Now that the plan was in motion, Lincoln left the details to the War Department. On September 25, Stanton queried Grant for suggestions:
The President some time ago authorized a regiment of prisoners of war at Rock Island to be enlisted into our service. He has written you a letter of explanation. It was done without my knowledge and he desires his arrangement to be carried into effect. The question now arises, how shall they be organized, officered, and assigned to duty? Shall they be formed into one regiment by companies as other troops, or assigned in companies ‘ or squads to other organizations? Please favor me with your views on the subject. …4
Grant replied that same day, succinctly and to the point:
Your dispatch in relation to the organization of troops from prisoners of war is just received. I would advise that they be placed all in one regiment and be put on duty either with Pope [on the Northwest frontier] or sent to New Mexico.5
Grant’s decision made it much easier for Rathbone to recruit prisoners who might object to enlisting to fight against former comrades-in-arms, but Rathbone was still bound by Lincoln’s order to enlist only persons of Northern or foreign birth, and after he had reached Rock Island he discovered that a large majority of prospective recruits were discouraged Southerners. Early in October, Lincoln was again brought into the scheme because of the restrictions in his original note to Colonel Huidekoper. After considering the matter, Lincoln wrote a new memorandum:
… It is proposed to change this so that the ascertainment of names, examination and mustering can all be gone through with there, under the supervision of Colonel Johnson [Andrew J. Johnson, commanding at Rock Island] and Captain Rathbone, thus saving much time and trouble. It is also proposed that the restriction in the President’s order limiting the recruits to persons of foreign and Northern birth be removed, and that the question of good faith on the part of those offering to enlist be left to the judgment and the discretion of Col. Johnson and Col. Caraher [Andrew P. Caraher, later commander of the 2nd U. S. Volunteers]. The limit of the whole not to exceed 1,750 men.6
As a result of these new instructions, recruiting among the prisoners at Rock Island went smoothly throughout October. For their various reasons—despair, optimism, disillusionment—many Southerners took the oath and signed up for frontier service.
Colonel Johnson separated the recruits from the other prisoners with a high board fence, crowding them temporarily into 16 small barracks. This area was immediately dubbed the “calf pen,” the main area of the prison being known as the “bull pen.” One of the prisoners, J. W. Minnich, said that “some of the men who went into the ‘calf pen’ gave evidence of a desire to help some comrade who would remain true to his cause, and communications were soon established and chunks of meat and bread would find their way over the fence without wings, though flying. … Headquarters soon dropped on to it, and a guard was put on the beat between the fence. …”7
The total number of recruits reached 1,797, slightly in excess of Lincoln’s authorized 1,750, quite enough for two regiments. According to Minnich, hunger was a prime factor in the ease of recruitment. Rations had been cut, and packages of food were no longer permitted to be received from outside. “The authorities had opened a recruiting office,” he said, “holding out the bribe of ‘full rations’ to complaining stomachs, ostensibly on the grounds that there were many men among us who realized that they were engaged in a wrong cause and would gladly accept service with the loyal States under a guarantee that they should not be anywhere engaged against their former comrades, but be sent to the frontier to war against the Indians. …”8
Days and weeks passed and as winter came on the confined recruits spent their days shivering around barracks stoves, awaiting orders to be sent West. Johnson dispatched several urgent messages to Washington, reporting the situation and requesting instructions. “Their clothing is of the poorest description,” he wrote. “As they are no longer prisoners of war, clothing cannot be issued to them from the prisoners’ portion, and as they are not organized, clothing cannot be issued by the quartermaster. … These men are to be pitied, as they are under the same surveillance, owing to their being in prison, as the prisoners, and their conduct does not warrant this watchfulness.”9
During the same weeks that Johnson was attempting to prod the War Department into issuing orders which would send these recruits on their way, General Pope was desperately seeking troops to man his far-flung frontier posts.
At last, on February 6, 1865, the slow-moving military bureaucracy brought supply and demand together, and Pope was authorized to organize the Rock Island volunteers into two regiments and appoint officers to command them. “The officers appointed,” the order specified, “must be in the service now, or have been honorably discharged. So far as can be done, they should be men familiar with frontier life.”10
Pope wasted no time in issuing his orders. He sent General Alfred Sully to Chicago, and within two weeks the long-suffering U.S. Volunteers were organized, uniformed, and staffed with officers. Between February 20 and 24, various companies of the 2nd Regiment moved by rail to Fort Leavenworth. The following week, companies of the 3rd Regiment made the same journey, and in the last days of February the Galvanized Yankees, wearing unaccustomed blue uniforms, were drilling with arms and awaiting orders to march into the turbulent land of the Plains Indians.11
From army scouts, stage drivers, bullwhackers, and soldiers who had been out on the Plains during the winter, these former Confederates heard that life would be dangerous indeed anywhere west of Forts Riley and Kearney. The Leavenworth newspapers informed them that this was “no Indian scare but a bloody Indian war in reality.”
The raids of late summer 1864, they were told, had quieted down for a while after General Samuel R. Curtis led a few regiments on a thousand-mile march up the Platte and then back to Leavenworth over the Santa Fe Trail. Ben Holladay of the Overland Stage had made a cautious inspection tour, and promised to run his coaches again if the government would furnish military guards and escorts. The government, being anxious to keep travel and communications open, assured Holladay of its cooperation; the overland mail contract was renewed for four years at the exorbitant rate of $750,000 per annum; and orders went out to military commanders to assist in reopening the routes.12
Schedules were just beginning to run smoothly again when Colonel J. M. Chivington and his Colorado cavalrymen rode out to teach the Cheyennes a lesson in their winter camp at Sand Creek. What followed on November 29, 1864, was the Sand Creek Massacre, and the Cheyennes were soon boiling all over the Plains, eager for revenge.
With Sioux and Arapaho allies, the Cheyennes concentrated along the South Platte and Sweetwater, raiding and plundering over a distance of 400 miles, burning Julesburg and many road ranches, ripping out miles of telegraph line. With their Southern allies—the Comanches and Kiowas—they attacked trains, posts, and escorts along the Santa Fe Trail.
Once again in Denver and Santa Fe there was panic ; merchants raised the price of scarce goods. No trains would cross the Plains to bring food and clothing, hardware and ammunition.
About the same time that the 2nd and 3rd U.S. Volunteers were preparing to march west from Fort Leavenworth—March 1865—a few heavily armed wagon trains were beginning to move again. Joseph H. Taylor, a guard with one of the first trains to risk the journey from Julesburg to Fort McPherson, said the trail was “one continuous string of dead, both white men and Indians—dead stock, burned trains and ranches.”13 Flour, coffee and tea, tins of kerosene, bolts of cloth were scattered over the prairie. Naked and mutilated bodies, rotting where they had fallen, or charred in the ruins of burned cabins, lay unburied.
Those in authority knew that this repetition of the previous summer’s scenes meant that henceforth the lines could be kept open only with strong and continuous military support. The job of seeing that this was done was assigned to General Grenville M. Dodge. The men who would face most of the dangers were the Galvanized Yankees.
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Dodge started the 2nd Regiment marching toward Fort Riley on March 1, but he held the 3rd a few days longer at Fort Leavenworth because none of its field and staff officers and only a few of its company officers had reported for duty. On March 7, he ordered the 10 companies of the 3rd to assemble for a parade review March 9 in the garrison square and be prepared to “move immediately after en route for Fort Kearney where they will report to the commanding officer and await further orders.”14
On March 9, however, no senior officer had yet reported, and departure was held up for two more days. The highest ranking officer was Lieutenant Lafayette E. Campbell of Company E, but Dodge decided he could not hold the regiment any longer than March 11; troops were needed too badly on the stage line west of Fort Kearney. They marched that morning under Lieutenant Campbell, with a few mule-drawn wagons, “well-armed and equipped, clothing, camp and garrison equipage … very deficient. … The weather and roads were very bad, but little transportation could be obtained and the march was very laborious.”15 At Fort Riley they found some of their old comrades of the 2nd Regiment still awaiting assignments along the Santa Fe Trail. They rested there for four days, picked up a few more officers, and on March 26 started Northwest for Fort Kearney.
On April 9, some 800 weary former Confederates slogged the last mile into Fort Kearney, into a land totally strange to most of them—a barren sweep of country, somber, forbidding, gripped by a winter reluctant to give way to spring. But after the long 350-mile overland march, even the rotting cottonwood barracks of Kearney seemed like a sanctuary. Only two companies, however, would remain long at Fort Kearney.
The 3rd U.S. Volunteers were now in the Department of the Plains, under the command of a tough and impatient frontier campaigner, General Patrick E. Connor. On April 9 the telegraph line was open from Kearney to Denver, and Connor learned of the arrival of his new troops that same day. He immediately issued orders for the disposition of units of the 3rd Regiment. “Two companies at each of Kearney, Cottonwood, Julesburg, Junction, and Laramie. Headquarters of regiment will be at Julesburg.”16
Further instructions followed in rapid succession from Connor’s headquarters, orders which divided the regiment “in small parties of one non-commissioned officer and twelve privates each stationed at various points generally ten miles apart on the line of the Overland Mail Route for the purpose of guarding citizens and their property from attacks of hostile Indians.” By the end of May the regiment was guarding 600 miles of road.17
Companies A and B, with headquarters at Fort Kearney, were the first to move out to specific assignments, details from A guarding stations immediately west of the fort, details from B guarding stations to the east. On April 13, the remaining companies resumed march from Fort Kearney, and a hundred miles farther west, C and D were detached at Post Cottonwood. Some of the men of Captain Fritz Rehwinkel’s Company D, which was to see considerable action, later marched back over part of this same route, distributing one sergeant and 10 men at each of Gilman’s, Midway, Pennestein, and Miller’s, all frequent targets for raiding Indians. Lieutenant William H. Bartlett’s C Company drew the stations west of Cottonwood.
At Camp Rankin in Julesburg, just across the line in Colorado Territory, the 3rd Regiment established headquarters April 25, retaining Companies E and F. Half the men of each company were assigned to stage stations in the vicinity; the others were to assist in constructing a new post near Julesburg to be known as Fort Sedgwick.
Companies G and H marched another hundred miles west to Junction (later known as Camp Ward well), which was in an area relatively free of Indian troubles in 1865.
Companies I and K journeyed up to Fort Laramie to enter into a series of dangerous adventures along the Pacific Telegraph Line. Acting under special orders from General Connor, these two companies left Laramie May 15. In addition to guard duties they were expected “to assist the telegraph operators to repair the line when required.” Captain Henry Leefeldt established headquarters for K Company at Camp Marshall, 65 miles to the west. Captain A. Smith Lybe marched Company I to Three Crossings, distributing his men along the telegraph line at Sweetwater, St. Mary’s, and South Pass, 300 miles west of Laramie. Company I would march farther, fight more Indians, and suffer more casualties than any other company of the 3rd Regiment.18
As warm weather brought green leaves to willows and cottonwoods along the streams of the Plains country, the Galvanized Yankees settled into their new routines. At each of their headquarters stations, they shared duties with units of various state volunteer cavalry regiments. Troopers of the 1st Nebraska were at Cottonwood and Fort Kearney; Colorado cavalrymen were at Junction. A detachment of the 7th Iowa and a company of that remarkable group of mounted Indians, the Pawnee Scouts under Captain Frank North, operated out of the 3rd Regiment’s headquarters at Julesburg. West of Fort Laramie along the North Platte and Sweetwater, the 11th Ohio Cavalry welcomed I and K Companies of the 3rd, and there may well have been some surprising reunions of former Confederate soldiers. The 11th Ohio carried several Galvanized Yankees on its rolls, mostly Kentuckians, some of whom had served under General John Morgan. (Their story is told in Chapter IX.)
The records show very little friction between state volunteers and the former prisoners of war from Rock Island. The state troopers had been serving for a long time; the Civil War back East had ended, and they were eager to be mustered out of service. Any replacements were welcomed. A soldier of the 11th Ohio, Lewis B. Hull, who was at Fort Laramie in May to pick up supplies, noted in his diary the good news of the arrival of “two companies 3rd U.S., enlisted rebels from Rock Island.” He added that he “talked to rebels awhile,” and seemed to accept their presence in U.S. uniforms as a matter of course.19
From their assigned posts along the Overland Stage Line, the U.S. Volunteers began accompanying the veteran cavalrymen on escort rides with stagecoaches. The bracing spring air, the big open sky, the wide rolling land, the sweet taste of freedom, must have erased any individual doubts they may have had of their decisions to exchange the confinement of prison life for frontier duty. They soon acquired the jaunty manners of their Western mentors; they learned to distinguish deer, antelope, and elk, gray wolves and coyotes; they marveled at the tremendous herds of buffalo; they learned the tricks of identifying at long distances the hostiles from the friendly Indians.
The system under which the army guarded stagecoaches and telegraph lines across the Plains developed from a plan advanced in the 1850’s by Henry O’Rielly, a pioneer builder of telegraph lines. O’Rielly was the first to propose a line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, and although he later lost the contract to others, some of his suggestions for overcoming difficulties were adopted. Known as the “Stockade Routes Proposal,” O’Rielly’s plan was to open transcontinental military roads guarded by soldiers all the way across the West. Each detachment of soldiers would construct its own stockade “like frontier settlers, and a portion of its dragoons riding each way every day, as patrols, or sentinels, ten miles out and ten miles back—thus giving protection to travelers and settlers; while these patrols moving with military precision, could transmit an express letter-mail across our vast territories to the Pacific Ocean.” As soon as these military routes were made secure, O’Rielly envisioned the construction of telegraph lines alongside the roads.20
When the Overland Stage Line began operation, the managers disregarded O’Rielly’s military security plan, but they did establish stations all the way from Atchison, Kansas, to Salt Lake City, 10 to 12 miles apart. As O’Rielly had foreseen, Indian troubles soon developed, and the stations had to be fortified. Stage horses, being the sturdiest and swiftest steeds available, were considered great prizes by the Indians, and in a short time the stage line was asking for military escorts to ride “ten miles out and ten miles back,” as originally proposed by O’Rielly.
Many of the stations were established at road ranches, which had been operating for years as crude taverns along the
Western trails. In hostile Indian country, the owners built their ranches in the manner of an O’Rielly stockade so as to withstand raids. Along the Platte, ranche buildings were usually constructed of sod walls with roofs of timber and brush covered with more sod. Floors were often nothing more than tamped earth. The main house was divided into a living room, a storeroom, and a “pilgrim” room. Groceries and whiskey were sold in the store room, and travelers could spend the night in the pilgrim room. Around the ranche were stables and corrals where the owner’s stock and relief teams for stagecoaches were confined.
Overland Stage stations varied considerably in size and quality of services, and were known along the line as “home” stations and “swing” stations. Every fifth or sixth stop was a home station, headquarters for blacksmiths, harness repairmen, carpenters, stock tenders, and coach drivers. Because several people lived there, a home station attracted additional establishments, such as stores, saloons, and dance halls. Soldiers escorting coaches always preferred assignments which brought them into a home station for the night. Life was livelier there than at a swing station, where two or three other soldiers and a single stock tender furnished the only human diversion, and there was usually nothing to do but read a yellow-backed novel or a month-old newspaper—that is, unless hostile Indians happened to be on the prowl.
On May 11, General Connor moved his headquarters from Denver to Julesburg, which he considered a better vantage point for planning his summer campaign against the hostiles. The move also brought him into position to view the behavior of his Galvanized Yankees at close hand. Colonel Christopher McNally reported for duty at Julesburg on May 12, and Connor gave him command of the post in addition to his duties as commander of the 3rd Regiment. Connor was Irish, McNally English, but they had similar military backgrounds, both having come up through the ranks during the Mexican War. McNally had seen seven years of hard service as an enlisted Mounted Rifleman, and he understood the enlisted man’s viewpoint. He was still recovering from severe wounds received in Civil War actions in Arizona, but he entered immediately into the difficult task of commanding a regiment spread out over 600 miles of Western trails.