on each side of a number of killed and wounded.
The officer in direct command always reported to
me personally whatever had happened during the time
he was out—the result of his reconnoissance,
so to speak, for that war the real nature of these
excursions—and on one occasion the colonel
in command, Colonel Conrad, of the Fifteenth Missouri,
informed me that he got through without much difficulty;
in fact, that everything had gone all right and been
eminently satisfactory, except that in returning he
had been mortified greatly by the conduct of the two
females belonging to the detachment and division train
at my headquarters. These women, he said, had
given much annoyance by getting drunk, and to some
extent demoralizing his men. To say that I was
astonished at his statement would be a mild way of
putting it, and had I not known him to be a most upright
man and of sound sense, I should have doubted not
only his veracity, but his sanity. Inquiring
who they were and for further details, I was informed
that there certainly were in the command two females,
that in some mysterious manner had attached themselves
to the service as soldiers; that one, an East Tennessee
woman, was a teamster in the division wagon-train
and the other a private soldier in a cavalry company
temporarily attached to my headquarters for escort
duty. While out on the foraging expedition these
Amazons had secured a supply of “apple-jack”
by some means, got very drunk, and on the return had
fallen into Stone River and been nearly drowned.
After they had been fished from, the water, in the
process of resuscitation their sex was disclosed,
though up to this time it appeared to be known only
to each other. The story was straight and the
circumstance clear, so, convinced of Conrad’s
continued sanity, I directed the provost-marshal to
bring in arrest to my headquarters the two disturbers
of Conrad’s peace of mind, After some little
search the East Tennessee woman was found in camp,
somewhat the worse for the experiences of the day
before, but awaiting her fate content idly smoking
a cob-pipe. She was brought to me, and put in
duress under charge of the division surgeon until
her companion could be secured. To the doctor
she related that the year before she had “refugeed”
from East Tennessee, and on arriving in Louisville
assumed men’s apparel and sought and obtained
employment as a teamster in the quartermaster’s
department. Her features were very large, and
so coarse and masculine was her general appearance
that she would readily have passed as a man, and in
her case the deception was no doubt easily practiced.
Next day the “she dragoon” was caught,
and proved to be a rather prepossessing young woman,
and though necessarily bronzed and hardened by exposure,
I doubt if, even with these marks of campaigning,
she could have deceived as readily as did her companion.
How the two got acquainted, I never learned, and though
they had joined the army independently of each other,
yet an intimacy had sprung up between them long before
the mishaps of the foraging expedition. They
both were forwarded to army headquarters, and, when
provided with clothing suited to their sex, sent back
to Nashville, and thence beyond our lines to Louisville.