Wanderlust or Service?

By the winter of ’97 the talk in the boardinghouses and saloons wasn’t just wages and copper. Cuba was in the papers every day. The rebels had been fighting Spain for years and the stories of starvation camps made the rounds in the saloons same as the baseball scores. Most folks in Butte didn’t know Havana from Helena but the papers swore we’d be in it soon enough. Some figured it was all yellow ink and politics—others said war was certain.

In 1898 I took work as a painter, hoping the worst of the hard times had passed and I might scrape enough together to roam again. I was forty-two years old and knew that my days of hard labor were numbered. I could survive on a painter’s salary but if I found myself out of work, I’d be standing in one of dozens of breadlines in Butte.

Then in February the Maine blew up in Havana harbor. More than 260 sailors dead in a blink. Nobody knew what set it off and the headlines didn’t wait for facts. “Remember the Maine!” they cried and the people did. It looked like war against Spain was imminent.

Butte lit up like it had struck a new lode. Every saloon and union hall was buzzing. You couldn’t walk down any street without hearing it hollered through a haze of smoke and whiskey. By March the flag-raising started. The Cornish had their brass bands, the Italians waved bunting from their shopfronts and even the Chinese strung red lanterns alongside Stars and Stripes in Reeder’s Alley.

Dublin Gulch was a different story. Some cheered with the rest, but plenty muttered about being sent to fight Spain while England sat fat and easy, still starving families back home. England had money sunk in those sugar fields and Cuban bonds besides. The London papers fretted over their investments but the truth was plain—the British looked kindly on America stepping in, so long as the sugar and tobacco kept sailing across the Atlantic.

April brought parades proper. The unions marched shoulder to shoulder, banners high, bands blaring. Kids ran ahead waving paper flags, and recruiters stood at the curb handing out forms and promises. In Butte you were either in the line or standing back with your hands in your pockets, and if you lingered too long, someone asked you why.

It was loud, it was proud and it was Butte all over—half celebration, half argument and nobody keeping quiet.

Then came McKinley’s call for volunteers on April 23. The regulars were too few for a war—only twenty-odd thousand in the whole army. Washington doubled that number overnight, then turned to the states besides. That’s how the 1st Montana came to be called up. The recruiters set up shop quick. Plenty of boys signed their names right off. I didn’t. Not at first. I watched the parades, read the papers, listened to the talk in the saloons and boardinghouses. I still had work and a man doesn’t drop his pay just because the band is playing. After a few days of considering it, I made my decision.

I’d worked the mines, dug and blasted, worked the smelter, prospected and clerked in Boise. I’d seen enough sulfur smoke to last a lifetime. A war meant a uniform, a rifle and a chance to kick off the moss. Maybe it was another kind of prospecting—new ground to cover, paid for by Uncle Sam with a taste of adventure thrown in. They said we’d be bound for Cuba, an island in the Caribbean where the air was warm and the women fair. Sounded a world away from Montana.

On May 6, Anaconda gave us a send off to remember. The city was decorated with every size of flag, bunting covered every building, carriage and wagon—even the horses had to wear a patriotic bonnet.Thousands of people turned out for the morning of our departure and we marched behind the Marshal of the Day, the Anaconda Band, Fire Department, hundreds of school children, the Grand Army of the Republic, Sons of Veterans and Ex-Confederates. A band of Indians showed in all their regalia, having held a long grudge against the Spanish.

Company “K” to which I had been assigned, with Captain Thomas Dillion in the lead followed next. Behind us was Company “M” commanded by Captain John Hallahan. The parade began at 9 o’clock, the crowd so thick that even after they moved aside to the sidewalks, there was scarcely enough room for us to march through. The people of Anaconda waving flags, cheering, the band playing, sun shining bright, warm and dry. It was a glorious send-off.

We had to laugh when there was some commotion when we reached Park Street. Apparently the children were expected to drop out of the parade at this point and while the youngest children followed their police escorts, the older children kept on marching all the way to the train station. The celebration continued as we boarded the train cars and through open windows we shook hands with the crowd. When the whistle blew and the rail cars began to move, the cheering drowned out the sound of the train. [1]

It wasn’t a long trip on the map. The train was another matter. The first leg carried us an hour east to Garrison. The townsfolk turned out to welcome us while our special was attached to the Gallatin Valley Limited. When we reached Deer Lodge the spontaneous celebration held for us there, held us up and when we reached Mullen Pass we waited an hour due to an accident on one of the box cars. Never did get the full story on that hold up, then it was on through the deep tunnel on a steep grade. We were expected in Helena at 1 o’clock but didn’t arrive until half past four. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the hoopla as I’d been that morning and would have preferred a banquet to another crowd of noisy flag wavers.

In no time we received news that Commodore George Dewey had sailed his fleet into Manila Bay a week earlier and wiped the Spanish fleet clean out. Dewey ordered cables cut before the fight so Spain couldn’t cry for help, which meant he couldn’t cable Washington either. He had to send a ship to Hong Kong to tap into the wire and the news rattled halfway around the world before it reached President McKinley, then us.

We were dropped off at Camp Robert B. Smith, a tent city set up next to the Broadwater Hotel. Trains had been arriving for three days along with thunder storms and the mud in the camp threatened to suck our boots off. Soon as we settled into our straw filled tents, most of us headed into town and I wasn’t about to be left behind.

Was I answering the call of duty to God and Country—or had another fit of wanderlust taken hold of me? History was moving around me like a tide and I was trying not to drown. I was forty-two—almost disqualified by age alone.

The next day we were to be formally mustered in after a physical.

Lieutenant Jacob Kennedy told me I was too old and too short. But in fact, I stood 5’ 5 and 7/8” and passed the physical that would describe me as having a ruddy complexion, blue eyes and gray hair. I was accepted into Anaconda’s Company K, 1st Montana Infantry on May 7, 1898.

I listed my father, Ed J. Callahan of Brooklyn, New York as my next of kin, as if the Army could find him if they had reason to try. I never told any friends in Anaconda that I had two children. They believed I was a childless widower.

I was immediately assigned the job of Company Clerk.

Though it was spring—in Montana that means snow and mud. We shivered at night beneath two thin army blankets, mud soaking a man’s boots by dawn and his blankets by midnight. We marched through sludge by day. It got so bad we nicknamed the place “Camp Mud.” Only after men began falling sick were we moved to higher ground.

We still wore civilian clothes. Only half the men had rifles—antiquated, single-shot Springfields, issued during the Indian Wars of 1873. The Regular Army had five-shot Krag–Jørgensens and were already bound for Cuba. I envied them.

We stayed in Helena training while the snow turned to cold rain. The new camp was drier but disease and restlessness lingered. For three weeks we drilled in the hills and drowned our boredom in town saloons.

It wasn’t until May 25th, that we marched in another parade and boarded a train bound for San Francisco. The whole town turned out to see us off, waving flags and shouting cheers. Patriotism ran hot but we were freezing and glad to go.

The train pulled slow at first, climbing out of the gulches, then over the Divide. By nightfall we were already tired of the lurch and grind. Sleep on those benches was a poor thing—every time the wheels hit a joint in the rails it rattled your teeth and the smoke from the engine found its way through the windows we’d open to clear out stale air.

Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains a rumor swept through the train: Cuba wasn’t our destination. We were bound for the Philippine Islands—seven thousand nautical miles from the mainland. None of our officers confirmed it yet no one denied it.

Day two we dropped down through Idaho and rumbled across the Snake, sage and basalt flats giving way to wheat fields. Even in the small towns we encountered folks cheering us on. Women waved handkerchiefs, children ran along the cinders beside the cars and someone always managed to pass baskets of bread through the windows before the whistle blew us out again.

Meals came in tin pails, sleep in snatches. By the third day Oregon’s Blue Mountains came into view—deep pines, high bridges, tunnels dripping with cold water as we roared through them. The boys crowded the platforms between cars watching the scenery slide past like some endless moving picture.

The last stretch into California was no easy ride; it reminded me of the pack trails in the mountains around Shoup, where a man could look down and see the switchbacks twisting under his own feet. The train wound down the Sierras the same way, curves so sharp you could catch sight of the engine doubling back below. Sparks from the engine showered the dark and cinders stung your face if you leaned out too far.

Those mountains set me thinking of Idaho—the trails of the mountains, my beautiful, young wife and my little children. Suddenly we dropped in an open valley to a sight new to me. Neat rows of fruit trees stretched across the flats, tidy and endless, each one squared by a farmer’s hand. Then came the grapes—vines tied up and running along wires, not so high they couldn’t be picked without a ladder unless a fellow was short like me. I’d have needed a box to stand on. They ran in long green lines, trellised and trained.

It was another kind of country altogether. Gold in the foothills, and here below them, grapes, milk and honey. For a moment I half wished the train would stop and let me down to walk among it, just to see what it might be to live in a land that gave so much to the hands that tended it.

But the fields ended as quickly as they began. One moment it was tidy rows of vines, the next the city rose up—sudden and sprawling with smoke, clamor and people. I hadn’t seen a metropolis such as this since I’d left for the west. It was like stepping from quiet timber into a stampede. I felt unsteady and excited.

We clattered into the Oakland Mole at last—a long timbered causeway two miles out into the Bay, where the trains rolled straight onto the docks as if the rails themselves meant to walk on water.[2] The government hadn’t hired one little coach, but a full train of cars packed stem to stern with volunteers. We were near a thousand Montanans, plus kit and rifles. It took no small time to empty us out.

After four days of smoke and steel we stepped off the cars stiff-legged and dirty but proud. The coast air smelled of salt instead of sulfur—and that alone felt like freedom.

Ferries nosed up to the slips and we were herded aboard like cattle, a hundred or more to a gangplank. They crammed us onto the decks until the boats rode low. Trip after trip they ferried us, smoke pouring from their stacks, whistles shrieking until the whole regiment was over.

Then came the waterfront of San Francisco, a sight that near took our breath. Warehouses, wharves and ships jammed together as far as a man could look. Steamships flying flags from half the nations of the world, sailboats—every pier alive with whistles, hawkers and the din of cargo being moved. It was a place that made Butte and Boise look like cow towns. Like the harbors of New York, the world’s trade gathered then scattered.

San Francisco turned out in force greet us. Crowds lined the streets from the ferry landing all the way up Market Street. Women waved flags and threw flowers from balconies. Bands played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Newspapers later said it was as if the city wanted to adopt every volunteer as its own son. Most of us still in civilian clothes, clutching two thin blankets, we could have been mistaken for tramps except we marched like soldiers. And marched we did.

But romance met reality quick enough. Camp Merritt sat a mile inland from the docks—and it was already overflowing. They had us pitch in to convert a nearby racetrack into what the Army called the “Richmond Extension.” I won’t repeat what the boys called it.

That rumor we’d carried with us over the Rockies proved out. Our regiment was folded into the Third Brigade, Independent Division, Philippine Islands Expeditionary Forces under Brigadier General H. G. Otis.

Spain had ruled the Philippines for nearly three hundred years—its gateway to Asian trade. Now, with Dewey’s victory in the harbor of Manila, the U.S. looked poised to oust the Spanish with our help.

We had a lot of questions but our officers had even fewer answers. From our end, it looked like chaos. Issued straw mattresses that sand fleas found more welcoming than we did, we tossed the straw but never rid ourselves of the fleas. We scratched ourselves raw.

Weeks passed. Sand clogged the toilets. Human waste piled up. Typhoid and dysentery ran rampant. Then came measles. The city took notice as the death toll rose and we weren’t as welcome in town as we once were.

With camp too sandy for drilling, we marched up to the Presidio instead. It gave us solid ground—and a break from the stench of the camp.

Only after other state units shipped out were we moved to the main camp—a mile from the coast. We’d escaped Montana’s winter only to shiver in coastal fog so dense you couldn’t see five feet ahead. Guard duty was miserable. We wouldn’t have seen an enemy unless he whispered in our ear.

Eventually, we were vaccinated, issued uniforms, rifles to those who hadn’t yet gotten one. and allowed to roam the city. The food when it came, was little better than the straw we’d tossed—spoiled beef, worm-eaten hardtack and coffee that tasted more like ditch water than drink. The meat was the worst. They called it “embalmed beef”—boiled in chemicals to keep it from rotting. It smelled like carrion and turned a man’s stomach before it hit the pan.[3] Some said it was fit only for the grave it came from. Boredom and bad rations drove men into bars and brothels.

When we were fed a batch of rancid bacon, we’d had enough. The whole company lodged a protest loud enough it made the newspapers back home. They called us mutinous but no man should be asked to choke down meat not fit for a crow. The smell alone turned your stomach. We raised hell and the next day fourteen hundred pounds of spoiled bacon was condemned and hauled off.

Some officers shook their heads at us, said we’d overstepped. Maybe so. But a man who works hard drilling, marching and standing guard in San Francisco fog deserves something better than rot and grease for his pay.

Anaconda Standard, July 7, 1898

Montana Boys Are All Right

“It was a theme of universal comment in San Francisco,” said W. E. Bond, who has just returned from that city, “that in physique the Montana Regiment made by far the best appearance of all the volunteers quartered there. They were literally head and shoulders above any of the others. The Montana boys, in fact, are as strong, well-made and rugged as lot of soldiers as one will see anywhere in the world. The percentage of illness among them. Has been very small, and that notwithstanding the indisputable fact that at times their rations were miserable stuff, unfit, you might say, for crows and vultures. The complaint of the Butte company that rebelled one morning, on a count of the poor quality of the food served to them was unquestionably just. The company, however, made a serious mistake in not registering their objections in the proper manner to the proper officers. And investigation, however, shows that the complaint was so well grounded that the boys escaped punishment. The very next day, 1,400 pounds of rancid bacon was condemned and thrown away.

“Of course there has been a great deal of soreness in the regiment over the fact that, although it was the first volunteer regiment in the country to complete its organization and tender its has been held until the last to start for the Philippines. Various reasons are assigned for this unfortunate delay. The opinion is general in the regiment that politics has had much to do with it. There is also universal regret among the officers that Colonel Kessler’s temporary assignment to a brigadier generalship was not made permanent.

“That the boys will acquit themselves handsomely in the Philippines, especially if there is any fighting too be done, is a foregone conclusion. The time they have spent in San Francisco has been consumed in hard drilling. They are trained down and in the very best of shape physically. Captain Hallahan’s company has impressed critical observers very favorably. In appearance, it is one of the most conspicuous companies in the regiment. It is composed of strapping big, husky fellows who drill like clockwork. But I am not drawing any invidious comparisons. I speak of Hallahan’s company only because it had had no previous existence as a member of the National Guard and hardly any of its members know the slightest rudiments of military drill.”

EGGLESTON

We’d waited weeks on end while the government went hunting for ships that hadn’t even been secured before we enlisted. Private steamers had to be inspected, stripped down and fitted for the job—anything to make them safe enough to haul men, horses and cannons across the Pacific. It gave us plenty of time to sit and stew.

Later on folks might call it a first-class muddle and that’s polite. Around our campfires we put it plainer: somebody in high office didn’t know his elbow from his ass.

Some swore politics was behind it—that big Eastern regiments with better friends in Congress were being shipped first—while we Montanans sat scratching fleas and drilling in the fog. Others said it was simple incompetence, the Army trying to run an empire with peacetime tools. Either way, we were angry. We’d signed up to fight, not to march around in San Francisco fog with rancid bacon blowing through our bellies—no date of departure in sight.

Looking back, I’ll tell you this: a war can be lost to blunders just as quick as to bullets. We hadn’t learned it fully yet, but the lesson was coming.

The men—me included—were beaten down physically but the real strain was showing in our heads. The fleas, the fog, the waiting—it gnawed at us more than any drill or rancid bacon could. If we could suffer in San Francisco close enough to hear church bells on Sunday, how much more would we suffer 7,000 miles across the Pacific? None of us said it too loud but the question was there, hanging heavier than the fog itself.

Three months would pass before Company K finally set sail on July 18. We were divided between freighters—the S.S. Pennsylvania and the Rio de Janeiro—crowded in with horses, mules, guns and whatever diseases we carried along. At first the ocean breeze was sweet relief. Then came the seasickness. Violent. Unrelenting. Some never fully recovered.

There were no hired cooks. Soldiers did the feeding, stirring pots with the same hands that hauled crates, shoveled manure and cleaned rifles. Refrigeration failed within days. We ate what spoiled then ate slum—a gray, greasy stew of canned beef, potatoes and hardtack, always with the taste of tin and taint.

The toilets overflowed, sewage gas choking the hold until men gagged in their their triple-stacked bunks. Heat, humidity and stench drove us to the deck, scrambling for a patch of open air to sleep—if we could find space. The officers slept in cabins, meals served hot and clean, their wine uncorked. It was a bitter thing, knowing that they dinned while we choked down slum.

We’d been at sea near ten days when word spread we’d make landfall at Honolulu. Most of us thought it was a cruel joke. After eating slum for breakfast, lunch and dinner, in air so foul it could turn a mule’s stomach, who dared believe in a paradise waiting? Then, sure enough, Oahu rose out of the sea—green peaks against a blue sky so clear it near broke a man’s heart.

The whole town of Honolulu turned out to meet us. The docks were alive with schoolchildren singing, bands playing, bells ringing. Ladies draped us with leis until we smelled like gardens instead of a ship’s bilge. They pressed pineapples and oranges into our hands, the taste of fresh fruit after weeks of concoctions nearly undid us. For the first time since leaving San Francisco I felt like a man again instead of cargo.

We showered, shaved, walked on steady ground. Not one of us had ever seen a lovelier place but shore leave was short and at sundown we were ordered back aboard, with the promise that we could spend part of the next day ashore.[4]

Before nightfall that second day, the ship slipped out of the harbor. We leaned over the rails and watched the hills fade. Nobody had much to say. The smell of flowers clung to our uniforms, faint and sweet. Some 5,000 nautical miles away lay the Philippine Islands.

Thirty-seven days of sickness and fatigue wore us thin. Even the slum ran low. We arrived in Cavite, Philippines on August 24, unwell and starving. Fifty officers led 1,019 Montana volunteers now assigned to the Second Division under General Arthur MacArthur. We were met by new fevers, new fleas, and the news that Manila had surrendered to the U.S. eleven days earlier.

After all we’d endured, the city had already surrendered. Not a shot fired by us. If we’d carried any shred of morale across the ocean, Manila stripped it in an instant.

NOTES

[1] Anaconda Standard, May 7, 1898 gives a full description of Anaconda’s preparations and send-off. James A. Callahan served with the 1st Montana Volunteers during the Philippine-American War (1898-1899)

[2] A mole is an artificial causeway or pier built out into the water, usually on fill or pilings, wide enough to hold tracks, sheds, and ferry slips. The Southern Pacific Railroad constructed the Oakland Long Wharf in the 1860s and by the 1880s–1890s it had been rebuilt and widened into a massive timber-and-fill structure extending about two miles into the Bay. Locals called it the Oakland Mole because of its bulk and its job “boring out” into the water.

[3] Soldiers’ complaints about “embalmed beef” referred to a notorious scandal during the Spanish–American War. The U.S. Army had contracted with Chicago meatpacking firms to supply canned and refrigerated beef. Much of it was chemically treated with preservatives such as boric acid, salicylic acid, or formaldehyde to mask spoilage, earning the nickname “embalmed.” General Nelson A. Miles, commanding general of the Army, testified before Congress that the beef was unfit for consumption and had made soldiers sick in Cuba, San Francisco and later, the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt and other officers lodged similar complaints, and the ensuing investigation became one of the war’s most public controversies. Although the companies denied wrongdoing, the episode revealed serious flaws in wartime procurement and food safety, and fed public distrust of both military leadership and the meatpacking industry.

[4] The Montana regiment’s stop in Honolulu was brief—likely only two days, given their August 24 arrival in the Philippines. The respite was mostly ceremonial and restorative, with food, fresh water, and a short chance to walk ashore before reembarking.