"mixed" character. Letters held for postage--consequently not
"dead"--come under this head. They, too, are sent back to the writer, if
the signature can be found, and the place from which they are dated
corresponds with the post-mark; if not, they are assorted according to
letter and put away into "pigeon-holes," marked with the letter
corresponding. Foreign letters, such as I spoke of before, come under
this head, too. Then there are official letters--in relation to military
and judicial matters--short-paid, and, therefore, brought before this
tribunal. These require minute attention, as three and four documents
are inclosed in one envelope sometimes, making it difficult to discover
who is the proper person to return them to. Again, there are letters
with postage-stamps to be returned, and money letters containing not
over one dollar: those with larger amounts are directed in the
superintendent's room. Ladies directing stamp and money letters keep
account of them in a book, submitted, together with the letters, to the
superintendent, at the close of office hours, every day. Money letters
are marked with red stars, stamp letters with blue. Stamps taken from
dead letters are destroyed by the proper authorities. Then, there is
copying to do--orders and circulars, rules and regulations, to be
transmitted to the different local post-offices; and translations to be
made of communications received from foreign post departments. All this
is "Special" work. A large proportion of the letters passing through the
office are German letters--some French, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish;
but two German clerks are constantly employed, while one clerk can
easily attend to the letters of all the other different nationalities
together.
Sometimes it comes to pass that the superintendent visits one room or
the other, with a number of letters in his hand; these have been
misdirected or badly written. The red letter stamped on each letter
guides him to the desk of the lady who has directed it; and very
sensitive is each and every lady to the slightest reproach or reprimand
received, because of the universal kindness and respect with which they
are treated by all the officials with whom they come in contact.
If the task of poring over these epistles of all kinds, day after day,
is, on the whole, tiresome and wearing, there are certainly many
incidents to relieve the tedium of the occupation. Incidents, I say;
letters, I should say. The deep respect we entertain for a well-known
army officer was justified to me by the insight his own letters gave me
into his character. It is against the rules of the post-office
department to read any part of a letter, unless it is necessary to do so
in order to discover the correct address of the writer; but, as the
general's handwriting is a little hasty and peculiar, and his military
honors and titles were not appended to these letters I speak of, it was
natural that they should be read by the clerks, in order to ascertain
whether they could be returned to the place they were written from. One
of these letters had been written to an old lady (I judged so from the
fact of his inquiring about her son and grand-children) somewhere in the
South, who, it appeared, had entertained the general at her house, one
day during the war, when the general was very much in want of a dinner
to eat. He had not forgotten her kindness and hospitality, though it was
now after the close of the war; but the old lady had probably removed
from the little village to which the letter was directed, or, perhaps,
she had died: so the letter came into our hands, and was returned to the
general. Another was to an old friend of the general's. They had played
together as boys, perhaps, but his friend had not risen to fame and
fortune, like himself; he was giving words to his deep sympathy with a
misfortune or bereavement that had befallen his friend--sympathy
expressed with such tender, true feeling, that we felt as though it were
another bereavement that he should have lost this letter of the
general's.
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.