Tamblyn was pessimistic about prospects of immediate relief. In spite of intense cold, Indians had been harassing travelers between Fort Fletcher and Salina. Only a few days before, six employees of the Butterfield line had been attacked by a war party at Walker’s Creek. Two men were killed, the other four badly wounded. Tamblyn ordered Captain William Bleadenhiser to mount 25 men of G Company and go in pursuit, but winds had already drifted over the tracks on hard-packed snow, and the raiders vanished.16
The officers’ consultation at Fort Fletcher after arrival of the column from Pond’s Creek was grim in its implications. Salina was 80 miles to the east, and even if the men could march that far on parched corn, there was little likelihood that the garrison there could feed them.
Then, on the first day of February, a miracle occurred. A supply train appeared on the eastern horizon; the wagons were loaded with rations for the three posts, enough to last at least a month. Tamblyn ordered everything unloaded at Fort Fletcher. As no stagecoaches had been running since December, he saw no reason to jeopardize the lives of the men in A and I Companies by ordering them back to their isolated stations.
“The first requisite at Fort Fletcher,” said Musgrove, “was winter quarters. These the men set about building at once without waiting to recover from the fatigue of the late march. Fortunately there was a fringe of timber along the creek, and the art of building log cabins was well known to the men, so it was but a few days before the men were housed in comfortable cabins about eight by ten feet, four men to each.”17
Unfortunately the soldiers of A and I Companies did not have long to enjoy their new quarters. Toward the end of February, the Butterfield Overland Despatch announced resumption of service, and the first coach from Atchison brought orders for Captains Straut and Musgrove to reoccupy Monument Station. A few hours later Captain Edward Ball and a company of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry arrived at Fort Fletcher. These regular cavalrymen were to relieve the 13th Missouri from further duties in western Kansas, and Captain Ball’s headquarters would be Pond’s Creek.
On March 1, the two companies of Galvanized Yankees started westward again, Captain Ball’s cavalrymen serving as escorts. On March 6, they reached Monument. Captain Straut’s men moved into their old quarters, and for the third time in three months Captain Musgrove’s men had to construct new quarters for themselves. However, no sooner were they comfortably housed at Monument than a new set of orders arrived. Company I was to report back to their original station, Pond’s Creek.
They found Pond’s Creek bustling with springtime activity. Captain Ball had relocated the site a mile and a half northeast of the slope where the men had built dugouts, and there were rumors that a permanent fort would soon be built (Fort Wallace). This time there was no problem of constructing quarters. Tents were issued to the men, and although details were assigned routine activities, a new and more pleasant period now began for the men of Company I. As Captain Musgrove put it, “beyond the inevitable camp guard, there were no military duties to perform, and if the men were present at roll call night and morning, there were no restrictions on their movements.”18
Meanwhile coaches were beginning to run again, but the Indians and the blizzards had almost wiped out Butterfield’s resources. When his rival, Ben Holladay, offered to buy the line in April, the Overland Despatch quickly sold out. Perhaps Butterfield saw doom coming for all stagecoach lines in the steel railroad tracks pushing across both Nebraska and Kansas. Holladay, however, announced grandly that under his ownership the Smoky Hill division would become an express route between the East and California. The Galvanized Yankees served as guardians for Holladay’s express coaches during part of their brief period of glory, but the world was changing. Both organizations would be mustered out of existence before the end of 1866.
In that springtime of their last period of service, the 1st U.S. Volunteers discovered that the Great Plains could be congenial as well as inclement. Under a warming sun the harsh landscape changed to delicate shades of green. The ice-locked prairie was transformed into a garden of wildflowers, filled with an abundance of game. There was time for hunting buffalo and antelope, for observing the antics of prairie dogs and jackrabbits. They discovered that not all Indians were hostile. And they learned the lore of the West from one of its best teachers, a seasoned scout named Bill Comstock.
Comstock was employed at Pond’s Creek as official guide and interpreter. According to legend, he was the man sought by Ned Buntline, a dime-novel writer, to become the model for a character to be known as Buffalo Bill. Buntline, however, arrived too late—the Cheyennes had killed Comstock, so the novelist took William F. Cody instead. Comstock was much more of the genuine article than Cody. A grandnephew of James Fenimore Cooper, he grew up in the frontier tradition and had spent most of his life in the West. He was a bullwhacker, miner, Indian trader, trapper, buffalo hunter, and then a scout for the Army.
Before he came to Pond’s Creek, Bill Comstock had known Galvanized Yankees at Fort Halleck, where he distinguished himself by capturing a desperado named Bob Jennings. Jennings had killed one Hod Russell, and then when a posse went to arrest him, he wounded the leader and escaped into the mountains above Fort Halleck. According to Charles Adams, a soldier stationed at Halleck, Jennings sent word to the commander, Captain J. L. Humfreville, that he would kill him or anyone else who tried to arrest him.
There was a hunter there named Billy Comstock who said he would get him for $1,000. No get him, no pay. So there was a bargain to that effect. Comstock took ten or twelve Indians and started off as though on a hunt. They found Jennings out in the mountains sitting by a tree, his big hocken [Hawken] rifle leaning against the tree and his belt and two big revolvers on the ground beside him. The Indians told him one of their ponies was lame and asked Jennings if he would see if he could tell what was the matter. He did not suspicion any trickery and when he took up the foot the Indians all piled on him and wound a rope all around him and had him good and fast.
He was taken to the post and kept a while in the guardhouse and then taken out and hung to a large sweep used to swing meat out of the reach of bears and wolves. … The large end was so heavy it took two or three men to hold it down. When all was ready the Captain asked him if he had anything to say. He commenced to say, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy,” but before he got it all out the Captain said, “turn him loose,” and away he went. The large end of the sweep was so heavy that when it struck the ground it threw him the length of the rope above the pole, and when he dropped down there was just a quiver and all was over.19
Presumably Bill Comstock received his $1,000.
At Pond’s Creek, Comstock was a main attraction for the boys of Company I. “One of the diversions of the camp,” said Captain Musgrove, “was listening to his tales of experience, his narrow escapes … the scenes of horror he had witnessed. … Bill Comstock had a wonderful ability at trailing a party of Indians or a single warrior. He could easily read all the ‘signs’ left by them for the information of other Indians, could interpret the meaning of one, two, or three columns of smoke used in telegraphing between different parties, and, after a party had passed could tell with remarkable accuracy, by examining the trail, how many were in the party.”20
Another admirer of Comstock was the Harper’s Weekly artist, Theodore Davis, who spent considerable time in western Kansas after his adventures on the Butterfield stagecoach. “No Indian was ever half so superstitious as Will Comstock. He had his ‘medicine’ horse, ‘medicine’ field-glass, ‘medicine’ everything, in fact. Even Will’s evil-looking dog was ‘medicine,’ and had a ‘medicine’ collar. … Yet for all this, Will Comstock is fearlessly brave. He is quiet and unassuming in manner, small in size, and compact in proportion. He is one of the best riders in the Plains, with which he is probably more familiar than any other white man who roves over them.”21
To the Galvanized Yankees, Comstock must have seemed imperishable. Yet only two years after they kne
w him during that spring of 1866 at Pond’s Creek, he died at the hands of treacherous Cheyennes a few miles north of Monument Station.†
Early in May, one of the new Holladay express coaches brought unexpected orders from Fort Leavenworth. All companies of the 1st U.S. Volunteers were to march there for mustering out.‡
“The march was uneventful,” said Captain Musgrove. “At Monument Station my company was joined with that of Captain Straut, and we proceeded together to Fort Fletcher. Here we joined the two companies there, and all proceeded under command of Colonel Tamblyn to Leavenworth.” On May 22, 1866, the last man of the battalion was mustered out. “At St. Louis,” Musgrove concluded his chronicle, “I secured transportation for my men to their several places of abode in the Southern states.”22
So ended the longest period of service of any of the Galvanized Yankee organizations—22 months of soldiering from Virginia to Minnesota and the Great Plains of Kansas.
*See pages 129-132 for an account of the Bent brothers’ attack on two companies of the 5th U.S. Volunteers earlier in the year.
†For an excellent account of the life of William Comstock, see “Will Comstock—the Natty Bumppo of Kansas,” by Dr. John S. Gray, Westerners Brand Book, Chicago, February 1962.
‡Company I, 1st U.S. Volunteers, was replaced at Pond’s Creek by another company of Galvanized Yankees—Company B of the 6th U.S. Volunteers, Captain James Gordon, commanding (see Chapter VII). Company B served there until October 1866. In July, the station’s name was changed to Fort Wallace, and it soon became one of the more active cavalry posts in the West, such names as Custer, Keogh, Benteen, Beecher, and Forsyth being associated with it. During the period the 6th U.S. Volunteers were there, it was a 2nd Cavalry post. One of the officers of the latter organization, Lieutenant George A. Armes, recorded some of the excitement and color of the first days of Fort Wallace in Ups and Downs of an Army Officer. One of Armes’s close friends, often mentioned in the book, was Lieutenant R. E. Flood, second in Command of Company B and the post quartermaster. The Galvanized Yankees of Company B. spent much of their time digging stone out of a nearby quarry for construction of the new fort.
XI
Last Man Out
IN MAY 1866 WHEN Lieutenant-Colonel William Tamblyn’s battalion of 1st U.S. Volunteers closed out its record of longest service, there were still three other regiments of Galvanized Yankees on the frontier. The 4th Regiment, organized some three months later than the 1st, was mustered out in June. The 5th and 6th Regiments, organized seven or eight months after the 1st, served on until autumn. Not until November 13, 1866, were the last three companies disbanded—H, I, and K of the 5th Regiment—after 20 months of service.
Of all the Galvanized Yankee companies, H Company was the most peripatetic. From the day it was organized at Camp Douglas, Chicago, in April 1865 with a strength of 97 men, until early November of 1866 when its surviving 30 members marched into Fort Leavenworth to be discharged, H Company was forever wayfaring. It was also in a constant state of fragmentation, with detachments marching off on all sorts of major and minor missions. In the course of its journeyings, H Company operated in five different army districts. Its members saw most of the military posts of Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska, and one of its detachments had the distinction of being the only Galvanized Yankee unit to serve in New Mexico—as escort to a wagon train.
H Company also had one of the highest rates of desertion of any company, although it is quite likely that some of the men so listed on its rolls may have simply become lost. Detachments returning from long marches usually found that the company had been transferred, perhaps 200 or 300 miles, and by the time they reached that new headquarters, the chances were that half the company had gone to one place and the other half somewhere else. The opportunities for striking off on one’s own in such cases were no doubt tempting. In its 20 months of traveling, H Company lost 67 men, but only two by death, one by honorable discharge.
On April 28, 1865, H Company reached Fort Leavenworth from Camp Douglas prison, and three days later 22-year-old Charles H. Hoyt, “mustered from civilian life by virtue of a commission from the Secretary of War,” took command with the rank of first lieutenant.1 Judging from records of the company, it appears that Hoyt leaned heavily upon his 30-year-old sergeant-major, John C. McDade, a Confederate veteran from Pike County, Alabama.
H Company was primarily an Alabama-Georgia outfit, soldiers from those states representing about half the strength. Most of them had been captured in the Confederate Army’s last defeats around Nashville and Chattanooga during 1864, and most were seasoned veterans of the Civil War.
On May 1, arms and equipment were issued to H Company, and the men began daily drills. On May 3, Hoyt received an order from headquarters to participate in the establishment of a chain of sentinels about the post: “The main object making this necessary [the order read] is thereby to prevent: 1st: The coming in of lewd women and others. 2nd: To keep soldiers within our lines and prevent loafing about. 3rd: To give men and officers a chance to practice thoroughly outpost and picket duty.”2
For two weeks, H Company did its share of guarding Fort Leavenworth from “lewd women and others,” and then on March 18 “took up the line of march” with the regiment, bound westward for Fort Riley. On May 28, the regiment marched into Riley and set up a tent camp. First duty for the H Company men was to dig latrines 50 yards from the camp guard line—12 feet long, five feet deep, three feet wide. Being a young man of modest sensibilities, Lieutenant Hoyt had the sinks screened with tree branches on the side facing the camp.
During the following week the company drilled, marched in dress parades, and awaited further orders. The orders came on
June 5. Companies H and I were to march immediately as escorts for a wagon train bound for New Mexico. When they reached Fort Dodge, the two companies would relieve the 2nd U.S. Volunteers on duty there; a detachment of H Company would then proceed with the train to New Mexico.3
As ranking officer, Lieutenant Frederick Hubert commanded the combined companies. The train consisted of 175 wagons and 150 head of cattle, and for the first few days Lieutenant Hubert permitted the men to walk beside the wagons in a loose route march. On June 14, when the train went into camp at Spring Creek, company roll calls revealed 12 men missing, lost, or deserted.
Hubert at once drew up a stern set of orders to be read to the men. Henceforth the two companies would alternate as rear guard, marching in formation, and be charged with the duty of rounding up stragglers. No soldiers would be allowed to leave the column without permission of the commanding officer.4
The train moved on to Fort Ellsworth, turned southwest, and followed the Santa Fe Trail past Forts Zarah and Larned. When buffalo herds were sighted, Lieutenant Hubert organized hunting parties to procure fresh meat for the command. As they approached Cimarron Crossing, they ran into some of the roving bands of Kiowas that had been making life miserable for the 2nd U.S. Volunteers at Fort Dodge.
On June 29, about 40 hostiles charged into one of the train’s cattle herds, killing two Mexican herdsmen. “As soon as the cry of Indians rang through the camp,” Lieutenant Hubert recorded, “I had the mule herd driven in, formed my men for the defense of the camp, and doubled the pickets around it. The Indians, satisfied with the mischief done, struck across the road and made for the river. They did not succeed in driving off any stock, notwithstanding the immense amount of stock in the command. … If I had had any means to pursue the devils they would not have gone away unpunished.”5
Upon arrival at Fort Dodge on July 1, they were given a hearty welcome by Major William F. Armstrong and his 2nd U.S. Volunteers, who were eager to leave the dugouts they had constructed there during the spring.
H Company was not to spend much time at Fort Dodge, however. Major Armstrong, who had been fighting off Kiowas for a month, decided that a mere detachment of H Company was insufficient protection for the westbound train. He ordered Lieutenant Hoyt to take his entire comp
any as escort to Fort Lyon. The commanding officer there could then decide what force would be necessary for the remainder of the journey.
So it was that H Company marched another 175 miles west to Fort Lyon, arriving there in mid-July. As Indians were not troublesome on the route south to New Mexico, Lieutenant Hoyt detached a few of his men to continue with the wagon train, and turned back for Fort Dodge with the rest of his company.
When he reached Fort Dodge, new orders were waiting. H Company was to turn about and march back west over the same trail for 100 miles and occupy Camp Wynkoop.6
Camp Wynkoop was 60 miles down the Arkansas River from Fort Lyon, and was about as lonely a place as a soldier could find in all of Kansas in 1865. It had been established in May 1864 by Major W. W. Wynkoop, then commanding at Fort Lyon, as a picket camp for observation of Indian or Confederate movements, but was soon abandoned.7 As it was a halfway point between Forts Dodge and Lyon, the Army decided to send a company of Galvanized Yankees there to give military assistance to wagon trains.
Lieutenant Hoyt and his men had no horses, however, and they could offer little protection to trains passing through that wasteland of sand hills and blowing dust. After about six weeks of ineffectual duty—during which time they must have wondered if the Army had forgotten their existence—they received notice that the 5th Regiment was moving north to Nebraska. H Company was to abandon Camp Wynkoop and march to Fort Kearney by the most direct route.
They headed north across the untracked High Plains into hostile Cheyenne territory, crossed the Smoky Hill, and turned eastward along the Solomon. It was late October before they reached Fort Kearney only to discover that their regiment had moved on west to Julesburg and Laramie.