Sent to school for one day, then sent to the fields

His mother died when he was about three and his father when he was about eight. He was placed with a family on the understanding that they would send him to school.

They sent him once. "This family sent him to school one day and, being relieved of their promise, he was sent to the fields." He learned to read and write after he married Catherine Belinda Martin, who taught him.

In the spring of 1851 they left North Carolina — by wagon over the mountains to the Ohio, down the Ohio to its mouth, then up the Missouri, settling about forty miles east of Kansas City. Ruthy Jane was six weeks old when they started.

Missouri turned on them. Confederate neighbours robbed the house repeatedly at night, "even dragging the children from their beds." Once they took him away altogether — and a near neighbour, one of the party, pleaded for him until they let him go. His daughter recorded the conclusion the family drew: they would be quite as safe without him. He enlisted in August 1862.

He caught smallpox and was shut in an old barn to recover alone. When an epidemic followed he was made warden of the hospital. His company fought at Lone Jack, sixteen miles off, while he lay ill; Belinda heard the cannonading, and the next day rode out with a neighbour woman and searched the dead and wounded, "fearing the worst."