Fresh from robbing the Deadwood Stagecoach, the Sioux performers of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West changed into loose-fitting Chinese garb and attached long single braids to the backs of their heads, mimicking the clothing and hairstyle of the Boxers then rebelling halfway around the world. Thus was the stage set for the “Western Easterners” to man a wall and defend their position against U.S. Army re-enactors in a scene played out in Cody’s “Rescue at Pekin.”

Pittsburgh was the host city this day in late May 1901, and the big-city crowd did not disappoint. As the action unfolded, spectators stomped their feet so hard as to send vibrations through the grandstand. During the climactic scene, as the Army re-enactors scaled the artificial wall, the jingoistic roar from audience members swelled to ear-throbbing intensity, and they surged over the railings to join performers on the arena floor.

The drama depicted actual events of the ongoing 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion. Emerging as a violent response to increasing foreign incursion into China, the Boxers (nicknamed for their martial arts skills, though officially known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists) sought to eradicate all signs of modern progress (railroads, telegraph lines, etc.) and called for the liquidaton of foreigners, particularly Christian missionaries (and their Chinese converts).

On June 20, 1900, the Boxers besieged foreign embassies in the Legation Quarter of Peking (present-day Beijing), trapping within its walls nearly 500 foreign civilians, 400 military personnel and 3,000 Chinese Christians. Fifty-five days into the siege eight nations, including the United States, sent some 20,000 soldiers to relieve the siege. In battle that August 14 and 15 they defeated the Boxers and then divided the capital city into occupation zones, sending occasional punitive forays into the countryside. Not until Sept. 7, 1901, did representatives of the allied nations and China’s Qing empire sign the Boxer Protocol, officially ending the rebellion.

Ever the savvy showman, Cody was quick to draw a correlation between the Boxers and American Indians. As the rebels had resisted foreign incursion, he reasoned, so Plains Indians had resisted the westward tide of Anglo settlement, cutting telegraph lines, attacking railroad crews and battling U.S. soldiers. Fueled by superstitious ideology, the Boxers believed they could induce spirits to enter their bodies and render them invulnerable to bullets, much like Plains Indian adherents of the “Ghost Dance” movement believed their ceremonial shirts would protect them. The latter movement ended in tragedy on Dec. 29, 1890, with the battle turned massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., all but ending the American Indian wars.

Buffalo Bill was a stickler for the authentic, wherever possible employing real soldiers, cowboys and Indians performing with real weapons. But as he had no access to real Boxers, the duty fell to those Sioux already in Cody’s employ. They were perfect for the role, one New York Sun reporter quipped, as they were “used to dying” in each show. “They die in the cowboy battles about the emigrant wagon, and they die again in the chase of the Deadwood coach,” he wrote. “They made no objection to…dying the death of Boxers this year.” A New York Evening Sun reporter noted, tongue in cheek, “Some of them seemed a little ill at ease in their Chinese makeup, but they kept themselves entirely in the landscape, positively refused to scalp a single member of the allied forces and never even indulged in so much as the ghost of a war whoop.”

American Indians had long featured in promotions for the Wild West, which urged potential ticket buyers to come see the “horde of warpainted Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux Indians” (though after convincing the infamous Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull to tour with him in 1885, Cody had hired only Sioux from the Pine Ridge Agency). Why did Plains Indians who had violently resisted “foreign incursion” agree to perform in the Wild West shows? For starters, those working for Buffalo Bill earned a decent wage, while employment prospects on and around the reservations were limited. In addition, room, board and travel were free. Finally, performers’ immediate families were welcome to join them on tour.

In the fall of 1900, drawn like so many Americans by the dramatic events in China, Cody proposed to his theatrical manager, Nate Salsbury, that they incorporate a reenactment of the allied victory over the Boxers in the forthcoming season of the Wild West. The pair put their heads together and came up with “The Rescue at Pekin.”

On April 2, 1901, opening night, they debuted the Chinese-themed spectacle at New York’s Madison Square Garden. After a fortnight’s run Cody took the show on the road, and by the time the season wrapped in late October the troupe had performed in arenas from upstate New York to the South and across much of the Midwest. In 1902, with few changes to the program, Cody and company performed for audiences in the Western half of the country.

The twice-daily shows were an enormous draw, attracting on average some 20,000 to 30,000 patrons, not counting those turned away at the gate. The audience often exceeded the population of the host cities, as people from surrounding areas packed the stands. The June 4 edition of Pennsylvania’s Reading Herald reported that crowds began to gather in the early morning, by showtime transforming into a “great huddled mass.”

As the battle between the Boxers and the soldiers marked the grand finale of each performance, Cody and Salsbury spared no expense. “It was indeed an enormous and costly undertaking,” author John R. Haddad writes, “requiring 100 horses, large amounts of gunpowder and explosives, the latest in cannons and firearms, and of course the massive wall of Peking that loomed majestically over one end of the arena.” The cast alone, including the braided Sioux “Boxers,” numbered 500.

The performance lacked for nothing. Whether it was authentically cast or accurate in every detail was beside the point. Cody and company were, above all else, entertainers, and whether clad in Western buckskins or Chinese silks, they seldom disappointed the huddled masses. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

On December 18, 1860, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a compromise plan to the U.S. Senate. Just two days later, South Carolina would become the first state to secede from the Union, and within six weeks, six more Southern states would follow suit. But while Dixie fire-eaters were driving their states pell-mell toward disunion, Senator Crittenden and other moderates were working to broker a sectional adjustment — one that could, they hoped, soothe Southern fears about Abraham Lincoln’s election and stay the secession tide in the South. 

The Crittenden Compromise would be central to these efforts during the winter and spring of 1860-1861. It represented an attempt to settle the slavery question once and for all, drawing on the tradition of grand settlements like the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. Indeed, the cornerstone of Crittenden’s plan was a constitutional amendment that would divide the remaining Western territories along the old Missouri Compromise line, barring slavery above and protecting slavery below the 36º 30’ parallel.  

Moderates like Crittenden hoped that this might be enough to secure the loyalty of the remaining Southern states to the Union. This might, in turn, make Republicans more willing to let the secession crisis play out, and it might eventually make the seceded states more willing to return to the Union. Yet most Republicans, including Lincoln, refused to countenance any further extension of slavery into the territories. Attempts by moderates to push through the Crittenden Compromise repeatedly foundered against this opposition. 

Compromisers struggled, too, against the opposition of Southern secessionists, who argued that it did not do enough to protect slavery from the threat of an empowered Republican Party. Over the course of the secession crisis, it became clear that the leaders of the seceded states had no interest in negotiation or returning to the Union. Southern rights advocates in the states that had not seceded also complicated the project of compromise; their demands for more concessions meant there was no consensus around Crittenden’s or any other compromise measure even in those states.  

One such antagonist was Virginia’s John Robertson, a prominent Democrat and judge from Richmond. The state legislature sent him as a commissioner to the seceded states in early 1861, and he returned with assurances of the new Confederate States’ sympathies with Virginia. They are “bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh,” he reported. 

The outbreak of fighting at Fort Sumter on April 12 provided the push for which many Southern hardliners had been hoping. Abraham Lincoln responded by issuing a call for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion in the South, and in short order Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded and joined the new Confederacy. The start of the war seemed to signal triumph for militants like Robertson and disaster for moderates like Crittenden. Yet neither man would accept this as the outcome of his labors. 

Robertson wrote a letter to Crittenden near the end of April that highlighted just how uncertain the future appeared in that moment. Robertson refused to believe that the collision at Fort Sumter necessarily meant war —and rejected, moreover, the idea that war would accomplish the ends of either side in the conflict. He thus suddenly and unexpectedly found his own goals aligned with Crittenden’s, and Robertson begged the old Kentuckian to renew his efforts at conciliation.  

From Robertson’s point of view, civil war did not seem inevitable, even when armies were massing on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The situation represented a dramatic escalation, to be sure, but in the context of the decades-long sectional crisis over slavery (one that had at other points erupted in violence), observers like Robertson could imagine outcomes other than intestine war. 

John Robertson to John J. Crittenden, April 28, 1861

Dear Sir,
No man could have more earnestly striven than yourself to [resolve] the feuds, whose increasing fury, already advanced to the stage of murderous conflict, threatens to involve thirty millions of men in the horrors of civil war. However I may have differed with you, looking from a Southern view, as to the acceptability of the terms of adjustment you proposed, I never doubted that you regarded them as just, or, at least, as preferable to the evils otherwise to ensue, and as the best which could possibly be obtained. The event has proved that, moderate as they were, the ruling faction [the Republican Party] would be content with none but such as would degrade the South. Wellnigh desperate is the condition to which that faction has reduced this country. The fact now stares them in the face that the Union is dissolved beyond all hope of restoration, at least, in our day. Yet they are threatening to preserve the Union by force. They read the riot act to millions of men, nay, to sovereign States, who are to be coerced into friendship by their foes at the point of a bayonet. But, waving all recrimination, not insisting on the absurdity of the idea, or the impossibility of reducing the South to an ignominious submission, or the certainty that their subjugation, if possible, would defeat the very object their enemies profess to desire (namely, the preservation or restoration of the Union), by converting States into vassal provinces (in that character alone can they remain or enter into it), let us inquire if there are no means by which the anticipated consequence of our family jars (now an accomplished fact), the separation of the States, may be recognized by the ruling faction at Washington, without deliberately repeating the most atrocious crime, and steeping their hands still deeper in the blood of their brethren. A word from the long-eared god [Lincoln], who now holds in his hands (as he imagines) the destinies of the country, would be enough. He has only to say, “Let there be peace,” and there will be peace. But he and the murderous gang whom he consults already cry ‘Havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war. And yet the star of hope still twinkles in the clouded firmament. Preposterous as is the idea of peaceful union or reunion, there may still be a peaceful separation; and it is to yourself, sir, who, if allowed to do so, I will still regard, notwithstanding the marked difference of our political sentiments, as a valued friend,—it is mainly to you I look for effecting so glorious a consummation. I do not desire that my name should be connected with an effort which you may, most probably, consider utterly idle, and which, should you think worth trying, be more apt to succeed without it. Before going further at present, permit me to inquire whether it will be agreeable to you to entertain the thoughts which, after much anxious reflection, have entered into, and taken firm possession of, my mind.

It is proper to say that my appeal to you is wholly without the sanction or knowledge of any constituted authorities, State or federal. It has been suggested even but to two individuals; in the judgment of one of them you would yourself repose great confidence. I have received decided encouragement to make it.

An immediate answer, if convenient, will greatly oblige me. 

With great and respectful regard, yours,
John Robertson

For all of their disagreements, Crittenden must have found some encouragement in Robertson’s kindred desire for peace. Robertson still seemed to hope that secession could be accomplished peacefully, but Crittenden saw peace as a means to promote compromise and reunion, as well. A month after the former’s letter, Crittenden would preside over a convention in Frankfort, Kentucky, which would renew calls for Crittenden’s compromise as a basis for sectional adjustment. “Whether any such constitutional guarantees would have the effect of reconciling any of the seceded States to the government from which they have torn themselves away we cannot say,” the convention declared, “but we allow ourselves to hope that the masses in those States will in time learn that the dangers they were made to fear were greatly exaggerated, and that they will then be disposed to listen to calls of interest and patriotism, and return to the family from which they have gone out.” 

In the meantime, Crittenden would also be instrumental in the effort to keep Kentucky neutral in the Civil War. He would tour the state advocating this policy, arguing that it would leave Kentucky well-placed to act as a mediator in the conflict. Kentuckians might not be able to stop the ensuing fight, but it certainly seemed a better alternative to him than active involvement in war. 

A week before the Frankfort Conference on May 20, 1861, Kentucky’s governor would issue a proclamation declaring the state’s neutrality; in it, he claimed that this course would help promote peace. Such hopes obviously failed to stop the onrushing war that would rage for four years and kill hundreds of thousands of people. No one could foresee what would come, but Kentucky’s neutrality in 1861 — and the efforts of men like Crittenden and, to some extent, Robertson — stood as a monument to their different visions for the future in that moment. Those different visions informed their behavior during the conflict, and at least in the case of Kentucky, those ideas helped shape the broader contours of the Civil War. 

Jesse George-Nichol is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia.

By the early 1850s gold fever had spread across the American West. Southwestern Oregon Territory was no exception, as placer miners had descended on Coyote Creek in what today is Josephine County. Camps sprang up, and the goldfields remained a beehive of activity until gold strikes in neighboring Idaho in the 1860s drew the miners away. But the Coyote Creek diggings would experience a resurgence, and a town would be born of it.

After a few short years the excitement in Idaho faded. Miners returned to Coyote Creek to find 500 Chinese laborers working the old claims for 10 cents a day plus rice. The miners demanded their claims be returned, and the Chinese contractor yielded. Again, small camps sprang up, including one named Goldville.

By the late 1870s placer mining had given way to more efficient hydraulic mining, bringing a whole new flood of gold seekers. Among them was the Rev. William Ruble, who arrived with his wife, sons Bill and Schuyler and their families. The Rubles were Campbellites, aka Disciples of Christ, committed to restoring an early form of Christianity that adhered to strict doctrine. Disenchanted with the evils of society, they had taken to the Oregon Trail in 1853 and landed first in Salem, where they took up farming and the nursery business.

Over the span of a dozen years the Rev. Ruble bought up the majority of mines and claims in the area. He also set up mining businesses for his sons. William and son Schuyler invented the Ruble hydraulic elevator, designed to separate coarse rock from finer material in a placer mine.

The Rev. Ruble and sons set about improving Goldville and founded it as the town of Golden in 1890, the post office opening in 1896. After building the family residence and a Campbellite church, the Rubles added a school, a general store and other homes. Theirs was a monumental effort at civilizing the area, though some miners, particularly single ones, were less enthusiastic about the mores of its founders. The Campbellites did not permit the busy saloons and brothels of other prosperous camps, nor is there a record of the town ever hosting a dance. Miners seeking such pleasures had to travel to the town of Placer, a few miles south on Graves Creek, which did a booming business in sin.

Golden itself remained relatively small, never home to more than 200 or so people, with another several hundred in the surrounding area. Despite its dearth of entertainment, the town held on for nearly 30 years, only to fade as the ore faded in value. Perhaps sensing its decline and his own, the Rev. Ruble left in 1901, his sons and their families soon following his example. The founder of Golden died in Salem in 1905.

A year later Golden school reported three dozen students in attendance. But the exodus continued, and the post office shuttered in 1920. Mining dribbled along into the mid-20th century, but the town faded into a ghost.

Today the Campbellites’ quaint and attractive 1892 Golden Church still stands. Nearby is the Rubles’ house, also built in 1892. Also surviving is a 1904 general store, an outhouse and the remains of other outbuildings, including the carriage house.

There are no extant businesses in Golden, but the church is always open. Nearby is a small cemetery, though oddly enough no residents of Golden reside in it. In fact, no one has found eternal rest there, for the little graveyard sprouted up as a small-screen stage set. In 1972 the producers of the popular Western series Gunsmoke filmed an episode in Golden, one scene requiring a cemetery, and the rest is TV history. Visitors unaware of its short history still leave coins and trinkets atop the fictitious grave markers. The town and its pretend cemetery have since served as a backdrop for other Western productions.

In the 1990s concerned residents formed the Golden Coyote Wetlands to preserve the town and adjacent creek. Owned today by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, Golden is a state heritage site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Those interested in a longer visit can stay in a nearby campground off Coyote Creek Road, which runs through town.

Despite its lack of what many miners considered “essentials,” Golden survived more than 130 years to earn protected status for coming generations. Most ghost towns of southern Oregon weren’t as fortunate, having fallen into ruin or been stamped out of existence beneath the ever rolling wheels of progress. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

By the end of the Civil War, it is estimated that surgeons on both sides had conducted roughly 60,000 amputations. With the increased number of disabled veterans, the prosthetic industry saw great advances. Many of these veterans, however, decided not to wear artificial limbs for various reasons, including not wishing to take “charity” from the government (which gave a stipend to veterans for the purchase of a prosthesis), and making their contribution to their cause more visible to the public, by pinning up an empty sleeve or trouser leg instead of hiding the injury with an artificial limb. In addition, depending on the type of injury or how the wound healed, some prosthetic limbs could be uncomfortable to wear. 

As a result, another industry sprang up that made implements for veterans who did not have a prosthesis. Veterans who had lost an arm learned to use specially designed devices with their remaining limb in order to perform everyday tasks.

One of these devices was the “One Armed Man Fork.” This knife and fork combination utensil was also given the name “knork.” While the basic design had been in existence since the 1700s, it was refined and made popular just after the Civil War. One of the companies manufacturing the knork was the Artificial Limbs & Specialties Co. of New York, which partnered with The Press Button Knife Co. to manufacture a switchblade version. The blade was enclosed and could be released by pressing a button. The blade was made of steel and the handle was aluminum. An advertisement for this device states that “a piece of meat can be cut on the plate by a rolling motion given to the knife, and the knife can then be inverted by twisting the hand and food conveyed to the mouth by means of the fork. Butter can be spread upon bread, potatoes mashed, and other services performed. Pressure applied to the press button will release the lock and the knife can be closed and carried in the pocket. Price: $2.00.”

Less elaborate styles of knorks (as shown in the photo) were also available for those on a limited budget.

Center stage in a northern Colorado museum is an unmistakable symbol of the West. Faint lettering on the driver’s box of the historic stagecoach reads U.S. Mail, attesting to its original purpose, while covering nearly every square inch of its woodwork are scrawled signatures, hinting at its raucous second career in Wild West shows. Among the signatures is that of down-home humorist Will Rogers.

While it can prove challenging to chisel facts from Western lore, this coach and its storied past endures, thanks to Frank C. Miller Jr. The sharpshooter turned Wild West showman once described how he acquired the coach:

“In the late ’80s and ’90s it was on the ‘Bill’ show (meaning the Buffalo Bill circus) on his many tours, but as it became so old that it would not stand up under the hard knocks required of ‘Indian holdups,’ it was traded for a more modern model. I fought hundreds of Indian battles from the top of the coach myself on the shows. European royalty rode in the coach, as well as Teddy Roosevelt and President [William Howard] Taft, and I believe you will still find Will Rogers’ name written on the back.…When the new coach was put into use, I bought the old coach from Cody and sent it home and have owned it ever since.”

Built in 1874 by the Abbot-Downing Co. of Concord, N.H., the light coach is more correctly called a mud wagon. A basic, unglamorous conveyance, it was made to transport passengers and mail over rough-hewn trails. Given the lack of a paper trail tying the wagon to either Miller or Cody, it is difficult to verify Frank’s story. He may have glossed over the facts, but a kernel or two of truth remains.

A renowned marksman, trick shooter and roper, Miller claimed to have toured with Cody in Europe, though which tour is unknown. As he was 40 years younger than Buffalo Bill, Frank probably would have been too young to join any but one of Cody’s last European tours, between 1902 and ’06. The mud wagon would have been retired by that time, as period advertising featured the Wild West’s more elegant Concord stage, with its higher profile and oval body. Dubbed the “Deadwood Stagecoach,” the latter is on exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.

Franklin Carl Miller Jr. was the third of four children born to immigrant parents. His Danish father and Swedish mother had independently followed the promise of gold to the north-central Colorado mining settlement of Black Hawk, where they married in 1876, later moving to the growing frontier town of Fort Collins, where Frank was born on May 11, 1886. The Millers prospered, running a saloon, a mercantile store and, later, a garage.

Taking a page from Cody, showman Frank became a skilled self-promoter. Local newspapers are peppered with notices of his performances, dinner guests and encounters with notable figures, including a visit to Cody’s foster son, Johnny Baker. Miller worked for Zack Mulhall’s Wild West show and headlined with the Irwin Brothers’ Cheyenne Frontier Days Wild West, which billed him as the “Most Marvelous Marksman in the United States.” When that show closed in 1917, Frank bought a ranch northwest of Fort Collins and married Florence “Peggy” Leedle, a gal who loved the spotlight as much as he did. She performed on horseback, crooning songs, and they adopted a son, Franklin, who went by “Teddy.” Naming their spread Trail’s End, the Millers developed it into a dude ranch, offering fishing, Western entertainment and a menagerie of trained wild animals, including bears and wolves. Newspapers announced regular visits from such celebrities as humorist Rogers, circus performer and actor Fred Stone, sharpshooter Captain A.H. Hardy and novelist Rex Beach.

Miller held performances both on the ranch and in neighboring towns. Central to his show was the mud wagon, which he rode in parades and holdup re-enactments. When the wagon deteriorated, he had it loaded onto a flatbed trailer and performed from atop that.

Just when his show seemed to peak, Miller’s life went into a tailspin. First, wife Peggy left him. Next, at the tail end of the Great Depression, he lost Trail’s End to bankruptcy. Finally, the unthinkable happened. In 1946 son Teddy, who’d joined the Army, was killed in a motor pool fire while stationed in occupied Berlin. He was 19.

It was at that low point the mud wagon, among Teddy’s favorite family keepsakes, took on new meaning. As a memorial to his son and the six other soldiers killed in the fire, a grief-stricken Miller presented the coach to the city. It was initially housed in a small purpose-built brick building with a viewing window.

Today, most of the 150-plus visible signatures on the coach are difficult to read or trace, and many bearing earlier dates are questionable. While there is no way to verify the validity of Rogers’ signature on the upper left rear panel, neither can it be discounted. Miller and the humorist certainly knew each other. Most other signatures appear to be those of tourists or perhaps Trail’s End visitors or show hands. Most date from between the 1910s and ’40s and represent citizens of states across the West and Midwest.

Miller lived out his life in Fort Collins’ Linden Hotel, across the street from the red sandstone building that once housed the family saloon and store. In exchange for his room and board he painted Western scenes and visited schools, regaling young listeners with stories of the Old West and his encounters with Cody and Rogers. On Nov. 21, 1953, Miller, 67, died of a heart attack.

In the mid-1990s Miller’s memorial mud wagon underwent conservation. It has since been housed at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, where it symbolizes the many facets of the Old West. With its ties to mail and passenger service, Wild West performances, and perhaps even showman Cody and humorist Rogers, the mud wagon has gained the celebrity Miller had long envisioned. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

A historian with a brush and a palette, David Wright considers it his mission to depict America’s frontier era with precision. “We historical artists march to a different drummer,” explains Wright [davidwrightart.com] from his home studio in Gallatin, Tenn. “We tell a story. It’s our obligation to future generations to paint our subjects with as much accuracy as possible.”

Wright’s insistence on authenticity has found him riding Wyoming’s Wind River Range on horseback and hunting moose on Canada’s Aulneau Peninsula dressed in brain-tanned buckskins and bearing a frontiersman’s guns and accoutrements. “Such experiences enable me to see things from a much closer perspective than if I were just using past masters like Alfred Jacob Miller, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer as references,” he explains. “Landscapes, rifles, bead and quillwork or Indian tattoos—I want it all to be historically dead-on.” His quest draws him to museums and archives, while his home reference library is also extensive.

“The cliché ‘The more I learn, the less I know’ really is true,” he says. “As long as I am a student of history, I’ll never quit learning.”

Rosine, Ken.—the birthplace of Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass”—was a country hamlet when Wright was born there in 1942. Idyllic remembrances of flint ridges, cornfields and tobacco rows flood his memories. “My first interests were hunting and fishing and have been all my life.” Always he drew, aided by his mother’s creativity.

“Mom would lay a sheet of paper on her lap and draw,” Wright recalls, then she would take his hand and trace the sketches. At age 9 he won a local art show. After high school he took classes at a Nashville advertising school, then studied watercolor in Italy. The latter move, ironically, kindled his interest in the frontier when he spied a 1777 French musket for sale, bought it and fired it, the flintlock’s smoke and flash awakening latent nostalgia.

By 1962 Wright was back Stateside, drawing for the Nashville Banner and Nashville Tennessean until drafted into service in Vietnam. In 1964 and ’65 he flew more than 100 missions as the door gunner on Bell UH-1 Iroquois (aka “Huey”) helicopters. While in-country he sketched everyone from schoolchildren to Montagnard highlanders and soldiers—though never combat scenes. “Life changes your outlook on things,” the artist says.

On returning home, Wright resumed commercial artwork while freelancing on the side. He experienced another awakening when he joined the rugged fraternity of the American Mountain Men, further sparking his interest in the fur trade as he dressed the part and learned frontier skills.

“Utilizing the day’s firearms and tools gives me an edge in seeing what the lives of our frontier forebears were like,” he explains. “I know what it’s like to build a cabin, split rails, hunt with a flintlock and be freezing in buckskins. I know how wool feels in a snowstorm and how wet leather clings to you.”

Wright’s first mountain man portrait, for Gray Stone Press, sold out. Encouraged, he shifted his focus to portrayals of heroic frontier figures. By 1978 he was following his own muses and garnering national acclaim.

The Eiteljorg Museum, in Indianapolis, has devoted an expansive retrospective to Wright’s work and recognized him with several awards. The Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Ga., named him an artist of excellence. His art also hangs in Nashville’s Tennessee State Museum and the visitor center of Kentucky’s Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The Hamilton Collection commissioned Wright to render a series of four collector plates depicting American Indian women. “It is pleasing to be accepted in such a widespread market,” says the artist.

Still, every season finds Wright in the woods, sometimes alone, sometimes with kindred spirits, reliving some footnote of frontier history to preserve in photos, sketches and mental images to inform his paintings. “Every day is a blessing,” says the artist turned mountain man. “Make the most of it.”

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

If you ask me, World War II’s coolest airplane is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It looks like something a kid might have doodled in a notebook while daydreaming in class. I became enthralled with the airplane in junior high when I read a book by Martin Caidin called Fork-tailed Devil: The P-38. I also made the Revell model kit of the Lightning flown by Richard Bong, America’s highest-scoring ace with 40 victories. I believed then that the P-38 was the war’s greatest fighter, but the more I read, the more I realized that the North American P-51 Mustang probably made a bigger impact. The P-38 was a much more complicated beast, and it experienced all sorts of mechanical issues in both theaters of the war, while the single-engine Mustang proved to be a relatively trouble-free “Big Friend” to American bombers over Europe.

In the Spring 2024 issue of World War II we told the story of a P-38 pilot, Laurence Elroy “Scrappy” Blumer, who flew in the European Theater. While the Lightning did perform valuable service there, it really made its reputation in the Pacific, where, among other things, P-38 pilots flew one of the most amazing missions of the war. On April 18, 1943, 16 Lightnings of the 339th Fighter Squadron under the command of Major John W. Mitchell flew out of Guadalcanal to shoot down Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack. They knew where to find the admiral because the United States had cracked a coded Japanese message that detailed his plans. And find him they did, after Mitchell led them on a circuitous 600-mile course over the ocean, guided only by his wristwatch, a newly installed navy compass, and dead reckoning. Amazingly, they arrived just as Yamamoto was descending over Bougainville Island to land in his Mitsubishi G4M1 “Betty” bomber on an adjoining island. (The deteriorating wreckage of the admiral’s Betty still lies in the jungle on Bougainville.)

Two pilots, Tom Lanphier and his wingman, Rex Barber, were later awarded a half credit each for the admiral’s Betty, but Lanphier publicly claimed he was the pilot who alone shot down Yamamoto’s airplane. Barber later came to believe that he deserved sole credit. When Barber contested the credit allocation in 1991 before a U.S. Air Force board, I wrote a magazine article about the mission and the ensuing controversy. I got to meet and interview Barber and Mitchell (Lanphier had died in 1987) and I did phone interviews with all the other surviving members of the mission, known as Operation Vengeance. It was quite a thrill to talk to these men and hear their personal recollections of this historic incident. I came to believe that Barber was probably correct, but the board decreed that there just wasn’t enough evidence to change anything after the passage of so many years. To this day Barber and Lanphier share the credit for shooting down Yamamoto.

I still treasure the memories of interacting with these men who had become part of history. I also treasure P-38 Lightning, a book I own by writer Jeffrey L. Ethell and illustrator Rikyu Watanabe. It’s a beautiful volume, with lots of foldout illustrations of the airplane, but my copy is special because it includes an inscription and signature by John Mitchell himself. I think that’s pretty cool—just like the P-38. 

Who was Etta Place?

She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But little is known about her origins and less about what happened to her after Sundance and Butch were killed in South America.

Larry Pointer, author of the 1977 book In Search of Butch Cassidy, wrote that Etta’s identity is “one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.”

Place was likely born in 1878 and as an adult was described as having “classic good looks,” with a nice smile and a refined bearing, a description confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh—some say the couple’s wedding picture—taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Young’s photo studio at 815 Broadway in New York City. She spoke in an educated manner and knew how to handle a rifle.

She had met Longabaugh a year or two earlier and may have been involved in some of the Wild Bunch robberies, scoping out a bank in advance or holding the group’s horses during a heist. But the New York City picture, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 book The Last Outlaws, “hints of proper high teas, Central Park carriage rides and evenings at the theater.”

Even her name is probably false. “Place” was the maiden name of Longabaugh’s mother, Annie, and Sundance sometimes used the alias “Harry Place.” It has been suggested she took to using the first name “Etta” in South America after Spanish speakers mispronounced “Ethel,” which may or may not have been her actual first name. The Pinkertons variously referred to her as Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.

In a letter to friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang’s June 2, 1899, train robbery near Wilcox, Wyo., Longabaugh enclosed a copy of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his wife and a “Texas lady.” The Pinkertons, who spent a lot of time and effort pursuing the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which fits with her noted skills with horses and firearms. In 1906 William Pinkerton, his detectives having traced Place to Fort Worth, asked that city’s police chief to “find out who this woman is.”

Based on the theory Etta’s real name was Ethel and she hailed from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel born in or around Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and ’80. Over time she eliminated each as a contender for the youthful Etta Place.

Except one.

That one was Ethel Bishop, who resided with four other women in what was probably a brothel near notorious madam Fannie Porter’s San Antonio pleasure palace, a known Wild Bunch hangout. Another oft repeated story suggests Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes Place was the daughter of one Emily Jane Place of Oswego, N.Y., who was related somehow to Sundance’s mother. Still others have suggested Etta was in fact Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch associate known to have vied with sister Josie for Cassidy’s affection.

Could Bassett have won Sundance’s attentions as well?

Probably not. By 1903 Bassett had married Hirum “Hi” Henry Bernard and that same year was arrested (and later acquitted) on a charge of cattle rustling while Place was in South America.

On Feb. 20, 1901, after posing for their portrait, Place and Longabaugh boarded HMS Herminius in New York, disembarking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 23. Traveling with them was Cassidy, using the alias “James Ryan” and claiming to be Etta’s brother. In 1902 Place and Longabaugh returned briefly Stateside for Etta to seek treatment of an unknown disease, and again in 1904, when Pinkerton operatives believed she visited family in Texas. In 1906 Place returned Stateside for keeps, possibly due to her illness. Sundance returned to South America, where most historians believe he and Butch died in a 1908 shootout with soldiers in Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Etta vanished.

Several researchers have suggested she became a brothel operator in Fort Worth under the name Eunice Gray. But in an article in the October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell noted she’d seen an alleged portrait of the young Gray, and the woman in that photo definitely “was not the same woman seen in the famous New York City portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.”

In 1909 an unidentified woman fitting Etta’s description asked a U.S. diplomatic official in South America for help in obtaining Longabaugh’s death certificate. But she never returned to his office. At most, however, the incident only proves Place was alive in 1909.

Other theories have since surfaced: that Etta was the wife of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she relocated to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived happily ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was either killed during a domestic dispute or took her own life in Argentina in the 1920s. In 1970 Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betensen, told Los Angeles Times reporters that her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as thought, and that Etta had lived out her days as a schoolteacher in Denver.

In the end, speculation, guesswork and coincidence aside, we only know for certain she was a pretty woman who once carried on a romance with the Sundance Kid and then disappeared from the pages of history.

Nothing more.

To this day similarly incredible tales circulate about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stories relating their escape from the Bolivian gunfight and their subsequent lives of anonymity in various locales out West or in South America.

Like the theories surrounding Etta Place, though, they are unsubstantiated and probably false.

But tempting. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

“It was either a good line, or a bad one, and, whichever it was, I took it on my own responsibility….I took up that line because it enabled me to hold commanding ground, which, if the enemy had been allowed to take—as they would have taken it if I had not occupied it in force—would have rendered our position on the left untenable; and, in my judgment, would have turned the fortunes of the day hopelessly against us.” So testified Union Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles on February 26, 1864, to the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War about the controversial decision he made, against orders, to reposition his 3rd Corps at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

As a politician, Sickles understood the importance of getting out in front of a story and shaping how it was perceived. In his view, had he not moved his corps to its advanced position, the battle likely would have been lost—a narrative he pushed on more than one front. Sickles, whose left leg was shattered by a cannonball and amputated during that day’s fighting, eagerly shared his version of the battle with President Abraham Lincoln while recovering from his wound, as well as anyone else in Congress he thought might be of help, particularly those who served on the Conduct of the War committee.

It was no accident Sickles was the first officer to testify before the committee about Gettysburg. In March 1864, he was likely the author, or at least the source, of an article about the battle in The New York Herald, under the pen name “Historicus,” which essentially repeated Sickles’ points from his testimony before the committee.

At the time, Sickles was unsuccessful in his effort to have Maj. Gen. George Meade removed as commander of the Army of the Potomac and for his personal return to the army, which Meade had blocked. But he was successful in muddying the waters of truth and in casting doubt upon Meade’s generalship at Gettysburg. This has echoed through the decades to today, where people still fiercely debate the wisdom or folly of Sickles’ advance, and view Meade’s generalship through the lens Dan Sickles shaped.

In considering the position Sickles occupied and the one Meade ordered him to be in, it is worth pausing a moment to consider the two men’s military pedigree, for in this area they were not equals. Sickles had no antebellum military experience. He was commissioned a colonel on June 26, 1861, principally because he was a well-known Democrat who supported the war and could assist in the raising of troops.

Sickles’ nomination to brigadier general in September 1861 was held up for months, and although he had command of a brigade, when it shipped out for the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, he remained in Washington to fight the political battles needed to secure that promotion. He succeeded but missed the key Battle of Williamsburg, although he was with the brigade at Fair Oaks (Seven Pines) on May 31–June 1, 1862.

Sickles saw further action during the Seven Days’ Battles starting in late June, but then returned home on a recruiting mission, which resulted in him missing both the Second Bull Run and Antietam campaigns.

When Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside assumed command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, Sickles was bizarrely placed in command of the 3rd Corps’ 2nd Division despite his lack of military training and combat experience. His division was lightly engaged at Fredericksburg, however, suffering only about 100 casualties.

Then, in yet another questionable military decision, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker handed Sickles command of the 3rd Corps upon replacing Burnside atop the Army of the Potomac in January 1863.

In describing the general’s performance at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May, Sickles’ biographer, James Hessler, wrote: “[H]e fought aggressively, but demonstrated questionable military judgment.” Shortly after that battle, Sickles left the army again, claiming a shell burst had damaged his health. He did not return until June 28, the day Meade replaced Hooker as the army’s commander.

There is no question Sickles was a brave soldier, but he was a corps commander with relatively little experience who had demonstrated no aptitude to read terrain well. Meade, on the other hand, was a West Pointer with 28 years’ service in the Army, including as a topographical engineer during the Mexican War, where his job was to read terrain. Meade had commanded, with great skill, units from brigade to corps in the Army of the Potomac in every major battle in the Eastern Theater.

When Meade decided where to place each of his corps on July 2, he relied on an early morning reconnaissance he had conducted. Meade sent verbal orders to Sickles early, probably about 5–5:30 a.m., to relieve a 12th Corps division on the northern slope of Little Round Top and to extend his right to connect with the 2nd Corps. Sickles never visited Little Round Top that we know of, and he would later claim the 12th Corps division had no defined position, which was untrue, for some of his troops did in fact spell relief for part of the 12th Corps command.

At 11 a.m., after riding to Meade’s headquarters, Sickles told his commander he was unsure of the position he had been ordered to occupy. Meade reiterated “that his right was to rest upon General [Winfield S.] Hancock’s left; and his left was to extend to the Round Top mountain, plainly visible, if it was practicable to occupy it.”

What then of the advanced position to which Sickles subsequently moved without orders? The reasons why Meade had not deployed the 3rd Corps here soon became abundantly clear for several reasons: 1) the advanced position upset the defensive arrangement of the army commander; 2) it was beyond support distance of the 2nd Corps, or any of the army’s other corps; 3) Sickles did not have enough men to assume the front he chose; 4) he left Little Round Top, the key terrain on the southern end of the field, undefended; 5) the salient at the Peach Orchard was easily hit by a crossfire of Confederate artillery; 6) if the 3rd Corps was driven from its position, it would have to retreat over open ground, likely leading to heavy casualties; and 7) contrary to Sickles’ claim, Meade’s assigned position for the 3rd Corps was a superior one.

To answer Sickles’ rhetorical question of whether his line was a good or bad one: no, it was bad—and it nearly led to the army’s defeat. Colonel E. Porter Alexander was one Confederate certain the battle was won when he placed his guns in the Peach Orchard, with the 3rd Corps driven back. But “when I got to take in all the topography, I was very much disappointed,” he recalled. “It was not the enemy’s main line we had broken. That loomed up near 1,000 yards beyond us, a ridge giving good cover behind it & endless fine positions for batteries.”

It was the original position Meade had assigned Sickles to defend.

Scott Hartwig writes from the crossroads of Gettysburg.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Adding insult to injury, a Pawnee scout for the U.S. Army shot in 1869 by a member of his own command was for decades denied a marker reflecting his Medal of Honor for the same action. What makes the oversight worse is that Sergeant Mad Bear (Co-Rux-Te-Chod-Ish) was the first American Indian ever awarded his adoptive nation’s highest honor. Thanks to the diligent research of Wild West contributor Jeff Broome, the scout may finally have his day in the sun. 

In the summer of 1869 Major Frank North and his company of Pawnee scouts were in pursuit of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Chief Tall Bull along Kansas’ Republican River. On July 8, according to Mad Bear’s citation, the sergeant “ran out from the command in pursuit of a dismounted [Cheyenne]” when badly wounded by the bullet fired by a fellow scout. But when North’s brother Luther wrote a memoir mentioning his own stint as a commander of the scouts, he recorded Mad Bear’s name as Traveling Bear, and the confusion lingered. 

Enter Broome. During research toward his 2003 book Dog Soldier Justice, relating the captivity ordeal of Susanna Alderdice amid the same conflict, he discovered the misattribution of Mad Bear’s medal. The Medal of Honor Historical Society of the United States notified Veterans Affairs of the error, and the latter ultimately concurred. A private marker stands atop Mad Bear’s grave at the North Indian Cemetery in Pawnee, Okla. The Pawnee Nation must first remove it before the VA will place a military marker designating him as a Medal of Honor recipient. So it appears Mad Bear’s luck is about to change.

The “Greatest Generation” is renowned for military heroism during World War II. But before this famed demographic signed up to fight for Uncle Sam, many were shaped by a childhood spent amid World War I.

It’s not surprising, then, that the First World War instilled an entire generation with a brand of patriotism that could prompt risking everything to preserve the American dream. That exact experience is currently showcased in the National World War I Museum’s exhibit “The Little War,” an exploration of childhood between 1914 and 1918.

The exhibit’s items, according to Specialist Curator Natalie Walker, incited questions for museum staff about war’s impact on children, both during World War I and throughout subsequent conflicts.

“[It was] the literature that was being produced for children at the time, the toys, the games they were playing — Allies versus the Central Powers,” Walker told Military Times. “It made it that much easier to embrace the Second World War just 20 to 25 years later.”

Those who produced children’s literature, toys and costumes of the time presented the war in a way that would remove fear factors. In doing so, the lens through which World War I was viewed by children was one of adventure, where morally superior participants always emerged victorious.

It was natural, then, for young Americans raised in such an environment to not only be willing to serve if called upon, but do so excitedly — even subconsciously — as they deployed like the heroes they once read about.

“[The literature] beat it in in terms of good versus evil … to instill these ideas of patriotism, being a good citizen, and fighting for your country,” Walker noted. “But these kinds of things also trivialized violence and war. [Children are] playing from the safety of their backyards and all of this literature talks about a Boy Scout who goes overseas, and he escapes every battle and conflict unscathed. … They didn’t want to scare children. … At the same time, they’re not really telling the truth.”

Some of the most prominent items in the exhibit’s collection include illustrated literature, children’s soldier and nurse costumes, ration books and nighttime prayer missals. Much of the media at the time, meanwhile, dehumanized the enemy in the eyes of children.

“One of my favorite pieces is called ‘Nursery Rhymes for Fighting Times,’” Walker said. “It’s a book that was published in 1914 in Great Britain, and it takes popular nursery rhymes of the time and reworks them as a form of propaganda that really demonizes and dehumanizes Germany.

“There were no holds barred when they were creating this stuff. … If you’re a little kid, and you’re reading about the Kaiser, who’s going to come and bomb your town and hurt people you love, that’s a scary thing,” she added. “If you’re in middle school, maybe you’re reading this and getting angry. If you’re in high school, you’re probably ready to go enlist.”

The double-edge sword, however, is that many children were vital to the efforts of their countries during both world wars. Even simply by contributing to work around the house, Walker said, many were being molded for duty.

Given that these phenomena continue into today’s conflicts, Walker said she hopes the exhibit will spur conversations between children and adults.

“I want people to walk in this exhibit and get the sense that children had an active, vital role, and here’s what they did,” she said.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Not so long ago, I had an extraordinary experience. I sat in the pilot’s seat of an Avro Lancaster, a British four-engine heavy bomber from World War II, gazing through the windshield at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, England. The four Merlin engines were whirring and, when I felt ready, I allowed my right hand to drop down to the four throttles, pushed them forward, and then, feeling the metal of the control column in my hands and breathing in deeply that curious smell of oil, metal, and rubber, I watched as the big bomber started to thunder down the runway.

I was there because of an email that pinged into my inbox one day. Had I met Andy Sturgess, the writer wanted to know? If not, I really should, because Andy had created an actual Lancaster cockpit and fuselage on his farm and turned it into a simulator. I simply had to see it to believe it, my correspondent said. Well, truth be told, I was busy writing a book at the time and, although the suggestion piqued my interest, I didn’t get around to following up on it until a few months later.

Andy and his family live on a small farm only a dozen miles from me here in southwest England. As I turned off the main road and down a narrow track to the farm, I started wondering if I were in the right place. I was, though, and after a chat and a mug of tea, Andy led me out of the back of the farmhouse and toward an unremarkable modern barn. The moment he opened the door, however, I was transported into a different world. Steps led up to a briefing room—an office in which every artifact, from desk to telephone to maps, radios, paint, and a hundred other items, was historically perfect for an office on a wartime RAF base. Next door was another room in which there was a fully functioning Link Trainer, a primitive but still surprisingly effective wartime RAF simulator for pilot training. 

These two rooms were remarkable enough, but nothing had quite prepared me for what followed as Andy took me out into the corridor and opened another door. This led straight into the fuselage of an actual Lancaster. I saw the wireless operator’s desk, then the navigator’s desk. Everything was perfect, down to the low red light over the navigator’s desk, as well as the map, instruments, and flashlight. Beyond was the flight engineer’s dickey seat and the cockpit, and beyond that the curved windshield, a screen so large that all one could see out of it is what a pilot would have seen. Incredibly, every one of the controls in the cockpit was linked to a computer and the screen in front. That included throttles, control column, and all the dials and switches. For a moment, I just sat, open-mouthed, in a state of complete wonderment. Of course, I’d known Andy had created some kind of Lancaster simulator but not in my wildest imaginings had I expected the Aladdin’s cave in which I now found myself. 

It has taken Andy some 20 years to create this. Almost every part of the Lancaster is original and the few things he could not source he has made himself. His simulation is 100 percent accurate and laid out as a wartime Lancaster, whereas the Lanc owned by Battle of Britain Memorial Flight (BBMF), the only one flying in the United Kingdom, is actually post-war. On the night of May 16-17, 2023, Andy, with the help of a former BBMF navigator, used his simulator to refly the Dam Buster’s Raid along the same timeline as the actual Operation Chastise from exactly 80 years earlier. “We got there to within two minutes of the original lead crews,” Andy told me. “It was a very special but humbling experience.” It was a very special and humbling experience for me, too, to sit at the controls of a real Lancaster. What an absolutely extraordinary thing Andy has created. It is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.

What he has created allows anyone to get as close as humanly possible to experiencing what it was like to actually fly a wartime Lancaster, and that’s quite something. Half closing my eyes, I really was transported back to 1943. I think Andy Sturgess is something of a heritage hero. 

On Jan. 30, 1968, all U.S. combat units in Vietnam went to alert status when the Viet Cong violated the Tet Cease-fire by attacking Da Nang and eleven other cities in the center of the country. The 9th Infantry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry (Mechanized) deployed to overwatch positions around the sprawling American logistics base at Long Binh, which was also the headquarters of U.S. II Field Forces. Early the following morning, Jan. 31, the rest of the coordinated VC/NVA attacks erupted countrywide. The 2-47’s B Company, along with the Battalion Scout Platoon, led by 1st Lt. Brice Barnes, moved into the Long Binh base perimeter when it came under direct attack. Just after they arrived, VC sappers using satchel charges blew part of the American ammo dump.  

Widows’ Village, located directly across Highway 15 from II Field Forces headquarters, was a motley collection of shacks occupied by the widows and families of ARVN soldiers. When a company-sized VC unit attacked through the hamlet on their way to assault the II Field Forces compound, a platoon of four M-113 armored personnel carriers (APC) from B Company was sent across the road to block the attack. But the American platoon immediately ran into fierce resistance. The platoon lost two of its APCs and took heavy casualties, including the platoon leader. Ordered forward by the 2-47th’s battalion commander, Barnes left two of his APCs to provide security for the battalion command post and took his other eight M-113s across the road and into the village. Assuming command of all the American troops in Widows’ Village, he organized and led the counterattack.  

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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According to his Distinguished Service Cross citation: “Repeatedly disregarding his safety, [Barnes] braved withering fire to direct civilians in the battle area to safety. Bullets struck all around him, but he refused to take cover and led a house-to-house sweep, personally destroying a recoilless rifle and an automatic weapon position.” In the course of the battle the scouts rescued more than 50 civilians and led them to safety. At one point Barnes himself ran directly into enemy fire to rescue an old woman and two small children. As the heavy fighting progressed and the scouts were starting to run low on ammo, Barnes was able to attract the attention of two AH-1 Cobra gunships orbiting low overhead. Since he did not have the radio frequencies or call signs for the gunships, he had to stand exposed on top of one of his APCs and use hand-and-arm signals to direct the gunship fire against the dug-in VC positions.  

After Widows’ Village was secured and the Scout Platoon was resupplied with ammo, the platoon was ordered to proceed two miles west to Bien Hoa City, where the 2-47th’s C Company had been heavily engaged all day. But they never got there. The Scout Platoon ran into a heavy ambush while passing through the village of Ho Nai on Highway 1. The murderous crossfire by heavy machine guns and RPGs broke Barnes’ column of eight APCs into three groups. During the fighting Barnes was hit by fragmentation from an RPG round that struck close by. Meanwhile, he was able to call in support from two UH-1B gunships to finally clear the ambush.  

For the combined fights at Widows’ Village and Ho Nai, Brice Barnes was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Later during his first tour in Vietnam Barnes commanded Headquarters Company of the 2-47th. During his second tour in Vietnam he commanded Company A, 5th Battalion, 12th Infantry, 199th Infantry Brigade. After he left active duty, Barnes continued to serve in the Texas Army National Guard, where in later years he commanded a mechanized infantry battalion. He finished his military career as a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. From 2010 to 2012 he served as the Honorary Colonel of the 47th Infantry Regiment.  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Those who study warfare will inevitably run into the so-called “great man theory” of history. Simply put, it denotes the study of individual leaders and their abilities. In earlier times, scholars adhered to this school of thought as explaining the entirety of military history to the myopic exclusion of all other factors.

Over time the “great man theory” became less in vogue, and in the present day is looked upon by many scholars as nonsense; they choose to interpret military history purely through the lenses of more abstract factors such as society, technology, gender or economy, for example.

Give the ‘Great Men’ A Chance

While it goes without saying that military leaders can neither exist nor function in a void of social, technological or economic factors, I feel it is worth pointing out that the “great men of history”—notable male leaders, that is—deserve a fairer hearing.

Today, historical focus on notable men tends to be regarded in a dismissive manner, like something old-fashioned or awkward. It seems to me that this is partly due to the fact that the leaders being studied are men, and mostly because many people have apparently lost belief in the potency of individual human achievement. New trends in scholarship suggest that there has been too much focus on men in war history altogether. That is a gross oversimplification. While it is true that the roles of women have been overlooked, that does not make the achievements of men in military history any less deserving of attention.

Importance of Leadership

What is manifest in the lives of the “great men” is a quality universal to all human beings: the power of the individual to change world events. Social factors and technology make for interesting studies but these arenas do not shape themselves. People need leaders, and leaders don’t simply materialize out of nowhere. They come from among us. It is worth looking at who they were, what they did and how, and above all, whether we consider them to have been effective or not. Only by doing so can we educate ourselves.

Why is such an education important? The world is suffering from an acute leadership crisis. I believe there is currently a dearth of good male role models for young people. This deficit is real and troubling. However, there is another critical factor producing this discord. There is a complete lack of focus and discussion in society on the qualities that make good leaders and on the true potential of individuals.

Political and popular culture today encourage us to think in terms of groups with rigidly codified principles of belonging that seem to predestine our behavior, instead of encouraging us to recognize our individual ability to choose our own destiny and change the world around us. 

Need For Future Leaders

This magazine contains a diverse array of military leaders. They were and remain controversial. Whether we decide to admire or dislike them, their actions are worth studying. We at Military History Quarterly (MHQ) invest time in evaluating leadership. In my book “Bernard Montgomery’s Art of War,” and series about Erwin Rommel, I analyze these two battlefield captains. My colleague Jerry Morelock has delivered a masterful study of military leadership in his excellent book, “Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S. Army’s Greatest Battle,” which tackles competent and incompetent leadership in one of the U.S. Army’s most complex battles. We believe these studies will be of use to future leaders.

It is a fallacy to think that the destinies of “great men” of military history, or leaders of any kind, are written in the stars and that we who read about them are mere mortals who have no hope of ever changing the world for the better. I close with an excerpt from the poem, “The Man From the Crowd,” by Sam Walter Foss. The poem is worth reading in whole; in it, Foss illustrates how people tend to fall into set patterns of behavior, while a leader will show willingness to break the mold and stand out to meet a challenge or fulfill a call to action.

He reminds us that the world needs great men. So let us not hesitate to continue to study and reflect on the lives, strengths, weaknesses and decisions of notable men in military history. 

                     
“Men seem as alike as the leaves on the trees,
As alike as the bees in a swarming of bees;
And we look at the millions that make up the state
All equally little and equally great,
And the pride of our courage is cowed.
Then Fate calls for a man who is larger than men—
There’s a surge in the crowd—there’s a movement—and then
There arises a man that is larger than men—
And the man comes up from the crowd.…

And where is the man who comes up from the throng
Who does the new deed and who sings the new song,
And makes the old world as a world that is new?
And who is the man? It is you! It is you!” 

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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It’s about time we get to know Gerald Ford. We know his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who handed his vice president the presidency by resigning during the Watergate proceedings in 1974. We know the man who defeated him in the presidential election two years later, Jimmy Carter, and the man who in turn defeated Carter, Ronald Reagan, and went on to redefine the Republican Party.  

Ford has been left to us as the bumbler from Michigan who stumbled into the Oval Office for a brief stint, pardoned his shamed former boss just to please the Republican Party, and then pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers.  

The historian and biographer Richard Norton Smith is trying to change that impression. He spent 10 years researching and studying the life and presidency of Gerald Ford, culling from numerous documents not previously available and conducting 170 personal interviews, including enough personal discussions with Ford himself that Ford asked him to deliver the eulogy at his funeral.  

The conclusion of that effort is An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, the 832-page book published in 2023 that aims to recast the image of modern America’s accidental commander in chief from a punch line into a respectable Oval Office alumnus.  

What would you say Gerald Ford is best known for?

There’s my generation: mention Gerald Ford and they’re as likely to think of Chevy Chase impersonating him on Saturday Night Live. It was a proxy. It wasn’t just physically clumsy. It was that Ford was intellectually deficient. That that was the implication. I don’t think he felt defensive about any of that. The one thing that really bothered him was the notion popular in some quarters that he was a party hack, that he was just a party guy. He knew that the first line of his historical obituary would revolve around his unelected status as vice president taking over as president after Richard Nixon resigned, and that the second line would include his pardon of Nixon for involvement in any covering up of the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Then there was Ford’s conditional amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, which happened about three weeks before.

How are these takes on Ford unfair?

Ford played football at a national level at the University of Michigan and yet finished in the top third of his class, a feat that he repeated at Yale Law School while simultaneously working full time as an athletic coach. And by the way, the clumsy reputation, you know, the man falling down the steps of Air Force One. It was a football injury. That literally haunted him.   As for the pardon of Nixon, there are all sorts of criticisms that could be made. Probably, strategically, Ford had very few options other than to do what he did, but how he did it and when he did it, that’s certainly open to criticism. I’ve always believed that one reason contributing to Ford’s precipitous decline in the polls at the time was that even conditional amnesty for the draft evaders came as such a shock to his natural constituency.  

What should Ford be known for that he may not be? Would you say he’s underrated as a president?

Certainly, in foreign policy, the Helsinki Accords, which were widely criticized from both ends of the political spectrum in 1975, are now seen very differently in light of everything that’s happened since. I think it’s a consensus that they are at the very least a major milestone on the road leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and ultimately the Soviet Union itself.  

The economy, if you look at the domestic front, economic deregulation, which is something we take for granted today. It’s hard to make Generation Y believe that there was a time, not so very long ago, in this country when the Federal government determined where planes could fly and what truckers could carry, and where you could get a home mortgage. The fact is that there has been lip service for years, particularly on the right, about deregulating the economy. For some people, that was part of a wide directive to undo or reverse the New Deal. Ford never bought into that. Ford was first of all a classic sort of Midwest right-of-center pragmatist who grew up in the shadow of the New Deal. He was part of that consensus generation that had the shared experience of the Great Depression and World War II.  

The common perception may be that Ford lucked into his job. Did he deserve it? Was it something he aspired to?

He sure didn’t think of it that way. He never wanted to be president. He never wanted to be vice president. Well, no, I’ll take that back. He did want to be vice president, in 1960, years before he became one. Because he had proved to be such a vote getter early in his career, he was approached repeatedly about running for governor of Michigan or the Senate seat. He was offered an appointment to the Senate seat in 1966 by Governor George Romney. But he wasn’t interested in the Senate or being governor. He wanted to be Speaker of the House.  

After he left the presidency, I think he felt a degree of guilt, particularly the burden that in some way his absences and all the additional demands placed on his wife, Betty, contributed in some ways to her problems. Now we know that much about alcoholism is genetic. Her father was an alcoholic. She had a brother who was also an alcoholic. Clearly there was evidence that she was vulnerable.  

And she basically raised the kids, as he made it very clear. By the way, he said more than once in his later years that he thought when the history books were written, she, her impact, her contributions to the culture, would outweigh his own. I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate, but… Most people who become president want to be president to the exclusion of almost everything else, and that’s what makes him unique, because he never wanted to be president.  

Kristie Miller, author of Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson’s First Ladies, wrote of An Ordinary Man that “Rare is the history book that rewrites history. This is one.” How might you agree or disagree with that assessment?

I certainly didn’t say, OK, I’m going to sit down and write a work of revision. The thought never occurred to me. If people choose to reinterpret their take on history as a result, that’s up to them. I mean that people could draw their own conclusions. I’ve spent 40 years at this now, and I’ve always tried as hard as I could to avoid being a special pleader, and that means trying to present both sides, if not more than two sides, to most issues and the personalities that deal with them. I thought long and hard before doing this, and it wasn’t that I ever doubted, seriously, whether I could be objective, whatever that means—detached, critical. I remember something the great Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Kennerly said to me, that if you’re not critical, you’re not credible, and I believe that very, very much.  

So this ordinary man of your title—underrated, unappreciated, and oft-forgotten—turns out to be a bit of an extraordinary president. How should we remember Gerald Ford?

I think his presidency is much less of a coda than it is a curtain raiser. It’s much more about what followed, including the Carter presidency and the Reagan presidency. One thing for which Ford gets no credit and the ’76 campaign at the height of the challenge from the right, from Ronald Reagan on the eve of the Texas primary, Ford sends Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Africa because Ford has decided to do a 180-degree shift in U.S. policy toward White minority governments, beginning in Rhodesia. He is basically sending Kissinger to let them know that their days are numbered and that the United States henceforth is embracing the notion of Black majority rule. The implications of that are enormous. And, of course, on the day of the Texas primary, he got shut out by Ronald Reagan. It was a bad night, but it doesn’t matter because we did what was right and foreign policy is not going to be determined by the Republican primary schedule. That, in a nutshell, is what makes Gerald Ford relevant, and in many ways, the kind of president we say we want. He probably is, as we said earlier, more remembered for Chevy Chase’s pratfalls than for reversing American policy toward Black Africa. But that’s why people write books.

This interview appeared in the 2024 Spring issue of American History magazine.

On a cloudless, deep-blue sky afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. He’s an 80-year-old semi-retired farmer, U.S. Army veteran, rock & roll devotee, and storyteller with a wit and sense of humor as sharp as the tip of a new bayonet.

“How are you feeling?” I ask my friend minutes after arriving at his farm office.

Aside from mourning the recent death of Barney—his nine-year-old barn cat—Ridley feels fine, a fact he attributes to “clean living and cheap beer.” He wears tan Carhartts, brown work boots, a blue-checkered shirt and, appropriately, a baseball cap with the words “Life Is Good” across the front.

Ridley’s roots run deep here in Maury County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state before the Civil War. He’s the great-great-grandnephew of Gideon Pillow, the Confederate brigadier general, Mexican War veteran, politician, lawyer and, before the war, one of the foremost slaveholders in the county. Ridley’s paternal great grandfather, who depended on mules for farming and was one of the county’s leading citizens, earned the nickname “Mule King”—Columbia, in fact, has long been touted as the “Mule Capital of the World.”

When I need my history fix and a good laugh, I visit Ridley. We’ve sat together inside magnificent St. John’s Church—a slave-constructed plantation church built under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his brothers. It stands roughly a mile and a half southwest along Mount Pleasant Pike, across the road from the mostly empty field where Polk—an Episcopalian bishop and future Confederate lieutenant general—lived in a mansion called Ashwood Hall. There, we have admired the two massive gingko trees Polk imported eons ago from Japan and have poked about what little remains of brick kitchen for the mansion, destroyed by fire in 1874 and never rebuilt.

Today, though, we will explore far more humble construction. Near Ridley’s farm office and the east fork of Greenlick Creek stand three ramshackle slave cabins. “The Quarters,” Ridley calls the property, which is owned by his daughter, who lives in New Mexico, and a friend.

“I’ll take care of this until she puts me in a nursing home,” he says, half-jokingly.

In a way, these cabins are as much a part of Ridley as the land he has farmed for decades in Columbia. As late as the 1990s, he tells me, these humble structures served as homes for poor Black farmhands and others. Many of them worked for the Ridleys.

“The woman who raised me lived here,” Ridley says as we examine one of the rickety cabins. Her name was Katie, a “wonderful” lady who had a gift for cooking fried chicken. The Ridley family employed her for more than three decades.

At another cabin yards away, ancient white paint clings to exposed exterior logs. Four modern wooden posts strain to prop up its porch overhang above two large, well-worn walkway stones. On an exterior wall, a half-dozen old hangers dangle from a rusty nail. Above us, a corrugated tin roof keeps nature at bay.

“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” Ridley says.

What a contrast these antebellum structures make with Clifton Place, the brick manor house on the hill 750 yards away. In rich late-fall sunlight, the mansion almost seems to glow. Peek through trees from the road leading to Ridley’s farm office and you’ll spot its imposing Ionic columns and impressive limestone porch.

From 1839 until the early years of the war, when the U.S. Army confiscated the property, the mansion served as centerpiece of Clifton Place, Pillow’s plantation that encompassed hundreds of acres. His slaves—most of whom lived in cabins at “The Quarters”—generated his wealth by planting and harvesting cotton, hemp, corn, and other crops as well as tending to his cattle, sheep, and hogs.

As one of Tennessee’s leading citizens and one of the wealthiest men in the South, Pillow moved in elite social circles. He counted James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, among his friends. Following the end of his presidency in 1849, Polk dined at Clifton Place with Gideon and his wife, Mary. Pillow himself dabbled in national politics, opposing secession initially in 1861 before relenting.

As a military man, though, political general Pillow failed to measure up. During the Mexican War, the twice-wounded Pillow angered superiors—including Winfield Scott—for his self-promotion. No surprise, perhaps, given a massive painting of a heroic Pillow in military uniform greeted visitors in the front entrance of Clifton Place.

During the Civil War, Pillow abandoned his post at Fort Donelson in February 1862, sneaking away from the beleaguered garrison under the cover of darkness before the Union Army under Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Confederates’ surrender. At the Battle of Stones River nearly 10 months later, Pillow led a brigade with mixed results. True or not, a story of the 55-year-old officer cowering behind a tree during the battle has stained his résumé ever since.

Unsurprisingly, Scott—overall commander of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out—did not count himself among Pillow’s fans. In his 1864 memoirs, “Old Fuss And Feathers” described Pillow as “amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character.”

As we walk from cabin to cabin, Ridley reflects only briefly on his connection to Pillow and the slaves who toiled for him.

“Just part of history,” he says.

Ridley and I gingerly step into a cabin, home for Pillow’s field slaves. More than a year ago, he had brush and other vegetation cleared from around these remarkable survivors, giving us easy access.

Each cabin is roughly 15-by-15 feet with a small loft accessed by a rickety ladder. Each has a post-Civil War room out back. I’ve visited the site a half-dozen times but see something new each time.

Steps ahead of me, Ridley shines the narrow beam from his flashlight on a fireplace, revealing bricks and small dirt piles in an otherwise barren room. Fragments of newspaper—used as insulation by postwar inhabitants—speckle the walls. A dour-looking baseball player stares from a March 1937 newspaper sports section. A decrepit floor, victimized by time and nature, crunches beneath my feet.

In another cabin, we find more reminders of the 20th century: a swinging blade, peeling wallpaper adorned with blue- and aqua-colored floral designs, a chipped ax handle, and a barren clothes hook on a door. Pasted to the back wall is a fragment of The New York Times from decades ago.

“Life in America,” the partial headline reads.

From the era of slavery, though, we find no visible evidence they were here. No fragments of 19th-century pottery or shards of glass. No messages etched on bare, wooden walls.No privy to mine for secrets. Much is left for our imaginations.

And so, I wonder: Who were these men, women, and children?

What treatment did they receive from Pillow?

What were their names?

Perhaps the 1870 U.S. census provides us hints. “Sarah” and “Randall”—listed as farm hands for the Pillow family in that census—appear on deeds as far back as the 1840s.

I wonder what ultimately became of the slaves who toiled for Pillow. Were they buried in the nearby cemetery in the woods—the remote graveyard at the base of Ginger Hill that Ridley showed me months ago? Or were they buried in St. John’s Church Cemetery, far in the back, away from the final resting places of the White folks? Or perhaps they ended up in one of the scores of family cemeteries that dot the county.

And I wonder what will become of these historic treasures near the east fork of Greenlick Creek. Ridley wants to save the cabins, but that probably would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and more expertise than he has.

What would a professional archaeologist unearth here?

I also wonder what will happen to Clifton Place, where Ridley’s paternal grandfather lived until 1949. It remained part of the Ridley family for years afterward.

“I watched television in there for the first time in my life,” Ridley says. He recalls family gatherings in the 12-room Greek Revival-style mansion and 16-foot-high ceilings.

In 1972, a Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate named John R. Neal purchased the property from the Ridley family. He and his wife, Linda, aimed to restore the mansion, but their yearslong effort proved daunting. “We saw the white columns, the Gone With The Wind atmosphere,” she told a reporter in 1986. “We didn’t see the cracks, the structural problems.”

The Clifton Place grounds include the original detached kitchen, carriage house, ice house, law office, spring house, blacksmith, and quarters for “house” slaves. In the Pillow-era smokehouse stands the original poplar chopping block and “ham logs”—hollowed out poplar logs for the salting of hams. The smoky aroma in the small brick building still tantalizes.

“The most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere,” a researcher once called Clifton Place.

John Neal died in 2018, but Clifton Place remains with his family. The mansion, however, has stood unoccupied (and inaccessible to the public) for more than a decade. Like the nearby slave cabins, it too could become nothing but a memory without significant preservation efforts.

Time may not be on the side of people like us who relish places like this. In an empty field across Mount Pleasant Pike from Clifton Place, developers have plans for residential housing. “750 houses on 450 acres,” Ridley says.

Oh my, what will I see here a decade from now?

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). He also can be visited on Facebook at John Banks’ Civil War blog.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times.

Writing home in the early morning hours of July 2, 1863, it likely crossed John Wheeler’s mind that this might be the last letter he would ever write. Wary of the impending combat he and his men were about to face on Gettysburg’s second day, the 20th Indiana Infantry’s colonel could be forgiven for such somber reflection. Two years earlier, as war clouds loomed over the fractured nation, Wheeler had been editor (and co-founder) of his home state’s Crown Point Register, proclaiming on its masthead, “Independent in all things—Neutral in nothing.” It was a supplication he had also lived by as a soldier and commander.

Early in the war, Wheeler—a distant relative of eventual Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler—raised a 100-man company and was elected captain. Among those to enlist were the sons of a family friend: Albert Luther and his brother John, vice president of a local bank.

Spearheading the region’s prolific recruitment effort was Erasmus Corwin Gilbreath, a lawyer and entrepreneur who before the war had helped bring a railroad to the county seat. For his energy and notoriety, he was named a lieutenant in the 20th Indiana.

The 20th’s first assignment was guarding railroads in Maryland. It was then sent to the North Carolina coast, and in January 1862 was stationed at Fort Monroe, Va., under Brig. Gen. Joseph King Fenno Mansfield, later mortally wounded at Antietam. On March 8, the Hoosiers were called to nearby Hampton Roads to help protect the stricken USS Congress from capture by CSS Virginia. Fire from the 20th wounded Virginia’s commander, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, and helped drive off Confederate boarding parties.

The 20th, an impressed Mansfield later remarked, “could do without food longer…eat more when they got it; could suffer more without being disabled; get in line quicker; stay there steadier and swear harder than any group of men.” On May 10, 1862, President Lincoln visited Fort Monroe, and while watching his fellow Midwesterners prepare for a move on Norfolk, reportedly cheered, “Bully for the Indiana 20th!”   

Joining the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign, the 20th was assigned to Maj. Gen. Phil Kearny’s 3rd Division in the 3rd Corps. Kearny raved about the 20th’s fighting ability at Oak Grove, Savage’s Station, and Glendale during the Seven Days’ Battles, labeling them “my 20th Indiana marksmen.”

“If I had 40,000 men like those of the 20th Indiana,” he declared, “I could fight and whip any army in the world.”

After fighting at Second Bull Run and then Ox Hill (where Kearny was killed), the 20th was assigned during the subsequent Antietam Campaign to the defenses of Washington, D.C., but returned to the Army of the Potomac before the Battle of Fredericksburg. On December 13, 1862—a day described by Captain Gilbreath as being of “almost September brightness and warmth”—the Hoosiers saved Captain George Randolph’s artillery in the 3rd Corps by bringing up ammunition and manning the pieces after the battery lost infantry support. A grateful Randolph remarked after the war that the 20th was “the best regiment, volunteer or regular, that I had the fortune to serve with….We were always glad to know [they were] near.”

Gilbreath suffered a severe right leg wound during the fighting that day but bravely spurned amputation—somehow surviving. The wound, however, would require corrective surgery in 1875. Despite having limited use of the leg for two years and suffering a permanent limp, he returned to duty in April 1863.

Intense Fighting at Gettysburg

In the spring of 1863, Wheeler was promoted to colonel and given command. John Luther was made lieutenant, becoming Wheeler’s adjutant. During the Chancellorsville Campaign, the 20th helped lead the 3rd Corps’ advance and captured a horde of prisoners of the 23rd Georgia Infantry in Brig. Gen. Alfred Colquitt’s Brigade, part of Lt. Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s Second Corps.

Later, the Hoosiers were involved in a night action and served in the rear guard for the retreat over the Rappahannock River. Brigadier General John Henry Hobart Ward, their brigade commander, praised the regiment’s “coolness and undaunted courage,” noting it “sustained its well-earned reputation gained on the Peninsula.” Wheeler was proud of how his men performed in “one of the most severe [battles]” and confidently wrote home that “western men are the thing. [The army] could do much more if we had…more men from Maine and the west….we are all well and ready for anything that comes along.”

What came along would prove a severe test. The 20th arrived in Gettysburg after dark on July 1, spending a tense night, sleeping with weapons ready, on the Union left on the south end of Cemetery Ridge. On July 2, the regiment was placed in the Rose Woods on Houck’s Ridge with most of Ward’s 2nd Brigade. With the launch of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s attack at 4 p.m., the Hoosiers (along with the 86th New York) soon found themselves hotly engaged with the 3rd Arkansas. The Union troops had initial success, driving back the Southerners and advancing as Ward had directed, only to be ordered back a short time later.

As he had ominously feared, Wheeler was an early casualty, shot from his horse and falling dead at the distinctive boulder across the road from what is now the 20th’s monument. He was quickly buried by the Luther brothers.

The firing was rapid and intense, and when John rejoined the fight using a discarded rifle, he was hit by a spent bullet and left dazed. Describing the action to his family, Albert wrote: “[We] had to fire slower because [the] gun barrels had got so hot…[we] could hardly hold them.”

Ward’s men resisted the Southern attack for more than an hour, but by 5:30 p.m., with Lafayette McLaws’ Georgians having joined the fight, the Confederates grabbed the upper hand. Gilbreath assumed command of the 20th when Lt. Col. William C.L. Taylor was wounded. Ward, aware his men were low on ammunition, ordered the 20th and his nearby regiments to pull back.

Bristling at how the Rebels laughed when the Hoosiers’ flag fell, Gilbreath took satisfaction in that those colors were immediately recovered and that the struggle had been anything but a rout. The 20th, according to the Official Records, “held the position assigned it until the brigade commenced to retire…[and] fell back in good order.”

Per one account, the 20th “moved three hundred yards to the rear where it halted and re-formed its ranks.” Official reports and recollections from the neighboring regiments, as well as the captured/missing numbers for Ward’s entire brigade, confirm that Ward was able to bring his men back in good order from Houck’s Ridge, contrary to the commonly made assumption that the 3rd Corps simply folded and ran when attacked.

On July 3, the 20th was sent to the center of the line for “clean-up” in the wake of Pickett’s Charge, and later was placed on burial duty.

Gettysburg had been a memorable battle for the Hoosiers. Dudley Chase, an Indiana judge who was wounded at the Rose Woods while serving in the 17th U.S. Regulars, later recalled they were “desperately fighting…out of the jaws of death and the gates of hell…” The cost was high. Of 401 men engaged, the 20th had 32 killed, 114 wounded, and 10 captured/missing. Those totals represented 25 percent of Ward’s deaths during the battle, and 20 percent of his total losses.

Despite the bloodshed, the mood of some of the men was buoyant. Writing home, one Hoosier reported 14 casualties in his company alone but threatened the Rebels with a “whailing [sic]” and a “sound thrashing” if the Southerners did not return to Virginia quickly.

Albert Luther boasted to his family that Lee’s men “got a sound whipping” and that “[w]e are ready and anxious to give them another battle.” The subsequent arduous pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia to the Potomac River rendered some of the Hoosiers shoeless, and the pace diminished Albert’s fervor; in fact, he felt “so tired at night I could hardly stand.” The anticipated showdown with Lee’s defeated army would not occur, as the Confederates were back in Virginia by July 14.

Last Left Standing

In August 1863, the 20th was one of the Western regiments handed the grueling task of keeping order in New York City after the July Draft Riots. Although Gilbreath chose to romanticize the famed metropolis (“Most of us had only dreamed of [this] city”), his regiment was unable to let up for even a moment, at one point meeting “with a howling mob” and “fixing bayonets, marched off, driving the crowd before us.”

As the Overland Campaign approached in the spring of 1864, John Luther expressed apprehension and optimism—“all are dreading the heavy campaign that is staring us in the face”—but he also appraised the Army of the Potomac as being never more formidable. The fighting that May and June left him despondent, however: “After the most hard battle ever fought, I am still alive and that is about all…” Expressing both resignation and relief, he wrote from Cold Harbor, Va.: “It seems a miracle that I am here, that it is my luck to be spared so far…”

In the later reorganization of the Army of the Potomac, the men of the 7th, 14th, and 19th Indiana were consolidated into the 20th, which was renamed the “20th Indiana Veteran Volunteer Infantry.” This was another source of pride for the men of the 20th. “No greater compliment could be paid you,” Chase opined at their 1888 reunion.

The other Indiana regiments, all with memorable service, became members of the 20th. The 20th was the Indiana infantry regiment “last left standing” in the Army of the Potomac. Active through the Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns, it fired its final guns on April 9, 1865. Back in Indianapolis, the 20th mustered out in July.

John Wheeler was buried on July 30, 1863, in Crown Point with nearly a thousand mourners in attendance, including both Luther brothers. To this day, the town has not forgotten the colonel, naming a new school in his honor in 2007, with his uniform and murals commemorating the 20th on display.

The Luther brothers survived the war, with John living until 1924 and fortunate to attend Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary reunion in 1913. Albert was not so blessed, dying before his 30th birthday. The two are buried within feet of Wheeler at Maplewood Cemetery.

Gilbreath made a career of the military and died in 1898 while on active duty. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery alongside his wife and daughter. A family heirloom was a handkerchief stained with Lincoln’s blood (his father-in-law was a friend of the slain president).

In 1889, at the ceremony inaugurating construction of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, the 20th was the only Indiana unit to have its flag placed in the cornerstone—its soldiers “the last men standing” at home, as well.

Charles J. Rebesco, a first-time contributor, writes from Munster, Ind.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

So you’ve had a “fender bender” in your plane and are in need of some wings. What do you do? 

You could rent a plane from the local flight school. But at a cost of $155 per hour (whether the propeller is turning or not) that is simply not practical. Can you borrow a plane? Perhaps, but after someone learns why your plane is in the shop they might not be so keen on handing over the keys to their bird. You could bum rides from friends. Sure, but they may not stay friends for long. Or you could give up flying until your plane is repaired and use the time to work on your golf game. Never!

That leaves just one option: Buy a second plane.

The challenge is that planes are notoriously poor investments—in most cases they are either way overpriced or in such poor condition that the cost of making them airworthy makes them unaffordable. Finding a plane you can both afford and actually fly as soon as you’re handed the keys takes some luck, and a strategy. 

I wanted a basic machine, nothing fancy—a simple Cessna or Piper—something for day trips to the islands or Cape. It didn’t need to go fast. It didn’t need to be all-weather. It just needed to be reliable.

So my search began where all searches begin: the internet. But like all internet searches, frustration quickly set in. My search ran up against the reality that lots of people are looking for the same plane, particularly flight schools and new owners. Such planes, being in high demand, command a hefty premium in price. Not only that, but such planes also tend to be very high time (read: worn out), and thus more trouble than they’re worth.

I needed to change my approach. After a couple of dead ends, I found an area of aviation where one can still find a simple, affordable aircraft: Vintage planes. The plane I generally fly is 60 years old, so by vintage I mean planes that are really old, almost antique. These are planes built not long after the dawn of aviation; planes that are covered in cloth rather than metal; planes manufactured by companies long out of business…the Taylorcrafts, the Luscombes, the Aeroncas, the Stinsons and the Swifts. 

And what I landed upon surprised me: the Ercoupe, a twin-tail, tricycle gear, metal and cloth hybrid that was way ahead of its time when it was designed in the mid-1930s. Back then, the Ercoupe seemed poised to do for aviation what the Model T did for the automobile. 

In 1935, less than a decade after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis, aviation had—to use a bad pun—taken off. Airline traffic in the United States was doubling every year, carrying more than 900,000 passengers (compared to more than 853 million passengers per year today). Each year saw a proliferation of new airlines, new airplane manufacturers, new records being made or broken and exploding interest in aviation. 

In all this heady optimism, the Department of Commerce sought to bring airplane ownership within reach of ordinary citizens. Under the auspices of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of NASA, it challenged engineers to develop a machine that inexperienced pilots could operate, at a price much less than conventional airplanes.

From this emerged the Ercoupe, a name derived by the name of the company that produced it, Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO). Designed by legendary aeronautical engineer Fred Weick, the Ercoupe incorporated a number of features that made the plane simpler and safer to fly. This included tricycle landing gear, which made the plane much easier to take off and land than its tail-dragging cousins. The plane’s twin tails were designed to be outside the propeller wash, which alleviated unwanted yaw movements on takeoff and at slow speeds. The bubble canopy gave the pilot unmatched visibility. The fuel-air mixture was fixed, so there was no mixture control. There were no flaps. Elevator deflection was limited, making stalls nearly impossible. And, most importantly, the plane’s flight controls were integrated—the rudders were linked to the ailerons. That meant no rudder pedals, which also meant all turns were coordinated. Because of this, the Ercoupe was the first plane to be certified as “characteristically incapable of spinning,” and every plane has a placard on the control panel stating as much. On the ground, the nose-wheel was also linked to the control yoke, so the plane steered like a car.    

ERCO marketed the Ercoupe as “the world’s safest plane,” one as easy to operate as the family car. In 1945, the sticker price was $2,665. A Buick sedan, by comparison, sold for $1995. In another first, you could buy an Ercoupe in a department store. Macy’s took out a full-page ad in The New York Times in 1945 to herald the opening of its airplane department. At Hamburger’s in Newark, New Jersey, elevator operators hollered, “Sixth floor, airplanes!” Aviation was going retail.

But the dream of “an airplane in every garage” never materialized. Though safer and easier to fly than conventional planes, the reality is that the Ercoupe still requires airmanship—not to mention a license—to fly. And that includes knowledge of weather, aviation regulations, navigation and aeronautics. The average American wasn’t quite ready for this. Sales stalled. In 1950, ERCO sold the rights to the Ercoupe to the Forney Aircraft Company. Fred Weick moved on to Piper Aircraft, where he later designed the venerable Piper Cherokee, one of the most popular airplanes of all time. A succession of companies made Ercoupes up until 1967—a total of 5,685 in all—an exceptionally long run for a general aviation aircraft. Of those, more than 2,000 are estimated to still be flying. 

A well-maintained Ercoupe still costs less than a compact sedan. The plane I found was born in 1946. When I first laid eyes on it, I thought it looked like an MG with wings. It was painted in the silver-and-yellow WWII Army Air Corps trainer scheme. Very sharp.

Thing is, the only Ercoupes to actually serve in the military were a pair bought by the Army in 1941 that were evaluated for use in observation and later used as target drones. The government used another Ercoupe to test jet-assisted take-off (JATO), in which a short-burst rocket was strapped to the fuselage for a high-powered take-off.

So the plane’s military paint scheme was a bit of a fraud, but that’s okay because—having never served in the military—so am I. After getting it home, I placed a series of mosquito stickers along the side of the plane that attest to my “confirmed kills.” 

The man who sold it to me is a Navy veteran and retired Boeing 747 captain. He told me Pan Am used the Ercoupe to train its early crews in how to land in a crab. The conventional technique of banking the plane and applying opposite rudder to stay on the runway centerline wouldn’t work with the giant 747 because the outboard engines could scrape the pavement if the wings weren’t level.

“The technique was to fly in the crab, and at 50 feet above the runway the flight engineer would call ‘50 feet’ reading the radar altimeter and the pilot would bring the nose around with rudder to straighten it out and reduce side loads on the main gear,” he told me. “Worked well! Thank you Ercoupe for the help!”

My insurance company required me to get an instructor’s sign-off before covering me for solo flight. My instructor, a young guy who flies for a major airline, had never heard of an Ercoupe. When I told him it had no rudder pedals, he sounded perplexed. “How do you land it?” he asked. “We’ll figure it out,” I said. 

The plane, we discovered, is an absolute cinch to fly. Flip the battery switch, turn on the magnetos and just pull the starter. With the carburetor wired, there’s no fuel mixture to adjust. Gas from the plane’s two wing tanks is gravity fed to the engine, so there’s no tank selector. Just “drive” the plane out to the runway, line it up, push in the throttle and when the plane hits 65 miles per hour lift it off the runway. 

You’re not going to go very far or go very fast with a cruising speed of around 95 miles per hour. And if there’s a stiff headwind you may find that cars on the highway below are passing you. But with the windows down and the wind in your hair you get the feeling that this is the way flying was meant to be…that “slipped the surly bonds of earth” sort of thing. More than anything, it is just fun.

Want to check out some basic aeronautics? Stick your arm out the window and hold it in the wind. Watch the nose drop and the plane begin to turn (this is actually an approved technique for making a rapid descent). Put the plane into a steep turn and you’ll get the feeling there’s nothing between you and the ground. Circle over Gillette Stadium and it will be like you’re on a string spinning over it. 

But the best part of it is bringing it home. Given all my experience and training, I thought that landing sideways onto the runway would make for a hair-raising, jarring arrival. Not so. The trailing-link gear gently cushions the landing and the plane naturally pivots in the direction of flight, straightening out for a smooth, effortless landing.

 “How can you tell when you’re on the ground?” my brother asked when I took him up for a flight. 

I wish all my landings could be like that.

Tom LeCompte is a freelance writer, airplane owner and longtime pilot based south of Boston. When not writing or researching stories, he’s airborne somewhere. This article originally appeared on his blog, nineronepop.blogspot.com.

Thousands of Frenchmen served the Vichy government as part of the paramilitary Milice, which earned a terrible reputation for brutality, torturing and killing many French citizens in the Resistance. After the country’s liberation, were there reprisals against these men?  —Mark Peters, New York, N.Y.

Following the liberation there was what was called in France an “epuration,” or purge, of those who had worked for or collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Some of these purges were unofficial, in other words people who had served in the Milice or otherwise collaborated were summarily executed, while women who had conducted relationships with Germans had their heads shaved and were ostracized from their communities.

In his 1997 seminal work, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-1944, British historian Ian Ousby says the most accurate number of such deaths was around 10,000. Most were members of the Milice, whose ranks were filled with young men of varying motivations: some were anti-Semites, others anti-capitalists or fascists. There was also a criminal element, along with a sizeable number who joined to avoid the STO (Compulsory Work Service) that sent French citizens to Germany to work in industries supporting the Nazi war effort. 

In September 1944 a special court was established to judge collaborators; among those convicted and executed for treason was the Milice’s leader, Joseph Darnand. These trials lasted until 1949 and although thousands were sentenced to varying punishments, many Miliciens escaped justice. One of the last high-profile figures of the Milice to appear in the dock was Paul Touvier, who, after decades of hiding from the authorities for his role in the execution of seven Jewish hostages in 1944, was convicted in 1994 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment—but he died of cancer two years later.

British naval historian and geostrategist Sir Julian Corbett (1854–1922) was a contemporary of renowned American naval strategist Rear Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914). Unlike Mahan, Corbett had no personal military or naval experience, which prompted many senior officers in the Admiralty to view him and his theories with skepticism. A misconception persists that the ideas of Mahan and Corbett are in opposition, that one must accept one or the other. But that is an oversimplification. There is much to be learned by a comparison of the two.  

In developing a set of principles for naval warfare, Corbett drew from the theories of land warfare developed by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. On the relationship between war and politics he echoed Clausewitz: “Military action must still be regarded only as a manifestation of policy. It must never supersede policy. The policy is always the object; war is only the means by which we obtain the object, and the means must always keep the end in view.”  

In defining essential differences between the respective physical operating environments of land and sea, however, Corbett departed from Clausewitz on key points, particularly the importance of concentration and the decisive battle. Control and security of communications, for example, is far more difficult at sea. Communications on land are largely limited to known roads, rail lines and rivers and channelized by mountains, forests and other no-go terrain. Predicting communications and movement on a vast, flat ocean is an entirely different matter. “At sea the communications are, for the most part, common to both belligerents,” Corbett noted, “whereas ashore each possess his own on his own territory.” Thus, he concluded, only relative command of the sea was possible at any given place and time.  

Corbett departed from both Mahan’s and Clausewitz’s argument for the primacy of destroying the enemy’s main force. Rather, the British strategist argued, controlling the lines of communications, both friendly and enemy, should be the main objective of naval warfare. Two ways to do that were through naval blockade or by capturing or sinking enemy warships and merchant ships. Corbett’s departure from the decisive battle principle prompted pushback from many of the Royal Navy’s more traditional admirals. Yet he enjoyed the backing of reform-minded First Sea Lord and Admiral of the Fleet Sir John “Jacky” Fisher.  

In 1911 Corbett published Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. He wrote during a period of sweeping technological changes. Steam had already replaced wind and sail as the fleet’s primary motive power; steel hulls had replaced wooden ones; and naval guns were acquiring greater range, accuracy and hitting power. While there was no way Corbett could have foreseen certain technologies, he knew change was imminent and ongoing. That’s why he called his book Some Principles, rather than The Principles. His intent was to produce a living document to or from which future generations of naval thinkers could add or subtract.    

Lessons

Determine the mutual relations of your army and navy in a plan of war. Only when this is done can one develop a plan for the fleet to best execute its assigned mission.

Offense and defense are not mutually exclusive. All war and every form of it must include contingencies for both.

The object of naval warfare is the control of communications. Naval operations in both world wars proved Corbett right.

The most pressing problem to solve is not how to increase the power of a fleet for attack, but how to defend it. Though Corbett wrote long before the advent of naval aviation, this remains the central difficulty of the aircraft carrier.