Fort Atkinson - We Are Still Here...

Summer Season Episode 2

Last week, we left you on a bluff above the Missouri River. November 1819. A Nebraska winter is closing in. Something about to go very, very wrong.

 In Part 2 of our Fort Atkinson series, we hear the story from the inside. Through the journal entries of our soldier stationed at the fort in the winter of 1819–1820, we follow the crisis as it unfolds and what would take 157 men before spring arrived.

 The details are real. They come straight from the historical record.

 We also look at what came next, how the soldiers who survived that winter went on to become the first large-scale farmers west of the Missouri River, and why Fort Atkinson is a place worth standing on.

For photos, maps, and a behind the scenes look at what we’re getting into this summer, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram.

Plan Your Visit
Fort Atkinson's next living history weekend is June 6th and 7th, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fort Atkinson State Historical Park, Fort Calhoun, Nebraska. Free with a Nebraska State Park entry permit.

Fort Atkinson State Historical Park — Nebraska Game & Parks

Friends of Fort Atkinson — fortatkinsononline.org

Want to Learn More

Diary of James Kennerly, 1823–1826. Missouri Historical Society Collections Vol. VI, No. 1 (1928).

Johnson, Sally A. “The Sixth’s Elysian Fields: Fort Atkinson on the Council Bluffs.” Nebraska History 40 (1959): 1–38.

Levine, Victor E. “Scurvy in Nebraska: The Epidemic of Scurvy at Cantonment Missouri, Nebraska, 1819–1820.” Journal of Nutrition, January 1955.

Nichols, Roger L. “Soldiers as Farmers: Army Agriculture in the Missouri Valley, 1818–1827.”

Reals, William J. “Scurvy at Fort Atkinson, 1819–1820.” Nebraska History.

Wesley, Edgar Bruce. “Life at a Frontier Post: Fort Atkinson, 1823–1826.” Journal of the American Military Institute Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 1939): 202–209.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

November eighteen nineteen, a Nebraska winter. Nearly a thousand people on a bluff at the edge of the known American world. And something was about to go very, very wrong.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

November eighteen nineteen. Cantonement, Missouri, Council Bluffs. The barracks are finished at last. We have been at this bluff since October, and the work has been relentless. Timber, brick, lime. The men who did the heaviest labor are already showing in the SIC report, worn down before winter has properly arrived. They are calling this place Contonement, Missouri for now. It sits high on the bluff above the river, and on a clear day you can see a great distance in every direction. There is something both magnificent and lonesome about it. We are, by any honest measure, at the edge of the world. The nearest American settlement is hundreds of miles behind us. Our rations are what they are salted pork, hard tack, cornmeal, a daily jilla whiskey, which the men receive with considerably more enthusiasm than the salt pork. The meat has not been right since we arrived. There is a smell to it that the boiling does not entirely remove. The surgeon says it is fit for issue. The men say otherwise, but they eat it. It is cold now, kind of cold that gets into the joints and stays. I think of what my mother would put on the table in November turnips, onions, dried beans. Here there is salt and hard tack, whiskey, and the wind off the river. We are soldiers, we do not complain, at least not in writing.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

By October, the sick list had already grown long enough that the commander ordered surgeons to report the names of every sick man every single morning. Something was building. Nobody had a name for it yet.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

January 1820. The mercury has not risen above zero in several days. The last night it fell to twenty two below. I do not write that to complain. I write it because I am not sure I believed such cold was possible before I felt it. The sick list is a different matter now. In the beginning it was dysentery, pulmonary complaints, the things you expect when men have been worked hard and wet and cold. But something else has appeared. The surgeons are calling it a scorbutic taint. The men who were already weakened by other illness are the ones it takes first. They languish in a way I have not seen. Recovery is slow, the surgeon says. A man will seem to improve and then simply decline. Fresh beef is given only to the hospital patients. The rest of us have the pork. I will not describe the pork in detail. The smell and the taste both tell you not to. We eat it anyways. The vinegar is gone. The surgeons believed vinegar might help. There is none left to find out. Kendall, who bunked two down for me, was moved to the hospital this week. He is not an old man, he is twenty three. His gums are swollen, and his joints pain him so that he cannot dress himself. I carried his blanket. I do not know what this is. I know that I am eating what he was eating. I know that I am cold in the same way he was cold. I try not to think too carefully about the arithmetic.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

On February 6, 1820, the Fort Surgeon put that in writing. They sent a formal letter to the colonel commanding the post. The language was careful and official, but between the lines you can hear it. Terror had begun to walk the sentinel path. It had started quietly back in January, scorbutic taint, they called it, the first creeping signs of scurvy, swollen gums, joints that wouldn't stop aching, a weakness that sleep couldn't fix. By February, it was no longer quiet. They wrote that the disease had assumed a distinguished rank among the numerous diseases that afflicted our camp. That the salted meat was rotting, that the vinegar was gone, that nearly the whole regiment had sunk beneath its influence. 157 men would not survive that winter.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

February 1820. They have issued new garrison orders. We are to air our betting on Saturdays. We are to wash our hands, face, feet, the whole body if possible, before sleeping. Police tubs are to be provided for the night so that men do not have to go outside in the cold. The filth near the gates is to be carried a considerable distance from the cantonment. I follow every order. I do not know if it helps. Seventy men were sent downriver to Fort Osage last week. The ones too sick to stay, too sick to recover here. Three of them died on the way. The ones who made it sent back word that they are recovering, that they are in high spirits. I read that and I think, what does it mean to be in high spirits when you have lost your teeth? Some of these men have lost every tooth from its socket. I have seen it. There is a word now. Scurvy. The surgeons have given it a name and named it the cause: the lack of vegetables, fresh food, of things the body requires that salt pork and hard tack don't contain. They knew the cause. They could not produce the remedy. The river is frozen. The supply boats will not come until spring. The wild things are buried under the snow. Henderson died Tuesday. Morrison on Thursday. I did not know Morrison well, but I knew his face. I have begun to look at my own gums in the morning. I press my joints carefully, methodically, the way you might test ice before you step onto it. Spring will come. I tell myself this the way a man prays.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Spring did come.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

I do not know how to write what the last two weeks have been. The wild onions came first, small things, no larger than a nutmeg, the surgeon said. They pushed up through the ground along the riverbank almost overnight, or so it seemed, to the men who had been watching the ground for months. An Indian showed someone where to look. I do not know which Indian or which someone. I only know that within days, men who could not lift themselves from their bunks were outside in the weak spring sun, eating wild onions from the ground. They moved the worst of the sick to the camp three miles outside and called it camp recovery. Fresh air, tents, wild vegetables beginning to grow. Supply boats arrived with provisions we had not seen since November. Not a single man died at Camp Recovery. Not one. Some of them arrived there in conditions I will not describe. All of them lived. I sat on the bluff this morning and looked at the river. The same bluff I have stood on through this winter. It looks different now. Or I look at it differently. I am not sure which. A hundred and fifty-seven men did not make it to this morning. I carry that. I think we all do in our way. But the onions are up, the boats are coming, the sky above the river is the particular blue that only appears in spring after a long winter. When you have been watching for it, we are still here.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Andrew, thank you for bringing him to life for us. What did it feel like to inhabit the story? To put yourself inside that winter.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Reading it like that is different than just researching something. Um, it kind of goes back to why I like doing the living history, is because you can actually put yourself in the mindset. And I don't know how many times I've read information about this scurvy epidemic, but actually putting a human tone to it is totally different.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Reading it from their perspective, someone who's lived it in that way, looking at a document versus here's how I felt in this moment.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

It's a lot different.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Yeah, it's just a different way of feeling it. I don't know. It's it's just interesting. So, yeah, so the fort survived this, and then there's some remarkable things that happened. Um, these soldiers who almost starved became the first large-scale farmers west of the Missouri River.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Yeah, you know, it's actually kind of ironic. They they had such poor nutrition in the beginning to the point where they were dying from disease, and because of that, they started to cultivate huge farms and became some of the best fed people in the country. After that scurvy winter, yeah, um, they put in requests for huge amounts of seeds. So in 1820, they started cultivating uh 512 acres by 1822, um, everything from wheat, corn, beans, turnips, all that. So, like I said, they were very well fed. Stephen Long of the Long's Expedition coined the term the Great American Desert as he passed through the Great Plains. And I think it's interesting to me that this area went from being considered an arid desert, which wouldn't have been of much use to anybody for farming or grazing, to being the breadbasket of the world. Yeah. And the first people to figure that out were the soldiers stationed at Fort Atkinson.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

And they had to do it. It was out of necessity. They had to become self-sufficient.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

One other thing I found kind of interesting. Years after the fort was abandoned when the Mormons came through, there were remnants of the crops planted still growing, and they were able to harvest the remnants of those crops for their winter quarters. That's cool.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Fort Atkinson is the kind of place that earns its history. Stand on that bluff. Talk to the residents, let it be real. And if you're not near the fort, find the history near you. It's there, it's always there. You just have to go looking. Andrew, do you want to tell us a little bit more about the Living History weekend that's coming up here in a week now?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Yeah, it's coming up. As a volunteer in the Living History program at Fort Atkinson, I would like to personally extend an invitation to you. Starting at 10 o'clock on Saturday, come out and see us. You'll see soldiers marching in uniforms, practicing the manual of arms. Uh, you'll get to see the cannon, the blacksmith, the tinsmith, the settler, the spinners and weavers, all of it. Come check it out. And look me up and we'll talk history.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

It's really cool. We've been out there a couple times. There's always different things happening. Do you guys do different things though?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Yeah. Normally we do scenarios on the Living History weekends. Last month we did the death of Captain Woolley's wife, who upon her death was pickled in a barrel of brandy and sent home.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

As in home, like, how did you get her home?

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Uh, they sent her downriver in a keelboat. Oh.

unknown 11:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yep. Embalmed in a barrel of brandy.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

How how how fancy.

unknown 11:43

Lucky.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

So I'll be out there Saturday talking to the residents of the fort and sharing it out in real time on Instagram. So follow along on Rooted in the Plains, even if you can't be there in person. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains, and I hope you learned something new today. For photos, maps, and a behind the scenes look of what we're getting into this summer. Follow along on Instagram at Rooted in the Plains. Thanks.