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.

Charles McKinley Saltzman Army Chief Signal Officer

Charles McKinley Saltzman was born in Panora, Iowa, in 1871—skinny, serious, and wired like a man who already heard radio static no one else could pick up. He graduated from West Point just in time to catch the Spanish–American War, where the Army still fought like it was 1864. Saltzman rode with the 1st Cavalry, and earned two Silver Stars for keeping his head while everything around him smoked and rattled. Officers said he had “the calm of a telegraph pole in a lightning storm.”

While other men were polishing sabers, Saltzman was climbing poles in the Philippines, stringing wire across mountains and jungles, keeping messages alive in places where nothing stayed alive for long. A Manila paper said he “could coax a signal through a brick wall and across a typhoon.” He took the compliment and kept working.

In 1912, he was in London, sitting among diplomats and radio wizards at the International Radiotelegraph Convention. The world was trying to agree on how to talk through the air without stepping on each other’s transmissions, and Saltzman showed up like the one man in the room who actually understood how the equipment worked. One observer said he “handled radio law the way a pianist handles a keyboard—precise, patient, and deadly.”