The Captain Who Stole Flour to Feed His Men
A Civil War veteran seeks to reclaim his rank, decades after being dismissed for threatening a commissary agent to secure bread for his starving soldiers.
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.
SPOKANE, Dec. 5.—Capt. O. N. Clark, a veteran of the civil war and comrade of John Brown, has applied for reinstatement to the rank of captain, asking Congressman Cushman to introduce a bill in Congress for this purpose. Clark, now nearly 80, served as captain of Company B, Fifteenth Kansas Infantry Volunteers. He was dismissed near the end of the war for an act of insubordination: his company had been without bread for two days, surviving only on bacon. When he requested flour from a commissary agent, he was told he needed orders from a commanding general who could not be located. Clark confessed, 'I just leveled my gun and said we would have some flour or blow the top of his head off. I told my sergeants to take the flour. For that I was dismissed.'
“I just leveled my gun and said we would have some flour or blow the top of his head off. I told my sergeants to take the flour. For that I was dismissed.”
This story highlights the perennial tension between rigid military bureaucracy and the immediate survival needs of soldiers. It offers a fascinating, human-scale look at the chaotic, often desperate realities of Civil War service that rarely made it into official regimental histories.
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