Confederates in Montana Territory: In the Shadow of Price's Army

history.

INTRODUCTION

To write about the Civil War is to step onto hallowed ground. As our nation continues to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, many ask, What role did Confederates and their sympathizers play in settling Montana Territory? A legend persists that Montana was settled by the left wing of Price’s army—meaning that Missourians came west in large numbers after defeats suffered by Major General Sterling Price’s Confederate army. Most agree that pro-Confederate sentiment was strong as Montana’s gold rush camps sprang into life and Montana Territory was created on May 26, 1864. But how strong was pro-Confederate presence and sentiment? Was it more than defecting and disillusioned men who abruptly left the service of General Price’s Missouri State Guard when they suffered defeats in the western theater? How did this Southern sentiment influence politics in the new territory on the remote Upper Missouri region? What kind of men, women and children composed this influx of Southerners and sympathizers? Where did they come from? Why did they come? What impact did they have on Montana Territory?

Some clues came in my book Montana Territory and the Civil War: A Frontier Forged on the Battlefield. The gold strikes of 1862 and 1863 triggered a flood of those who sought fortune or opportunity, stampeding to rapidly forming mining camps over long overland wagon trails or the seasonal steamboat route up the Missouri River to the head of navigation at Fort Benton. Men and families from South and North migrated to the camps, where they brought their wartime experiences and strong sentiments with them.

Typical of the Southerners who came was Captain Nick Wall, exiled to the Upper Missouri as a condition of his parole after his capture at Camp Jackson near St. Louis in May 1861. Wall left politics behind as he began his new life building the largest and most sophisticated business enterprise in the new territory, integrating steamboat operations with overland freighting and retail merchandising.

Antagonism between South and North, between Confederate and Union sympathizers, ran deep, yet no pitched battles were fought in the rough streets of the mining towns. Rather, political strife and rhetoric took the place of armed warfare. Confederate sentiment was strong throughout the territory, especially in Madison County along the mining camps of Alder Gulch. Names reflected early sentiment: Dixie Town, Jeff Davis Gulch and an attempt to name the largest camp Varina to honor the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The compromise name became Virginia City.

Confederate veterans were in on discovery of most of the largest strikes, including Georgians at Last Chance Gulch and secessionists who struck gold and named Confederate Gulch. Songs Dixie and Bonnie Blue Flag were on the hit parade in the hurdy-gurdy dance halls of Virginia City, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was cheered and celebrated on the streets. When ex-Confederate soldiers formed Gallatin Masonic Lodge No. 6 in October 1866, they refused admission to African Americans, which was not surprising, but they also refused to admit whites who had fought for or supported the Union.

While it might have been lost in the East, the Civil War was won in the western theater as the Union seized control of the Mississippi River and saw Ulysses S. Grant emerge from obscurity to craft victories from Fort Donelson to Vicksburg, gaining control of the vital transportation corridor while carving the Confederacy into two regions.

Confederate soldiers and sympathizers flocked to Montana Territory during and after the war. Many of these men and their families came from Missouri and other border states after the defeat of General Price’s Missouri State Guard. The secessionist influence was so strong in Montana that it remained a force in politics and the court of public opinion for many decades.

Look at a sampling of the colorful characters that came to the Montana frontier and hear their stories of the war, the environment in the battleground states and their way west. Confederate military leaders as well as common soldiers and their families sought shelter and opportunity on the remote mining frontier that became Montana.

The story begins with a look at their origins and ends with a discussion of the persistence of their Lost Cause as they arrived in Montana. In between, meet fascinating characters who came to Big Sky country, including guerrillas who fought with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, as well as cavalrymen who rode with Confederate legends General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Colonel John S. Mosby. Their stories include key elements: where they came from, why they fought for the South, what they did during the war and why they came to Montana Territory.

Henry Kennerly first came to the Upper Missouri in 1855 with an Indian Peace Commission. He returned to his native Missouri to join his brothers to fight for the Confederacy. Before the end of the war, Kennerly returned to the Upper Missouri to work in the bison robe trade and become active in Democratic politics. Captain John H. Rogers, another Confederate soldier, also became active in Montana territorial politics. Elected to the first Montana legislature, Rogers triggered a firestorm of controversy when he refused to sign an Ironclad Oath of allegiance to the Union.

Colonel Thomas Thoroughman served in the Missouri State Guard before being captured by Union forces, paroled and banished to the western territories. Thoroughman became active in Democratic Party politics and was elected to Montana’s first constitutional convention. A brilliant lawyer and politician, Thoroughman typified the many pro-secession Missourians who left Montana to return from exile to their home states before the 1870 U.S. Census. Although hard to measure, thousands of Southern-leaning men and their families returned to their home states in the years after the Civil War as political conditions settled and the Democratic Party regained control of the border and Southern states.

Nine-year-old Horace R. Buck from a Unionist family in Mississippi lived with his mother throughout the long siege of Vicksburg in the spring of 1863, when that critical Southern stronghold fell to the Union. After studying at Yale University, young Buck came up the Missouri River to Montana Territory to become a highly respected lawyer and rise to the top of his profession.

German immigrant John C. Lilly joined Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest’s 1st Kentucky Cavalry at the beginning of the war. Young Lilly rode alongside that brilliant, innovative cavalry officer, all the while recording his observations of life in the Kentucky Cavalry, his commander and their many engagements. Presented in this volume are many of Lilly’s diary entries from his handwritten account, featuring everything from the thrill of victory in the early years to the agony of defeat as the long war progressed. Lilly’s diary concludes with a tribute to his hero: There never was a man in that war as a General that done any more daring deeds and hard fighting then General N.B. Forrest of the Confederate Army. At war’s end, Lilly came up the Missouri River to Fort Benton, where he quickly established a reputation as one of the toughest, most colorful characters in a frontier filled with war veterans, adventurers and desperadoes. Whether running dance halls in the Bloodiest Block in the West or fighting the Nez Perce with Donnelly’s Mounted Civilian Volunteers, John Lilly left an indelible mark on frontier Montana.

The names of William Clarke Quantrill, his Raiders and Bloody Bill Anderson are the stuff of legend, personifying the toughest of the unconventional guerrilla units in the border states throughout the Civil War. Riding with Quantrill, and at times with Anderson, were the three Berry boys: Ike, Richard and James. The latter, Jim Berry, left the battlefields to come to the mining camps of Montana Territory. After the war, he returned to Missouri with his family and joined the Sam Bass outlaw gang in the Black Hills gold rush to become active in stage and train robberies. Details of Jim Berry’s life of crime, culminating in his shoot-out with a sheriff, make for gripping reading. His family descendants remain in Montana today.

Slaveholder Colonel James Conrad of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and his two young sons joined the Confederate army. The teenage boys, William G. and Charles E. Conrad, joined Colonel John S. Mosby’s Rangers for the last year of the war. Mosby, refusing to surrender, disbanded his cavalry, and the Conrad boys returned to their devastated family plantation. They soon boarded a steamboat bound up the Missouri River, where they both became giants in Montana Territory.

The Moore brothers, Perry and John, left their Missouri home to fight for the Confederacy with both Missouri and Kentucky units. With the 9th Kentucky Cavalry in General John Hunt Morgan’s division, the Moores served as military escorts in the final days before Confederate president Jefferson Davis surrendered. Returning home to northeastern Missouri, the brothers learned that their mother and younger siblings had departed for the western territories. The Moores searched the West to find their family.

Shirley C. Ashby left his home in the Shenandoah Valley to join the 1st/6th Virginia Cavalry. The fighting 6th fought in a staggering two hundred engagements throughout the war, and when General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865, the 6th Virginia Cavalry slipped through Union lines and later disbanded. Heading west, Ashby boarded a steamboat early in 1867. At Fort Benton, he worked for the Conrad brothers and made and lost fortunes on the frontier.

Raised in Virginia’s Piedmont, Frank D. Sandbar Brown served in the Richmond Battalion before transferring to the Confederate War Department to act as orderly for his cousin Secretary of War James A. Seddon. Brown’s stint in the war ended in the Confederate marines, and he headed up the Missouri River, working in the fur/bison robe trade. An unreconstructed Confederate, Brown settled in the Philipsburg mining area and assumed a leading role in the United Confederate Veterans.

Born a slave, Joseph Wells accompanied his master into the Missouri State Guard. Thousands of slaves went to war with the Confederate army as construction workers, teamsters and manservants. This manpower significantly helped the Confederacy, although most slaves were not armed and enlisted into the army until late in the war. At war’s end, Joe Wells headed west, mining in Colorado and the Black Hills and holding various jobs in Montana Territory. Interviews in his elder years shed light on his fascinating life and raise puzzling questions.

Perhaps the most intriguing story, mixing Quantrill guerrillas, a battered steamboat, a teenage traveler, a charming murderer and a faded grave marker, is the saga of Langford Farmer Peel. The steamboat Richmond steamed up the Missouri River on a mission of revenge. This strange voyage with a colorful crew on their mission of vengeance makes this a saga to remember.

These stories reveal varied backgrounds, wartime experiences, motivations for migrating west and degrees of success and failure in finding hope and opportunity. Although economic status and attitudes toward slavery varied, most were motivated by greater loyalty to their state, considered by many to be their country, rather than to the Union. Some were slave owners, while others had mixed feelings about the peculiar institution. Yet all believed the rebellion was an issue of states’ rights, not the abolition of slavery. Theirs was a War of Southern Independence, and for that, most were ready to fight.

Once Confederates and Southern sympathizers arrived in Montana, some quietly hid their past allegiances, while many mellowed over the years. Others were unrepentant throughout their lives, even passing it on to descendants. Over the decades, large-scale migration of Northerners and foreign immigrants further diluted Confederate fervor. Yet the Lost Cause persisted in Montana for many decades.

Chapter 1

FROM THE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE WAR OF SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE

CONFEDERATE VETERANS SETTLE MONTANA

Thousands of men who fought under the Bonnie Blue Flag came west during and after the awful struggle and established themselves in what was then a rugged frontier. Arriving in newly formed Montana Territory, these men, women and children joined families arriving from the North and from abroad, as well as thousands of Native Americans who had lived in the region for centuries.

Fort Benton, the fur/robe trade center on the Missouri River, had long been a multiracial melting pot. In the opinion of historian J.W. Smurr, Fort Benton was practically an appendage of the state of Missouri and had long been the headquarters of Missourians associated with the fur trade.

With the gold strikes in Alder Gulch and the major defeats of Major General Sterling Price and the Missouri State Guard in 1862 and 1864, thousands flocked to newly formed Madison County. Almost everyone attributed this early migration to Union domination of Missouri. Many secessionist Missourians, whether in Confederate service or not, left their homes and moved west. Some came as exiles, paroled to the western territories; others as deserters or draft evaders. Some came after service and discharge. Families came to avoid the insurgency fighting all around them; others for opportunity after their slaves had been freed and their plantations destroyed. The western territories became a safety valve for a wartime population on the move. Even remote Montana Territory could not escape the effect of the Civil War.

The first territorial census hurriedly taken in Montana in September 1864 recorded 15,812 nonnative residents—regrettably, neither place of birth nor former residence was recorded. Three-quarters of these early transient miners were found in the mining camps of Madison County in southwestern Montana. Over the next two years, many of these miners stampeded on to new gold strikes in Last Chance, Confederate and other gulches. During these years, many thousands more arrived in this land of opportunity, some with and some without families. The population of the new territory might have grown to thirty thousand by the mid-1860s, unrecorded by any census.

Sterling Old Pap Price, legendary commander of Confederate forces in Missouri. Library of Congress.

During 1864–65, as the new territory was forming, it is likely that perhaps half of the residents were pro-secession, whether in Confederate service or sentiment. In addition, the Northern contingent included many Peace Democrats or Copperheads, those who wanted peace with the South at any price.

Both foreign-born and native-born residents included large numbers of Irish, many of whom were loyal to the Union, yet almost all of these War Democrats voted democratic. Thus, Missourians, Southerners, Copperheads and Irish formed an uneasy coalition to make the Democratic Party dominant for several decades. Just how uneasy is indicated by the feelings of territorial secretary Thomas Francis Meagher when he complained, These sympathizers with the Rebellion acquired not only a strong majority in the territorial legislature, but the mastery, moreover, of the political action of the territory. Meagher later tempered his rhetoric to cultivate the Southern vote.

In fact,