Francis J. Herron Iowa Civil War General

General Francis J. Herron

Francis J. Herron looked like he should’ve been selling dry goods instead of commanding men into artillery fire. One soldier remembered him as “slight of build, quick in motion, with eyes that never seemed to stop measuring distance.”

He was young. Thin. Sharp-eyed. The man people underestimated fast and then regretted it later.

He wasn’t born in Iowa, but Iowa made him. By the time the war arrived, he was living in Dubuque, working as a banker. When the first guns fired in 1861, Iowa answered with farms, factories, and young men who barely knew how to hold a rifle. Herron joined the fight. A Dubuque paper said he left “without hesitation, with the confidence of one who had already chosen his duty.”

He helped raise the 1st Iowa Infantry and marched off with them like someone who’d been waiting for the war to start. At Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, his regiment was thrown straight into one of the war’s early disasters. The Union lost the field. Men scattered. Smoke swallowed the hills. A private later wrote, “The air was thick with lead and fear. The trees were cut as with knives.”

Samuel Ryan Curtis Iowa Civil War General

General Samuel Ryan Curtis

Samuel Ryan Curtis didn’t look like a war hero. He looked more like a county surveyor who wandered onto the battlefield by mistake and never quite left. Thick sideburns. Heavy jacket. A man built for long walks and paperwork, not cannon smoke and screaming horses.

But the war didn’t care what men looked like. Curtis had been a West Point engineer, a congressman from Iowa, and a man who believed in the Union the way farmers believe in fences. When the shooting started in 1861, he quit politics and picked up a sword at age fifty-six. Most men that age were done charging at anything. Curtis was just getting started.

Missouri was the problem. Torn in half. Bushwhackers in the trees. Guerrillas in the shadows. Everybody armed. Everybody angry. Confederate armies wanted it back. Union generals wanted to hold it. Civilians just wanted to survive. One Missouri paper called it “a land where every fence rail hides a rifle and every road leads to ambush.”

Curtis was sent in to clean it up.

In early 1862, the Confederates made their big gamble. General Earl Van Dorn gathered an army and marched north into Arkansas, aiming straight at Curtis. Win the fight. Take Missouri. Threaten the Mississippi. Shake the whole Western war loose. Southern papers bragged that Van Dorn intended “to march through Curtis as through dry leaves.”

Curtis saw it coming and didn’t blink. He planted his army along Little Sugar Creek near a place called Pea Ridge and waited. Ten thousand men. Cold ground. Wet boots. No retreat planned. If the Confederate army came, they would come straight into his teeth.

Aunt Becky Civil War Nurse and Saint

Aunt Becky

Sarah Graham Palmer Young was a thirty-two-year-old widow from Ithaca, New York, when she threw herself into the war. After her brothers enlisted, she couldn’t stay home sewing bandages. She kissed her two little girls goodbye, packed a carpetbag, and boarded a southbound train in 1862.

 

She didn’t have any orders, a uniform, or a promise of pay. She just walked into the camp of the 109th New York Volunteers and asked where the sick were. Someone pointed to a tent thick with blood and fever. She went in and stayed.

 

The soldiers called her “Mother.” She snapped, “I’m not that old.” They laughed and called her “Aunt Becky.” Within weeks, she was part of the place. She worked nights, argued with surgeons, and gave her coffee to men who couldn’t lift their heads. She joked with the men when she could, cursed under her breath when supplies ran short, and once told a colonel, “Sir, if you’d been as useful with a needle as you are with that sword, these boys might’ve had decent bandages by now.”

 

She wasn’t trained. No woman was. She learned by doing—pressing on wounds, wrapping stumps, sitting beside the ones who wouldn’t make it till morning. “I did not go to make history,” she said, “but to serve.”

 

Once, near Fredericksburg, she walked six miles through sleet to get rations for her hospital tent. The commissary officer tried to turn her away. She grabbed the wagon reins and drove off before he could stop her. “If you want your mules,” she told him, “come find me at the hospital.”