The claimant filed his declaration for a pension in 1878, alleging that about the 25th day of December, 1863, he received a gunshot wound in his left knee while engaged in a skirmish.

There has been much testimony taken in this case, and a great deal of it is exceedingly contradictory.  Three of the claimant’s comrades, who originally testified to the receipt of the injury by him, afterwards denied that he was wounded in the service, and a portion of the evidence taken by the Bureau tends to establish the fact that the claimant cut his left knee with a knife shortly after his discharge.

An examining surgeon in November, 1884, reports that he finds “no indication of a gunshot wound, there being no physical or rational signs to sustain claimant in his application for pension.”

He further reports that there “seems to be an imperfect scar near the knee, so imperfect as to render its origin uncertain, but in no respect resembling a gunshot wound.”

I think upon all the facts presented the Pension Bureau properly rejected this claim, because there was no record of the injury and no satisfactory evidence produced showing that it was incurred in service and in line of duty, “all sources of information having been exhausted.”

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, June 23, 1886.

To the House of Representatives: 

I return without approval House bill No. 7401, entitled “An act granting a pension to Samuel Miller.”

This man was discharged from one enlistment June 16, 1864, and enlisted again in August of that year.  He was finally discharged July 1, 1865.

In 1880 he filed an application for a pension, alleging that in May, 1862, he contracted in the service “kidney disease and weakness of the back.”

A board of surgeons in 1881 reported that they failed to “discover any evidence of disease of kidneys.”

It will be observed that since the date when it is claimed his disabilities visited him Mr. Miller not only served out his first term of enlistment, but reenlisted, and necessarily must have passed a medical examination.

I am entirely satisfied with the rejection of this claim by the Pension Bureau.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, June 23, 1886.

To the House of Representatives: 

I return herewith without approval House bill No. 424, entitled “An act to pension Giles C. Hawley.”

This claimant enlisted August 5, 1861, and was discharged November 14, 1861, upon a surgeon’s certificate, in which he stated:  “I deem him unfit to stay in the service on account of deafness.  He can not hear an ordinary command.”

Seventeen years after his discharge from a military service of a little more than three months’ duration, and in the year 1878, the claimant filed an application for pension, in which he alleged that “from exposure and excessive duty in the service his hearing was seriously affected.”