scotland aimed at liberalizing church doctrine, Rose was deeply aware of her subordinate role in the Wood ménage.
Surgeon Wood was on active duty for much of his career. In 1846, speaking fluent Spanish, he traveled incognito across Mexico delivering to Commodore Robert Stockton long-awaited word of the outbreak of war between the United States and Mexico, news that facilitated the acquisition of California. A few years later, serving with the Asiatic Squadron, he was on hand at the opening of Japan. He wrote several popular books about his experiences. Surgeon Wood had a substantial library of Spanish, French, and English classics. Here Erskine first read Cervantes (one of his father's favorites), Voltaire, and Swift. In his autobiographical notes, Wood writes that his father's "taste for classical literature, his ideas upon culture and manhood, his contempt for wealth as an object of sole pursuit in life, had an influence on my own character." Wood's literary imagination was also clearly affected by the romantic tales of adventure and exotic objects his father brought home from his voyages.
With the close of the Civil War, William Maxwell Wood, now Surgeon General of the Navy in recognition of his service with the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, took his family from Erie to Rosewood Glen, a small farm in the rolling hill country on the outskirts of Baltimore and within convenient reach of his office in Washington.
In his manuscript autobiography (begun in 1913 but never completed), much of which reads like passages from Mark Twain, Erskine sees himself as a mix of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer with the Erie Canal serving as his Mississippi River. Erskine pictures his teen years on the Maryland farm in lyrical tones. The prevailing atmosphere in the Wood home was upper-middle-class conservative with order, duty, and propriety as cardinal virtues. But the beauty of the surroundings seems to have helped offset some of the harshness at home. A clear, swift-flowing stream threaded stands of oak, hickory, maple, and red gum hung with clusters of purple fox grapes. Spring brought trailing arbutus with its scatter of pink stars, and laurel, wild honeysuckle, and azaleas sweetened the woods. At Rosewood Glen, Erskine learned to ride horseback, swing the scythe and cradle, and to hunt possum and raccoon.
Erskine received his early education in private and public schools. In the fall of 1868, he enrolled as a day scholar in the St. Thomas School for Boys. He remembers most vividly the snuff-taking, cane-wielding "Old Murray" who taught English and Latin grammar, geography, history, and composition through a combination of intimidation and drill. Increasingly the teen-ager indulged his appetite for good reading in his father's library. He was also an avid reader of Mayne Reid's frontier stories and those, together with the sprawling pink expanse of the "Great American Desert" depicted in school geographies, set visions of the Wild West pulsing in his mind.
In the late spring of 1869, much to his surprise, Erskine's life took a dramatic turn. Surgeon Wood arranged an interview for his son with president U.S. Grant. Erskine remembers nothing of what transpired during his talk with the President except that Grant lit a new cigar from the glowing stump of an old one. Erskine marked this in his mind as a bad habit. The interview combined with his father's influence resulted in Erskine's appointment-at-large to the United States Military Academy.
There is nothing to suggest that C.E.Scott Wood, as he was invariably listed on the military rolls, coveted the career of a professional soldier. Except for top marks in military drawing and creditable performance in ethics and law, he was a mediocre student and his military record bordered on disgrace. Piling up demerits just short of dismissal, the young cadet spent most weekends walking off punishment tours. In four years he never held a cadet rank. Years later, in New York, Erskine wrote in his journal: "I never pass West Point without thinking of my cadet days...I hate the memory of it even now."
C.E. Scott Wood's class was unique in that it enrolled James Webster Smith of North Carolina, the first Black to enter the Academy. Erskine joined his classmates in consigning Smith to "Coventry," the silent treatment. That action drew a sharp reprimand from Erskine's father. Smith eventually was found deficient in natural and experimental philosophy and dismissed. Nearly forty years later, in 1912, Wood resigned from the Oregon Bar because it refused to admit a Black, one of many stands demonstrating Erskine's departure from his youthful conformity.
Cadet Wood resented what he considered to be undue emphasis on scientific and technical subjects in the West Point curriculum. Seeking relief, he did an unusual amount of extracurricular reading, checking out works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Sir Walter Scott, among others. He also found stimulation in the Academy's social scene, such as it was. He was an enthusiastic and graceful dancer and he often "led the German," a popular dance of the day. He was very handsome, quite the charmer, and amid the hops, cotillions, and flirtations he met and fell in love with Nanny Moale Smith, a Washington belle, who lived with her stepfather, Dr. Nathan Lincoln, a prominent Washington physician.
Casting desperately about for a way out of West Point, Erskine wrote letters home full of plans to resign and offer his services to the Mexican or Egyptian army or to go to Florida to grow oranges or, most frequently, to turn to a writing career. In a typical letter written to his son the cadet's fourth year, William Maxwell Wood expressed his disapproval of Erskine's restlessness in flat, measured, elegant prose: "It is this unreasonable desire to escape from the present to an unknown and uncertain future, which has from the beginning been one of the causes of your demerits...my earnest and final advice to you is to abandon all feverish desire after change and address yourself with honest and unceasing vigilance to the labor, the claims and obligations of the present around you---and of the place and position to which yo are called." The elder Wood's counsel prevailed, for when the class of 1874 was graduated, reduced from an entering strength of sixty-seven to forty-four, C.E. Scott Wood stood academically squarely in the middle.
Along with other Academy graduates of indifferent record, Wood was assigned to infantry duty on the frontier in the Department of the Pacific. In his late autobiographical notes he remembers inaccurately: "I tried to change into Custer's cavalry but the Adjutant General refused and thus saved my life." Actually, correspondence in the Huntington Library's Wood collection shows he tried to trade with another new officer who had a cavalry assignment but met with refusal.
The young "shavetail" reported first to Fort Bidwell, an outpost in the northeast corner of California. En route to Fort Vancouver, Washington Territory, his permanent post, Lt. Wood marched with his company along the lonely stretches of southeastern Oregon. The journey through the Harney Desert worked a profound influence on the 23-year-old lieutenant. The world of his youth had been green and wooded, with water ever close at hand. Now Wood was learning a new conception of space and scale. The human figure was minuscule and much of the land lay stark and brooding all the way to the horizon. The line of march took the soldiers to the west of Steens Mountain, an extended ridge-like uplift, its upper reaches patched with perpetual snow, rising to nearly ten thousand feet, forming on the east a jagged escarpment with over a thousand feet of free fall. The high desert is gray with sagebrush, greasewood, and rabbit brush, mottled with tough, twisted juniper and mountain mahogany, broken and uplifted by ramparts of rimrock. There are alkali flats that glare under the sun or float like puddles of pewter beneath the desert moon. Steens Mountain is more than a dramatic landmark, for snowmelt and springs cascading down glacier-cut gorges along its flanks produce marshland and meadow in the Harney Basin. Wherever there is water--along the narrow valley of the Donner and Blitzen River, for example--there are natural meadows of wild hay, rich browse for cattle and sheep and wild horses. When Lt. Wood and his companions were passing through, early settlers such as John Devine and Pete French were developing an impressive range cattle industry in the region.
As they approached "P" Ranch, home place of Pete French, the troops camped at the southern tip of a long marsh that stretched north of the Malheur and Harney lakes. Here tules, pondweed, cattails, reeds, and grasses of all kinds grew rank and high, providing perfect cover as well as food and nest material for more than two hundred species of waterfowl and wild birds. Lt. Wood rambled along the marsh's edge, wide-eyed at the teeming bird life on every side. The tules were hung with blackbirds, some of them red-epauletted, others with brilliant yellow heads. In a clearing were the matted sedge thinned out he counted more than thirty sandhill crane feeding quietly in the shallow water. The marsh fluttered with movement and rang with song--the sibilant notes of the blackbirds like air forced through a dusty flute, the muffled pile-driver boom of the bittern, the mewing cry of curlew and gull, the cacophony of countless ducks, the plaintive, monotonous shrill of killdeer and other sounds more or less musical but too muted or confused or unfamiliar for the young officer to sort out and identify. One species of wader caught Wood's fancy with its curved bill and its gleaming plumage of iridescent green and purple and bronze. He shot two of them, stretching the skins to dry in the sun, intending to send them to decorate the summer hats of Nanny Moale Smith, his sweetheart back east.
Years later, in his first effort at autobiography Erskine recalls with sensitive precision that night on the Harney Desert when he lay sleepless, feeling keenly "the isolation, the beauty, the solitude and hush and above all the vastness of the desert and the breathtaking sweep of the dark dome above with its busts of stars. "As the camp noises subsided, "a small owl, puffed up and mottled like a partridge, mounted a badger mound and stood solemn and still on legs long enough to seem borrowed. For some time the owl was mute and then it began its song, a tremulous, high, mellow coo-co-hoo, much like a dove but higher, fainter, incredibly soft."
The entire journey across the high desert of eastern Oregon affirmed the sense of freedom and expansiveness that the West had symbolized in Wood's boyhood. In a letter to Max Hayek, the translator of The Poet in the Desert, Erskine explains his love for eastern Oregon"
It means youth to me and the smell of sagebrush is the most delicious fragrance on earth: especially after a rain. Its blinding light, dazzling wide stretches--pale far purple mountain peaks--and the glorious skies are beautiful to my eyes--intoxicating beyond green mountains or sapphire sea.Wood welcomed his new assignment. Vancouver was just across the Columbia River from Portland, a metropolis compared to Fort Bidwell. Yet Erskine did not forget the days and nights in the Harney Desert and he was drawn back to what he called, in The Poet in the Desert, "that lean and stricken land" many times until he knew its contours, its diversity, and its moods in intimate detail. In fact, the region was to run as a kind of theme through most of his life, and before he was done with the desert it would help turn him toward poetry, painting, and rebellion.
Stationed at Fort Vancouver, Wood grew restless. He had begun to keep a journal, a practice he would continue for much of his life. He also hoped to publish some of his writings back east. In the spring of 1877, he took a leave from his duties to escort a small expedition intent on climbing Mt. St. Elias. The party failed to reach the mountain but Wood collected stories and artifacts that would become the basis for an 1882 piece in Century Magazine called "Among the Thlinkits in Alaska." Noteworthy for its careful description and ethnographic detail, this article and A Book of Tales mark the beginning and ending of the first stage of Wood's writing career.
Lt. Wood had hoped to continue to explore Alaska, but in early June 1877 he was recalled to join his company that had taken the field in pursuit of Nez Perce Indians moving toward Canada to avoid confinement on the reservation at Lapwai, Idaho Territory. lt. Wood served creditably in this campaign, his baptism in fire, being one of only two white men to pursue the Nez Perce for the entire anabasis. As aide to general O.O. Howard, he was closely involved with the surrender negotiations on the morning of October 5th, gathering, through an interpreter, the gist of Joseph's sentiments regarding surrender. It is very likely that the young officer's literary bent moved him to shape the surrender speech, since become so famous, that he understood to have come from Joseph's lips. In fact, Lt. Wood's gift for phrasing goes far to explain the renown the speech has attained. The whole episode opened Wood's eyes to the power of the state to subdue a desperate and dignified people who were guilty simply of being in the way. Wood also bitterly resented Colonel Nelson Miles, who had entered the campaign only in its final stage, taking full credit for the Nez Perce surrender when it was Wood's commander, General O.O. Howard who had given chase to the Indians for nearly 2,000 miles. An indignant Wood released an account Pursuit to the Chicago papers that corrected the false impression, thereby arousing Miles's ire and setting up a tension between lieutenant and general that became a factor in Wood's resignation seven years later. At any rate, from the time of the surrender, Erskine and Joseph became friends and later, during his teens, Wood's eldest son, Erskine, spent parts of two summers in Joseph's camp at Nespelem, Washington.
In 1878, Wood served with Howard in the campaign against the Bannocks. In November, after the defeat of the Bannocks led by Chief Moses, Wood, now a first lieutenant, returned east to marry nanny Moale Smith, his sweetheart of cadet days. He brought her back with him to Fort Vancouver. In February on 1879, Wood served as Howard's emissary to Chief Moses, handling the peace negotiations. That fall the Wood's first son Erskine was born at Vancouver Barracks.
With the Pacific Northwest secure, General Howard was appointed superintendent of the United States Military Academy and Erskine returned with him to the scene of his unhappy cadet experiences, this time as adjutant. A second Child, Nan, who was to become Oregon's first congresswoman, was born at West Point in 1881.
When Mark Twain made several visits to West Point to talk to the cadets, Erskine, as his host, delighted Twain by making a secret printing on the Academy Press of Twain's "1601," or Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors, the humorist's racy, rough-and-tumble reconstruction of talk in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Participants, including Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duchess of Bilgewater, Ben Jonson, and others, gathered in the Queen's private chambers, discuss such bawdy topics as who has broken wind. Adjutant Wood put together a small but sumptuous edition of the unsigned scatological piece on deckle-edged vellum, stained in mild coffee to suggest age and using old English-style type to give a touch of elegance to the four-letter words. The Academy printing of "1601" circulated among the military "brass" and one copy went to John Hay and another to the Bishop of London. For a time Wood and Twain exchanged letters and the latter's influence on much of Wood's writing is apparent, especially in his satire. This publishing adventure affirms Wood's rebel soul, his literary leanings, and his interest in fine press printing, something he would retain all his life.
By 1882, Wood was considering the law as an escape from the army. Citing earlier duty as judge advocate in the Department of the Columbia and arguing that formal training in law would approve his military efficiency, he secured a leave of absence to enroll in Columbia University, where he earned a B.S. and an LL.B. in 1883.
While in New York, Erskine formed what would become an abiding friendship with the painter J. Alden Weir, son of Wood's instructor in military drawing at West Point. Weir brought the lieutenant-on-leave into a small bohemian circle of artists and agents, including sculptor Olin Warner; A.W. Drake, art editor of Century; the impressionist painters Wyatt Eaton and Childe Hassam; and the eccentric and mystic, Albert Pinkham Ryder. Wood reveled in the company of this creative crew that gathered in a French restaurant on the south side of Washington Square or at a saloon on the corner of 14th and 4th to talk of European art trends or to deride the Hudson River School and denounce the sterility and inhibitions of the artistic establishment. Here, Erskine's penchant for rebellion took on another dimension.In March 1883, law degree in hand, Lt. Wood was relieved of duty on Howard's staff and sent to Boise Barracks, Idaho Territory, to join his regiment. Nanny, with the two children Erskine and Nan and a third child, William Maxwell, about to arrive, were in Fort Vancouver. Erskine tried desperately for assignment to Vancouver. Extended military correspondence, in which Wood skirted insubordination, earned the insistent lieutenant what amounted to a reprimand from commanding General Miles; whereupon Erskine submitted a resignation that was promptly accepted, effective September 22, 1884. At 32, C.E.S. Wood turned to life in Portland and the practice of law. In 1884, Portland was a prosperous shipping town of over 20,000 population, known as the Boston of the West. Located in a temperate, green region west of the Cascade Range, the city lies along the shores of the Willamette River close to is juncture with the Columbia. To the west are the Coast Range and the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles away. The Willamette Valley spreads to the south.....
In a letter to Helena kay, author of a 1937 Master's thesis on his writing, he explains the development of his ideas concerning the economic and social order: I saw that the trouble was we were living in a feudal system, and by the old feudal fee simple deed, we were giving to a few shrewd forerunners the people's heritage and creating a small group of feudal barons who owned all and who were willing the people should multiply to become fighters and industrial serfs. Even when as a young lieutenant I was campaigning against the wild men of the desert, the desert had got into my blood, [and] I saw this going in fee simple to cattle and sheep men, the water all seized, no place for hopeful settlement, and the great forests also stolen by the fee simple deed, a corrupt or ignorant congress, and some organized perjury. I saw everything of value taken usually by some form of fraud--water power, oil, iron, coal, copper--everything. Wood's libertarian views were shaped in part from reading in Jefferson, Thoreau, Marx, the French Anarchist Proudhon, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, and single-taxer Henry George. Wood subscribed to benjamin Tucker's Liberty, an organ of American anarchism that served, after the turn of the century, as an outlet for his increasing literary flow, playing an important part in his apprenticeship as a writer and a social thinker. Wood came to believe in the doctrine of right and beneficial use, the concept that land and water should be owned by those who use it productively, not by the grantees and their heirs and assigns, in perpetuity. Privilege and class distinctions violated Wood's sense of justice. Erskine's broad philosophy of freedom that he called philosophical anarchism, the belief that the best way to assure one's own freedom was to insure the freedom of others, carried over into aspects of his personal life. There it involved their children, who were given the maximum amount of freedom consistent with their own safety. Barbara hartwell writes of them: "They were utterly uninhibited before anyone even heard the word; their personalities were allowed to ramble richly at will...." When he wa criticized for excessive permissiveness, Erskine responded: "Doubtless I made many mistakes, but I preferred to err on the side of minimum restraint, having been subjected to its maximum operation in my childhood." The turn of the century marks a serious shift in Wood's life in Portland. His interest in the law waned and his urge to write intensified; his passion for his wife subsided into affection, and his philosophical anarchism cohered, strengthening his radical stance. The most crucial aspect of Erskine's personal rebellion was his rejection of the institution of marriage. He saw monogamy as a kind of tyranny that stifled freedom. He could not accept the idea that two people sign a piece of paper that binds them together no matter how they change or what is in their hearts. In his own case, the marriage ties were not holding. Nanny's health was uncertain. She suffered from chronic headaches and in 1891 and for several years after she spent a great deal of time at a spa in Colorado Springs. Husband and wife grew apart, taking vacations alone and sleeping in separate rooms. Moreover, Erskine was a handsome, articulate, charming, and romantic figure. Beautiful women found him most attractive and he in turn was attracted to them. Sometime around the turn of the century, his secretary for the Lazard Freres account, Kitty Beck, a sensitive and appealing woman with radical sympathies, became his lover. The gap separating him from Nanny widened, although his affection for her remained strong........... source - http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/u-w/woodIntro.html
William Owen "Buckey" O'Neill
In 1898 with the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, demand for war against Spain swept the country. In New York, Col. Wm. F. Cody's Wild West Show featured a troup of Cuban rebels who unfurled the Cuban flag while the cowboy band played a Cuban anthem and the audience yelled "Cuba Libre." Col. Cody, himself, offered
to raise an army of 30,000 American Indians. Thus, John Hay's "splendid little war" broke out with Spain. Almost immediately Theodore Roosevelt ordered a Brooks Brothers custom made uniform and organized a volunteer cavalry troop of which he was to be second in command. Leonard Wood was to be in command.
The troop was composed mostly of cowboys but also included a few Indians and wealthy polo-playing easterners. In Arizona, a former sheriff of Yavapai County, William Owen "Buckey" O'Neill, under whom Horn had served as a
deputy, organized a troop, later to be Troop "A" of the Rough Riders. Of O'Neill Roosevelt
later wrote in his 1899 The Rough Riders:
There was Bucky O'Neill, of Arizona, Captain of Troop A, the Mayor of Prescott, a famous sheriff throughout the West for his feats of victorious warfare against the Apache, no less than against the white road-agents and man-killers. His father had fought in Meagher's Brigade in the Civil War; and he was himself a born soldier, a born leader of men. He was a wild, reckless fellow, soft spoken, and of dauntless courage and boundless ambition; he was stanchly loyal to his friends, and cared for his men in every way.
In July, shortly before Roosevelt's famous charge, O'Neill was killed at Kettle Hill. But O'Neill in some aspects was less than rough and tough. When Dennis Dilda, a condemned murderer, was hanged in 1886, O'Neill commanded the Honor Guard. When the trap dropped, O'Neill fainted dead away.
source - http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/horn3.html
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William Nivison Blow, Major USV
4th Virginia Volunteer Infantry
Contributed by John Blow
Captain William Nivison Blow, USA was born August 11, 1855 at "Tower Hill", Sussex County, Virginia, and graduated from the Virginia Military Institute with high honors in 1876. For some years he devoted himself to the practiceof civil engineering.
In 1882 he married Mary Elizabeth Thomas, daughter of General H. G. Thomas. He was appointed second lieutenant of the 15th Infantry on October 20, 1884. He served with his regiment at Fort Randall Dakota till 1890 and Fort Sheridan Illinois until 1896. He acted as adjutant general of the troops engages in suppressing the riots in Chicago, Ill. in 1894. He was commended in General Orders No. 33 Headquarters of the Army, for courage and prompt energy in rescuing, at the peril of his life, a young man from drowning in Lake Michigan, near Fort Sheridan. He served for four years as adjutant quartermaster of the 15th Infantry.
He was serving at Fort Bayard, NM, when he was appointed in 1898 a major of the 4th Virginia Volunteer Infantry, with which he served in Cuba till Jan. 11 1900, when the regiment was mustered out. He was first lieutenant in the Regular Army at this time, and by a singular coincidence his father and grandfather had served in the 4th as first lieutenants. His first cousin, Lt. George Preston Blow, USN, was on board the MAINE when she was sunk in Havana harbor.
He was disbursing officer of the Cuban census until Feb. 1901. Blow was promoted Captain in 1899 and served with his company in the relief expedition in China in 1900 when he went with his regiment to the Philippines, serving there until 1902.
He returned to the U.S. in 1902 and was stationed at Monterey, California at the time of his retirement Nov. 25, 1905, for disability in the line of duty. He died October 28, 1907 at Sarah Leigh Hospital, Norfolk, Virginia., Oct. 28, 1907 following an operation for appendicitis.
Co D, 4th Virginia Volunteer Infantry, consisted of officers and men largely from Hampton, VA
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Pershing
"John J. Pershing was born in rural Missouri in 1860 of what he described as "upstanding, though humble, European stock." His earliest memories were of the Civil War. Young Jack, son of a stalwart Unionist store owner, worshipped the bluecoats who rode through town, but he would probably never have joined their ranks if it had not been for the Panic of 1873, which wiped out his father's business. The only way Jack could afford to attend college was to win a position at West Point. His academic record at the Point was mediocre--he finished thirtieth out of a class of 71. But his soldierly bearing and leadership qualities were unsurpassed. He became first captain of the Corps of Cadets, the same post that Robert E. Lee held before him and that Douglas MacArthur would hold after him.
Upon graduation in 1886, 2nd Lieutenant Pershing was assigned to the 6th Cavalry at Fort Bayard, New Mexico. This provided him with a good introduction to the Old Army, 25,000 Indian-fighting, whisky-drinking, poker-playing, expletive-spewing men scattered in dusty outposts along the Western frontier. The officer ranks were still dominated by graying Civil War veterans. The era of the Old Army, designed for constabulary work in Indian territory, was drawing to a close. Young Pershing got to participate in its last campaigns, first against the Apaches and then against the Sioux Ghost Dancers in 1890.
In the next few years Pershing shuttled through a number of assignments, including a stint with the 10th Cavalry, a unit whose enlisted men were black, before winding up as an instructor at his alma mater. His martinet manner so grated on the cadets that they called him "Nigger Jack"--a nickname that stuck, though it was later softened to a more genteel "Black Jack." When the Spanish-American War broke out, Pershing wrangled an assignment back with the "Buffalo Soldiers" of the 10th Cavalry and helped storm San Juan Hill. A commanding officer said he was "cool as a bowl of cracked ice" under fire.
Afterward he was assigned to the Philippines, and it was here that Jack Pershing made a name for himself. He was sent to the island of Mindanao, populated by Muslim Moros who had never really been subdued by the Spanish. The Moros still practiced polygamy and slavery and fiercely defended their way of life, even unto death, with suicidal charges with razor-sharp weapons known as the kris and barong. Captain Pershing preferred to win over the Moros with outstretched hand rather than mailed fist. So successful was his campaign that he was made a datto, or chieftain. When he left the Philippines in 1903, suffering from malaria, he was already one of the most famous officers in the army.
Pershing was 45 years old, and though he had a reputation as a ladies' man and a fine dancer, he had never been married. In his next posting, Washington, he met an enchanting, if plain-looking, 25-year-old woman named Helen Frances Warren, who happened to be the daughter of Francis Warren, not only the richest man in Wyoming but also chairman of the Senate's Military Affairs Committee. Jack fell in love with "Frankie" at first sight. They were married in 1905 at a ceremony attended by Theodore Roosevelt, who pronounced it a "bully match."
The next year, Black Jack received a belated wedding present. President Roosevelt promoted him straight from captain to brigadier general over the heads of 862 more senior officers. Roosevelt explained that it was the only way he could reward merit; in those days all promotions short of general officer rank had to be done on strict seniority. But seeing the son-in-law of a powerful senator promoted out of turn caused no end of resentment in the officer corps. It even led to the publication of rumors, adamantly denied by Pershing, that he had fathered children out of wedlock with a Filipino woman while serving in the archipelago. His young bride stood by the newly minted general, and he survived the storm." - The Dusty Trail The Pancho Villa Punitive Expedition, 1916-1917. BY MAX BOOT - http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110001695
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