Hessian John: 19Th Century Military Surgeon

By Donald A. Walbrecht

Johann Walbrecht, a young Germanic hunter/soldier, is immersed in medical training at Marburg University when he is forced to flee his country after a pistol duel with the son of the regions Baron. He has no idea the course of his life is about to change forever.
It is November 1840 when he boards a ship bound for America. Four months later, John arrives in New Orleans, Louisiana aboard the slave ship he has worked on keeping the captives alive. He buys four slaves, eats a hearty meal at a French restaurant, drinks too much, and is eventually robbed of the gold eagles gifted to him by ships captain. So begins Hessian Johns new and unpredictable adventure. He acquires Mississippi riverside land neighboring Joseph Davis (older brother of Jefferson Davis), completes his medical training, and is recruited as an army surgeon during the Mexican War of 1847. John soon becomes one of the earliest doctors to challenge the longstanding problem of poor sanitation in military camps and field operations.

In the first of a four-book series, a frontier doctor embarks on a coming-of-age journey in the American South before the Civil War and participates in historical events that soon lead the direction of both his career and his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426957260

Donald A. Walbrecht

Colonel Don Walbrecht is the 11th USAF pilot of the Mach-3 SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft. He holds Bachelor Degrees of Science and Arts from The University of Idaho and The University of Maryland, Master Degrees of Science and Literature from The George Washington University and The University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from East Anglia University. Since retiring from the Air Force after 30 years of flying, and staff-officer and commander duties, he has served as professor of history and aviation technology for the University of Maryland and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He currently lives in South Idaho where he supervises graduate-level research projects, writes and lectures, travels nationwide to visit historical sites, and participates in aviation-related symposiums. He is the author of On Silent Wings, a scientific-fiction romaunt.

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© Copyright 2011 Donald A. Walbrecht, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4269-5725-3 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4269-5726-0 (e)

Trafford rev. 02/03/2011

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This book is dedicated to my daughter Sally Walker who designed the cover and solved numerous computer issues.

Contents

Preface

1 Kindheit — Childhood

2 Ausflug von Europa

[Flight from Europe]

3 Around the African Coast

4 Across the Mid Atlantic

5 New Orleans Auction House

6 Joseph and Jefferson Davis

7 Plantation Life and Politics

8 Toe-Toe and the Floating Palace

9 Politics and Pursuers

10 Omus McCorkle and Bella

11 Dr. Turner and the Seminole War

12 Little Journey McCorkle

13 Varina and our History Lessons

14 Pittsburg, New York & Washington

15 Advancing my Education

16 Completing my Medical Education

17 Forming the Mississippi Regiment

18 The Germans in Texas

19 To Texas and Mexico

20 On to Saltillo

21 The Battle of Buena Vista

22 Honoring the Mississippi Riflemen

23 The Black River Pirates

24 Ten Days at Home

25 Return to Mexico

26 Cerro Gordo and Puebla

27 Onward to Mexico City

28 Chapultepec Castle

29 Home Again

30 Gold in California

31 My Capture

32 Race toward Monterey

Cast of Characters

APPENDIX

Preface

My great-great uncle, Johann Walbrecht, was a 19th-century Hessian soldier who came to the American South in 1841. At first he served as plantation medic and then as an assistant surgeon in the Mexican War. In the early 1850s, he went west as an army doctor along the Oregon Trail. In the mid-‘50s, he traveled with Major Delafield’s Commission of U.S. Military Observers during the Crimean War. In the ‘60s, he was an army surgeon in the Civil War, later doctoring transcontinental railroad builders. In the ‘70s he served in western Indian campaigns and finally spent the ‘80s and early ‘90s as a frontier postmaster in the Snowy Range of Wyoming.

He was born in 1817 in the village of Frankenbach near Wetzlar and Giessen in Hesse and died in southeast Wyoming in 1893. He and his ancestors had been Hessian Jägertruppe, who wore forest-green uniforms, were expert long-shot musketeers, many of whom had been rented out by the aristocratic dukes to serve as auxiliary soldiers to European armies during 18th and 19th century wars. Johann and his brothers, each having served as Jägers, followed their father Johann (1786-1851) to become Tierärzte (veterinarians), Zahnärzte (dentists), and pracktizierender (village doctors). Johann’s grandfather, Gotlieb Kaspar Walbrecht (1751-1820), was a respected surgeon who had practiced medicine throughout northern Hesse for many years. As a result of the post-Napoleonic turmoil in Germany during the early 1800s, Johann and his younger brother Johann Peter (1823-1900, called Hanspierre) each earned the opportunity to attend medical school as extensions of Jägerdienst (military service), expecting to become Regimentsärzte (surgeons) in Landgraf Wilhelm von Biebertal’s Wetzlar Jägerregiment. Troubling events while at medical school led to Johann’s abandonment of medical studies at Marburg University, after which he participated in historical events in the American South, East, and West, where he was variously known as Johann, Johannes, Johnny, Hessian John, or even H. J.

The Bear-Skin Greatcoat

In 2000, after a series of hand-me-downs, this author inherited the three-quarter-length greatcoat, which had been handcrafted by Arapahoe tribeswomen from the hide of a full-grown black bear that had injured Johann southwest of Laramie in 1885. That coat and his Sharps rifle had been sent in November 1893 to his youngest brother [my great-grandfather], Christian Walbrecht (1829-1916), who lived in western Nebraska. Christian got the rifle, while my grandfather John (1859-1939), got the bear coat. Since the coat seemed too heavy to wear, it was stored in an old metal half-trunk where it remained until Grandfather John died in 1939. The coat then went to Uncle Edward and on to my father, John Peter (1897-1964). After he died, my brother, Miles Richard got the coat, which he stored at our mother’s home where it remained until I took possession in 2000. Eight years later, Miles and I agreed to give the coat to the county historical museum. When I revealed the coat at a meeting of the Historical Society in 2008, those present were impressed with the fine condition of the 123-year-old coat.

Our Treasure Hunt

At a family reunion in the summer of 2010, Miles and I decided we’d take a close-up look at the coat, since it would permanently reside in the new Gooding, Idaho County museum. We each tried it on and had photos made while posing to look like Great-Great Uncle Johannes. Afterward, I examined the hem stitching to determine its integrity noting a knot had failed in the hand-stitched lining allowing it to protrude. When re-adjusting the lining, I felt a lump that needed flattening before securing it. When I opened the bottom, I retrieved a foot-square sheet of buckskin that had fallen to one side. The thin piece was soft after many years and the writing on it was clear enough to make us realize we’d discovered something exciting. On the faded skin, a simple map appeared to show where H.J. had hidden something in the fall of 1892, anticipating a hard winter, like the one in 1888 that killed most of Wyoming’s and Montana’s cattle.

The task ahead would be to find the site of H.J.’s outlying post office, where now, 117 years later, we might hope to find the spot of the star-like mark on his map. Two days later we headed to Laramie to explore the University’s archives to learn about territorial postmen. Since we found no specific reference to his service, we determined he had probably operated a sub-office out where miners could pick up mail, newspapers, and basic goods for those who searched along the Wyoming border.

Before Uncle Ed died in 1975, he’d written a brief description of his great-uncle, John, who’d died when Ed was only four years old. He’d been told that John lived about 40 miles southwest of Laramie on the Little Laramie River at place he found on a territorial map that included both Wyoming and the Dakotas.

To find any record of H.J.’s presence, we spent two days researching Wyoming territorial history and seeking long-established ranchers whose grandparents had pioneered the region. An old map misled us to Camp Walbach 30 miles northeast of Cheyenne—a long-abandoned fort named after a cavalry colonel who’d been killed in an Indian battle. We also learned Laramie County had once included all of Wyoming when established in January 1867 by the Dakota Territorial Legislature. After the Wyoming Territory was established, Laramie County became a long strip stretching from Colorado to Montana with the town of Laramie located in Albany county. After Crook. Platte, Converse, and Goshen counties were carved from Laramie County, it shrunk to 2,703 square miles.

Over the next two days, we rambled over back roads seeing pretty countryside and lots of antelope, but no trace of H.J.’s cabin site. Next we scoured the Cheyenne area, reading Union Pacific Railroad surveyors had selected the site for a railroad camp, which became an instant city. UPRR agents sold the first lots for $150 in July 1867; however, by November (when the first train arrived) 4,000 people had settled in the hell-on-wheels camp-town where building lots went for $2,500. Although people raced farther west as the tracks were laid across Wyoming, many stayed in Cheyenne making it the state’s largest city and the territory’s capital on the 25th of July 1868. Its location only 10 miles from Colorado was at the railroad’s north-south/east-west junction with accessibility to all points—a big factor in the town’s rapid growth, further stimulated by huge herds of cattle arriving from Texas. In the mid-’70s, gold was discovered in Dakota’s Black Hills, making Cheyenne the main supply hub for mines on Montana’s sacred Indian lands.

In our expanding search, we decided the Cheyenne area an unlikely place for H.J.’s post office because of the town’s rapid buildup in the late ‘60s and the new focus on gold mining to the northeast. We then searched southwest of Laramie along the Little Laramie River that flowed out of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains where we should have started first if we’d read Uncle Ed’s note more closely. In Ed’s statement he’d written, My grandfather (Christian) traveled from Germany soon after the railroad passed through Laramie in 1868 hoping to join his older brother at Sheep Mountain in the new Wyoming Territory. Although we narrowed our search, we found no traces because the surrounding hills were still wild and wonderful even in the 21st century.

We spent two more days traveling back roads until we stopped at a house where a pioneer family had owned a large cattle ranch since 1890. Among the family’s keepsakes, was an old photograph of their great-grandfather, Jacob Neilson, standing next to a bearded man whose name, Hessian John, had been printed on the photo’s back. In addition, Jake had told his son of the interesting old doctor who told fascinating stories about crossing the ocean in 1840, fighting in the wars, and taming the tribes. The current ranch owner’s father, Foster Neilson, had told of being shown an abandoned cabin site in the 1930s, but none of the younger men knew its location.

We returned the next day with a metal detector, a GPS receiver, sleeping bags, a camera, and some trail grub and started on our adventure. After a two-day search, we found the remains of a long-decayed cabin standing among mature pines, one of which rose from the cabin’s missing floor. Near the front door we found the word "Lindenbaum" [Lindentree] burnt into an old board. While searching behind the cabin, Miles found five rock-covered grave mounds. At the end of a gravel path among the pines, we found the remains of a collapsed outdoor toilet with the name Shiloh burnt on a board. At that moment, we decided we’d probably found H.J.’s little cabin where he’d put hard times behind him.

Our Discoveries

We found no other clues until I used the metal detector to search inside and outside of the moldering cabin walls. We found odd pieces of rusted metal, two mule shoes, a few old pennies and nickels, and lots of corroded shell casings. We studied the buckskin map closely to orient the cabin’s remains with some timeless features. A few points of reference seemed to verify the site as H.J.’s, and after some of Molly Neilson’s wonderful sandwiches we worked along the pathway to the grave mounds. Because there were other graves there, we thought they might have belonged to his old buddies who, during their twilight years, drank homemade brew and swapped Civil War stories. After we made a widening sweep of the site, we sat down to analyze the map’s five Xs and its star-mark at a spot covered with deadfall trees and new-growth aspens.

I swept the detector along the path and made a circle around the toilet and then near the individual graves. Between the cabin and the toilet I found a copper two-cent piece dated 1864 and a silver 1876 liberty-seated quarter. Next I swept the grave mounds, which to our relief elicited no electronic whistles. We then searched through the thick aspens, stumbling awkwardly over deadfall trees until I spotted a large D-shaped patch where the root body of a big tree had torn away much of the topsoil. Near the rotted tree, some smooth rocks were scattered that might’ve formed a star before the tree had toppled during a wild Wyoming windstorm. With difficulty, I thrust the detector’s head into the thicket and got a welcoming shriek from the loudspeaker, as if H.J. himself had said, Endlich du bist hier [Finally you are here].

After a cup of coffee, we began digging not knowing what kind of a fragile container might’ve been buried 118 years before. The ground was dry and netted with aspen roots from which we took turns bucketing out soil until we were four feet below the humus layer. Suddenly Miles’s trowel made a distinct TINK against the lid of a well-sealed crock-jar. We carefully cleared away the remaining dirt, and after I shot photos of the big jar we lifted it from the morass of aspens and deadfalls. I rescanned the pit to determine if other objects might have been buried even deeper. After ascertaining that nothing else remained, we agreed that we probably had great-great uncle H.J.’s prize in hand.

The heavy crock had been well secured with melted sealing wax and had been further wrapped and painted with heated tar. Before leaving the site, we photographed the area thoroughly, had another cup of coffee and some of Molly’s fried chicken, and then took an afternoon nap to recover from the effects of Wyoming’s 9,000-ft elevation and the day’s excitement. We padded the jar with our sleeping bags and drove slowly to the ranch house where we planned to open the jar with the Neilsons, and store any fragile items until we could study what might be museum-quality materials.

After supper, Walter fetched a sharp knife, cut the tarred shroud, broke the encircling sealing wax, and lifted the lid carefully. Amazingly, the contents, except for the leather items, appeared as if they’d been sealed recently. Molly lifted out the first two items: an old button accordion and a cowhide-covered notebook, the latter being too stiff to open easily. Next, Foster retrieved a cloth-wrapped .44-caliber revolver, coated with congealed grease, along with two boxes of cartridges. Walter took a turn and drew out a tightly wrapped package containing an ancient chain-mail vest that seemed out of place in Wyoming. Miles reached deeper, lifting a buckskin pouch filled with some 19th-century medical tools, five gold pieces, a nice collection of U.S. silver and copper coins, and some 18th and 19th century European coins, all of which we photographed.

I pulled the last package from the bottom, which contained a sealed pack of hand-written papers and three well-studied leather-bound books: an 1876 bible, an 1888 medical text, and an all-purpose volume for cookery with answers to every kind of household question that might arise on the frontier. Finally, a pack of letters and faded pictures of family members and military associates—Hessians, Southerners, and Yankees—were all carefully examined. The greatest treasure turned out to be H.J.’s journals from the 1840s to the ‘90s on which these books are based.

In October 2010, I found a note in the university archives from H.J. to his brother Christian that said, Instructions are coming where you can find my diaries, medical instruments, and a pistol that would likely be stolen if sent by mail. Unfortunately, the note had ended in a postal file with an October 1892 letter to Christian in Nebraska that said,

Lieber Christian, It’s September 15th 1892. I’m here in my postal-cabin high in the Snowy Mountains with three old friends whom I’ve been meeting with over the past seven years. We’ve often told stories of our attempts to get rich in the gold fields, of Civil War battles, and of our good and bad times with the tribes. The others had come up here in the Snowies after burying Jake Snavely down at Sheep Mountain two weeks ago. All of us had laughed many times at Jake’s oft-told tales of his joyful life that began in England in 1812. After drinking toasts to Jake, we drew straws to see who’d be first to tell one’s own full-life story. Since I drew the short straw I am to be first; therefore, I’ve been sorting through my journals of the past 55 years. I’ll finish them soon, and since I’m ailing from tangling with a bear seven years ago, I wish to finish translating my journals before the hard Wyoming winter sets in—which may be my last. I’ll tell my life story next week and have one of those old guys send my bear coat and my Henry rifle on to you.

—Viele Grüssen, Ihren Bruder, Johann

From this letter we learned that Johann’s post-office-store hadn’t been located down at his winter cabin on Sheep Mountain but up on the Snowies as a half-year outpost that he and a partner operated from April to October each year to serve miners working Wyoming’s end of Colorado’s Never Summer Range. His remote postal cabin sat 10,800-ft. high at Lake Marie on the crest of the Snowy Range Pass near the 12,000-ft. Medicine Bow Peak. It was there in the little cabin that his partner found Johann dead in October 1893, after which his buddies moved the body down to H.J.’s Sheep Mountain site for burial among those who’d preceded him. More than 30 years later, after a difficult six-year effort, the Great Sky Road was built across his high mountain pass on the Snowies, and 117 years after his quiet passing, we finally found his Sheep Mountain grave and his wonderful journals.

Chapter 1

Kindheit — Childhood

I, Johannes Walbrecht, was born in 1817 in the village of Frankenbach in the Grand Duchy of Hesse about 100 kilometers north of Frankfurt-am-Rhein well before Germany became a unified European nation in 1871. My earliest memories were of the beautiful summer of 1820 and of the noisy beer fests that autumn after good harvests and of my grandfather telling about the miserable year without summer (1816) just before my birth when it snowed in July, all the crops failed, and many people starved.

An even clearer memory was the time in 1821 when everyone was talking about the death of Emperor Napoleon who’d swept through our homeland making great changes that almost freed us of from the rule of feudalistic princes and land barons. Seven years before my birth, Napoleon’s Grand Army of more than 200,000 French soldiers had swept through the Germanic provinces toppling the longstanding dictatorial rulers and giving new hopes to the Hessians for an enlightened government ruled by an elected parliament. Unfortunately, after Napoleon’s defeats in 1812 and 1815, our Grand Duke regained his autocratic grip on our region, continuing his semi-feudalistic rule like that of the other teutonic Grafen [barons] who’d all reestablished their old ways of heavy taxation and mandatory military service for all men to serve six years in their province’s regiments.

My two grandfathers, five of my great uncles, and my great grandfather had all served as Hessian Jägers with the British Army during the American Revolutionary War between 1776 and 1780. One had died in America; two had remained in Pennsylvania; the others had returned home, including my grandfather, Gottlieb Christian Kaspar Walbrecht, who became his region’s doctor.

We didn’t travel much during my early years. Twice we made trips to the pretty village of Altenvers where Doktor Gottlieb lived and where my father and his two brothers had learned grandfather’s medical skills for doctoring people and animals, also pulling teeth and helping with childbirthing. On the journeys to nearby villages, I met cousins who lived in Altenvers, Gross Altenstädten, Oberlemp, and Niederlemp.

My early schooling included eight years of very disciplined study right across the street from our home at 17 Kirchstrasse. Every one of those school years was under the demanding tutelage of Lehrmeister Wilhelm Hammerbach who drilled us daily in Latin, languages, mathematics, history, and writing. As years passed and fewer achievers remained in Hammerbach’s classes, only seven of us perfected the higher academic skills to his satisfaction. Thereafter he added daily drills in French and English, steadily leading us toward the university pathway of the classical Latin-based trivium and quadrivium, which he said, Those subjects will serve you well when you attend university after your mandatory years of military service that will surely involve these foundational academic studies.

As I departed school at 16 for my Jäger training, Herr Hammerbach said, You were my best student, Johannes. Please continue to study so you can become a medical doctor like your grandfather and father. You must always read what is new in science and the arts, and apply yourself like you’ve done so well in my classes. Always think of service to others and above all—always keep yourself clean.

Militärdienst — Military Service

In 1833, when at the age of sixteen, five of Hammerbach’s achievers (Georg Baumann, Wilhelm Gratz, Frederick Schneider, Herbert Schmidt, and I) were mustered into the Grand Duke’s 2nd Infantry Regiment at Wetzlar. At first we underwent a year of hard training as 4th-class recruits to gain basic soldier skills, specializing in marksmanship. We were tested regularly in the battlefield challenges of 19th-century warfare where only the effeminate Willi Gratz failed to earn 3rd-class status. As a consequence, he was assigned to food service and commissary duties, and later to record-keeping work, finally becoming a batman to Hauptmann Hermann Heinz, one of the unit’s aristocratic young Captains, after which little Willi became aloof and disdainful of the rest of us. Meanwhile, Georg, Freddy, and I were assigned as pikemen, later as grenadiers or fusiliers, and finally as musketeers.

Soon I was recognized as one of the best shots of the regiment’s new soldiers, even when firing old flintlock shoulder arms. I held an advantage at target shooting because I had shot muzzle-loaders since I was 12 with cousin Herbert Schmidt, the son of region’s Forestmeister. Both Herbi and