Foster also added that when the shot was fired, he heard Shanks cry out: “I am a dead man! Company I, do your duty!”
As Foster was one of the telegraphers at Camp Marshall, he returned to the office, and not long afterward Shanks summoned him to his quarters to give him the message which was telegraphed to Fort Laramie that evening. “I was in Captain Shanks’ room when Roy, I Company, 6th U.S. Volunteers, came in and told Captain Shanks, ‘I have got your man,’ holding a pistol in one hand and shaking Captain Shanks’ hand with the other.” When Foster asked Roy if Ferrier had been shot, Roy replied: “He is and I shot him. When they run on Captain Shanks, they run on Company I.”
In presenting these depositions, Lieutenant Brazie expressed the opinion that the statement of Sergeant William Johnson of Company I “comes nearer explaining the circumstances than any other I could procure.”
Johnson’s story of the altercation in the mess room was about the same as the others, except that he added considerably more profanity in recalling the remarks of the men involved. After the shooting of Shanks, Sergeant Johnson said that in obedience to the captain’s orders he started in pursuit of Ferrier with five or six men. “About a quarter mile from the post we separated, Corporal Stacy of my company and myself going together. We followed down the creek about a half mile and turned back up it again. After going about a quarter of a mile, I saw two men about ten steps apart going in the same direction as ourselves. When I got up in about ten steps of them they turned face to face and were talking. As I went across the creek I says to Ferrier, ‘You have shot the Captain and you have got to go to the quarters with me.’ He turned his back to me, and was shot. Before being shot he refused to surrender, whereupon Private Frederick Roy fired on him, seeing that Ferrier was armed with his pistol buckled around him.”
At the end of his official report of January 9, Lieutenant Brazie stated that a surgeon was in attendance on Private Ferrier “and pronounces the patient out of danger and in his opinion will survive.”
Ferrier died the next day. The case was closed with the notation “by reason of gun shot wound.”16
In the life of John Shanks there never seemed to be any long periods of tranquillity. The wound which he believed not dangerous became infected and he was ill for most of the winter. Things began to go badly. His easy relations with Fort Laramie were never the same after the shooting of Ferrier. Headquarters chastised him for not sending reports regularly, for not keeping the mails moving smoothly over his section, for not saving empty gunny sacks, for not reading the Articles of War regularly to his men, and for visiting Laramie without permission.
On January 27, 1866, he received an order to “take prompt measures to secure a large and abundant supply of ice for the use of the troops during the coming summer. Where ice houses have not already been built they will be constructed without delay.” At blizzard-ravaged La Bonte, ice was the last thing Shanks or his men were interested in, but three weeks later he received a curt order to report “what steps have been taken to secure a supply of ice for next summer.”17
To take some of the paperwork off his desk, Shanks assigned his lieutenant, James V. Griffin, to command Company I and Camp Marshall, and devoted his flagging energies to matters concerning other stations in his section.
About this time the telegraph line also became a constant annoyance. Civilian operators quit, blizzards snapped poles, and inspectors from the Pacific Telegraph Company arrived and demanded troop escorts.
On March 9, a severe windstorm flattened several miles of poles between La Bonte and Horse Shoe, severing communications. As he made a reconnaissance of the damage and assigned repair details, Shanks must have realized for the first time the enormity of the task which had confronted the original builders of the line some five years earlier.
For some reason, chroniclers of the Old West have generally ignored the drama of that first telegraph line. The Overland Mail, Pony Express, and Pacific Railroad have become fixed in Western legend, but the Pacific Telegraph has been lost in the maze of history. It was built in 1861, a decade before the first railroad, and was overshadowed by onrushing events of the Civil War.
As in the building of the transcontinental railroad, construction of the telegraph was organized as a race between competing companies, one moving eastward from California, the other westward from Nebraska. The first company to reach Salt Lake City would receive a prize of $40,000.
An engineering genius, Edward Creighton, was in charge of construction from Nebraska westward. He employed 80 men, purchased 700 cattle for beef, loaded 75 ox-drawn wagons with wire insulators, tools, and provisions. Dividing his workmen into three crews, he assigned one group to digging holes, another to cutting and setting poles, the third to stringing wire.
The race began on July 4, 1861, the contract requiring completion within two years. Three months and 20 days later, October 24, Creighton strung his last roll of wire into Salt Lake City and won the prize. The Californians came in two days afterward, and telegraphic communication was established between the Atlantic and Pacific. President Lincoln sent the first message, the Governor of California responded, and Brigham Young dispatched greetings in both directions. Rates were set at $6.00 for the first 10 words, each additional word 75¢, which explains why news bulletins from the East published in Western newspapers were models of language economy.
Creighton’s most difficult problem was securing suitable poles across long stretches of treeless plains. Specifications called for poles 20 feet long to be sunk four feet in the ground, and in some places they had to be hauled more than 100 miles. Creighton had surveyed his route, however, locating sources of supply in advance, and he distributed his timber cutters and oxen so they were always in the right places at the right times.
Creighton furnished his workers with good tents and large quantities of excellent food cooked on portable stoves. The diggers averaged about 12 miles per day, digging 24 holes per mile, but the pole crew gradually fell behind and was still 150 miles from Salt Lake when the last hole was dug.
Fortunately for the line builders, the Indians exhibited more curiosity than hostility in 1861. At Deer Creek—later to be one of Captain Shanks’s stations—a Sioux delegation confronted the diggers when they arrived and made a mild protest. The Sioux had heard correctly that the poles were to stand as tall as three men, but they also had been told that wire was to be strung closely from top to bottom. Such a fence, they declared, would keep all the buffalo and other game from their favorite hunting grounds. When the superintendent assured them that only one wire was to be strung along the top of the poles, the Indians seemed relieved.18
To prevent possible Indian interference with the line, Creighton arranged for visiting chiefs along the route to inspect the instruments and receive mild electric shocks, which might lead them to dread the strong medicine of the wire. One chief, however, was skeptical of the white man’s magic. Captain Eugene Ware told of how this Indian persuaded his warriors that it would be a good thing to have some telegraph wire up in their village to fasten ponies to. “They cut off nearly a half-mile of wire,” Ware said, and all the Indians, in single file on horseback, catching hold of the wire, proceeded to ride and pull the wire across the prairie toward their village. After they had gone several miles and were going over a ridge, they were overtaken by an electric storm, and as they were rapidly traveling, dragging the wire, by some means or other a bolt of lightning, so the story goes, knocked almost all of them off their horses and hurt some of them considerably. Thereupon they dropped the wire, and coming to the conclusion that it was punishment for their acts and that it was “bad medicine,” they afterwards let it alone. The story of it, being quite wonderful, circulated with great rapidity among the Indians.19
By the time the Galvanized Yankees came into the West, however, the Indians had overcome their fear of the white man’s humming messenger wires, and would often rip out long sections, sometimes cutting down poles and burning them. Another enemy o
f the telegraph was the buffalo, especially on open plains where there were no trees for animals to rub their itching hides against. After a dozen or so shaggy buffaloes scratched themselves against a slender pole, it would often fall to the ground. In an effort to stop this, sharp spikes were driven into the poles, but the spikes seemed only to add to the bliss of the scratching monarchs.
The long section of telegraph line which Captain Shanks had to repair in March 1866 was more vulnerable than most because the builders had used pine poles instead of cedar, and after five years of use the wood was beginning to rot. New poles had to be cut and barked, and new holes dug in hard frozen earth. But the captain knew that every newspaper editor west of La Bonte would be publishing acidulous comments about the telegraph’s military guardians if too much time elapsed before service was restored. He worked his men hard for three days, and messages began flowing East and West again.
A month later another crisis confronted Captain Shanks. Five men deserted at Horse Shoe Station, presumably gone up the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields. Shanks wanted to track them down, as he had done successfully at Julesburg, but could not obtain permission to take a small detachment into the dangerous Indian country north of the Platte. These were the only men lost to I Company by desertion during its period of service.
In June, orders came for all 11th Ohio Cavalry units to proceed to Fort Laramie for mustering out. Shanks took over the Ohioans’ horses, mounted half his men, and prepared to guard his section with reduced forces. Fortunately the Indians were temporarily peaceable; many were gathering at Fort Laramie for treaty negotiations organized by Colonel Maynadier.
Marching westward from Fort Kearney was Colonel Henry B. Carrington and the 18th U.S. Infantry, regular Army troops, some of them bound for Utah, some for the Powder River country where Carrington would establish headquarters at ill-fated Fort Phil Kearny. By an odd coincidence, Carrington had been one of the chief prosecutors of the Chicago conspirators, but there is no record that he and Shanks met in the West. Carrington crossed the Platte 10 miles east of La Bonte at Bridger’s Ferry, operated by a squaw-man, Benjamin Mills. A detachment of the 11th Ohio had left there a week before Carrington arrived, and Shanks had not yet replaced them. As Carrington’s wagons pulled in for the crossing on June 20, Mills informed the colonel that Sioux had raided there 24 hours earlier.
Carrington immediately let it be known that Bridger’s Ferry was a critical point on his supply line. During the next few months hundreds of wagons had to be transported across it to sustain operations along the Bozeman Trail. Shortly afterward, Shanks received orders to move his headquarters to the Ferry. Henceforth its defenses would have equal importance with the telegraph line.
To go with him to Bridger’s Ferry, Shanks selected his favorite sergeant, 23-year-old Clark Suggs of Newton County, Mississippi, Corporal John Spriggs of Mobile, Alabama, and 19 dependable privates. He placed small howitzers at opposite landings, established vigilant guard routines, and the Sioux soon learned that Bridger’s Ferry was no place for raiding.
Shanks and his boys passed a pleasant summer, the captain as usual finding ways of obtaining little luxuries which made life more enjoyable for the detachment. Some of the last references to his military career appear in records of the 18th Infantry at Fort Phil Kearny, where boards of survey inquiring into supply shortages reaching that post noted that such items as soap and coffee had been “requisitioned” from wagons passing Bridger’s Ferry, Captain Shanks commanding. One mysterious disappearance never solved was a consignment of porter, meant for use by surgeons at the fort as a tonic for invalids. Of 258 bottles, 205 had disappeared somewhere between Laramie and Phil Kearny.20 Wagons carrying the bottles of mildly alcoholic brew passed Bridger’s Ferry in September, just about the time John Shanks received orders to prepare Company I for mustering out.
In what better way could he and his boys have bid farewell to their service as Galvanized Yankees than in festive toasts over bottles of U.S. Army porter? On October 11, 1866, one day after all the enlisted men of his company were mustered out at Fort Kearney, John T. Shanks relinquished his commission. So ended his fantastic career as soldier of the Confederacy, prisoner of war, spy for the Union, and captain of U.S. Volunteers.
*The post was named for Captain Levi G. Marshall, Company E, 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, who supervised its construction in the autumn of 1864.
IX
Ohioans from Dixie: The Powder River Expedition
AS HAS BEEN NOTED, a considerable number of former Confederates were enrolled in the 11th Ohio Cavalry Regiment. The first battalion of the 11th—all Ohioans and staunch Unionists—arrived at Fort Laramie in May 1862. Late the following summer the second battalion (Companies E, F, G, and H) traveled from Ohio across the Plains to join the regiment; on its rosters were a few former Confederates. In June 1864 at Fort Laramie, Companies I, K, and L were organized from surplus recruits assigned the regiment, including Galvanized Yankees enlisted from prisoners of war.
Among the men in Company E were several former Confederates and Confederate sympathizers. Because most of them used false identities, it is impossible to trace the origins of these Galvanized Yankees. Several were Kentuckians who had been active in Ohio with the Knights of the Golden Circle, an organization opposed to the war policies of President Lincoln. Some had probably joined up for the sole purpose of traveling westward, then deserting at the first opportunity and disappearing into mining areas in search of their fortunes. Most were very young, 18 to 21.
In September 1863, Company E stopped for about a week at Fort Kearney while en route to Laramie. One night several of the soldiers rode over to a Dobytown saloon for drinks and a few games of chance. Among them was an Ohio lad who had enlisted as Benjamin Monroe. His real name was Benjamin Monroe Connor, but he had received a medical discharge from an Ohio infantry regiment, and as his Southern comrades had done, changed his identity so that he would not be rejected for cavalry service in the West.
While sitting in a saloon, Connor overheard a group of E Company men plotting a mutiny. “I observed from their dialects that these men were Southerners. … I listened as intently as I could without betraying my interest, and gathered that their intention was to get as many soldiers as possible to join them in a mutiny when we reached Julesburg.” There were four ringleaders—Patrick Gray, William Crawford, and two Kentuckians who had enlisted under the same nom de guerre of John Sullivan. Their plan was to give the secret grip of the Knights of the Golden Circle to every soldier in E Company to test out those who might be favorable to the mutiny. “I was among rebels dressed in Union uniform. These men had joined the Northern army to escape being drafted to fight directly against the South, knowing that the 11th Ohio was enlisted for service in the Indian country. … I rode along silently behind the bibulous crowd, taking in every word of the treasons a few of them planned so boldly, yet uncertain how I should act in the matter. I was only twenty years old at the time, and timid.”1
For several days, Connor kept his dangerous knowledge to himself. Company E resumed march for Julesburg, and every night he observed the plotters discussing their conspiracy. At last one evening he gathered courage and went to see the commanding officer, Captain Levi Marshall, and told him everything he knew.
Next morning at company formation, Marshall placed the two Sullivans, Gray, and Crawford under arrest, disarmed and dismounted them, and ordered them to walk the remaining 300 miles to Fort Laramie.
At Laramie, the four troublemakers were court-martialed and sentenced to three months hard labor. During this period, young Connor’s duties along the telegraph line brought him occasionally to Fort Laramie, where he would see the prisoners shackled in ball and chain, chopping wood or policing the post. He wondered if they had guessed the identity of their betrayer.
In the spring of 1865, the four men were released and assigned to Ben Connor’s detachment at South Pass. Connor stayed clear of them, and was not aware that they were
still plotting mutiny. Suddenly one day in May, the two Sullivans and Gray resisted the authority of Lieutenant John Brown. This time no court-martial was necessary. Brown ordered them shot to death in the act of mutiny.2
“Many men in our command were from Kentucky and a few had come from other Southern states,” Connor said. “In case the mutiny had come to a head, bloodshed would have been unavoidable. … Not all the Southerners were disloyal by any means.”3 A short time after the shooting of the three mutineers, one of the loyal Southerners warned Connor that the surviving fourth member of the group, Crawford, had somehow discovered that he (Connor) was the one who had reported the original conspiracy to Captain Marshall.
“I felt that Crawford would either kill me or I would be compelled to kill him. … So one day I started out hunting, as I had often done before, leaving the post with a horse, a gun, and a saddle, but this time never to return.”4 (Ben Connor spent the remainder of his long life in the West, as a miner, cowboy, and respectable stockman. He was so remorseful of his act of desertion that he never returned to Ohio.)
In late summer of 1864, Captain Henry E. Palmer was ordered to report for a special assignment at Fort Leavenworth “to take command of a detachment of the 11th Ohio Cavalry, sixty men, every one of them lately Confederate soldiers with John Morgan on his raid into Ohio.” Palmer was to conduct these men to Fort Kearney and there turn them over to Captain J. L. Humfreville of the 11th Ohio.
On August 8, as Palmer and his detachment were nearing Big Sandy Station, they met several freighters and stagecoach passengers on horseback, fleeing a band of raiding Cheyennes. Palmer listened to the fugitives’ stories of massacres farther west, then decided to march on. His 60 Kentucky cavalrymen were experienced raiders themselves, and had volunteered to fight Indians. They camped that night on the Little Blue, with Indians all around them on distant hills.