Tragic night-time incident when the terrified Rangers shot and killed an approaching figure on a horse they assumed to be a Union advance scout, but who turned out to be a passing stranger. Those enemies never materialized, and the Rangers were soon filthy and hungry. Union troops would send the Rangers, at top speed, in the direction opposite of the supposed Yankees.
Every few nights, he noted, a rumor of approaching Moreover, Clemens discovered that his friends would refuse any orders that he gave, arguing that heĬlemens also wrote in his memoir that it rained almost constantly, and that he and the men lacked any uniforms or arms and relied on local farmers for food and shelter. According to Clemens’s 1885 short memoir of his war experiences, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” the Rangers would occasionallyĪttempt a military drill, but they soon collapsed into horseplay and then forgot what little they had learned. Which made him second in command of the dozen or so men. Disregarding his complete lack of military experience, his comrades elected him lieutenant, His rather flippant attitude toward the war would change, however, as the realities of army life in the field set in.Ĭlemens, according to a fellow recruit, showed up for the Marion Rangers riding a mule and carrying a squirrel rifle and an umbrella. Indeed, in the months before joining the Rangers, Clemens had expressed both pro-Union and anti-Union views as the states While his father had once owned a slave, and while he had spent many boyhood summer days surrounded by slaves on his uncle’sįarm, Clemens seemed to enlist more as a lark than for any political or ideological reasons. In the Marion Rangers, a unit of the Missouri State Guard from the Hannibal area. Surely, though, he must have sometimes thought about his own war experiences in theĬommercial traffic on the Mississippi River had ceased soon after war broke out, and Clemens, then 25 years old and a steamboat pilot for two years, decided in early June 1861 to join with some friends in enlisting
Mainly focused his columns on mocking the territorial legislature or relating humorous anecdotes about the citizens of Nevada. Although he occasionally wrote about the war raging back East, Clemens Missouri, he was a newspaper editor in the Nevada Territory, causing some local scandals with his acerbic political commentary and tall tales.
No longer risking his life in a guerrilla war in northern Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.īy early February 1863, Samuel Langhorne Clemens must have felt glad that he was more than 18 months removed from any direct participation in the Civil War.
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