Part 25
The remark was often made among us that the Dead Letter Office afforded the very best opportunities for making collections of autographs of celebrated people--only the authorities could not be made to see it in that light. It was always with a sigh of regret, I must confess, that letters signed by such names as Bancroft, Whittier, Beecher, Grant, Greeley, were returned to their rightful owners. The most interesting accounts of foreign travel were sometimes contained in the dead letters--accounts more interesting than any book ever published. These were, as a general thing, written by ladies--and that sealed their doom. Gentlemen writing letters almost always sign their full name; but a lady will write a dozen pages, telling her friends all about the Louvre and the Tuileries, the Escurial and London Tower, in one long letter, and then sign Kate, or Lillie, at the end, thus precluding all possibility of having her letter returned, though we know from it that she has returned to her home in Boston. It is almost incredible what a large number of letters passing through our hands are "finished off" by that classically beautiful verse--"My pen is bad, my ink is pale; my love for you will never fail"--and it is impossible to believe in how many different ways and styles these touching lines can be written and spelled, till you find them dished up to you a dozen times a day, in this office. Eastern people don't appreciate this "pome" as Western farmers do. Missouri rustics are particularly addicted to it. What the predilection of the Southern people might have been, I cannot say; it was just after the close of the war, and their letters were pitiful enough. Of course there was not a Federal postage-stamp to be had in any of the Southern States; and no matter how deeply the contents of some of these letters affected us, we could not forward them to the people they were addressed to. These letters from the South portrayed so terribly true the bitter, abject poverty of all classes, at that time, that the Northerners to whom they were written would not have hesitated to assist these friends of "better days," could they have received the letters; but, even had we been allowed to forward them, the chances were extremely slender that people were still in the same position and location after the war as before the war.
Not these letters alone were sad; for sometimes a whole drama could be read from one or two short letters. One day we found among the dead letters a note written in a feeble, scrawling hand. It was by a boy, a prisoner and sick, in one of the penal institutions of New York--sick, poor fellow! and imploring his mother--oh, so piteously!--to come and see him. He was in the sick ward, he said, and if he _had_ been wicked, and had struck at his step-father when he saw him abuse his mother, would she not come to see him, only once, for all that? She must not let his step-father prevent her from coming; he was dreaming of his mother and sister every night, and he knew his mother would come to him; but she must come soon, for the doctor had said so. Perhaps the letter had not reached the mother because the step-father had taken her out of the son's reach; for, in the course of a day or two, we found another letter addressed to the same woman, by one of the prison officials: the boy, Charley, had died on such a date--about a week after his letter had been written--and he had looked and asked for his mother to the last.
About letters written by German people I have noticed one peculiarity: they never omit to write the number of the year in some part of the letter, or on the envelope, outside. Sometimes it is written where the name of the country or the State should be found on the envelope, so that the direction would read, "Jacob Schmied, St. Louis, 1865;" or they write it at the bottom of the letter, instead of signing their name, and then write their name at the beginning of the letter, as though they were writing the letter to themselves. Everything is heavy and clumsy about their letters; they never indulge in joke or sentiment; and through the negligence of one of the German clerks, the most serious trouble had almost been brewed in a German brewer's family, at one time. It happened in this way:
A substantial German brewer had written to Hans Biersöffel, dunning him for money, owing on several barrels of _lager_. Hans must have left the city--at any rate, the letter came to our office, and was returned to the brewer; but, unfortunately, a very sentimental letter, containing a copy of some love-sick verses, written by a German lady, and held in the office as a curiosity for a little while, had (by mistake, of course) found its way into this letter. The honest Dutchman had meant to return this piece of property to our office at the first opportunity, and therefore carried it in his pocket-book, where his wife discovered it, seized it, and held it over his head, as the sword of Damocles, forever after--as he could not prove to her satisfaction that the letter and verses had _not_ been sent to _him_ by the writer.
At the time I belonged to the corps of dead letter clerks, there were three rooms fronting on Seventh street, fitted up as offices for the lady clerks, and one very large room on the other side of the hall. A straw mat was spread on the stone floor in our room; one office-chair was furnished for each lady, and desks barely large enough for two ladies to work at, without elbowing each other; and in one corner, wash-stand and water. In the large room some twenty ladies were writing, while four or five folders had their desk in the same room. Of the other rooms, one was occupied by the lady superintendent, together with whom were from four to six ladies; the next room also accommodated six ladies, and the last one, which had the look of a prison, from a high grating running through it, afforded room for four others. There were old Post-office Directories, boxes containing printed matter, and such like valuables, kept behind this grating; and one day, when a party of sightseers came unasked into our room, the youngest lady there--whose spirit had not yet been broken by the weight of the responsibilities resting on her shoulders--explained to the gaping crowd that behind this grating were kept the silver and household furniture of General ----,--the assistant postmaster--boxed up, while he was recruiting in the country. This was a twofold revenge, the young lady said to us: it was punishing the visitors for their inquisitiveness, and "old ----" for having the grating put up there. Several years have passed since I last saw the post-office building; the ladies of room No. -- were then petitioning to have this grating removed. Whether their petition was granted, I have not learned.
_MARCHING WITH A COMMAND._
From Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, we were ordered to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, there to join General Sykes' command, then fitting out for the march across the Plains. General Sykes commanded the Fifth Infantry, while my husband belonged to the Third Cavalry; but as the latter regiment was to take up the line of march from Little Rock, Arkansas, through Texas, the lieutenant, as well as some three or four other officers of the Third, were well satisfied to be assigned to the infantry command, and sent in charge of recruits from Washington and Carlisle, to join General Sykes at Fort Leavenworth.
The two regiments (Fifth Infantry and Third Cavalry) were to rendezvous at Fort Union, New Mexico, where General Carleton was to meet the troops, and assign them to the different forts, camps, and stations in his department. This was immediately after the close of the war; and these eight hundred men of the Fifth Infantry and the Third Cavalry, under Colonel Howe, were the first regulars sent out to the Territories, from whence they had been called in to do some of the hard fighting when the rebellion broke out--volunteers and colored troops taking their place on the frontiers.
It was early June--the sky radiant, the earth laughing. Birds of the western prairies warbled their greeting from out the rose-trellises and sweet-scented flowers of the little enclosures in front of the officers' quarters, which, surrounding the well kept parade-ground, gave the place the look of one large bright-blooming garden. For days there had been at the fort signs and sounds as of a swarm of bees preparing to leave the hive. The carriage of the general flew back and forth between the town and the fort; the quartermaster dashed through the corrals, and by the workshops on his handsome sorrel; females of all shades and colors were interviewed and interrogated by officers' wives, who meant to provide themselves with luxuries for the journey; and new faces were seen and scanned in the mess-room every day.
The first day out from Fort Leavenworth we made but a few miles; the general seemed bent only on getting his command away from the barracks, for, though warned for weeks of the day of starting, there were those who seemed as little prepared for the march now as they had been two weeks ago. Well I remember the camp we made that first day--amid grass so high that we felt and looked like ants moving among the blades--and the confusion in our own establishment and that of our neighbors. The advantages of having secured the services of an old army-woman became apparent at this early stage. Without having at all consulted me, Mrs. Melville had boiled a ham, and stowed bread, cheese, and sardines, where she could readily lay hands on the articles, in the mess-chest. Coffee was quickly cooked, and we could sit down to our meal and invite others to it, before we had fairly realized the discomforts of a first night in camp.
A good woman was Mrs. Melville, but dreadfully tyrannical--domineering ruthlessly over myself and her husband, and only in awe of the lieutenant when he insisted on having his own way. They had always served in the cavalry, and had now again enlisted (I mean the husband, who drove our carriage, had enlisted) in the Third; and as Melville was the only cavalry recruit with the command, it had been a matter of some difficulty to appropriate him and his wife. It was not till the second day, when we made camp, that I saw how large the command was; and I remember thinking that it had taken since yesterday for the "tail-end" of the train of wagons, mules, and horses to leave the corrals and get into camp. When we left our camping-ground in the morning and returned to the highway, there was a broad road with deep ruts behind us, and hundreds of acres of prairie-land made bare and torn up, as though a city had been swept away, where the day before no sign of human life had been and the tall grass had waved untouched over the soft, black soil. Fancy the tramp of eight hundred men, the keen, light-turning wheels of a dozen or two of carriages, and the heavy, crunching weight of two hundred army-wagons, drawn each by six stout mules! No wonder the grass never grew again where General Sykes's command had passed!
Besides the twelve hundred mules in the wagons, there were some two hundred head extra, and a number of horses for the officers. All of these animals had been drawn from the government corrals at Fort Leavenworth; but I never realized how many there were, till one evening about four days out from the fort.
Elsewhere I have spoken of my white horse, Toby, who had so quickly become domesticated that he _would_ insist on returning to our tent, no matter how emphatically he was told that he must be turned out, and stay with the rest of the herd. The mules had been accustomed to follow the lead of a white "bell-mare" in the corrals; and as Toby was the only white horse in the outfit, they became greatly attached to him, and would follow him in his vagaries wherever he led. Unfortunately, when he took his way back to the camp and to our tent this evening, the herders were not on the alert as usual, and before they could turn the tide there was a stampede, and a perfect overflow of mules in the camp. Such yelling and bellowing as those animals set up, when they found themselves floundering among the tents, and belabored with clubs, ropes, and picket-pins by the enraged soldiers, was never heard before nor since. Even Toby's serenity was disturbed, and he stood half-way in the tent, trembling, and looking as though he knew that the wagon-master was making his way to our settlement. Though I could forgive the man's rage, as he pushed the horse to one side and passed into the tent, neither the lieutenant nor myself took kindly to his offer to "shoot the horse the next time he undertook to stampede the herd;" and I held close on to Toby till the mules were driven back, and the wagon-master's wrath had cooled.
Truth to tell, before the next forty-eight hours were over, I was wellnigh converted to the belief that we had drawn the meanest stock the government-stables had ever contained. I forgot to say that each of the officers had been assigned a company of the recruits, and as they marched with them, we ladies were left in our carriages alone. No sooner was the command fairly on the road this morning than Molly and Jenny, a pair of green mules drawing our carriage, fell to jumping and kicking on a rough piece of ground, and a moment later the carriage was laid prone on one side, while I quietly clambered out on the other. A chorus of little screams went up from the rest of the carriages--expressing more horror, I think, at my getting up without the assistance of the doctor, who came flying up on his square-headed bay, than at the accident itself.
This was not enough of evil for the day. We made camp early (the general made not over fifteen miles a day when first starting out with the recruits), and Molly and Jenny, fastened to each other by a light chain around the neck, followed Toby through the camp, where they had come to be accepted as standing nuisances. Away up near the general's tent, Toby must have fancied there was good grazing, for he went there, the two mules _en train_. What followed I learned from the grinning orderly, who rapped at our tent soon after, holding the mules by the chain, and saying that "the general sent his compliments to the lieutenant, and he'd shoot the mules, and the white horse too, the next time they pulled the tent-fly down over him."
I looked stealthily out, and saw Toby in the distance, contemplatively switching his tail, and half a dozen men at work re-erecting the general's tent. The story was too good to keep; and the general himself told how, lying asleep on his cot, under the tent-fly, where it was cool, he had been waked up by Toby's nose brushing his face. Raising himself, and hurling one boot and an invective at the horse, he was surprised at seeing the two mules trying to stare him out of countenance at the open end of the fly. The other boot was shied at them, but there was no time to send anything else. The chain fastening the mules together had become twisted around, the pole holding up the fly, and the precipitate retreat of the long-eared pair brought the heavy canvas down on the general's face.
Would I could end my "tale of woe" right here; but a love of truth compels me to say that the meanness of that horse seemed endless, and his capacity for wickedness was such that portions of it fell on Molly and Jenny, when a particularly rich harvest rewarded his efforts at deviltry. When Toby came to the tent-door, early next morning, I noticed a strangely bright polish on his fore-hoofs, and a suspicious greasiness about his nose and face. Molly and Jenny had greasy streaks running all over them, and seemed so well fed that I wondered to myself which of the officers' horses had to suffer last night, and go supperless to bed. Toby sniffed disdainfully at the bread I offered him, and turned to walk off very suddenly when he saw Melville coming toward the tent. I must explain that the tents were always pitched in the same order--the lieutenant's on one side of us; Captain Newbold's on the other; the baggage-wagon assigned to each officer drawn up behind the tent; the mules, of course, turned out with the rest of the herd. Melville pointed to the wagon behind Captain Newbold's tent, where a knot of men were gathered, bending to the ground; but he seemed too full for utterance. Almost instinctively I knew what he wanted to tell me. Newbold had brought two large jars of butter with him from Leavenworth, and Toby had encountered them last night, wiping his mouth on Molly and Jenny when he found the butter not to his taste. Over and above that, he had hauled six or eight grain-sacks out of the wagon, opened the sacks with his teeth, and scattered the grain for the two mules to eat.
I wanted to kill Toby on the spot; for the Newbolds were the best of neighbors, sharing with us, through the whole of that journey, the milk their cow (the only one with the whole train) was pleased to give. Not a word of complaint was heard from the captain or his little wife; but I did hope honestly that the miserable white horse might die of his extra feed of butter and oats.
In the evening Colonel Lane gathered the ladies together, led us to the top of a hill, and pointed out where Fort Riley lay, like a grand fortress, with long, white walls, rising on a green eminence. We reached it next day by night-fall, and though camped several miles outside of it, there were so many things which we found we actually needed, and which could only be had at this, the last post of any importance, that the greater number of officers were constantly to be seen between the sutler-store and the saddler-shop, the quartermaster's office and the corrals.
After a rest of three days, we took up the line of march again through prairie-land, dotted with farms and broken by forests and streams, through which (after having crossed the Kansas river at Manhattan, on a pontoon-bridge, before reaching Fort Riley) the soldiers seemed to think it rare sport to wade, barefooted, carrying shoes and stockings in their hands.
The country grew wilder and more desolate; and passing a farm-house one day, near which there were buffaloes grazing in the pasture with oxen and cows, it seemed nothing extraordinary, though, of course, we did not see the buffalo in his native freedom till some time after. At Ellsworth (now Fort Harker) we halted again for a day, and then gradually entered the wilderness. Fort Zarah seems to have grown where it is, only to help make the country look sadder and more desolate; but the well they have is splendid. I think so at least, for I was _so_ thirsty when we turned in there at noon, though we continued the march and did not make camp. The general seemed to consider the feet of his men fully seasoned by this time; and they certainly made some hard days' marches before they reached Fort Union. The days' marches were harder for them than they were for us, on the whole; though many a time, creeping slowly over the tediously level ground, did I wish that I could march with them, or help drive mules, or lead horses--anything rather than sit in the carriage for hours, the sun beating down in just the same direction, the men in front moving along in just the same measure. But there was something grand about it at the same time--a forest of bayonets in front of us, an endless train of wagons behind us, moving silently through the solemn wilds; hosts of red-winged black-birds fluttering along with us, the rarer blue-jay flying haughtily over their heads.
There was always something to see; the prairie-flowers were so dazzlingly colored some days, or the rock lay in such odd strata; and in one place we saw the remains of some rough fortifications built of the rocks--thrown up hastily, perhaps, one day when the party of brave emigrants spied "ye noble savage" bearing down on them. In camp everything looked pleasant and cheerful. The general had traversed the country more than once, knew every spring on the road, and had the camping-ground kept so neat that we could have stopped in one place a good many days without any discomfort. Beyond that, he was courteous and thoughtful of our comfort, as only a soldier can be; and there was not a lady "marching with the command" who would not have voted him a major-general of the United States army, or into the Presidential chair, if he had preferred it.
At Fort Dodge, where officers and men burrowed half under ground (at that time), I had not the least desire to remain. However, a few miles back, where the river makes the bend, there is a singular grandeur about the country, with nothing to break the utter loneliness, save the sad, heavy murmur of the water. And now we are out on the plains again; day after day we travel over land that lies so level and so still that not a being but the lark seems living here beside us. How hot and fierce the sun glares down on the slowly-winding column--a serpent it seems, with its length outstretched, as it moves over the bare, brown prairie. The spirit grew oppressed, and the heart fainted in the noon-day sun; the command to halt was always received with joy; and more than once we had to make forced marches to reach water. Yet we lost but one man out of the eight hundred, and he died the day we struck the Arkansas again--died in the road almost--and we carried him with us to camp; and at night, when the stars had come out and tear-drops hung in the eyes of the flowers by the river-bank, they carried him to his lonely grave. I went to the tent-door when I heard the muffled drums, and stood outside, in the dark, where I could see the short procession passing. Lanterns were carried in the train that moved ghostly away from the camp-fires and the white-looming tents. The grave was not far, and when they had lowered the coffin I saw the form of a man bowing over it, as though in prayer, and then the earth was shovelled back. The soldiers returned with measured tread, and left their comrade on the wide, lone prairie, with only the Arkansas to sing his dirge.
I went to sleep with tears in my eyes; but we were to make an early start in the morning, and before daybreak we were all awake and astir. Sadness could not live in the heart those early mornings, and I thought sometimes the general had _reveille_ sounded so early purposely, to show us how beautiful Nature was at sunrise.
Sunrise on the plains! Is there anything in music, in painting, in poetry, that can bring before eyes that have never beheld it, the passing beauty of such a scene? There are strains in music which bring a faint shadow of the picture back to me; no art can ever reproduce it. How balmy the faint breath of wind that seems to lift upward the light, gray clouds, to make way for the rosy tints creeping athwart the horizon! Watch the clouds as they rise higher in the heavens; see how the sun-god has kissed them into blushes as bright as the damask-rose, sending a flood of yellow light to cover them with greater confusion. Now they float gently upward till they reach the clear, blue sky, from where the yellow light has faded; and, watching bevies of other clouds, still dancing in the light above the first rays of the rising sun, the color fades from them, and they waft hither and thither--white clouds on deep blue ground--till the morning breeze bears them away from our sight. But words are weak and tame; and the yellow-breasted prairie-lark alone, rising high in the sun-bright air as the day begins, gives fit expression to her thanks for the glories of creation, in the wordless song she sings forever.