Moss Bluff Rebel: A Texas Pioneer in the Civil War

Chapter 9 Louisiana

Chapter 9 Louisiana colonel spaight’s executive officer arrived at Eagle Point the next morning with orders to break camp and prepare to leave in two days for Louisiana. Hampered by a nasty headache, Duncan ordered his men to organize weapons and other equipment, pack personal belongings, and send anything they did not need home to Liberty County. His main concern was with men still suffering from food poisoning. He separated those he thought could travel from the ones who obviously could not. He expected one of them who had been transferred to an area hospital to die. As he worked through the sick-call head count, Duncan learned three companies of the battalion would leave Virginia Point that night by ferry for the crossing to Round Point on the east side of the bay. He was told a boat would arrive the next day to collect his and another company. He wrote a short note to Celima, bought a bottle of rum for $10, and nursed it until 11 p.m. Duncan enjoyed spirits frequently throughout his adult life but wartime mumps and food poisoning gave him new excuses to imbibe. Patients afflicted with chills and fever in the nineteenth century regularly turned to concoctions whose chief ingredient was brandy, rum, or whiskey. Conventional wisdom on the Texas frontier held that alcohol was a curative panacea, swallowed either straight or mixed in some homemade recipe. Although quinine was recognized as an appropriate remedy for malaria, shortages prompted substitution with various tonics made from the bark of dogwood, poplar, and willow trees, all mixed with whiskey. One of the greatest difficulties encountered by Confederate physicians caring for soldiers was maintenance of an adequate supply of alcoholic beverages for anesthetic purposes. The rank and file was convinced whiskey shortages were the fault of thirsty army doctors, and often they were right. One Confederate doctor admitted after the war that he and his fellow surgeons would go on a spree the night after delivery of a load of spirits and they A4950.indb 58 A4950.indb 58 10/17/08 8:54:22 AM 10/17/08 8:54:22 AM Louisiana 59 usually succeeded in “drinking up every drop . . . before morning.” Duncan did not worry about doctors draining the battalion liquor cabinet. He had money to buy his own. Sunday around 11 a.m., Duncan and his men spotted a ferry approaching Galveston and assumed it was for them. It was not. A courier showed up before the boat landed with orders that Duncan and his company forget boats and take the northbound train up to Houston and transfer there to the Beaumont cars. His men loaded themselves shortly after dinner and the train pulled out of Galveston around 2:30 p.m., arriving in Houston at sundown. The company jumped to the ground, unloaded its gear, and bedded down around the depot. They were told to be on the Beaumont train by 6:00 the next morning. Rousted out of their bedrolls at 3 a.m., Company F climbed onto the eastbound train in time for a 6:30 departure. The train made only a few miles down the tracks before the engine broke down; mechanics took two hours to fix the problem. Under way again, it was not long before several cars derailed, causing another delay of three hours. Before sunset, the train shuddered to a stop three miles short of West Liberty on the west side of the Trinity. It had taken thirteen hours for the train to travel forty miles, an average speed of just over three miles an hour. If Company F had still been a cavalry unit, it could have ridden there at an easy trot in less than half that time. Duncan borrowed a horse, left a junior officer in charge of the company, and rode downriver to spend the night with Celima and the children. He got home just as dark fell; the children were already asleep. Duncan left the house the next morning around 10:00, driving a family wagon to the Liberty station where the train had finally arrived the night before . The men clambered back onto the cars and they left at 2 p.m. The journey was smoother this afternoon and the train pulled into Beaumont at dusk. The company camped in open space between the station and the Sabine River. There was little sleep for Duncan; he spent most of the night at the...