him, got hold of the arrow-bead with the pinchers, and finally succeeded in working and wrenching it out. The poor fellow was in great pain, but subsequently recovered all right. We had no anesthetics in the army in those days.
All of the stage-drivers and civilians around Julesburg flocked into the fort, and made up their minds to hold it against all odds that should come. All the available men of my company, about fifty in number, turned up at Cottonwood Springs, ready to march with General Mitchell, on the evening of January 14, 1865, about a week after the battle.
On the 15th of January, 1865, the command was drawn up in line, and consisted of 640 cavalrymen. This was in addition to about 100 mule-wagons lightly loaded with rations, corn, tents, and supplies. There was also a herd of about fifty extra horses that were fastened together close at the bit, and driven by fours. There were also four twelve-pound mountain howitzers, and two light three-inch Parrott guns. Captain O'Brien was made chief of artillery under General Mitchell. Colonel Livingston was the next in rank to General Mitchell, and to him was confided the looking after, and taking charge of, the line of march. On the evening of the 15th of January we went up the river to within three miles of Jack Morrow's, and spent a cold, unpleasant January night on the flat plains, without any fires, but we had tents which furnished us a good deal of shelter.
At Jack Morrow's ranch General Mitchell drew up and handed to me a paper which read as follows:
HEADQUARTERS, EXPEDITIONARY FORCES IN THE FIELD,
January 15, 1865. SPECIAL FIELD ORDER NO. 1.
'PAR. 1. Lieutenant E. F. Ware, A.D.C., is assigned to duty as Acting Assistant Adjutant-General during the Expedition now in the field, and will be obeyed and respected accordingly.
'PAR. 2. Captain O'Brien, Co. 'F,' 7th Iowa Cavalry, is hereby assigned to the command of the artillery in the field. All detachments in charge of artillery ordered to the field will report to him immediately for orders, with such officers as have been detailed for the artillery service.
'PAR. 3. Colonel R. R. Livingston will have the immediate command of the troops in the field, and all orders issued from these headquarters, for record, will be transmitted through his headquarters to regiments and detachments.
'PAR. 4. Lieutenant Thompson, First Nebraska Vet. Vol. Cavalry, will act during the expedition as Acting Assistant Quartermaster and Acting Commissary of Subsistence, and will be obeyed and respected accordingly.
ROBERT B. MITCHELL, Brig.-General, Comdg. District and Expedition.'
That evening I told General Mitchell about my visitation and premonitions, and how the frog-man got down on me, and told me thrice that I would 'never see Omaha.' We had quite a talk in regard to it at headquarters. I had made a memorandum of the circumstance in my itinerary, as I wanted to put it down and have proof in black and white, so that, in case anything should happen to me, the premonition would stand in writing as of the proper date and show something definite as to what had occurred. But in the discussion that evening with General Mitchell, in which Captain O'Brien took part, the doctrine of premonition was pretty thoroughly riddled. Said Captain O'Brien, who had about him no savor of cowardice, or superstition: 'These premonitions and prophecies are all bogus. Now,' he said, 'if any spirit, seen or unseen, any ghost or any angel, knows anything, why in thunder don't he tell it and tell it straight? Why does he give it to you in such a dark and veiled manner? If he knows you are going to be killed or die on such a day or hour, why doesn't he say so, tell it plainly, and leave the thing open to positive proof? No,' said Captain O'Brien, 'that isn't the way it is done. These things are always put into some sort of equivocal, double-dealing shape. Now, in your case, the message is, 'You won't see Omaha.' That doesn't mean that you are going to be killed, nor that your death is going to take place. You may never see Omaha, you may never see the North Pole, and may yet live a hundred years. Supposing, for instance, we should march on down to Fort Leavenworth, and didn't have to go to Omaha. Now that would be an every-day, unromantic fact, and entirely unimportant. And it would be just the same as if you were never going to see Davenport, Iowa. There are lots of places you are not going to see again. Now to pay attention to any such things as these is cowardice.'
Then said General Mitchell: 'These things are always double-barrel and meaningless in one sense, and very full of meaning in another. It looks as if somebody was guessing, and waiting for the guess to turn true. Take all the oracles of which classic language speaks: they were always put into such shape that nobody could understand them when given, and if they didn't turn out, no notice was taken of them; but afterwards something happened, and some deep and new hidden meaning was found in it. It's so with the prophecies of the Old Testament. If the prophecies of the Old Testament are read in a plain, sensible, straightforward way, then you will find they are not prophecies at all. The prophetic part of them was studied out long after the thing had happened; as a lawyer might say, 'It was a prophecy after the fact.' Now,' said General Mitchell, 'I don't suppose there is anybody that ever lived who hadn't had a lot of these premonitory experiences, but sensible men never pay any attention to them. If it should happen that you never do see Omaha, and should be mustered out and go home, you would always think there was something in the nature of prophecy to this nightmare of yours, – that it was a revelation. Now, I think you ought to see Omaha anyhow, and I think I'll have you down there alive and well inside of thirty days.'
I said: 'I have no confidence in premonitions, and I'll go to Omaha anyhow, just as soon as we make this raid down on the Republican River. If I get killed in it, well, then it can be said there was something to the premonition.'
This ended for the evening the discussion of that subject. But there were some of the officers who were superstitious, who had heard the conversation, and had heard my statement of the fact. They said, 'Now, there may be something in it, and you better go mighty careful. What's the use to go to Omaha anyhow?' Said one, 'My advice to you is to resign as aide-de-camp and go back to your company.' Another said, 'Be on your guard all the time, and it may be that the premonition is intended only to put you on your guard.'
In the morning of January 16, 1865, we started early, and took the road up Morrow's Canyon. We took what was known as the 'Trader's Trail.' Our troops were composed of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry, the First Nebraska Veteran Volunteer Cavalry, and Companies 'B' and 'C,' First Nebraska Militia (mounted). The First Nebraska was an excellent regiment; it had been in the service for a long time. It had been down in Arkansas doing duty, had got pretty well cut up there, but had been filled with recruits. As I had been with the invading army in Arkansas, it was a great pleasure for me to talk with the officers of the First Nebraska. We had been over the same trail. I told one of them about bringing in the negroes at Batesville down on White River, as hereinbefore related, and that I got a lot of them from a large plantation owned by a man named Le Neve.
'Yes,' said one of the officers of the regiment, 'the Le Neves were ruined by the war, and Mrs. Le Neve and daughter came into Batesville to be under protection, and we had to issue them rations as 'needy persons.' They were on our ration-list all the time we were at Batesville, Arkansas.' This officer said: 'I well remember a young lady riding up to the post quartermaster, and saying, as she whipped her dress with her riding-whip, 'Please, Captain, can Mamma have a little coffee this morning? She is not feeling very well.' Coffee was high-priced and difficult to get, and was not included in the rations which were issued to refugees. My recollections of the Le Neve plantation were that it was one of the finest in that country. I heard one of the negroes say that they were raising that summer, four hundred acres of corn for the Rebel army. This was in addition to a large quantity of cotton. The Le Neve home was a very fine one, with a village of negro quarters and smokehouses situated near it.'
The First Nebraska Cavalry had 'veteran volunteered,' as it was called. After a person had served in the field eighteen months, then he could 'veteranize,' as it was said, and enlist for three years longer and get a bounty of $300, so that soldiers and sometimes regiments 'veteranized.' The First Nebraska was a regiment in which the men had veteranized to such an extent that it was reorganized as a veteran regiment, and bore the name of veteran volunteer in the title of the regiment. The incursions of the Indians, and the vast damages which they had done in Nebraska, raised such an outcry that the Government had to send Nebraska troops home for the protection of Nebraska, the same as a portion of our regiment was stationed in Iowa. And so it happened that the 'First Nebraska Veteran Volunteer Cavalry' was drawn from the field, and the Confederacy, and sent out to fight Indians in the Northwest. The Seventh Iowa and the First Nebraska got along together very well.
The Nebraska MILITIA were frontiersmen who furnished their own horses and arms. They were, as soldiers, first-class in every respect. The companies were small but efficient.
As stated, on January 16, 1865, we went up the Trader's Trail seven miles. There was a small canyon on the left, very full of cedar. We crossed a basin up at the head of the canyon about two and one-half miles in diameter,
