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“Old men for counsel, young men for war,” runs the ancient proverb. The men who saved the Union in the sixties were for the most part young men, thousands of them being “boys in blue” literally as well as figuratively. Living in the town of Dover, Buffalo County, on the raw Wisconsin frontier when the Civil War broke out was a clumsy, overgrown boy named Chauncey H. Cooke. Born at Columbus, Ohio, in May, 1846, he had grown up in the Wisconsin wilderness; sleeping by night under the shake shingle roof of a rude log house through which in winter the snow sifted freely down upon him; by day, when not engaged in the hard toil of the frontier farm, hunting deer and bear and wild fowl or fraternizing with the red children of the forest who still sojourned in this region. It is not strange that such a course of life developed in him a “constitution like a horse,” and a physical stature beyond his years. When the call to arms came in the summer of 1861 young Cooke, although barely turned fifteen , was eager to respond to it. The next season came the Sioux troubles in Minnesota, and therewith the famous panic on the part of the people of Wisconsin which constitutes perhaps the most curious psychological episode in our history. But already our Buffalo County lad, having reached the mature age of sixteen, had resolved to enlist, even though to accomplish this might necessitate the stultification of his puritan training to the extent of telling the mustering officer a lie about his age. Going down to La Crosse for this purpose in September, 1862, he was enrolled in Company G, Twenty-fifth Wisconsin Infantry, and shortly thereafter, instead of being sent to Dixie, was on his way northward to share in the campaign of General Pope against the Sioux of Minnesota. The young soldier saw no fighting in this campaign. However, he made his first contact with the life of the great world outside the secluded valley in which he had passed his boyhood hitherto; and his letters home during this period present both an unusual view of the Indian trouble and the charmingly fresh and unsophisticated narrative of the reactions of the pioneer boy of puritan antecedents to the environment in which he found himself. With the passing years came a greater degree of sophistication, but essentially a boy our subject remained when in May, 1865, on his nineteenth birthday he was mustered out of the service after nearly three years’ campaigning. The letters which we print require but little editing. Since the originals are no longer in existence, however, it is in order here to tell the pedigree of the copies we present for the enjoyment of our readers. Mr. Cooke died at his home in Mondovi in May, 1919. The character of citizen he was is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the fact that by common consent the business houses of the city closed for two hours on the day of his funeral . A few years earlier these letters had been printed in the Mondovi Herald, and fifty copies of the entire collection were struck off in crude booklet form with the title, “Soldier Boy’s Letters to his Father and Mother, 1862–65.” A copy of this booklet came into the hands of the present editor, and struck by the character of its contents he took up with Mr. Cooke, a few months before his death, the question of reprinting the letters in this magazine. To this end a request was made for the loan of the original letters and this evoked the explanation from their author that most of them had been destroyed or given away to various friends. “Many of them,” he continued, “were scrappy and illegible to anyone save myself, written on all sorts of paper and nearly all in pencil. The soldier’s portfolio case for carrying paper and pen and ink, usually a part of his equipment while in training quarters, was nearly always thrown away when real service on the march began. I think you will find an agreement among the old vets that any chance bit of paper picked up from rifled country stores or dwellings along the line of march was the source of supply for letter paper much of the time. I am frank to admit that the printed letters are not a verbatim copy of the originals, if in any degree their fidelity be...

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