nth to resist this
apprehended movement of the Confederates.

This probably is a fitting place for something to be said about our
method of traveling by rail during the Civil war, as compared with the
conditions of the present day in that regard. At the time I am now
writing, about fifteen thousand United States soldiers have recently
been transported on the cars from different places in the interior of
the country, to various points adjacent to the Mexican border, for the
purpose of protecting American interests. And it seems that in some
cases the soldiers were carried in ordinary passenger coaches.
Thereupon bitter complaints were made on behalf of such soldiers
because Pullman sleepers were not used! And these complaints were
effective, too, for, according to the press reports of the time, the
use of passenger coaches for such purposes was summarily stopped and
Pullmans were hurriedly concentrated at the places needed, and the
soldiers went to war in them. Well, in our time, the old regiment was
hauled over the country many times on trains, the extent of our travels
in that manner aggregating hundreds and hundreds of miles. And such a
thing as even ordinary passenger coaches for the use of the enlisted
men was never heard of. And I have no recollection now that (during the
war) any were provided for the use of the commissioned officers,
either, unless they were of pretty high rank. The cars that we rode in
were the box or freight cars in use in those days. Among them were
cattle cars, flat or platform cars, and in general every other kind of
freight car that could be procured. We would fill the box cars, and in
addition clamber upon the roofs thereof and avail ourselves of every
foot of space. And usually there was a bunch on the cow-catchers. The
engines used wood for fuel; the screens of the smoke-stacks must have
been very coarse, or maybe they had none at all, and the big cinders
would patter down on us like hail. So, when we came to the journey's
end, by reason of the cinders and soot we were about as dirty and black
as any regiment of sure-enough colored troops that fought under the
Union flag in the last years of the war. When the regiment was sent
home in September, 1865, some months after the war was over, the
enlisted men made even that trip in our old friends, the box cars. It
is true that on this occasion there was a passenger coach for the use
of the commissioned officers, and that is the only time that