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Chapter 6 Morale even though farragut’s reinforced union armada sailed close to Sabine Pass and posed an imminent threat of invasion, Duncan would ride a mile for music. Several miles, in fact. On Sunday, February 1, 1863, he and two junior officers rode from Grigsby’s Bluff south to Sabine City to visit Captain John and Catherine Magill Dorman’s Catfish Hotel for supper and “some tolerable good music.” Duncan recounted the outing to Celima in a letter the next day. “Yesterday evening I called on some ladies and I think it is the second time since I have been in the army. I enjoyed their company very much; it had been so long since I had heard a female voice. They sang and played for me the following songs—Yes we miss you at home [sic], Bonnie Eloise and Annie Laurie. The ladies I called on were Mrs. Dorman and her sister and daughter. The young ladies are tolerably pretty but you need not get jealous for they lack a good deal of being as handsome as you are. Mrs. Dorman has a younger sister in the convent [school] at Liberty.” Captain Dorman, master of the Neches River cotton steamer Doctor Massie, married the widowed Georgia native Kate Magill in 1860 after his friend and Kate’s first husband, Arthur Magill, was killed November 2, 1859 in a boiler explosion on the T. J. Smith, a Neches River mail packet. Kate and Arthur, who had been the chief engineer on the Smith, built the Catfish Hotel in 1852 about three hundred yards north of Fort Griffin. By 1860, it was Jefferson County’s best-known inn. The two-story hotel had its own wharf where steamer crews docked to enjoy a meal in the regionally famous dining room. Irish American Kate Dorman was a favorite of Duncan and his fellow Spaight’s Battalion Confederates because she was much more than a singing local hotelier; she also was their compassionate nurse and a spunky Confederate patriot. The 4'10" Kate turned the Catfish Hotel into a temporary hospital during the yellow fever epidemic eight months earlier when permanent tenants fled with the town’s A4950.indb 41 A4950.indb 41 10/17/08 8:54:17 AM 10/17/08 8:54:17 AM 42 Chapter 6 residents. She and two friends cared for many yellow fever patients, including several soldiers of Spaight’s Battalion. What probably endeared Kate Dorman even more to Duncan was her feisty Confederate spirit. On their way to burn Fort Griffin, its fourteen barracks, and stables the preceding October, Federal soldiers confiscated her husband’s horse and cart to haul their howitzer. The outraged Kate gave the Union invaders a Texas tongue-lashing, shouting she hoped “our boys” would kill every last one of them and if she had twenty-five men, she would take them herself. On their way back to their landing craft after destroying the fort, the Federals returned Captain Dorman’s horse and cart and told him if he did not keep his wife’s mouth shut, they would hang him. Kate shouted she would see them in hell before that happened. When spunky little Kate Dorman sang for William Duncan and other Texas Confederates in the Catfish Hotel at Sabine Pass, they listened with wide grins on their faces. Captain Duncan’s turn as battalion duty officer came up again in February 1863, a month unusually full of administrative chores. He and Captain Marsh, the commanding officers of the two cavalry companies, were the only two officers in camp. Confederate gunboats had left the immediate Sabine Pass area and retreated to the upper reaches of Sabine Lake. Duncan began most days in court-martial proceedings, sometimes hearing a case but more often adjourning for lack of one. He kept his eye on several men suffering from the mumps, admitting in what turned out to be a premonition he was afraid of catching them himself. His officer-of-the-day duties included some local police and community-relations work associated with the battalion’s always-hungry soldiers. After a local woman complained that one of her hogs had been slaughtered , Duncan identified his men as the pig poachers and rode to her house to apologize. Two days later, he paid a similar call on an area farmer who had lost a yearling calf in comparable...

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