We had a man in our company by the name of John Ryan. He was a young Irishman from Dubuque. He was not inclined to get drunk, although he drank somewhat, but he was seized with the most intractable spells as to his disposition. He had wanted as a young man to be a prizefighter, and had taken lessons in pugilism. He would get along all right for two or three weeks, and then he would sort of get on the war-path, and he wanted to fight. Before he got through he had a dozen of them, and although he may have knocked over and whipped ten out of the dozen, he generally wound up by somebody pounding him up good and hard. I determined to see if I couldn't bring about a change, and I had a talk with him. The difficulty about it was that he was about as old as I was, and seemed to think that he understood, as well as I did, what ought to be done. I finally had a personal collision with him, and put him in the guard-house. Then he talked out openly that he proposed to shoot me before my term of service was over. I sent for him, and told him that he had committed a crime, and that I could have him court-martialed, and sent to the penitentiary; but, if I should have him court-martialed for threats, he might vainly form an opinion that I was afraid of him, and wanted to get away from him; that I did not propose to humor him by anything that would give him the opinion that I wanted to separate from him. I told him that it cost the United States a thousand dollars to get a soldier drilled up to efficiency, and it was my duty to see that he performed the work that the Government had paid him for; and that whenever he wanted to try determinations with me we would take a couple of revolvers and go up the canyon. He made no reply, and the interview ended. Ryan kept a-going from bad to worse. He seemed to have got an idea that he wanted to whip every soldier in the company. He wanted to have it understood that he was the best man in the company; once in a while, there being a good many men in the company of fine capability, some good man in the company who would get a cross word from Ryan would make a pretext of jumping onto Ryan, and, getting in the first blow, beat him up. I will have occasion to refer to Ryan further on, and the circumstances under which he finally deserted.
This brings me to the description of a man who came into our company after we had been at Cottonwood Springs for a couple of months, and desired to enlist. His name was Robert McFarland. He came to me and told me that he wanted to enlist, and said that he was a Scotchman, and that he concluded that he would like to learn to be a soldier. I didn't like his looks very well, and referred him to Captain O'Brien. Captain O'Brien had him sign up enlistment papers, and swore him in, and he was assigned to one of the barracks in the company. He appeared to be a very dumb, ignorant sort of fellow for a while, say for three or four weeks. He claimed to be a farmer boy, although his record showed him to be twenty-five years of age. My opinion is that he was, in fact, about twenty-eight at that time. He was always writing lots of letters. One day the Orderly Sergeant came to me and said that there must be something wrong about McFarland because he was writing so many letters. I told the Corporal of his squad to keep an eye on him, and see what he could make out of his actions. McFarland was a man who was inclined to shirk his duties, but he seemed to learn soldiering with wonderful speed, for after he had drilled a couple of days he seemed to drill as well as anybody. One day he was sent on a detail to go down to Fort Kearney and back. And while he was down at Fort Kearney McFarland fortunately got drunk, and he confided to one of his new friends in the company that he, McFarland, was an Irishman, and that he lived in New Orleans, and that he belonged to a military company there before the war. And when the war broke out he joined the Louisiana Tigers, and that he had been sent up to Virginia and was with Stonewall Jackson and in the battles of the army of the North Virginia until after Gettysburg, and until after Lee had returned to Virginia. And that he, McFarland, had made up his mind that the Confederacy was whipped, and that there was no use in fighting any more, and that he and several others had deserted with the intention of going out to the mountains and entering the gold-fields. He said that when he was coming along and saw a company of soldiers, he sort of made up his mind that he wanted to be a soldier again. As he was not fighting against his brothers in the South, he thought it wouldn't make any difference; that he wouldn't be captured by the Southern Confederacy and punished for deserting. And he also said that his name was not Robert McFarland, and that he had assumed that name for the purpose of enlistment. This was the brief of a long drunken story that lasted about all night, and was told to and listened to with great interest by one of our Iowa farm boys, who immediately came to me and gave it to me in detail; and I recognized the fact that the story was so coherent that it was without doubt true. So, one day while I was in command of the company, I sent for him and had a talk with him, and he with great reluctance admitted the facts. I told him then that he must brace up and be a better soldier, and do more work; that he was shirking a great deal; that the boys would notice it, and as he had been in the Confederate army they wouldn't like it. I had some writing which I wanted to do in some of the reports and returns, and I asked him how well he could write, and found out he was a most excellent penman, and I put him to work on writing. But he was a man who had a bad face, a bad disposition, and made a bad impression. He was not only a deserter, but he was evidently a great deal of a rogue. I will speak of him again further on.
Along the latter part of January, 1864, two men who were driving on a train passed the Fort; came in and said that they had had a row with the wagon-master and wanted to enlist. One of them was named Joseph Cooper and the other John Jackson. Jackson was about thirty, and Cooper was somewhere between forty-five and fifty, but gave his age forty-five, because that was the age limit. We were about to reject Cooper, but he said that he was a practical veterinary surgeon, so we took them both into the company. As they were both absolutely worthless and had probably been thrashed out of their train by the wagon-master because they were worthless, the boys soon got down on them, caught them in little, petty thievery, and we dumped them both into the guard-house and kept them in there off and on for quite a while, making them work under the supervision of a corporal when they were out. We found them stealing rations and selling rations from their comrades to the pilgrims. And upon the suggestion of the Captain I made life such a burden for them that, having given them an opportunity to desert, they embraced the opportunity and we heard of them no more.
We also lost two men by the fact that one of them was a minor and his mother took him out of the service with a writ of habeas corpus. This was before we got to Omaha. Another was a deserter from the Eleventh Iowa Infantry, then in the field; having been detected, he was placed under guard and sent to his regiment to be court-martialed.
In March, 1864, we received a consignment of twelve recruits, which brought our company up again to a good standing. These men were Iowa farm boys, and twelve as good men as could be found in the army. Three of them had already been in the service, been honestly discharged from wounds received, recovered fully, and reenlisted. Four of them were discharged as sergeants and corporals when our company was mustered out in 1866, one being Milo Lacey as First Sergeant.
The way that recruits came to a company during the Civil War was something like this: The boys at home were growing up, and wanted to get into the service, or for some reason obstacles to their enlistment had vanished, and when they got ready to enlist it became a question with them where they wanted to go. Each of them had several boy acquaintances or relatives who were already in existing regiments. Each one may have had two or three chums in some certain regiment, so when he made up his mind to enlist, he would enlist in a regiment in which he had friends or relatives. As the newspapers were full of the exploits of the regiments at the front, it often happened that some exploit would determine the recruit to go to that regiment if he had a friend or relative in it, in preference to some other regiment where he had a friend or relative. It so happened that the boys of our regiment had a great many friends and relatives in eastern Iowa, and these recruits would be brought together at some point and drilled preliminarily, and taught soldiering say for two or three or four months, and then they would be forwarded in squads to the regiment. If a regiment was not receiving the recruits that it wanted or thought it ought to have, it was common for the Colonel to pick out some good recruiting lieutenant and get him a recruiting furlough and then send him back where the bulk of the regiment had been recruited, and let him go to work. Many regiments were kept up to the maximum in that manner. Our company received subsequent batches of recruits, of which I will speak hereafter. Our company had first and last one hundred and fifty-one members. The casualties of the service were always heavy. For instance, we lost by death twenty-seven men, by desertion nine, and by transfer to other regiments and by other causes,