The Soldier's Flask Returns After Thirty Years
A Civil War veteran finds his lost canteen in a second-hand shop on a Seattle street, decades after it was taken from him in Virginia.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Reunions after long absence are not frequent in everyday life, but it is not often that they are as strange as the one recently enjoyed by William Phillips, a well-known G.A.R. man of this city. As he was passing a second-hand store on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Phillips' attention was attracted by a small leather-covered flask that seemed very familiar to him. He stopped and looked at it, wondering where he had seen it before. At last he decided that it bore a striking resemblance to a flask that he had carried during the war, and he picked it up to examine it more closely. The leather straps had disappeared, but upon the bottom, printed in ink on the leather, were the words: 'W. P. Battery D, First Virginia Artillery,' and all doubt upon the subject was dispelled. It was his old flask, taken from him by a Confederate soldier a few days after his capture at Danville, Va., on June 25, 1864, that had turned up again to greet him in Seattle after a separation of nearly thirty years. Mr. Phillips immediately entered into negotiations with the proprietor of the shop to obtain possession of it, and was told the price was 25 cents. As he was about to pay, he discovered he had but 20 cents with him, but finally managed to buy it for that price, being very careful not to display any undue anxiety.
“It was his old flask, taken from him by a Confederate soldier... that had turned up again to greet him in Seattle after a separation of nearly thirty years.”
Post-Civil War Seattle was a city defined by veterans, many of whom resettled in the Northwest for a fresh start. This story captures the uncanny way the physical artifacts of that conflict continued to surface in the lives of former soldiers long after the fighting ended.
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