By 1870, thousands of Civil War veterans were putting down roots with land scripts that made endless miles of the broad land out here a real bargain basement. If Chancellorsville or Missionary Ridge, if Gettysburg or the siege of Vicksburg, if any of those were in your rearview mirror, you--and your spouse--were eligible for a dreamy 160 acres, sometimes more.
By 1880, Nebraska was home to thousands of Civil War vets, men like Albert V. Cole, who, not yet thirty years old, had lived through a dozen bloody lifetimes before he crossed the Missouri and grabbed a plow. In addition, the man had been an orphan, his father having died when he was two months old, his mother as much as giving him up when he was ten. Little Albert got himself shuffled around from one house to another. "I had never had a home," he says in his pioneer reminiscence.
Now Albert V. Cole's young wife, on the other hand, was but a filly when she came out here to the end of the world, a place where his darling bride missed her Michigan family dearly.
He doesn't say it in that reminiscence, but Cole was a warrior. He'd joined Company C, Fourth Michigan Infantry in 1861 and engaged in almost countless Civil War battles: Yorktown, Newbridge, Hanover Court House, Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, Ellison's Mill, Gaines Hill, Fredericksburg, Malvern Hill, Second Bull Run, Antietam.
Albert V. Cole was a vet. Was he ever.
He reenlisted in December '63, signed up with Custer's famous Michigan brigade, and saw more action at Todd's Tavern, the Wilderness, Beaver Dam Station, Yellow Tavern, Meadow Bridge, Mechanicsville, and Pomunky River, until he took bullet at Haw's Shop and was forced thereby to lie on his back for six months without moving, suffering, or so his biography says, "in the most excruciating agony. . .as gangrene and erysipelas set in."
After all of that, Cole set out to homestead Nebraska land. He'd blazed through more horror than any fierce Great Plains winter could offer, even the big storm he couldn't help write about when he sat down to tell his story.
It was late Easter afternoon, and the bloodied war veteran had a wife for the first time, a sweetheart named Susan B. Crane, who, at just 19 years old, had never been "a thousand miles from her people," he admits, nor "separated from her mother" before coming out west to marry him. Cole's memoir doesn't as much as mention the Civil War, instead it goes on and on about that blinding Easter blizzard.
And it's not hard to understand why. In the middle of all that howling, Mrs. Cole told him what was on her mind and in her soul: "she made me promise that if our house ever blew down, I would take her back to Michigan." Albert V. Cole, storied Civil War vet who went down during the seven-hour battle at Haw's Shop, was scared to death of a broken heart.
There's more. In that three-day Easter storm, things got complicated. The Coles put up some neighbors and friends in what amounted to little more than a three-room shanty. Those neighbors, a couple building their own place a half-mile east, had been out for a ride on a lovely Sunday afternoon when the storm hit. They needed shelter, and so did another family, so that the Coles' little shanty held six adults and one child. If you're wondering, the three women and the child slept together on the bed, the men went on the floor.
That blizzard was no picnic, but Albert V. Cole's great worry was Susan Crane Cole. "Mrs. Cole almost prayed that the house would go down," he says, "so she could go back east." He can't have known that; but the almost in that memory suggests his real concern, and his love. "Almost prayed," he says. I can't help but think the man who took a bullet at the seven-hour battle of Haw's Shop, was a bunch more worried about his homesick wife than he was about some battering blizzard because Albert V. Cole--orphan, vet, pioneer--had a new and wonderful home that was, for all practical purposes, his first. "I had a home of my own and was delighted," he says, right in the middle of his description of that storm, "yet my heart went out to Mrs. Cole."
Yes, indeed it did.
It'll please you to know that Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cole had five children, and that soon after those first years Mrs. Cole's brothers and even her parents put Michigan behind them and homesteaded beneath the dome of sky in central Nebraska, where Mrs. Cole's own mother became a neighbor.
That's a picture-book end.
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