Imminent Peril (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

The Beginning…Mustering In, August 1862

My trip began on a beautiful cloudless day. It was going to be a hot one for sure, but at least the rain had finally stopped and the trail to Michigan Avenue was dry. The path was surrounded by tall grass and an occasional bunch of wildflowers. The air was filled with butterflies and the faint buzzing sound of bumblebees darting between colored flower petals. This pleasant natural hum of bees, swaying grasses, and chirping robins blended with an unusual crunching noise as I walked over the hundreds of grasshoppers that crossed my path. My right hand firmly grasped the homemade leather baseball that Mom had slipped into my jacket pocket during her final tearful goodbye hug.

Just as I had planned, the journey of a lifetime was ahead of me. My goal was that this adventure and brief stint in the military would provide me with an expanded set of experiences and exposure to unique places and things. I was anxious to grow up quickly and excited to see where this soldier’s passage would take me. It was an open-ended question. I understood my own self-image of being a somewhat naive and very young Michigan farmer who would likely return to my father’s homestead and plow the exact same fields. That was all right with me as long as I could hold onto broader and more dramatic memories that a soldier’s tour of service would most certainly provide. What I couldn’t perceive was that the sudden end for those numerous grasshoppers under my boots that morning would presage a set of horrifying events ahead of me, serving as a grisly but undeniably apt metaphor for the random, terrifying deaths I would witness and the outsize roles played by fate and luck in one’s survival. Hell, at my age, I didn’t spend any time thinking about metaphors.

GOODBYE

Earlier that same morning I had said goodbye to my sister, Dylan, and made her promise to write often. Her name revealed that we had a touch of Irish in our blood on our mother’s side of the family. Grandma came to this country in the early 1820’s. Our family considered ourselves of English heritage and never dealt much with our Irish lineage until a swarm of distant relatives arrived in the 1850’s escaping the Potato Famine. My sister reveled in meeting her new distant cousins; she finally had playmates that had beautiful red hair, just like her. Sis was great; despite the fact that she was younger than me, Dylan always felt responsible for both of us and watched out for me like a little mother.

It was extremely difficult to leave my parents. Mom was crying and holding me so tightly that I thought she would never let go. She had every right to be emotional. From her perspective it was way too early for me to leave home at all, much less to march off to war. I hardly shaved and didn’t have a single hair on my chest, although I was reasonably tall, compared to the local folks. Mom was proud that her little Gabriel actually stood about 5’10”, but she was very worried about my weight—“maybe 120 pounds,” she liked to say, “if he was dressed in soaking wet dungarees.” In my mom’s eyes, I was a wonderful, happy boy who was always helpful on the farm. She also knew that I was fueled by exciting, youthful dreams of exploring our vast country, a wanderlust she and Dad had always encouraged in me, even as a young child. Coupled with the intense love for the U.S.A. instilled in me by my extremely patriotic father, going off to war seemed inevitable, at least in my mind, so I was a bit surprised at depth of the sorrow in both their goodbyes.

My father stood behind us. He tenderly gripped my shoulder and I could see small tears welling up in his eyes. Our little black and white puppy, Willy, began jumping on all of us, thinking that he was going on a trip. After our group hug, we finally said farewell. I told them I would try to find my brother, David. Willy’s spirits remained high, his tail wagging vigorously as he followed me down the path, until Dad called him to come back home. With his tail lowered between his hind legs, he returned and only looked back once. I felt like he understood that I was leaving without him.

When I turned around for the last time, I could see my mother sobbing in my dad’s arms. I left home with mixed emotions that included the nagging question of whether I was being selfish by leaving within only a year of David’s departure. The conflicting emotions choked me up. Nevertheless, I was finally on my own…a curious young man facing an uncertain, yet predictably challenging future.

Walking down the trail, I was haunted by one uncertainty above all. In combat, when the deadly shelling stopped and I was challenged to stand up and courageously charge the enemy...would I? I knew my brother, my hero, was definitely already performing as expected. He’d always had a knack for making my dad proud, and now the Union Army was certainly benefitting from his resolute and proficient actions. But that was my brother, not me.

As a kid, I remember seeing a passing animal show with all kinds of strange creatures, and hearing, for the first time, a lion’s roar. This burly beast was the embodiment of virility and courage as he paced in his cage, poised to respond savagely to all threats. This was my brother. And here was I: untrained, untested, and headed off to learn a proper response to dangerous battlefield conditions and other unknown challenges. It was difficult for me to even maintain a good walking clip, so distracted by the uncertainty of my forthcoming response to combat. Would I emulate the courageous lion, or in the end, would I be like the more skittish creatures, the unimpressive and somewhat contemptuous and fearful breeds? As the sun rose in the sky and drops of sweat appeared on my brow, I had no answers.

Still, I reminded myself: After months of waiting, I was finally on my way to Detroit for the adventure of a lifetime. Detroit, with a population of over 46,000 residents, was the biggest city I could imagine. It had barely sunk in: little ole Gabriel Maddox was going there to join the United States Army!

Dylan had snuck me a recruiting poster about joining a cavalry unit that she had picked up in Ypsilanti. The poster noted that in late August of 1862, the State of Michigan was forming a new regiment of volunteers to be recognized as the 5th Calvary. So, I waited throughout the month of July and hoped that the recruiter would pass by our family farm, just east of Ypsilanti. Ypsi was a small town of 4,000 folks located about 30 miles west of Detroit. It was centered at the intersection of the Huron River and Michigan Avenue and was basically on a straight route between Ann Arbor and Detroit. I knew the recruiter would come through our area, because it gave him the opportunity to engage in recruitment discussions with the large pool of eager college boys that were studying at the University of Michigan.

Though Ann Arbor had only 5,000 residents, it would grow along with its increasingly famous public university. No one back in 1862 could have imagined that, following coach Fielding Yost’s success with the school’s football team, the University would open Ferry Field in 1906, a stadium with the capacity of 46,000 fans.1 These enthusiastic supporters would gather for games on beautiful fall afternoons to cheer on their favorite Wolverine football team. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but the Michigan Cavalry that I was attempting to join would adopt that same, fearsome moniker, and my fellow soldiers and I would proudly carry it onto the battlefields before us.

BASEBALL

I was actually somewhat familiar with the University of Michigan’s bustling campus, having visited it several times over the years with my brother David. By the early 1860’s it was teeming with more than 1000 all male students.2 One beautiful spring Saturday we took the family wagon to Ann Arbor to watch a cricket match—a somewhat strange, but popular English game that involved striking a bowled ball with a flat bat and running between what were called “wickets.”

When we arrived at the large play-field we could see a group of young fellows, all dressed in white, assembling for the game while a small crowd gathered to watch the match. What really caught our eyes, however, was a happy bunch of ruffians who occupied a distant corner of the sandlot. When we investigated, we found that they seemed to be arguing about the rules for a different game, one they called baseball. This was a sport that we heard about, but had never seen played. Most of these athletic, working-class hulks proved to be from the Detroit area, but the rule dispute was taking place between some loud New Yorkers and some students from Massachusetts. After the rules were decided in favor of the more aggressive boys from the Empire State, the game began. We chose to watch this uniquely American game, which the warm-ups suggested would be a lot of fun.

David and I absolutely fell in love with the game and at the end of the high-scoring contest we chipped in together to buy one of the baseballs used in the game so that we could cut it up and see how to make our own balls for use at home. After seeing several clearly inferior batted balls blow up in flight, we chose one of the preferred models as our template. The balls that Mom would eventually make for us started with a walnut center, which was tightly wrapped with a heavy yarn to form a beautiful sphere that was then covered by pieces of cow or horsehide and stitched tight to form a durable cover.

We were thrilled that some of the players asked us to...