The men sat among the trees, dirty and tired, their coats pulled tight against the dawn's chill. A gray light crept into the woods around them, ending the long, sleepless night of anxiety. Nearby the body of their dead colonel lay under a blanket, the chaplain by his side. Enemy skirmishers watched from the cornfield before them, and, to the rear, the immense strength of the Army of the Potomac was gathering. The fighting would resume soon.
        This morning by the edge of a Maryland cornfield would bring to a close the summer campaigns of 1862 - three months of marching and fighting that, for these men, had been a transformation of unusual severity. No longer were they untested innocents eager to see battle. They were now veterans, and if anyone had that morning reminded them of General George McClellan's pronouncement that it would take five years to make a volunteer into a reliable soldier, they might well have replied with loud guffaws. General McClellan had not been in the places they had been that summer. He had not seen what they had seen nor endured what they had been through. Few regiments in either army had. If the men in the woods that September morning were not yet soldiers, then there was not a soldier on the continent.
        His name was Bucktail, and he was born in Pennsylvania, or Maryland or Virginia, sometime in 1861, though just when is hard to say. He began as a mass of a couple of thousand legs, eyes and hands and half that many hearts, but at some point in that first year of the Civil War he became an entity unto himself, bigger and stronger than the sum of its parts.  The new persona transcended the individual limitations of the log­gers, rivermen, farmers, shop clerks and roustabouts who had combined to make it and became the brotherhood of the Bucktail the embodiment of all the brash, arrogant, muscular, masculine conceit the mountains of northern Pennsylvania could produce.
        Bucktail was fathered outside a butcher shop in Smethport, Pennsylvania, when James Landregan took a fancy to the tail of a hanging deer carcass. He sliced it off, pinned it to his cap and created an instant craze. Whether Landregan was boasting of his prowess as a hunter (many of the men from the wild mountains spent long days in the woods with a rifle, and they were proud of their marksmanship) or merely affecting a quasi-military ornament ---a poor rustic's version of the British Army's bearskin hats ---- his flourish captured the imagination of his comrades. They stripped the deer naked and adorned themselves with hanks of fur. In time, they would find genuine tails or write home to ask fathers, brothers or cousins to send them one. No man in the regiment wished to be without the badge that marked him as a part of Bucktail.
      There was not a regiment in America-in 1861 not filled with naïve arrogance and foolish notions of whipping 10 times its own number in the battles to come, but few volun­teers were more supremely certain of their superiority than the men who became the 13th Pennsylvania alias, 42nd Pennsylvania Infantry, 1st Pennsylvania Rifles or Kane Rifle Regiment, known to friends and enemies as "the Bucktails." Most regiments that had the chance to test themselves in battle had the nonsense knocked out of them soon enough, but Bucktail, as he sometimes called himself, seems never to have been willing to admit that he was not as good as he thought he was.
      He first descended upon the civilized world in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his rugged appearance and his rustic headgear caused a sensation. Newspapermen and citizens saw that here was a set of fighting men with style and spirit. That they were expert marksmen, or at least claimed to be, contributed to their celebrity, and the story of Bucktail spread as far as the local newspapers and word of mouth could carry it. After Bucktail learned that civilians were apt to view his antics with a wink and smile, he enlivened the weeks in training camp with drunken brawls, raids on nearby farms and gardens and occasional rebellions against authority. He had only contempt for the rules of discipline and regularly went absent without leave for an evening to seek his pleasures outside camp. "The guard appreciates that confinement is not conducive to Bucktail's happiness," one man wrote, "and Bucktail breathes the free air of heaven without restraint. If his steps are arrested by a 'who goes there?' 'Bucktail' is sufficient to satisfy all scruples of the sentinel, and an 'all right' sends him on his way rejoicing." Harrisburg's taverns rang with Bucktail's boister­ous roar. One of whom admitted, "A deal of valuable strength is expended in scuffling and dissipation."
      As Bucktail's fame spread, his ego fattened. A train ride through sout­ern Pennsylvania led a sergeant to declare that "All along our route the people turned out by the thousands to get a glimpse of the Bucktails." When the regiment reached Washington, the men found they were celebrities, On the streets of the capital, "every little boy we met hallowed out, 'go it, Bucktails,' or 'Bully for the Bucktails." The few times the regiment skirmished with Southerners that first year of the war, Bucktail believed he saw the enemy "scatter like frightened sheep" soon after the fight began. The explana­tion? "He did not know he had Bucktails to deal with." Nor did the bloody skirmishes dampen Bucktail's ardor. After a long fight at Dranesville, Virginia, in December 1861, Private William Clark declared, 'We are ready for another fight at the first opportunity."
      By the spring of 1862, when the regiment reached Falmouth, Virginia---of which one of the men remarked, "It would be hard to imagine a more miserable, God-forsaken place "--Bucktail was a fully developed persona, as cock-sure and bumptious as he had been at enlist­ment a year earlier. It was at Falmouth, however, that Bucktail's initiation to the hardships of war was to begin in earnest. The first blow came from within.
        Since the regiment's formation the men had been of two minds regarding their commanding offi­cers. Thomas Lieper Kane, the man who brought the Bucktails together, had been elected colonel in June 1861, but since his military experience  consisted entirely of throwing rocks at Parisian policemen as a col­lege student in France, he had declined the post in favor of Charles J. Biddle, a Philadelphia lawyer with command experience in the Mexican War.   Kane, the son of a judge, was also a lawyer and an ambi.tious man, and might have realized that deferring to Biddle, scion of a powerful and well-connected family, would do him no harm, especially since Biddle would be standing for election to Congress in the fall. Kane accepted the lieutenant colonelcy  and bided his time.
        Somehow, the upper class Philadelphian proved immensely popular with the woodsmen and mountaineers from the wildest part of Pennsylvania.  “I have never yet seen his superior,” wrote a sergeant.  “He is just the man we want.”  Another man thought Biddle “was idolized by the men: never was a regiment more attached to their commander, for never was an officer more considerate of the comfort of the men, or more attentive to the advancement of their military character.”  Biddle professed to return their devotion. "Next to my family," he told them in October 1861, "1 love this regiment best: I am resolved with you to conquer, or with you to die." Within weeks, his resolve apparently having dissolved, he resigned to assume his seat in Congress. The Bucktails buried their sorrow in metaphors: "A boy of ten years might better lose his father and mother," wrote one, "and be thrown penniless upon the world than we to lose our little Colonel."
        Lieutenant Colonel Kane took command of the regiment - a change not popular among all the men. Some admired him, pointing to his two wounds from a skirmish. "He is emphatically a fighting man," one man thought. "Lieutenant Col. Kane is a gentle­man and one of the bravest officers in the division; and one who will not ask a man to go where he does not take the lead himself."
      Many more of the Bucktails, how­ever, thought differently. "Ever since the resignation of Col. Biddle," wrote one man, "it has been evident that our Lieut. Col. was a man whol­ly unfit to be at the head of the regiment. He lacks that coolness of purpose and fairness of decision, so requisite in a military commander.”  The result of the rift in the regiment was that Kane has to stand for election to colonel.  The well-liked Captain Hugh McNeil of Company D, a pre-war bank cashier with no prior military experience, opposed Kane.  Despite Kanes vigorous electioneering---one man declared he “did not scruple to use any means to carry the election,” and used every influence that money, position and whiskey produce," - McNeil won election to colonel with 64 percent of the votes cast.
        The trouble at Falmouth came when McNeil went on sick leave with typhoid fever. The unchastened Kane, through back-channel machinations, gained permission to have a portion of the Bucktails detailed to develop "experimental rifle tactic. When McNeil left him in charge, Kane divided the regiment. "The news," thought one man, "came like a thunderclap." Sergeant Orrin Stebbins of Company A wrote bitterly "Col. Kane has 'seceded,' and taken with him four companies. Col. McNeil is very opposed, Gens. Reynolds and McCall are also, but Kane has money, and money always commands political friends. We do not know if the division is permanent." So Bucktail entered the summer campaign in two pieces: Six companies remained at Falmouth under the capable Major Roy Stone, the rest went with the persistent Kane.
        Kane's strong-arm tactics earned for Bucktail the distinction of being the only Federal outfit to participate in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign and the Peninsula Campaign, both of which would climax in June of 1862. For almost three months Confederate Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had been keeping Federal armies off balance in the Shenandoah. The Federal War department decided to send reinforcements to the Valley in late May to corral Jackson once and for all. Thus went Kane and his 200 or s6riflemen to the Shenandoah to play a small but significant part in one of the more important campaigns of the war.
        Kane managed to have his battalion attached to Brigadier General George D. Bayard's "Flying Brigade," which was composed of the Ist Pennsylvania and 4th New Jersey Cavalry regiments and a battery of Maine Light Artillery. It was the only brigade in the army that mixed all three arms together, so in that respect Kane's "experimental rifle tactics" were novel indeed. In truth, the experiment tested legs and lungs more than rifles. Bucktail spent the first week of June trotting over mile after mile of the Valley Turnpike and surrounding farmland trying to keep up with his equine brigade mates. He marched more than 60 miles in five days, leaving perhaps half his number lying by the roadside, victims of too much sun and too little water or rest. On the sixth day, Bucktail fought.
        General Bayard and his horsemen had hounded Jackson as he withdrew southward, and on June 6, the 4th New Jersey pursued the Southerners onto a wooded ridge southeast of Harrisonburg. General Turner Ashby, Jackson's cavalry chief, repulsed the Jerseymen and  immediately began setting a trap for an expected Federal count stroke. Ashby brought forward the infantry brigade of  General George Steuart  and lay them in ambush on the ridge, hoping the Federal cavalry would return. The Northerners came, but they were not lightly armed cavalrymen. When Kane had seen the 4th New Jersey thrown out of the woods, he had pleaded with Bayard to let him lead big Bucktails4nto the fight. The general had at first refused then succumbed to the insistent Kane. The Pennsylvanians went forward and engaged the Southern infantry in what was later grandiosely called "the Battle of Harrisonburg." Bucktail, was 104 strong after the bard marching of the previous few days, fought alone against two Confederate regiments and their supports. Kane, predictably, was aggressive in keeping his men to their work. He was heroic in braving the enemy fire, staying in the fight even after he went down with two wounds. Popular 22-year-old Captain Fred Taylor took command of the battalion, which did not waver until the lst Maryland charged. A leg wound prevented Kane from managing the Bucktail withdrawal, but Taylor was up to the task. He steadied his line for "one good volley," but he had already stayed too long. Barely 50 Bucktails made it off the ridge whole, and neither Kane nor Taylor was among them. Both, with a handful of their men, became guests of the Confederacy. But if Kane's rash foray into the woods had cost him half his men, it also had deprived Jackson of his cavalry commander.  The bold and effective Ashby lay dead in the forest. The remnant of Kane's command fought again two days later at the Battle of Cross Keys, where, with the 27th Pennsylvania, Bucktail repelled with bayonets a Southern assault on a battery.  By evening, just 40 Bucktails were in the ranks ready for duty.  In about a week of marching and fighting, Kane's battalion had lost more than 75 percent of its strength.
        Jackson decisively defeated the Federals the next day at the Battle of Port Republic, but Bucktail would take no part in the fight. Within days, the battalion was withdrawing with the rest of the Federal army, northward, away from Jackson and out of the Valley he had won. Jackson, too, would soon move out of the Valley, not to lick his wounds and collect his stragglers as the Federals were hoping to do, but to combine with Robert E. Lee to change the course of the war.
        The Confederate capital at Richmond, 90 miles east of the Shenandoah Valley, was in June 1862 beset by the enormous Federal army of Major General George B. McClellan. Lee decided his only chance to save the city from Federal capture was to attack. He planned to strike on June 26. There to meet him would be Major Roy Stone's Bucktails.
        Major General George McCall had bought his 9,000-man division of Pennsylvania Reserves to the Peninsula in midjune, among them were the six Bucktail companies left at Falmouth under Major Stone. just as fate had led Kane and his Bucktails to contribute briefly but significantly to the history of the Valley Campaign, so would it give them a place of distinction in the week-long running fight known as the Seven Days Battles. On June 26 Bucktail was on picket at Meadow Bridges north of Richmond, directly in the path of Lee's assaults.
        The fight, generally known as Mechanicsville, was chaotic from the outset. Confederates forced their way across the Chickahominy River, driving the Bucktails and other pickets before them.  Major Stone succeeded in withdrawing three of his companies of Bucktails to the strong positions at Beaver Dam Creek east of Mechanicsville, but the other three companies became heavily engaged and could not easily retreat. Company K, under Captain Edward Irvin, was surrounded and cut off. Irvin and his men lay in the swampy woods throughout the day and watched that night as the forest around them filled with campfires of resting Confederates. For the next five days, as the sounds of battle moved farther east, and the Southern army pursued McClellan's withdrawing army, Irvin and his men struggled through the woods and swamps of the Chickahominy River, hoping to reach friendly lines. Not until July I were they captured. They had eaten nothing in six days, so were unusually grateful for the first meal given them in a Richmond prison.
        Bucktail's five remaining companies had made it to Beaver Dam Creek on June 26 in disarray Major Stone had fled across a swamp and only escaped by abandoning his mare and a boot in the mire. Despite their adventures that afternoon, the Bucktails found their work was just begun. With the rest of the Pennsylvania Reserves, Stone's men filed into rifle pits and began laying down a heavy fire against a steadily building tide of Confederate attackers. Stone told his men to "Give them hell or get it ourselves." Private Enos Bloom recalled that "We did not fire a shot until they came within 100 yards of us, then we gave them what the Major told us to give them. We piled them up by the hundreds, making a perfect bridge across the swamp." Private Cordello Collins told his parents, "I fired until my gun got so hot that I could barely hold it in my hands." The day was costly for Lee but even more so for Stone. Of the nearly 400 Federal casualties at Beaver Dam Creek, more than a quarter of them were Bucktails.
        Lee resumed the fight the next morning, pushing hard against the Federal defenses. just before dawn on June 27, the Pennsylvanians had received word from army headquarters to withdraw from Beaver Dam Creek. The Confederate attacks added to the chaos of changing a position in haste, and once again the Bucktails suffered. "Our deadly fire could not keep back the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, 11 wrote Private Collins. "When we were ordered out, every man was for himself in the general rush, and all escaped that could."
      By the time Stone and his men reached the new Federal line above Boatswain Creek, they numbered just 131, about half the number of Bucktails who had begun the day in the rifle pits at Beaver Dam. Company E had been cut off, as Company K had been the day before, and the Southerners sent another portion of Bucktail to prison in Richmond. The rest of Stone's battalion skirmished in the afternoon during the enormous Battle of Gaines's Mill. Lee again lost heavily, but ended the day with his first victory. One hundred and eleven Bucktails ended the day dead, wounded or in captivity.
        Two more days of fighting and marching brought the Seven Days Battles to a climax on June 30 at the crossroads known as Glendale. The Southerners attacked with exceptional ferocity, and once again McCall's Pennsylvanians bore the brunt of the attacks. Since Gaine's Mill, Major Stone had collected stragglers and other wayward Bucktails until he could put 155 officers and men in line near the Long Bridge Road. Though Bucktail was small that day, he fought large. He helped blunt a Confederate assault on the Federal left and rallied other commands broken by the Southern onslaught. When forced to withdraw, Bucktail reformed and became the nucleus of a hodgepodge of refugees from other regiments who returned to the fight and helped keep the attackers at bay until darkness ended the fighting. Glendale saw some of the more desperate fighting of the war, and casualties were high. Perhaps no unit on the field suffered a higher proportional loss than Bucktail. When Stone counted heads the next day, he found but 63 men present. In all, the six Bucktail companies that began the Seven Days Battles lost 247 officers and men in five days of action, a casualty rate of 80 percent. When Colonel McNeil returned from sick leave, he stood with tears in his eyes and said, "My God, where are my Bucktails?"
        Thankfully, July passed uneventfully for Bucktail, excepting the several score of men in prison in Richmond. After a few weeks, the Confederates exchanged most of their captives and the stray Bucktails returned to the fold. Lieutenant Colonel Kane was among them, and, though still hobbled by his wound, he rejoined his little battalion in Major General John Pope's Army of Virginia.
        On the black, rainy night of August 22, Kane's men, now part of the headquarters guard, were on duty at Catlett Station with Pope's papers and baggage - and so, unfortunately, was Confederate cavalry commander Major General Web Stuart, with 1,500 of his troopers. The Southerners had slipped through the darkness in the midst of a tremendous thunderstorm and descended upon the sleepy Federal camp at Catlett. Stuart's primary target was the railroad bridge over Cedar Run, but Kane was again aggressive and alert. He rallied what men he could find and headed for the bridge.
        The darkness made it difficult to tell friend from foe. Horses and mules ran loose through the camp, silhouetted before burning wagons and terrified by the flashes of gunfire. "The shooting and shouting of the men," thought one Confederate, "the braying of the mules, the glare of the lightning and roll of the thunder, made it seem like all Pandemonium had broken loose." Kane and his men put up a fight, discouraging, if not actually preventing, the Confederates from firing the bridge (one raider thought that in such a rain storm "they might just as well have tried to burn the creek!"). When the Southerners withdrew, they left the bridge standing but took with them many horses, much equipment and 300 prisoners, 19 of whom belonged to Kane. Catlett was another hard knock in Bucktail's education.
        And there were more to come. After delivering Richmond, Robert E. Lee moved the war to northern Virginia, where, in the last days of August, he trounced Pope's army at the Battle of Second Manassas. Both Bucktail battalions were active in skirmishing throughout the battle, though they operated separately. In the withdrawal, Kane and his men served as a rear guard at the famous Stone Bridge over Bull Run, and, when the last of the beaten Federals crossed safely over, the Bucktails destroyed the bridge and brought up the rear.
        In the wake of Second Manassas, the fragmented Federal army was quickly reorganized at Washington by General McClellan. Colonel McNeil welcomed home the four companies who had been dragged away three months earlier by Kane, and the reunion was joyous indeed, especially for those Bucktails who did not care for their bold and controversial lieutenant colonel. Kane was promoted for bravery to brigadier general and left the regiment for good. His departure seems to have been a turning point for Bucktail. Despite his courage and zeal, Kane had from the outset been a divisive force in the regiment he had created. With that influence gone, the men united behind the popular McNeil.
        There was little time for Bucktail to reflect on the future or dwell on stories of his fragmented past, however. Lee had entered Maryland, and McClellan started his army off in pursuit. The Federals came up with Lee's rear guard at South Mountain, about 45 miles northwest of Washington, on September 14. The Pennsylvania Reserves pushed up the eastern slope of the mountain. Bucktail, less than 300 strong, was in the advance, moving from tree to tree and sheltering behind boulders and stone walls. The Confederates fired down from their strong positions to good effect, keeping the Pennsylvanian's at bay until one officer took the issue into his own hands. Bucktail Captain Edward Irvin, the same man who had stubbornly led his Company K through the Chickahominy swamps for six days without food, leaped into the open and shouted "Forward Bucktails, drive them from the position." The men surged forward with a cheer, followed by the Ilth Pennsylvania Reserves. Almost at once, Irvin went down with a head wound, but he had performed his role that day. The inspired Pennsylvanians took the crest and drove the Confederates into the valley beyond. The price was again high. Almost 20 percent of the Bucktails who had gone up the mountain came down either dead or wounded.
      After a day of rest and light marching, the Bucktails were again on the skirmish line as afternoon came on September 16. They crossed a stone bridge over Antietam Creek and moved forward in the advance of their brigade. Southerners firing from a patch of woods halted the Pennsylvanians in a plowed field. McNeil at once prepared for a general engagement. He sent word back to the brigade for support and deployed all his men. Artillery opened on both sides, and the Bucktails began taking cannon and musket fire. McNeil could wait no longer for the slow supports to come up. He got his men moving.
        There was no cover in the field, so Bucktail advanced quickly. The Confederate fire increased as the Northerners drew nearer the woods. The number of Pennsylvanians failing bloody to the furrows grew, and instinctively the whole regiment lay down. The enemy bullets flew above him and Bucktail fired from the prone position, sending round after round from Sharps breechloaders into the tree line 75 yards away. He began to creep forward, standing, running a few steps then again hitting the earth as flashes lit the tree line. Suddenly, Colonel McNeil stood and bellowed, "Forward, Bucktails, forward." The words were scarcely out before he dropped again to the earth, a bullet through his chest. Bucktail heeded his final order, however, and surged into the trees. Before darkness ended the fighting, the Pennsylvanians had taken most of the woods, and they rested.
        And so Bucktail sat on the morning of September 17 on the edge of a wood north of Sharpsburg. Barely 200 men remained of the nearly 900 that had begun four months earlier, and fighting that day would reduce them by another three dozen. The summer had left one colonel dead and two lieutenant colonels, a major and an adjutant wounded. Seven of the 10 captains had been killed, wounded or lost to disease or enemy prisons - some of them more than once -leaving just two company commanders and the adjutant to lead the regiment at Antietam.
        And there was much more of the same ahead. At Fredericksburg,  Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna and Bethesda Church, Bucktail would fight and bleed. Yet as individual Bucktails fell, Bucktail the phenomenon grew larger. The shared hardships of the summer of 62 built a camaraderie that would never weaken. "There are ties that bind the hearts of soldiers together," wrote one Bucktail before he was killed, "that none but a soldier can know. We feel like a band of brothers, united in one common cause.
    Four hundred and twenty-two Bucktails became casualties in 11 days of fighting that summer. Some of the fallen returned to the regiment. Most did not. Those who made it to Sharpsburg and beyond were as cocky as they had ever been, perhaps more, but by then there was more to Bucktail. No longer was the deer tail in the cap the emblem of tall talk by backcountry braggarts with more bounce than brains; now it was the badge of a man who had fought and who had proved himself by taking all that the war could send at him. Whatever else Bucktail was by September 1862, he was a soldier to be relied upon.- C W