by William Marvel
Northern New Hampshire has produced a fair crop of soldier-adventurers, despite a sparse population. There was Colonel Timothy Bedel of the Revolution and his son, General Moody Bedel of the War of 1812. Moody’s own son led a New Hampshire regiment in the 1863 battle for which the 54th Massachusetts has lately been given all the “Glory,” with a movie of that name.
The region’s most famous soldier was Edward E. Cross, of Lancaster, who divided his time between editorial politics and the more extreme politics that is decided on the battlefield. From adolescence he worked on Democratic newspapers, first at home and later in Ohio. Finally he ran a weekly in Arizona, fulminating against Mexicans and Indians and political opponents, with one of whom he fought a duel.
Cross came home in 1861 and recruited the 5th New Hampshire Infantry. He led a brigade from Chancellorsville onward, but his Democratic opinions precluded a promotion to brigadier general. Still, few New Hampshire visitors to Gettysburg fail to visit the 5th New Hampshire’s monument in the Wheatfield, on the spot where Cross received his death wound.
The town of Lancaster also produced a more hesitant soldier in the form of John C. Jenness, who was clerking in a Lancaster store in April of 1861. He was among the first in town to answer Lincoln’s call for troops, signing the roll of a local company, but apparently he thought better of it. When those recruits marched away, Jenness failed to show up, and no one went looking for him.
Men enlisted in droves for more than a year and a half afterward, but John Jenness was not among them. Even when Colonel Cross came home to raise a regiment among his neighbors, Jenness stayed home. Only when the stream of volunteers petered out and New Hampshire began raising a regiment for the short term of nine months did Jenness agree to go again, signing on as the quartermaster sergeant. Not enough men could be found to fill out the regiment, so after a few weeks in camp at Concord he was sent home.
Another year and a half later, the state had been drained of so many men that Jenness stood a fair chance of being drafted in the September levy of 1864. Instead, he resorted to political connections to finagle a commission in a short-term heavy artillery regiment that was serving comfortably in the safety of Washington.
The war ended a few months afterward, and he reverted to a job as a government clerk, but he again appealed to political friends for a commission in the peacetime Regular Army. It took a while, because so many more experienced veterans sought similar positions, but late in 1866 he received the commission and traveled to New York to be examined. The army board found him deficient in drill, tactics, and general knowledge of an officer’s duties, and rejected him, but he wrote directly to the Secretary of War, who sent him to a board that passed him.
Not until March of 1867 did he report for duty in Dakota Territory. He was assigned to Fort Phil Kearny, in what is now Wyoming, and four months into that assignment his company was detailed to guard a civilian construction crew cutting timber a few miles from the fort. On August 2, 1867, they came under attack by hundreds of the same Sioux horsemen who had wiped out an 80-man detachment from the fort the previous December.
Lieutenant Jenness and Captain James Powell had only 26 enlisted men and four civilians, but the men were all armed with new breechloading rifles, and they took cover behind a corral of jettisoned wagon boxes that were impervious to arrows. A young warrior named Crazy Horse led the attacks, but he found the breechloaders’ higher rate of fire more deadly than he expected, and after a few bloody attempts he dismounted his men. They had still not reached the corral several hours later, when reinforcements arrived with artillery, and the Sioux judiciously departed.
Captain Powell lost only three men, including Lieutenant Jenness, who was shot through the head by one of the few Sioux who carried rifles. The Lancaster clerk’s long, equivocating journey toward soldiering ended with his first hostile action, but he was the most prominent casualty of the Wagon Box Battle—one of the most famous clashes in the wars against the Plains Indians. Numerous histories mention him by name, and there is even a monument on the precise spot where he died, just as there is for Colonel Cross. Still, death in battle seems to have been more accidental for him than it was for his famous townsman—with whom he declined to go to war when the opportunity offered.
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