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Tough Wildcats-Swift Deer- Tall Pines

 

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We have come from the mountains

We have come from the dales ....

 

So ran the first lines of a poem which the Bucktails were wont to sing during the early days of the war when they were new at soldiering and hopes and spirits were high.[1] Now at last they were returning to the mountains and dales of their early war song.

The Wildcat District had been Pennsylvania's last fron­tier. Most of it was included in the last purchase from the Indians in 1784. It had remained practically unsettled until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even then few set­tlers came from downstate. It was the restless sons of New England, beginning their westward march, who had settled most of northern Pennsylvania. The Wildcat lumbermen were only a generation or two removed from the hardy Yankees from Connecticut and other New England states who poured into the top of the Keystone State in the early 1800's. With the timber boom which followed the Civil War, lumbermen from other places would be imported into the pine and hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania;[2] but the lumbermen who went to war from the Wildcat Dis­trict in the spring of 1861 were the area's own native sons.

Even as late as 1861 the Wildcat District folk were natu-

 

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rally considered frontier people by downstate Pennsylva­nians. Not many years before the war, referring to the region and the New England "adventurers" who had settled it, a Philadelphian wrote: "the peculiar language, habits, and

manners of that people still prevail to a considerable degree among the inhabitants."[3]

With the Reserves the Wildcats had fought on many fields by the side of their more polished and urbane Pennsylvania comrades. While the war had wrought its changes in the men, one may hardly assume that it produced much refine­ment and gentility in the upstate lumbermen. The Wildcats may have become somewhat tamer. That is all.

Historians have often referred to the Bucktails as a "famous" regiment. That they were good, hard fighters has never been questioned, but in a war where there were many hard fighting outfits on both sides there must be something extra to warrant the special designation. Attempts at comparison of fighting abilities of good units are not only dan­gerous, but futile.[4] Why are the First Rifles of the Pennsyl­vania Reserves included among the relatively few Civil War

regiments which history has chosen to designate as "fa­mous"? Probably the answer lies in their colorfulness.

From the moment the yelling Wildcats descended upon Camp Curtin with a deertail bobbing in every hat it was recognized that here was a group of men who were different. Fresh from their northern Pennsylvania wilderness, the lumbermen brought with them a distinctive flavor born of years of battling nature in her mountain fastness. Tall trees, skillfully cut, laboriously skidded down the steep hillsides, and then dangerously rafted down the swift currents of the

mountain rivers had been their product. One might suggest that possibly the tall pines were reflected in the personality of the lumber outfit.

 

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That the regiment had a personality all its own is certain, however difficult it may be to adequately describe after the passage of a century. Stalwart as the white pine, almost as agile as the deer, those mountain men from the hills of northern Pennsylvania could upon occasion fight like the wildcat for which they had been named. From a region which had been a trackless wilderness when the nation was born, when the nation started to break apart, there poured forth a group of unusual fellows who said it was not to be so.

In a war in which the soldiers would, it sometimes seems, rather lose their lives than their regimental colors, much store was set on symbols. The Bucktails had a symbol which bespoke their home country, their past, and the manner of men they were. It was a symbol which, after the initial ex­citement and enthusiasm had been worn away and home­sickness began to gnaw, gave them a tie with the mountains of their birth and knit them the more firmly together. To say that the Bucktails possessed regimental loyalty of a high order is to repeat the obvious. The outfit's distinctive em­blem probably had as much to do with its fame as the men's ability to shoot straight, whether with muzzle-loading Harp­ers Ferry muskets or Spencer seven-shot repeaters.

Illustrative of the regimental pride which developed among the Bucktails during the war and increased in after years is the story of a soldier from the Wildcat District who was just a bit too young in 1861 to join the eager, early re­cruits. William A. Stone finally got into the war and he also got to be governor of Pennsylvania. Governor Stone in ad­dressing his comrades of the One Hundred Eighty-Seventh Pennsylvania at a reunion of the regiment in 1900 had this to say: "I had two older brothers in the `Bucktail Regiment,' and they would never admit that I was in the army at all."[5]

To a lesser degree the entire Pennsylvania Reserve Corps

 

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achieved fame. To begin with, the Reserves had two distinc­tions, one growing out of the other. The fifteen Pennsyl­vania regiments had been taken into the Army as a division. Although the Second Brigade was finally detached, the in­fantry regiments fought as a division during their entire period of service. Division pride and loyalty among the men who in a broad sense were all neighbors was much higher than in other divisions. And, as one soldier so accurately put it, "they never lost the touch of elbows."[6]

Fairly early in the war the Reserves saw heavy fighting, and they always managed to do a good job. That they failed to perform the practically impossible at Frayser's Farm does not alter the fact that they did much toward saving a large part of McClellan's retreating army. Then in rapid succes­sion there was Second Bull Run, South Mountain, and An­tietam. After the terrible punishment at Fredericksburg the Pennsylvania division was never the same. Without adequate replacements it was impossible for it to again be­come the powerful division it had been that second year of the war.

Important, too, is the fact that Crawford as a commander could not measure up to McCall or Meade, to say nothing of the excellent Reynolds. While they fought out the period of their enlistment like the good soldiers they had become, 1862 was the zenith of the Pennsylvania Reserves.

 

Fireflies flickered across the village green in Wellsboro one evening in late June 1864. Wetmore's Brass Band had just finished playing "Faded Coat of Blue," and, as more appropriate to the occasion, had struck up "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." Across the street every window of the gray stone court house gave out the faint glow of coal oil lamps. The ladies of the Soldiers' Aid Society

 

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were bustling about making certain that everyone got enough ice cream, cake, and strawberries, and that no re­turned soldier paid for anything. The strawberry festival had been especially arranged as a welcome home to all the Bucktails.[7]

In every town and village in the Wildcat District that June the First Rifles were welcomed back to their home country. And after all the festivities were over the men put away their bucktails and went back to work.

The years went by. The tall white pines and later the hem­locks were cut down.[8] With the going of the timber, the wildcats gradually disappeared, and even the deer (until, much later, the stubby second growth was stocked with deer for hunters from downstate). With the cutting of the stal­wart trees, the soil began to wear away, and the streams so changed that only at freshet time could most of them float a raft or even a log of the size of yesteryear. The lumber era in northern Pennsylvania was ended.

For a while on every Memorial Day there could be seen in country cemeteries here and there a little group of aging veterans, stooped but proud, each with a bucktail tucked in his faded blue campaign hat. With the passing of the years, the tall pine, the deer, the wildcats, and the Bucktails, one by one, like the old soldiers they had become, faded away.

Today every county seat in the area has its Civil War monument, usually rather homely piles of granite to which nobody pays any attention. The Bucktails have long since been forgotten. The people have even forgotten that it was once called the Wildcat District.

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