Gemmell's Sawmill - Sheridan, Montana

James loved southwestern Montana better than any other place on the frontier.  Nearly twenty years had passed since his first expedition with old Jim Bridger, but he had returned time and time again during those years.  It's no wonder that he eventually chose Ruby Valley as his permanent home.

He loved to recount his Montana adventures and describe the pristine wonders of nature that few white men had ever seen.  Memories of his first visit to the region were still vivid in his mind when he described them to William Wheeler in 1879:

…wonderful spouting springs at the head of the Madison and…what have of late years become so famous as the Upper and Lower Geyser Basin, the Upper and Lower Falls…and the Mammoth Hot Spring…Here we camped several days to enjoy the baths and to recuperate our animals… We made winter camp at the mouth of the Big Horn, where we had a big trade with the Crow and Sioux Indians.  The next spring we returned with our furs and robes.(1)

As early as 1850 James went on trading expeditions up the Snake River, and as far as the Bitter Root or St. Mary's River among the Flathead Indians in Missoula County.  He camped at Alder Gulch on the very sight where rich gold discoveries were made twelve years later, discoveries that led to one of the largest gold booms in history.  “Not once did he have an idea of the great gold harvest that lay beneath him, but he saw only the beautiful and luxuriant furs and robes of the beaver, which he accumulated year after year and sent to St. Louis by way of Fort Bridger.”(2)

James made many such trading trips to Montana in the years preceding the gold rush.  He entered the fertile Ruby Valley with a party of five men and packhorses in the fall of 1857, and traded with the Indians.  They camped at the mouth of Daylight Gulch near Virginia City, where they met a trapper named Robert Dempsey.  James went down into the Yellowstone region and traded blankets for furs with the Indians.  When he returned to the valley, the snow was so deep that he was compelled to spend the winter at Dempsey’s camp and to postpone his return to Utah until spring.  There was no forage for the stock, and they had to cut cottonwood boughs as feed for the mules…that was all the feed those poor animals had to live on through the long winter.  The hardship and privations of that winter (1857-58) forged a life-long friendship between James and Robert Dempsey.  (Dempsey and his Indian wife, who was adept in the white woman’s manner of dress and housekeeping, became good friends of James and Maria when they later moved to Sheridan.)(3)

In spring 1863, during his second expedition from Utah to the Bannack gold mines, James headed northeast to Fort Benton, a trading post on the upper Missouri River, to trade with the Indians.(4)  While he was there, he purchased the sawmill machinery that was used to cut the lumber for the fort, loaded it in his wagon, and started back to Alder Gulch.  When he was one day out from Fort Benton, the Indians stole his mules.(5) Refusing to accept his misfortune, yet not wanting to antagonize the culprits, he came up with a solution.  He went back to Fort Benton, purchased five gallons of whiskey, and traded it to the Indians for his stolen mules.  Upon his return to Alder Gulch in October he met Joseph C. Walker, who had recently settled in Montana.  The two men (along with Walker’s brother and cousin) went into business and constructed a sawmill on a creek near Sheridan that became known as Mill Creek.(6)




Possible site of Gemmell's sawmill
in Brandon, Montana, just a few miles east of Sheridan
Photo by Bary Gammell



Brandon is located on Mill Creek just east of Sheridan

It took twelve mules to run the new mill, plus a crew of twelve men.  The fee charged for the unfinished lumber was twenty-five cents per foot.  (Profits in that first year were enough that Joseph Walker agreed to pay off James’ long overdue debt ($500 for goods on credit) to the Walker brothers of Salt Lake City.)  The mill crew worked hard all day, but during those long winter evenings, with nothing to read, they passed the time sitting around the fire telling stories.  Five members of the crew were James’ acquaintances from Utah, so most often the conversation turned to berating the Mormons, specifically Brigham Young.  James, at one time, had a cordial personal relationship with Brigham Young, but later, especially after his disaffection from the Church, James seemed bent on knocking the revered prophet down a notch or two.

Years later Walker recorded what he could remember of “the acts of the Mormons during those early years” as told to the crew by Gemmell during the long evenings at their camp on Mill Creek (twenty five miles from Virginia City, in the winter of 1863-4.)  Like most mountain men, James surely had developed the gift of gab, for as Walker declared, “I have penned but a tithe of the history he [James] gave.”  According to Joseph Walker, James told the crew how he made the decision to come to Alder Gulch.  Two of the few confidential friends that he had left among the Mormons seemed to think that



…it wasn’t safe for him to sleep in his house [because Brigham was "down on him"]...[James] said that he spent the days with his families, and hid and slept in the brush at night, but he said he could not make a living for two families and live that way.  So he got some Indian goods from the three Walker brothers [not Joseph C. Walker] on credit and with two old wagons and some Spanish mules he struck out north in the early spring of 1863 coming up through Bannack…(7)

Although Joseph Walker’s business partnership with James lasted only a year, he retained fond memories of those days, and recorded this final tribute:

…during the year Mr. Gemmell was associated in partnership with my brother A. M. Hardenbrook and myself, no partnership could have been more agreeable.  Many years ago Mr. Gemmell went to his reward.  Peace to his ashes.  He had worked upon the treadmill of life enough.  His body was interned on Mill Creek about eight miles below our winter camp of 1863-4.(8)

Walker and Gemmell saw each other for the last time in fall 1865 at Virginia City, not long after James had moved his family to nearby Ruby Valley.  At that reunion, James was eager to tell Walker about his long conversation with General Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced "Mahr"), newly appointed acting governor of Montana Territory, who had just arrived in Virginia City, the territory’s new capital.  James reported that he and Meagher chatted for hours, comparing notes about the experiences they had in common.  Both of these men had led very colorful lives, both had been prisoners in the British penal colony at Van Diemen’s Land, both had escaped on American whaling vessels, and both had made a home in Montana that same year.(9)  Meagher, a Union officer in the Civil War, was born in Ireland.  As a young leader in the Irish rebellion, he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in Van Diemen’s Land, but made his escape in 1852. James, who was captured in the Canadian rebellion, had escaped the island seven years before Meagher arrived, but he had learned about Meagher through newspaper reports. Just two years after his conversation with the general, James was shocked to read about his tragic death: “…suddenly in the summer of 1867, after beating the odds time and again on three different continents, Thomas Francis Meagher fell off a riverboat (at Fort Benton) and drowned in the Missouri River at age 44.  His body was never found.”(10)

________________________

1. Wheeler, p. 331.
2. Duncan, Elaine, “An Adventurous Pioneer,” 1926. (Elaine Ducan, great granddaughter of James Gammell, wrote this article when she was sixteen years old.)
3. Montana Historical Society, “The Pioneers”, author unknown. 
4. Larry Preston, in his 1956 paper on James Gemmell (pp. 17-18), cited an oral tradition passed down by family members.  As the story goes, James’ daughter Jeanette accompanied him on the trading expedition in spring 1863 from Salt Lake to Ruby Valley, Alder Gulch, and the Yellowstone region. There are many questionable aspects to the story; therefore it is not included here. To name just two, Jeanette would have been just eleven years old at the time…very young for such a dangerous trip. Also, James spent the winter in camp with his mill crew, before returning to Salt Lake Valley.
5. Montana Historical Society, “The Pioneers”, author unknown.
6. Walker, Joseph C., pp. 40-41, 64-65.
7. Walker, Joseph C. pp. 40-42, 64-66. See also “The Pioneers”, author unknown.
8. Walker, Joseph C., p.65.
9. Walker, Joseph C., pp. 65-66.
10. http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/ireland/meagher.htm    General Meagher’s statue still stands in front of the state capitol building in Helena.  

Family Photos - James Gemmell's children in Montana

Old photos are such a treasure!   Here are three taken in Sheridan, Montana.  They were published in a book called Pioneer Trails and Trials in 1976 by the Madison County History Association.
I would love to find out if anyone has the originals.

The Orlin Fitzgerald Gammell Family

 taken in Montana, c. 1910.

Orlin is James Gammell's firstborn son. 

 

The living children of James Gemmell (c. 1924), those who were living in Sheridan at the time.

 

George Gemmell, youngest son of James, and his son Billy, c. 1924,

 at George's blacksmith shop in Sheridan.

My next post will tell the story of  James' move to Montana.  (I will then move these photos ahead into other posts.)  

Thanks to Bary Gammell for providing these photos.

The Montana Gold Rush

While the Civil War was raging in the United States, Utah Territory was enjoying a period of growth and increased prosperity.  The 1860’s brought an influx of 16,000 Mormon converts from Europe, who crossed the plains in ox trains.  With its population growing, Utah made its third petition for statehood.  Ironically, just as the Southern states “were trying to get out of the Union, Utah was trying to get in.”  Though the quest for statehood was an uphill battle, President Brigham Young reminded the Saints how blessed they were to live in the sheltered valleys of the west:

Had we not been persecuted, we would now be in the midst of the wars and bloodshed that are desolating the nation, instead of where we are, comfortably located in our peaceful dwellings in these silent, far off mountains and valleys. Instead of seeing my brethren comfortably seated around me today, many of them would be found in the front ranks on the battlefield.  I realize the blessings of God in our present safety.  We are greatly blessed, greatly favored and greatly exalted, while our enemies, who sought to destroy us, are being humbled.(1)

James Gammell, his wives, and children were among those blessed to be spared the tragedy that befell his brother Andrew at the Battle of Vickburg.  Andrew’s wife, Het, was left a widow and his three daughters orphans.  In a letter to his sister, Jane, James expressed his sorrow for the loss of his two brothers:

I was on the river and far from the settlements when I got your Letter with the account of William’s Death.  [William died of pneumonia in Houston.]…Jane, it was a hard blow… Dear, Dear Brothers, they are both gone.  Poore Andy fills a bluddy but noble grave...Oh William, could I but bin near to have soothed your last moments and mingled my tears with those that was present.  It would have bin a great satisfaction to me, but now I can but weape over fond reckelections of those dear ones… Give my love to all, so says Uncle Jim Gemmell.  I shall shortly write to…Hetty [Andrew’s wife].(2)

After the U.S. Army vacated Camp Floyd in fall 1861 to fight the Civil War, James found himself searching for new business opportunities to support his growing family—now eleven children.  His wife Maria had given birth to a daughter, Emily, in February of that year, but the baby lived only a few days.  One year later Maria had another child, named Andrew after James’ brother.

James didn’t have to wait more than a few months before he heard rumors of a promising new business venture.  In July 1862, gold was discovered in southwestern Montana on Grasshopper Creek, sparking the biggest rush since the California Gold Rush of 1848-49.  Word spread like wildfire, and the mining camp of Bannack(3) literally sprang up overnight.  By January more than four hundred prospectors were settled into their tents and makeshift shanties, waiting until the spring thaw would permit them to pan for gold.  Many of them had come ill prepared for the harsh Montana winter, and supplies were scarce.  The nearest source was Salt Lake City, four hundred thirty miles away.  The miners soon learned that no matter how much gold you have, you can’t eat it!  They were forced to pay dearly for imported supplies, and the freighters often made more money than the prospectors.

Route to the Montana Gold Mines
(approx. the same route as I-15 and Highway 91)

In November 1862, James loaded up two wagons with seventy one-hundred-pound bags of flour(4), some blankets, and other supplies that he had purchased on credit from the Walker brothers in Salt Lake City and started for Montana, confident that he could to sell his merchandise at “boom town” prices.  There is no evidence that James ever panned for gold himself; instead, he sold his goods to those who did, and likely relieved some prospectors of a good portion of their treasure. 

James was successful in finding a new and shorter route through Cache Valley to the newly discovered gold mines.  On this trip he headed due north from Salt Lake City, through the settlements of Richmond (Utah) and Franklin (Idaho).  Eight miles north of Franklin, he crossed the Bear River into Marsh Valley (present-day Bannock County, Idaho).  The new road turned out to be “an excellent one, with abundance of feed and water.”(5)

At Marsh Valley he met up with an outfit headed back to Salt Lake City from the Bannack City mining camp with the express mail.  At the Snake River crossing, three of the five men accidentally lost all their provisions and nine hundred dollars worth of gold dust in the river.  So destitute were they when they met Gammell’s train, they decided to return to the mines and try to recoup their losses.  They arrived there with James on December 17th.  After the three men turned back, the other two, George Clayton and Henry Bean, continued southward alone through Cache Valley on the very same route James had taken going north.  They were never seen again.

Montana freighter, A.H. Conover, who left Bannack City a few weeks after the Clayton-Bean outfit, discovered that the two men had been killed.  He was told by a group of Indians at the Port Neuf River, near Pocatello, that two white men with five animals (Clayton and Bean had five animals) were murdered near the head of Marsh Valley, not far from the Bear River and the Cache Valley settlements.  They said the Shoshone killed the men to avenge the blood of three of their band who had been executed a few days before by U.S. Army Major McGarry and his soldiers.  McGarry had confronted the Shoshone while rescuing a white boy who had been kidnapped from Cache Valley.(6)  There were several Indian attacks along this same route within the next few months, causing the U.S. Army regiment at Camp Douglas(7) to mount an expedition against the Shoshone in January 1863.(8)

Unusually mild weather permitted James to travel the four hundred mile route between Salt Lake City and Bannack three times that winter.  By the end of March (1863), James had sold his first load of goods at Bannack, returned to Salt Lake City, loaded up another pack train, and headed back to the mines.  Since business was booming at the camp, he increased the size of his pack train to fifteen or twenty animals, heavily laden with provisions and merchandise.  He started out with a company of about six men, but added several more when he passed through the frontier settlements.(9)

Jim Gammell was well known at the Bannack mines for his homemade whiskey, the antidote of choice for the drudgery and boredom of camp life.  We don’t know for sure how Jim made his brew, but this is one method typically used to stretch a barrel of whiskey: “to two barrels of water, one added a few plugs of tobacco, some camphor, and a little ‘stricknine’ to give it tang.”  This concoction was added to a barrel of whiskey, producing three barrels of “Red-eye” or “Mountain Dew.”(10)  Captain James Stuart, who organized a prospecting expedition for gold along the Yellowstone River, mentioned Jim in his journal:  “April 9, 1863…Our party started from Bannack City for the Fifteen-mile Creek (now known as Rattlesnake Creek)…At the time I left town the inhabitants were nearly all the worse for their experiments with Old Jim Gammell’s minie-rifle whiskey.”(11) 

Virginia City,Madison County, Montana
View from Cemetery Hill 2004
(Wikimedia Commons)

Bannack reached its peak population of nearly three thousand inhabitants in spring 1863, with nearly two thousand others living downstream.  The settlement dissolved as quickly as it had sprung up when another rich gold vein was discovered in May at Alder Gulch, eighty miles to the east.  The first prospectors on the new site took their gold to Bannack to purchase supplies.  Once they got a little whiskey under their belts, they couldn’t resist bragging that they had found the “mother lode.”  As the news spread, many prospectors pulled up stakes and headed for Alder Gulch, which soon became the thriving settlement of Virginia City.(12)  Alder Gulch yielded an estimated $30 million in placer gold(13) in just three short years between 1863 and 1866.  (Not to say that every prospector got rich there. The typical miner struggled to make a living wage, and ended up with more blisters, aches and pains, than he did gold.)

Business was booming in Alder Gulch, and future prospects looked promising. James decided to leave the Salt Lake Valley and settle in Sheridan, just twenty miles northwest of Virginia City.  When he moved his family to Montana in 1865, Virginia City was the largest town in the inland northwest, with a population of over ten thousand.  (The present-day (2010) population numbers, as the townsfolk say, “one hundred thirty-two very hardy souls!”)(14)

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1. Church History in the Fulness of Times, chapter 30.
2. James Gemmell, letter to his sister, Jane, January 1, 1870.
3. The ghost town of Bannack is now Bannack State Park, located just 24 miles southwest of Dillon. Take I-15 to exit 59 (State Highway 278), and travel west for 17 miles. Turn left on the Bannack Bench Road and travel south for 4 miles to the Park entrance on the left-hand side.
4. Madsen, Brigham, North to Montana, p. 75.  Flour purchased in Salt Lake at $6 for a one hundred pound bag was sold in Montana for $40 a bag.
5. Deseret News, “New Road North”, December 10, 1862. The new road followed roughly the same route as present-day Highway 91 and I-15.  (See also Joseph C. Walker, p. 64.)
6. Deseret News, “More Indian Murders”, January 14, 1863.
7. During the Civil War, the government sent seven hundred troops to Utah Territory to protect the overland mail and the transcontinental telegraph stations from Indian attacks. Instead of using the recently vacated Camp Floyd, they chose a site east of Salt Lake City and named it Camp Douglas after Stephen A. Douglas. The troops came in October 1862 and stayed until the end of the Civil War. ( See Church History in the Fulness of Times, Chapter 30.)
8. The military action became known as the Bear River Massacre (about 250 Indians were killed).
9. Deseret News, “Pack Train for the Mines, March 25, 1863.
10. Madsen, Brigham, North to Montana, p. 27.
11. The Journal of Captain James Stuart, with notes by Samuel T. Hauser and Granville Stuart.  (See “The Yellowstone Expedition of 1863”, Historical Society of Montana 1876, Vol. 1, p. 149.)
12. http://www.legendsofamerica.com/mt-virginiacity.html   The majority of avowed secessionists living in the camp, which was then part of Idaho Territory and therefore "belonging" to the Union, made it primarily a "southern” town, with its residents’ sympathies lying with the Confederates. Furthermore, the camp was producing enough gold to win the Civil War for whoever could capture it. Due to this strategic position, President Lincoln soon sent northern emigrants into the mining camp to help hold the gold for the North. This of course caused all kinds of tension in the new city, which quickly became one of the most lawless places in the American West.
13. Placer gold mining, or free gold prospecting, should not be confused with hard rock gold mining. Placer mining involves dust, flakes, and nuggets, while hard rock mining involves veins of ore.
14. http://www.virginiacity.com/#photos Virginia City is now frozen in time. See a 19-minute video about its preservation.   

Memorials to Andrew F. Gammell

There are two plaques at Vicksburg that bear the name of Andrew F. Gammell.  Neither one is actually located within the Vicksburg National Military Park, but they are close by.  Both plaques can be found in the northeast end of the Jewish Cemetery at 2414 Grove Street, the dead-end in the middle of the Vicksburg Battlefield, near the park’s Visitor's Center.

The tract of land where the Anshe Chesed Jewish Cemetery of Vicksburg is now located was once part of the Second Texas Lunette, the fortress manned by the Second Texas Infantry, and the place where Andrew was killed.  At that time, Baldwin Ferry Road, a key entrance into the city, passed through this parcel of land.  A Confederate marker was later erected on the grounds of the cemetery, commemorating the Second Texas Lunette.(1)

2d Texas Infantry Position Tablet
Anshe Chesed Jewish Cemetery, Vicksburg
NPS Photo

The inscription reads:

CONFEDERATE POSITION TABLET

Lunette on Right of Baldwin’s Ferry Road

This salient lunette and the lines immediately on its right and left were held, May 22, 1863, and the assaults of the Union force repulsed, by the 2d Texas infantry—the right two companies occupying the curtain to the right; the left four companies, the curtain immediately north of the Baldwin’s Ferry Road; and four companies in the lunette. The 42d Alabama held the curtain between the right of the 2d Texas and the railroad. Green’s Brigade, about 1:00 p.m., reinforced this position; and, about 5:00 p.m., detachments of the 1st and 3d Missouri Cavalry, and of the 1st Arkansas Cavalry, dismounted, made a sally from the lunette and materially assisted in repulsing the Union assault on the left flank. Before the end of May the left four companies of the 2d Texas were moved into the lunette. A countermine against the Union approach was fired, June 28; two others were prepared, but not fired. Both the sap rollers in front of the two Union approaches to this work were burned on July 1. This tablet marks the salient angle of this lunette. Casualties: In 2d Texas during the defense: Killed 38, wounded 73, missing 15, total 126, Capt. A.F. Gammell and Lieut. Robert S. Henry killed, Lieut. William F. Kirk mortally wounded.

The second plaque, also located in the Jewish Cemetery, commemorates Moore’s Brigade, of Maj. Gen. John H. Forney's Division, of Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's Army of Vicksburg, and commanded by Col. Ashbel Smith.(2)

2d Texas Infantry Regimental Monument
Anshe Chesed Jewish Cemetery, Vicksburg

TEXAS

MOORE’S BRIGADE

Brig. Gen. John C. Moore

SECOND INFANTRY

Colonel Ashbel Smith

Casualties during defense,

Killed 38, Wounded 73,

Missing 15, Total 126

Captain A.F. Gammell and

Lieut. R.S. Henry killed,

Lieutenant W. F. Kirk

mortally wounded.

Andrew was originally buried in the plot of land that later became the Jewish Cemetery.  In 1866 a Confederate burial ground called Soldiers’ Rest was created at Cedar Hill Cemetery, just outside of the National Park.  An estimated 5,000 Confederate soldiers were then re-interred at Soldiers’ Rest.

Soldiers Rest, Confederate Cemetery
Vicksburg, Mississippi

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1. http://www.nps.gov/vick/historyculture/tour-stop-12-second-texas-lunette.htm
2. http://www.nps.gov/vick/historyculture/2nd-texas-infantry.htm 

Andrew F. Gammell and the Battle of Vicksburg

 


The Second Texas Lunette, Vicksburg, Mississippi
NPS Photo
On May 22 it was the scene of furious fighting as Confederates beat back repeated Union attacks.
During the siege Union soldiers dug approach trenches to within 15 feet of the lunette. http://www.civilwaralbum.com/vicksburg/2nd_tx.htm

Situated on the bluffs overlooking a bend in the river, Vicksburg was the most important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi.  Southerners knew that “if Vicksburg falls, the Mississippi falls, and if that river goes, the confederacy is divided and Texas could fall…and if Texas falls, the world falls.”(1)  By the end of 1862 President Lincoln announced to General Grant, “Vicksburg is the key; the war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket.”  Victory at Vicksburg would give the Union full control of the Mississippi River.

General Grant posed his army to crush a three-mile-long section of the Vicksburg defense line on May 19, 1863.  Three days later he began the most intense military bombardment he could muster, using hundreds of heavy cannon and every piece of ordnance.  The barrage began at six in the morning, and abruptly ended exactly at ten.  At that moment all units stormed up the hill, 35,000 Union soldiers at once.



Colonel Ashbel Smith
of Texas
Graduate of Yale Medical School

Located in the center of the Vicksburg defense line, and guarding the main road into town, was a crescent-shaped fortification, which later became known as the Second Texas Lunette.(2)  Under the command of Colonel Ashbel Smith, Andrew Gammell and the brave soldiers of the Second Texas Sharpshooters, known for their great accuracy with rifles, held this fortress for forty-six days.  Only when the prospect of starvation was certain did they surrender on July 4, 1863.  Colonel Smith described in vivid detail the events of those forty-six days:

On May 2 [1863], the regiment left camp on Chickasaw Bayou [nine miles above Vicksburg], without a change of clothes and with only a single blanket to a man. Dirty and ragged the men must needs be.  During the siege there were several showers of rain, two of which were drenching.  The loamy soil of this region was rendered a mire.  The men in the trenches were over shoe in mud.  With only a single blanket, they were obliged to bivouac in the mud.  A June sun soon dried it up. Nothing could daunt these men, impassive to fatigue and patient to endure.  My chief apprehension was lest the enemy [Union army] should make an assault when our guns were wet, knowing that he was furnished with every appliance for comfort and for securing his arms and ammunition.

[Vicksburg, Sunday, May 17] Subsequently, the same night, an hour or two after midnight, the men were roused from their bivouac on the ground, and moved out of their brigade position, and changed places with the Forty-second Alabama (a gallant regiment), in order that the Second Texas Infantry might man the fort [lunette] which commanded the Baldwin's Ferry road at the very point where the road traversed the lines to enter the city.  This was the assailable point of our lines; the place of danger; the post of honor: the key of this portion of our works of defense.

An irregular system of valleys covering a considerable distance in front of the fort furnished crests where the Union army could place its canons and find protection from Confederate fire.  Andrew’s company dug a ditch two feet deep on the inside of the fortress to enable the men to stand erect without being exposed to enemy fire.  On May 22, the Union attack began:

At an early hour of the morning of Friday, May 22, the enemy opened a most furious cannonade and fire of musketry, which were continued with occasionally varying intensity till 10a.m.  This was the hour designated in the enemy's orders, as afterward appeared, for a general assault on our lines throughout their entire length.  There was a sudden, sullen silence of the enemy's artillery.  Hitherto the positions of the enemy were known only by the flash of their guns and the clouds of smoke which enveloped their heads.  Instantaneously—the enemy springing up from the hollows and valleys to our right and front—the earth was black with their close columns, and ere Private Brooks could well exclaim. "Here they come."  They were surging on within a few paces of the foot of our works…The Second Texas was ready, standing up boldly on the banquette, and exposing their persons to the fire of ten times our numbers, my men received the enemy with a most resolute and murderous fire; my cannon belched canister; my men made the air reel with yells and shouts as they saw the earth strewn with the enemy's dead…Our men, too, fell thick and fast…

As the shades of the night were setting in, the enemy’s fire slowly and sullenly slackened. It ceased with the dark.  The enemy returned to their covers in the hollows and valleys…The loss of the enemy, considering the numbers engaged on either side, was enormous.  The ground in our front and along the road, and either side of the road for several hundred yards way to the right, was thickly strewn with their dead.  In numbers of instances two and three dead bodies were piled on each other.  Along the road for more than 200 yards the bodies lay so thick that one might have walked the whole distance on them without touching the ground.


Siege of Vicksburg
(Wikimedia Commons)

All our men at all times slept on their arms, and, as they were never relieved, but remained at all times at their post, the fatigue was very great.  They did their duty not only without a murmur, but with gaiety.

From the assault of May 22 till the surrender, the number of the enemy [Union army] operating directly in front and directly against the lines manned by the Second Texas was ten times greater than the strength of this regiment, and he was greatly superior in every appliance.  When the enemy took possession of the lines, after the surrender, officers and men expressed their unfeigned surprise and mortification at the weakness of our defenses.  The spade is a military weapon.

Colonel Smith mentioned by name a few individuals who distinguished themselves for bravery and honor. Among those few he mentioned were “Captain [A.F.] Gammell and Lieutenant [B. S.] Henry, who fell gallantly at their posts.  [They] were models of zealous and active duty.”  Captain Andrew Gammell died in the heat of the battle, before the surrender on July 4:

We laid down our arms—want of subsistence and want of ammunition.  The laying down of our arms, the surrender of nearly 30,000 men, is a misfortune which words cannot extenuate, but it was not a wholly unredeemed disaster.  The Second Texas Infantry achieved one victory—they utterly destroyed any prestige which the enemy might have heretofore felt when the soldiers they should encounter should be Texans.  And this was evinced in the marked and special respect with which the enemy, officers and men, after the surrender, during our stay in Vicksburg, were wont to treat and speak of the members of the Second Texas Infantry.  When the Second Texas Infantry inarched through the chain of the enemy's sentinels, the spirits of most of the men were even then at the highest pitch of lighting valor.  Released from the obligation of their parole, and arms placed in their hands, they would have wheeled about, ready and confident.

Very respectfully, your most obedient servant,


ASHBEL SMITH,
Colonel, Second Regiment Texas Volunteer Infantry.(3)

Soldiers Rest Cemetery, Vicksburg, Mississippi
NPS Photo

Lieutenant Andrew F. Gammell, Company D, Second Texas Infantry, was killed at the rank of Captain, and interred at Soldiers’ Rest Cemetery.  His unmarked gravestone is near the site of the battle.  From Vicksburg he wrote:

Kiss [the children] for Uncle Andy. When he comes home he will do it for himself.
So goodbye for present,

Your brother Andy(4)

The Civil War, the most painful of all United States wars, took a terrible toll on families. The total number of soldiers killed, both Union and Confederate, was 625,000, not to mention thousands who were wounded or maimed for life. On the home front, wives and mothers cared for their families and worked the farm, and after the war thousands of them, including Andrew’s wife Het, were left widows. It was literally a war of brother against brother. The Gammell family was no exception. Jane Gammell Wylie had two sons in the battle: Andrew Gammell serving in the Confederate Army, 2nd Texas Infantry, and James Henry Wylie in the Union Army, 1st Regiment, Massachusetts Heavy Artillery.
______________________

1. Michener, James, Texas, 1985, p. 629.
2. The Second Texas Lunette was technically a salient lunette. A two or three-sided field fort, its rear open to interior lines, was called a lunette (French lunette, “little moon”). Lunettes were often named in honor of battery commanders. A salient is an area of a defensive line or fortification that protrudes beyond the main works. In the Civil War, it extended closest to an enemy’s position and usually invited an attack.
3. The War of the Rebellion: A compilation of the Official records of the Union and Confederate Armies, United States War Dept., Robert Nicholson Scott, compiled by Calvin Duvall Cowles, U.S. Government, 1889. pp. 383-94.
4. Andrew Gammell, Letter to his sister, Jane, 14 January 1863, Vicksburg. (Copy from the collections in the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.)

Andrew F. Gammell of the Second Texas Infantry



NPS Photo
2d Texas Infantry Regimental Monument
Vicksburg National Military Park



The presidential election of 1860 caused quite a commotion in the state of Texas.  The new Republican Party had nominated abolitionist and former congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.  His very name became a curse word to Southerners.  So strong was the opposition in Texas that he was not allowed on the ballot. When Lincoln won the election with nothing but Northern electoral votes, Texans realized that their economy and their very way of life were in jeopardy.  They began hollering, “Immediate secession! Abe Lincoln is not our president!”(1)

The whole Southern economy was based on the belief that slaves were property and that the government had no right to confiscate personal property—and valuable property at that.  In Texas one adult male slave was worth nearly $1,000, and slaves were absolutely essential to running a cotton plantation.

Even non-slaveholders, like Andrew Gammell, felt the same way.  Only one person in ten owned a slave, but nine out of ten would support the war of secession.  Andrew told his sister, Jane,

I hope the day is not far distant when you all can welcome home the victorious soldiers of Texas.  How I look for that happy day when I once more can see my friends and know them free from Lincoln and his despotic rule.  Then I shall be satisfied…I do not care how soon [the Northern states] may fall out if they will let us alone.(2)

Andrew, along with his fellow Texans, was willing to risk his life in the defense of the South and its traditions, even though he had lived in Texas for less than five years.  Originally a Northerner, he was born in New York.  He was christened “Andrew Faulds Gammell”(3) at age twelve in Lowell, Massachusetts, while living there with his mother and his stepfather, James H. Wylie.  The family then moved to Hanover, Michigan, to be near his brother James Gammell after James had escaped from Van Diemen’s Land.  In Hanover, twenty-one-year old Andrew married Esther Van Patten, the sixteen-year-old daughter of his neighbor John Van Patten.(4)  Andrew and Esther had two daughters, Jennette and Esther, before leaving Michigan.

By 1860 most of the Gammell family, with the exception of James, had gathered in Harris County, Texas, where the oldest brother, William, a slave owner, had lived for more than twenty years.  William had been part of the contingent that won the original Republic of Texas from Mexico in eighteen minutes at San Jacinto.  Andrew and his sister, Jane, the wife of Captain James B. Andrews, settled in Harris County, along with their mother, Jane Wylie, and their stepsister, Mary Ann Wylie, who married a Texan, Darius Gregg.

Andrew and his brother William, both gunsmiths by trade, must have paid close attention to the heated arguments during the presidential campaign.  They realized that such animosity between the North and South was bound to end in war.

Just one month after Lincoln’s election, South Carolina seceded from the Union, citing the violation of its alleged rights to own slaves.  Texas followed suit a few weeks later on February 2, 1861.  On February 8, seven cotton states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to organize the Confederate States of America.  They named Jefferson Davis as President.  In April Davis ordered six thousand Confederate troops to take Fort Sumter. Shots fired at 4:30 in the morning on April 12, 1861, marked the beginning of the Civil War.  The sixty Union soldiers who manned the fort surrendered the next day, marching out of the fort bearing the tattered Union flag.

During the summer the Confederacy began organizing its defensive fortifications in Texas.  The Union battleships in the Gulf of Mexico now posed a threat to the shipment of Texas cotton to England.  Colonel John Creed Moore was sent to Galveston, where he organized and trained the Second Texas Infantry Regiment, known as the Second Texas Sharpshooters.  Andrew Gammell of Houston was one of the volunteers who enlisted.  By December the regiment, consisting of ten companies of volunteer militia, had moved to Camp Bee near Andrew’s home in Houston to complete their training.  By March 1862, Andrew had been transferred to Corinth, Mississippi, where his regiment became part of the Army of the Mississippi, commanded by none other than General Albert Sidney Johnston, former commander of Utah’s Camp Floyd.

With courage and youthful optimism Andrew bid a tearful farewell to his wife, “Het” (Esther), and his three daughters.  The youngest was three-year-old Kate.  He called her “Kitten.”(5)  Andrew took comfort in knowing that his sister, Jane, lived nearby and would be a great help and support to Het while he was gone.  (Andrew’s mother, Jane Wylie,  had met an untimely death just a few months earlier when she was struck by lightning.) After a festive ceremony in which the ladies of Houston presented the regiment with a silk battle flag, Andrew and his fellow soldiers departed Houston by train to Beaumont, Texas. From there they continued by steamboat and overland march to Corinth, Mississippi.(6)

As part of the greater Army of the Mississippi, Andrew and his fellow Texas Sharpshooters engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War at Shiloh, Tennessee (April 6-7, 1862), the battle in which General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed.  Johnston was shot in the leg while leading the attack on the Union army.  Thinking that his wound was insignificant, he dismissed his personal surgeon to care for other wounded soldiers.  Within one hour he bled to death; his boot had filled with blood from a severed popliteal artery.  After the battle the Second Texas was cited for bravery, and Colonel Moore was promoted to brigadier general.

By the time the Second Texas, now under the command of Colonel Ashbel Smith,(7) fought the battle at Corinth, Mississippi, in October, they had already become a seasoned fighting unit.  They managed to take Fort Robinett, but held it for only a short time and were forced to retreat.  From Corinth the regiment retired to winter camp at Grenada, Mississippi.  On Christmas Eve, President Jefferson Davis and General J. E. Johnston came to review the troops.  The dignitaries watched the parade from the porches of the mansions along Margin Street, while the troops marched from the fairgrounds to the downtown square to Margin Street, and then back to the fairgrounds.(8)

Andrew, still in good spirits and steadfastly optimistic about the Confederate cause, reported the news to his family, “I had the pleasure of seeing Jeff [Jefferson] Davis at Grenada.  He and General [J.E.] Johnston reviewed the army at that place… The army was very much pleased with him and cheer after cheer was sent up for him.”  In his letter Andrew had very little to complain about, except maybe the food and his aches and pains from sleeping on the cold ground:

My health is very fair at the present time, all but the rheumatism, which has bothered me for these last six weeks.  But I have a good appetite, as you would find if you could set me down to one of your old-fashioned dinners.  Whew, what a treat that would be for the soldiers now Jane!  I think from what I can hear that this spring [1863] will fetch the war to a close…That was great news we heard the other day [concerning] the recapture of Galveston… Fight them to the last is my motto.  Or as the gallant Lawrence said, “Never give up the ship!”  We have them on the downhill so that now if we follow them up it is soon over.(9)


The victory at Galveston (January 1, 1963) gave most Texans reason to be optimistic about the outcome of the war.  Galveston was the largest city in Texas at the time and its major seaport.  Confederates took back Galveston from Union occupation and retained it for the rest of the war.  The Union never tried to retake the island, but it reinforced the blockade in an effort to limit commerce in and out of the harbor.

As the Civil War was nearing the end of its second year, Andrew wasn’t the only one who was predicting that it would end soon.  Even General Ulysses Grant supposed that one final battle would bring the war to a close.  Hopefully that final battle would not be as costly as Shiloh.  The two-day battle of Shiloh was the costliest battle in American history up to that time, resulting in the defeat of the Confederate army and 10,699 Confederate casualties (1,728 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing or captured).  Union casualties were 13,047 (1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing).  The dead included Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston and Union general W.H.L. Wallace.  Both sides were shocked at the carnage.  Little did they know that “three more years of such bloodshed remained in the war and that eight larger and bloodier battles were yet to come. The war would continue, at great cost in casualties and resources, until the Confederacy succumbed or the Union was divided.”(10)

__________________________

1. Michener, James A., Texas, 1985, p .617.
2. Andrew Gammell, Letter to his sister, Jane, 14 January 1863, Vicksburg. (Copy from the collections in the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.)
3. The middle initial F in Andrews name stands for "Faulds." Faulds is most likely a family name in Jane Dickie’s family. James mentions a cousin named Andrew Faulds in his letter to Mackenzie, January 1843.
4. Jackson County (Michigan) Marriages, 1833-1870, p. 135.
5. 1880 U. S. Census, Chicago, Illinois. Kate, known as Kitten, is living with her mother Esther Gammell.
6. http://www.corinthcivilwarrelics.com/wprogers/story.htm
7. Ashbel Smith was a prominent political figure and doctor from Harris County, Texas.
8. Joseph Eggleston Johnston, not to be confused with Albert Sidney Johnston. http://www.alabama37th.com/flag.htm  and http://www.angelfire.com/ms2/33Miss/chapter2.htm
9. Andrew Gammell, Letter to his sister, Jane, 14 January 1863, Vicksburg. (Copy from the collections in the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.)
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shiloh

Visit to Sheridan, Montana - Bary Gammell

Liz, on Tuesday afternoon Jan and I had a nice visit in Sheridan with our cousin Sandra Baril. 

She showed us some locations related to Grandpa James that I wanted to share with you.  We first drove a short distance east of town to the likely area where James first settled and started the saw mill, Mill Creek.  The exact location is no longer identified.

After leaving the saw mill, James and wife Susan Maria Brown homesteaded west of town.  The land is now owned by 5L Ranch.

Going west and south is the Duncan property where it is believed James built this barn.

The cemetery where James is buried is 1.5 miles south of town.

After leaving I asked Sandra to go back so we could take a picture of two of us at the grave marker.

In backtracking we also came across the grave of Orlin Gammell, James’ first son.

When Jan was taking the picture of Sandra and me, I threw my cap on the ground. After getting back in the car I realized I forgot my hat. In going back to retrieve it I then noticed other grave markers next to James’ grave. Susan being Sandra’s great-great grandmother and I believe sister-in-law of our great-great grandmother Hannah Jane.

Photos by Bary and Jan Gammell