Nov. 28 — I buried my brother.
Christian's brother and co-soldier, Paul Dorweiler, wrote the above in his Civil War diary in 1863. Paul's eldest daughter, born post-war, was Margaret (1874-1971). A teacher, she translated Paul's diary "from the German", noting her father wrote little more in his diary, once Christian had died. Her translation was in 1938, seventy-five years after the diary was written. Paul's descendants in Minnesota preserved a copy. Many decades later, they sent excerpts to a local newspaper.
About Christian Dorweiler's death in northwest Georgia, the news article said:
"In the heat of battle Paul had time only to carve the letters 'C Dor' on a tree trunk to mark his grave, according to [living relative born in the 1930s]. The military later exhumed Christian's body and moved it ..."
STONES FOR SOLDIERS. Having computers now, we can search the military cemeteries. Sadly, Christian's name is not listed individually, event though his relative believed his body was retrieved. Soldiers remains could be exhumed for a mass re-burial elsewhere, or instead, might became part of a group honored "in memory of", any monument bodiless then called a cenotaph.
Having a special monument involved the regiment's state government or survivors wishing to pay for one. Such group monuments were erected at or near places where they fought and usually named no one individually, at best, named the regiments. Sites were often made into national parks, organized around Gettysburg and other national cemeteries. For example, New York State and Vermont had many dead there, so both erected tall obelisk monuments at Gettysburg, dated 1893 and 1899, respectively (SOURCE: Wikipedia's article, "List of monuments of the Gettysburg Battlefield", as viewed in Dec. 2023. Many have monuments on that list, including confederate states with heavy fatalities there. NPS.gov has accumulated many, not all names, for its "Soldiers and Sailors Database" (NPS=National Park Service). Different spellings might have to be tried, as muster lists sometimes were quickly made, without a double-check, might have become too faded read clearly, so spelling guesses were made.
Alternatives? If wanting a stone naming their soldier, families could buy a marker with both him and his regiment named. They could either have it installed at their home cemetery, in the home town, or at some national cemetery giving its permission to install a private stone on the grounds (Arlington).
His brother Paul is on the list, top left, of soldiers serving in Christian's company. Paul survived. His special stone is local, at West Bend, where they attended church. It has "GAR" inscribed (Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans' group, with Paul a member.) Again, Paul's stone is not a cenotaph, unlike monuments for some others killed in the War. That full truth was often deemed too awful for young ears. "Many were buried at Gettysburg", nothing precise said, as to who the many had been, might work, or something similar, even if not true for Christian.
THE DEADLY BATTLE. The brothers' regiment was were on its way to a major victory at Chattanooga, but Christian did not make it there. He died in north Georgia, while approaching its guarded border with Tennessee, going through a key pass. Their regiment was charged with chasing Confederate troops hoping to escape on a train with depot guarded by the pass, both sides, federal and confederate, made weary by a battle the day prior.
Those Christian's regiment chased would make it through the key mountain gap first, at/near the small town of Ringgold. Ringgold lay about 8 miles south of the desired border. Apparently under-aware of the larger number of northern soldiers that would accumulate on the other side, at their next destination of Chattanooga, Tenn., the confederates victorious at Ringgold, on the day of Christian's death, would, soon enough, themselves. be on the losing side at Chattanooga.
Why cross the state line there? There are old maps saved at the Library of Congress, that building right next to the National Archives, the two places providing details for the multiple histories written.
The chief reason-- Those fleeing could ride from Ringgold, instead of walk. They merely had to wait for the train.
Ringgold's rail depot was alongside a track going through the mountain pass and then onward, over the 8 miles to Tenn. Bypassing the "Alabama Road", bypassing a "Federal road" , the latter, on one old map marked "unused", the coming train boardable at the edge of Ringgold's winding brook. Over eons, each new flood of the brook made its course a bit flatter, a bit wider, and, thus, easier to travel. The train's route took advantage, the broad spots giving room to wait with the cargo and horses and equipment that needed to be loaded up and taken along.
The second advantage of Ringgold to those being chased? A disadvantage to those doing the chasing?
The terrain suddenly changed there.
By arriving first, the fleeing side could send snipers to the high spots now suddenly above. They could set up an ambush-like situation, point their guns at pursuers while waiting for the train. They could do so. Therefore, they did do so.
Third? The old population of Ringgold would abandon the place, out of the line of fire, less to feel guilty about, should shooting start. Maybe the population already had started to leave, guessing what was coming.
Fourth? Some said, later, that what had attracted the escaping confederates was Ringgold's "short-cut location". Just as St. Louis was described as the gateway to the newest part of the Midwest, an easier-than-average way to go in, stock up, and then move up the Miss. River, Ringgold was a similar shortcut for southern people wishing to access the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers, fur-traders and natives and other old-timers earlier using the pass if going to or from the Tennessee River.
The town of Chattanooga was easily reached once past Ringgold. Flowing under a key bridge at Chattanooga was the Tennessee River, its passage downhill to the Ohio essentially taking it north. After 250 miles of flow, the Tennessee joined the busy Ohio River, just past Tennessee's northern edge, at Paducah, Kentucky. Turning to go along the Ohio, it was then possible to reach Cincinnati, then Cleveland and the Great Lakes and more, without needing to go up the Mississippi River first. It was a shortcut, yes. General Grant had to stop the confederates from taking that shortcut.
When Christian's regiment and its own skilled sharpshooters approached Ringgold, it became the union side's "turn to die". The shooters above them could fire downward from two sides, then duck out of sight.
Shots came from ahead, up on White Oak Mountain, on the northeast side.
Shots also came from behind, up on Taylors Ridge, immediately southwest.
Farmers living around Christian's death site would later complain of the numerous bones too long strewn about. The official recorders of death at such sites might not re-enter and check bodies in time for good identifications, as the area might stay besieged for too many weeks. This was said to be true for much of northwest Georgia's side of the contested Tennessee border.
War tends toward chaos.
Many families asked, "What happened to him?"
The number of dead seemed enormous. Lists of recruitments were found, here and there, with attempts to gather them up and follow-up on each name. What seemed unavoidable? The results were too easily incomplete.
Paper and ink could not always be found to write things down, post-battle. For example, some months earlier, upon capturing critical Vicksburg, in July, 1863, Union soldiers found the paper shortage at Vicksburg severe, so severe, that newspapers there were being printed on the back of wallpaper, reported by the NPS. SOURCE: National Park Service's historians and e-books, especially its Vicksburg pages. These, for now, include NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/sec9.htm#2
Where else to search for his name? The combined national cemeteries, via the VA, run a "National Gravesite Locator". It covers confederate and union graves, plus burials from other wars. See it at GraveLocator.Cem.Va.Gov
PLAYING DETECTIVE-- CEMETERY LOCATOR INSTRUCTIONS. (Section might be removed after enough have seen this.)
These instructions may help in finding other soldiers. Our example is Christian and his guessed locations.
LOCATION. Search first, for deaths occurring in November of 1863, when Christian Dorweiler died, looking for surnames beginning with D. A first location to try? Specify the "Gettysburg National Cemetery". (Gettysburg's battle was often taught in school history classes, so well-remembered by northern school children. Not only was a battle there, but Lincoln spoke there. It was a crossroads with major arteries. Going eastish from Gettysburg, to Baltimore and DC, meant the White House could be reached. Going northwestish, through a thumb of Penn that bypassed Pittsburg, to touch Lake Erie, meant western NY state and eastern Ohio were both accessible. The last of Lee's soldiers escaping Gettysburg were said to be chased out by Vermonters. They would have been well aware that, if upstate NY invaded, Vermont was just beyond. Michigan regiments were also there, as Michigan was just beyond Ohio.)
DATE. Second, what if a mistake was made in entering someone's burial date? As a second test, keep 1863, but remove November, still looking at D's again, keeping Gettysburg. You will see two things: (1) The deaths of Gettysburg's Ds were almost all in July of 1863, as Gettysburg's battle date July, not November. And (2), Gettysburg's deaths of 1863 came almost entirely from infantries of just two states easily accessed from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania itself and next-door NY. Both states were highly populated. Their soldiers were defending their homes from an imminent invasion, assisted by troops from other states, but bearing the bulk of the battle burden themselves. )
REVISING LOCATION. If Gettysburg's deaths were the ones in July, where were the Nov. deaths buried? By specifying Chattanooga instead of Gettysburg, you finally will see the November dates needed for Christian's fellow troops. There's no state of origin designated, as they came from a battalion with multi-state recruitment. (The German "turnverein" at St. Louis, helping to staff a Missouri regiment, had sent out recruiters to other states. Many young German-Americans responded, including Chris and his older brother Paul and others from Guttenberg, Iowa, with Paul's diary describing their trip to St. Louis for training.)
To keep in mind, after repeated battles, plus campsite illnesses, regiments became reduced in size. The reduced ones needed to fold into larger, to stay above a critical size. What's more, the generals Grant and Sherman realized they needed, not a normal force, but an overwhelming force, as they approached the confederated troops aggregating at certain spots.
LIFE BEFORE WAR. The brothers were born in a very old place called Lommersum, that, circa 2008, was folded into the larger town of Weilerswist. He, three brothers and a sister immigrated with their parents. As a clue to finding their records, brother Paul had told a historian that he arrived in his 13th year.
What do we find, when we look? They settled, at first, in Clayton County, Iowa, near Minnesota and Wisconsin, their county right on the Mississippi River, north of Dubuque. They would farm and they would work in mines, at the edge of the river town of Guttenberg, where other German immigrants had come.
In a generation or two, all would speak English. However, for the first years in a new place, being around other German speakers meant that fewer mistakes were made, that bibles and prayer books and letters from "the old country" could be read, that everyone knew children understood their grandmothers' instructions, not believable to pretend they did not. Paul's diary was, thus, written in German.
THE SEVENTEENTH MISSOURI. The two Dorweilers began with the 17th Missouri in St. Louis. They and the others from the Guttenberg area are named in the image shown upper left, their subset shown in an old Clayton County source. The original 17th's commander was German-speaking, a city engineer from St. Louis, with experience in the Mexican-American War. He was killed at Vicksburg. One source said a grenade had been tossed his way, while the commanding engineer inspected a ditch.
That commander had reported to a higher-up German-speaker (more in Turnverein notes below) . That higher officer brought troops with him, from Belleville, Illinois, which was under 20 miles away from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River. That higher officer was said to be in charge of more than the 17th, the combined groups said to be 75% German-American. Named Osterhaus, now a Colonel, he'd had military experience in the German Revolution of 1848. (Some modern Germans explain 1848 as an essential, though unsuccessful, first step, on the way to democracy for ordinary people, instead of the older way of reserving democracy for nobles. See, for example, Bundestag.de/en/parliament/history/parliamentarism/1848/1848-200350).
As the key battles shrank varied units' numbers, their original 17th Missouri was folded into the 15th Missouri.
THE YEAR 1863, AT TWO OF THREE KEY PLACES. 1863 was busy for the 15th/17th Missouri. Their time in Vicksburg began with losses in May, their commander to die later of his serious injuries, at which point the 17th then reported to Osterhaus. Vicksburg ended with a victory in July, their grenade-damaged commander managing to stay alive, hearing of the victory, before dying of his wounds.
By then, enlarged forces of regiments and states banding together for what came next were supervised by a general, Ulysses Grant. A separate action, involving other troops elsewhere, not their regiment, a big and key battle eastward was at Gettysburg, like Vicksburg in that it was in July (with Lee defeated).
A few months passed. The Tennessee-Georgia border was contested soon enough, in November, this time, involving them.
Causing Christian's and many others' deaths, their losing battle was on unfamiliar terrain, on Nov. 23rd, shot at from above. Victory waited until later for the soldiers remaining, including his brother Paul. By then, they'd come under General Sherman, as well. The combination would defeat the Confederates' Tennessee Army, some key battles won at Chattanooga in November. Recall that Christian's death was while approaching Chattanooga, not at Chattanooga.
A National Park Service page for Vicksburg, the one cited above, noted that Confederate leader Jefferson Davis aimed to take St. Louis, by using his "Trans-Mississippi" troops. (The Trans-Mississippi troops were drawn from Confederate states bordering the Mississippi River, stretching, from Missouri, down to Mississippi and Louisiana. on uncomfortably close to St. Louis, the battle of Pea Ridge was fought barely outside the state, in Arkansas, ending essentially as the Missouri federal sharpshooters slowed down the confederates so the latter ran out of ammunition, had to leave to go back south, those retreating ending at places such as Vicksburg.) St. Louis was considered the gateway in particular to the new states of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota if approached from the Mississippi River. Vicksburg was considerably south. If the Union took Vicksburg, it stopped major movement that aimed for St. Louis and the frontier land beyond. It thus also stopped any future expansion of slavery by Jefferson Davis supporters into those places, a key reason for seceding was anger over not being granted new slave states. (The last "slam dunk" had been Missouri, its 1820 arrangement by the south-dominated US Congress called a compromise, yet, not feeling like one, to ministers preaching against slavery. The worst of the south had kept its numeric advantage in the U.S. House, still having every 100,000 slaves counted as if 60,000 slavery-loving white landowners. Maine was, thus, created in 1820, mainly out of Mass., and given two new senators, to make up for Missouri's new two.)
GERMAN TURNVEREIN. "Where is he?"
Once it was clear many families could be given no official answer, the solution seemed to be the building of monuments dedicated to sets of soldiers. To support the Union, the German "Turnverein" groups, especially from St. Louis, had recruited volunteers across multiple states. The cities approached by recruiters included Milwaukee and Detroit, the states included Iowa and others (a detailed source, still viewable as of 2021, is at 17thMissouri.com/story.html).
Pennsylvania had many German-Americans die at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg National Cemetery, thus, has many Germans with named graves. It has monuments for those who could not be named one-by-one, mostly for specific Pennsylvania regiments.
In contrast, monuments at the Vicksburg National Military Park are done differently, one monument per state of the affected regiments. (Iowa, thus, has a monument there, south of the Visitor Center; the national cemetery itself lies at the Park's opposite end, northwest of the Center.)
Both Union and Confederate states have monuments (relatives of both shed tears over the deaths), but only if sending regiments to fight at Vicksburg. Union states' monuments run along the Park's east edge. Confederate states' instead run along the Park's west edge. A map showing Vicksburg monuments and battle sites was viewed here: NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/images/map.pdf
For Vicksburg, the National Parks Service also maintains a few monuments dedicated to the Missouri 17th and its sharpshooter line, in memory of deaths on May 22, 1863. These decorative monuments apparently are not kept at Vicksburg, but at scattered locations in Nashville, Tenn., that part of Tennessee more tolerant of them, as not as gung-ho for secession as, say, some parts around Memphis had been.
For Ringgold Gap, where Christian died, only one monument there remembers the soldiers who died there, the New Yorkers. They were "singled out", as, related to greater population size, they were said to be the most numerous among the dead.
THE TURNVEREIN & WESTERN TURNER RIFLES. Paul and Christian had joined the German-speaking 17th Missouri Infantry, when it was under Col. Francis Hassendeubel. The Missouri Volunteers' most skilled group was known as the Western Turner Rifles. They were called that, not because their chief officer's name was Turner, but due to using tumbling exercises, the exercise of strenuous turns on the ground and maybe through the air building endurance, useful for long marches.
Again, after the deaths of too many, including engineer Hassendeubel, at Vicksburg in May, 1863, and Christian, in Nov., in Georgia, their 17th Missouri would join with the 15th Missouri Infantry, which had also seen a shrinkage of numbers. This did not happen until after Christian died. The whole was then given the 15th's name. The new arrangement put Paul under Gen. Sherman. The Dorweilers' unit was still called Company K; members of the 17, such as Christian, lost before the merger, were named as if they had always been in the 15th (top left)
DIARY PRESERVERS. Christian's brother Paul named a son Louis Christian Dorweiler, in memory of this Christian.
Namesake Louis Christian settled in Minnesota, served from there, as a non-partisan legislator. Two of Louis' sons had, by their 1920 US Census, gone to Hamel, Minnesota (in the Medina area of Hennepin County, west of Minneapolis). They would keep the family copy of their Aunt Margaret's translation.
Eighty years after her translation, Louis Christian's descendants in Hamel would let parts be put into print, done on Jan. 2 of 2020. The quotes above came from that. More bits of the diary, with family comment, were viewed while archived online at:
HomeTownSource.com/press_and_news/community/Medina
WHY FIGHT FOR ST. LOUIS? Mere young farmers from eastern Iowa, their larger family not yet moved westward to Kossuth County, Christian Dorweiler and his brother Paul traveled with others through Illinois, before crossing over the Mississippi R., into half-Confederate Missouri, that indirect way in avoiding the more pro-slavery subset of Missouri counties. Accompanied by others from Clayton County, Iowa, they were to join an unusual Union regiment that intended to fight for freeing the slaves, called the Western Turner Rifles. (Sebastian Eckart of Guttenberg, also in the Fifteenth's Company K , must have been known well by the Dorweilers. Decades later, when Sebastian left his wife a widow, she would marry Philip Dorweiler, also widowed by then. He was the older brother of Christian and Paul, active in Kossuth County in varied ways.)
Paul finished the war alive. Christian died at the Civil War's "Battle of Ringgold Gap", with Gen. Osterhaus, at the direction of Hooker, pursuing the confederates' Tennessee Army. The confederates, in escaping from a prior loss at Missionary Ridge, had burned a bridge that the union troops would need to follow them, causing the union troops to spend a night about two-and-a-half miles outside of Ringgold Gap. That let the confederates arrange the next set-up.
In particular, confederates under Cleburne were to guard the low part inside the mountain gap approach with two cannons. The goal, for both sides, confederate and federal, was to reach Chattanooga, TN, on the other side. The events are covered in varied sources, but Wiki historians give a good summary, saying how it all began:
"Around 8:00 a.m. on the morning of November 27, Hooker dispatched Major General Peter Osterhaus and his division to scout the area. While out, they encountered Cleburne's watchmen, who raced back to the Ringgold Gap to inform Cleburne of their encounter and the impending battle.[11]"
"Hooker saw a small line of infantrymen and decided to deploy his forces into the gap without his artillery.[26]... Woods' troops [Union side] were halted by gunfire from Taylor's Ridge and cannon fire from within the gap. To counter the opposition, Osterhaus sent the 76th Ohio and 4th Iowa to attack the Confederate forces on Taylor's Ridge.[29] The initial volley disorganized Osterhaus's division[27] and his Union forces were unable to advance from their position for the remainder of the battle.[28]" [NOTE: This would have been the point at which Christian Dorweiler died, unable to advance, yet fired upon from two sides.]
"Grant arrived near the gap, and the scattered position of his army made him decide to return to Chattanooga... [On the Confederate side, ] Cleburne had lost 20 killed and 201 wounded during the battle.[31] Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded.... Hooker was severely criticized for his conduct of the battle..."
Later, brother Paul would mention Christian's day and place of death to a county historian, after moving further west in Iowa, from Guttenberg, to Kossuth County. Otherwise, there seems to have been no record made. There seemed to be little recognition that his death happened, of the sacrifice both men made for the greater good.
The double defeat for the confederates, first, of the Trans-Mississippi Army at Vicksburg, then, of the Tennessee Army at Chattanooga, far exceeded the federal's Ringgold loss, in-between. The net effect meant the the western portion of the confederates was more or less finished. The danger of a big invasion by them, up northward, at St. Louis, was gone. Guarding of railroads and depots and other light work were the main tasks left in the Trans-Mississippi area, along with stopping shipments via Mexico of weapons ordered from foreign countries by the south. At the War's very end, there was a task unspoken of, supervising the return across the Texas-Mexico border, back into the States, of those non-believers in slavery and secession who'd escaped into Mexico.
The War would not fully end until the eastern portion of the confederacy capitulated, future actions stretching along the seaboard, from Atlanta, up toward North Carolina. Sherman had been hoping to make it to the horrific and sizeable prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, to set free the Union prisoners not yet dead, but Georgia was too under the confederates for that to be possible. Being unable to rescue those at Andersonville, plus other things, were believed to motivate the severity of Sherman's later "March to the Sea", the extreme destruction of Atlanta.
Read about Osterhaus here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5897385/peter-joseph-osterhaus
Osterhaus was another to pay a steep price. His first wife died while he was gone from St. Louis, that wife leaving him with a small child. At war's end, he became a diplomat, representing the US in France. After many years, he and his second wife retired in Germany, where he would be buried in a Jewish cemetery. His two sons spent considerable time in the States. One would retire as a rear admiral in the US Navy, after called back into action for WW I. The other died in Illinois, American enough to join the Elks, though he and his wife kept their Turner club membership going.
THE 17th MISSOURI, OR 15th MISSOURI? There are discrepancies in stories, as usual, so one cannot rely solely on the first sources viewed, but must check multiple sources. One source said their regiment was the 17th, another instead gave their names among the detailed list of the 15th's Company K, shown above left. Instead of an error, it became clear the two had merged.
According to CivilWarArchive.com, regarding Missouri troops, the 17h's history ended with Gen. Sherman, his "March to the sea November 15-December 10. Non-veterans mustered out September and October, 1864."
The site then says "Veterans and Recruits transferred to 15th Missouri Infantry December, 1864." The site's summary of losses said, "Regiment lost during service 6 Officers and 62 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 3 Officers and 148 Enlisted men by disease. Total 219."
That 68 lost in battle looks peculiarly small? When, for the Ringgold battle alone, a source above said "Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded"?
The 15th's count excluded those serving from New York regiments. The excess of deaths at Ringgold Gap were largely inflicted upon the more numerous New Yorkers, hence, their special monument at Ringgold.
MYSTERY-- Why go all the way to Missouri to join a Union regiment?
Paul would comment to a Kossuth County, Iowa, historian that the Iowa regiments had already filled their quotas, when he and Christian tried to sign up.
Where else to go? Minnesota was a short distance north, while Wisconsin lay across the nearby Mississippi River. They would instead go southward, down the Mississippi R., on the Illinois side, before crossing over to the St. Louis area.
Why be involved, at all? Newspapers spoke of the issues. Many of the German-Americans new to the country subscribed to newspapers, some in English, those in German easier to read for the women rarely leaving the household. Abolition would be a topic read about, once in America, just as freeing the remaining serfs was still a topic in parts of Europe.
Depending on where they lived, many German-speaking families in "big enough" towns had formed "turner" clubs, or tumbling societies, these were for family recreation and for general socializing, not just for health. The town had to be large enough to recruit sufficient members to pay for a building and equipment. St. Louis had been large enough. Some places still have gymnastics societies and singing groups and bowling alleys run by descendant organizers.
Many thought and talked about things, then decided they were abolitionist. (This did not mean radicals who bombed buildings. It meant sincere, ordinary people, who thought slavery should be abolished, as, like serfdom, it simply was morally wrong. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".)
How did tumbling and abolitionism join together? Had the brothers read in Iowa papers about the German-American "turners" in St. Louis, Missouri, training to fight on the Union side, in the pending US Civil War? It's possible. More likely, the Turnverein recruiters found them and were highly persuasive.
The Missouri group would be called the Western Turner Rifles, among other things. Paul's Civil War diary mentioned them, but Margaret's translation in 1938, seventy years after the war ended, had a problem.
Those capable of proof-reading for accuracy were long dead. The phrase "Turner" was mis-read as "Purner", in addition to Iowa's "Guttenberg" mistakenly being spelled like Germany's "Guttenburg".
Paul's diary, as translated and put into print in Jan of 2020, said:
"1861. Sunday morning, the 13th of October, we left Guttenberg (Iowa)…. On Tuesday evening, we left Dubuque (Iowa) and were quartered in the 'Western House.' After a long tedious journey through swampy prairies, Pana (Ill.) was reached at noon. Here we changed cars and proceeded on to Illinois town. We could see over the Mississippi River. We reached headquarters, the Purner Rifle Regiment, at eight o'clock in the evening.
Again, they had no captain surnamed Turner. Instead, their family fitness clubs taught members how to "turn themselves this way and that", to do stunts, as an athletic sport. Once the Turner Rifles of St. Louis were on the march as Union soldiers, they would earn a reputation for moving quickly and for their endurance.
Other sources tell us more: Missouri's 17th and its "Western Turner Rifles" were said to have, as a founder and trainer, the 17th's future commander, Col. Franz Hassendeubel. He had worked as an engineer for the city of St. Louis. The decade prior had been one in which people learned that a safe water supply and sanitizing of sewage was needed to stop cholera from returning and spreading inside cities. The work of civil engineers thus to set-up the needed water and/or sewer pipes, in addition to the normal work of building roads and bridges. His presence helped keep low the death-by-disease problem of so many camps in the War. That explains why he was inspecting a ditch when killed, his dark hair and beard making him an easy-to-spot target.
Col. Hassendeubel, like Christian, would not accompany Paul to an end-of-war "mustering out" in 1865. The Col. died first, in July of 1963, presumably still sincere in his desire to end slavery. (The Colonel's body was identifiable, died of his injuries in bed, so his family could ship it back home. )
After the Col.'s death, General Osterhaus and Capt. Woods remained of the three officers originally in charge. In November, the day before Chris died, there would be multiple deaths on Missionary Ridge- a warning. Things went "from bad, to worse" in Ringgold Pass, between a tall mountain (White Oak) and a high ridge (Taylor) , with snipers atop both. Christian Dorweiler and many others, mainly from New York state, died. The word ambush was not used, but the death rate high, the dying fast, with no lingering deaths in hospitals.
Since the troops were enroute to Chattanooga, the surrounding territory and maybe that city confederate, most bones/remains were not buried right away, judging from stories told at a Ringgold, Georgia, web site. Some local farmers said they could not bear to look at the dead bodies littering their fields. Some farmers left permanently, in reaction to the sight. (The bodies left behind would be from both sides, but Union deaths far outnumbered Confederate that day.)
PAUL. The war ended. The witness to the death of Chris, his brother Paul, would return home to Clayton County, Iowa. Could he act as if unaffected? Like many, some waiting for nightmares and night sweats to end, his decision to marry seemed delayed
Sometime between his muster out in 1865 and a land record in 1873, Paul would go across northern Iowa, heading southwestish to Fort Dodge, Iowa. He would file for homesteading land, with his father, their father using John instead of J.J. or Johann Joseph. They would claim 80 acres each. Brother Philip and brother-in-law Michael Bonstetter would follow, filing some months later.
Kossuth County's founders had been admirers of the Hungarian called Louis Kossuth, so named the county for him. Kossuth had come to the States in the 1840s, to speak of freeing the remaining serfs in Europe, trying to raise money for a fight in Hungary, in particular, which was, at the time, inside the Austrian empire. The similarities with southern slavery were too strong to be ignored.
Once all were in Kossuth County, Paul, his youngest brother, called Henry (working on and then taking over Johan Joseph's land), the eldest brother Philip, and their sister's spouse, Michael Bonstatter, would expand their farms. They each raised a family. These were things Christian would have enjoyed as well. For him, it was not to be.
Paul would live and die at the north edge of what finally would be called Garfield Twp. , but not until 1895, named for President Garfield, assassinated, out east, in 1881, dying in Cleveland.
A local historian, in writing a book in 1884 about Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, included biographies for both Paul and Henry Dorweiler. Such books were based on interviews and letters from the people discussed. They were as accurate as obituaries, maybe more accurate, as many people discussed were still alive and provided their own information. Paul would, at that time, recall Sherman's run through Georgia, participating in that March, which occurred some months after Christian died at Ringgold. Paul also remembered Missionary Ridge, which happened the day before Christian died.
Learning more about Christian's specifics would require physically visiting the National Archives in DC and hoping the paperwork was not too faded or otherwise ruined. His mother may have collected a pension based on his service, so would have provided family paperwork to justify that.
Paul's remembering him was fortunate, as little else online mentions Christian, apart from the Company K listing, upper left. We've found his name at his parents' house at census time and a pension card at FamilySearch. (It might be a pension stipend for his later-widowed mother?)
His sister's original name of Catharina would be a name on the French/Frankish side of the Germanics. Older brother Philip was listed in a French way at their immigration as Phillipe. What caused Catharina to change the other part of her name, Anna, to Antoinette, in later records in Kossuth County? A memory of living close to the Walloons speaking a very old form of French, similar to commoner latin, not so-called Classical Latin? As their church village of Lommersum had been close to multi-lingual Cologne and to what became Belgium, where both Walloon-French and Flemish-German might be spoken?
The same local county historian writing the two biographies in the 1880s reported that they emigrated as a family in 1852. That date allowed finding the old passenger list online at FamilySearch.org, showing them arriving in NY, pre-Ellis Island, on a ship out of Antwerp, reached from Lommersum by going through Belgium. The ship listing them as passengers was "Bar. Maria" (the Barque called Maria).
The port clerks noted all people listed on the page as German, a concession to how Brits speak about Germanics, as the German dialects have no "Jay" sound, the immigrants would have instead called themselves "Deutsch", for the language spoken. Just one occupation was listed for all, "cultivar", their dialect's term for farmers and gardeners .
FAMILY'S ORIGIN. Christian came to the States with his parents and siblings, the siblings to end in Kossuth County to be Philip, Paul, Henry and "Katharine". ("Katarina" was in an old source, but the more Irish spelling replaced it, one favored by nuns or schoolmates they may have encountered once in Kossuth County, Iowa). Their birth records back in Germany called them:
Philip Jacob, Paulus, Henricus, and Anna Catharina. Their father was listed at that point as Johann Dorweiler, their surname spelled just as they spelled it here, sounding like DOOR-why-ler to our non-German ears. Their father had earlier a more French-appearing form to his name, applying until Napoleon lost control and the Prussians preferring Johann were put in charge.
What was his birthplace? "Lommersum" is on their father's stone, painted where an old and fading carving once would have been, which was the old church town and birthplace.. It states their year of arrival in Clayton County, Iowa, plus "Township and Range" numbers that exactly match those which surveyors had put in descriptions of Paul's and John's acreage in Kossuth County, when they filed at Fort Dodge.
Their land was at the very north end of their numbered township, not to be given a name until later, once it held elections, only then called Garfield Twp. Yet, before then, earlier, township residents were so few in number that the Dorweilers and Bonnsetters were listed under neighboring Cresco Twp for census and military purposes.
Cresco had, as its post office, Algona, the seat of Kossuth County. In contrast, when separate from Cresco, Garfield would get their mail from West Bend, a postal zone straddling two counties, the cemetery of its Catholic church in the other county, Palo Alto.
To summarize their location: They were south of Kossuth County's seat at Algona, east of their Catholic Church in West Bend (Palo Alto County), and also near the church at St. Joseph (Kossuth County).
The birthplace of Lommersum has stumped people, perhaps as its address has changed. We found it at the German version of Wiki. A very old village, named a thousand years ago or more, Lommersum has combined in modern times with another, changing the Dorweilers' old address, from Lommersum, to Weilerswist. How is the name DorWEILER related to WEILERSwist? Weiler apparently is the word used for a very small village, a hamlet or "four corners" with a few houses and a church and school, surrounded by farms.
Geographers and historians writing at the German version of Wiki tell us Lommersum was sometimes called "little Spain", as the village had been under that country for a time. This was in addition to time spent under France. Spain had been put under Napoleon's brother for a time, who would be the father of Napoleon 3.
By the time the Dorweilers left, however, Lommersum was under Prussia's Lutheran rulers. The religious wars ended long ago, so there was no discriminations that way, people say. However, Lommersum did not pick Prussia, instead Prussia picked it, building its empire, competing with the French and Austrians. Their placement under the Prussians was agreed to at a conference in Vienna when a partition of places was set, with Poland also probably unhappy with its outcome, being divided among three countries, not left as its own country.
Religious issues were not a reason to come to the States. The religious wars of the Deutschlanders were long ago, long over. Catholics had lived in peace since the late 1600s and were allowed their own religion.
The last burnings of the Catholic churches ended in the late 1600s, so the Dorweiler's surviving birth records in Lommersum go back that far. The earliest found is a Balthazar Dorweiler (b. 1680, parents "Joanni", which is perhaps an old French, or Walloon, way to spell John, and "Annae Margarethae").
An archeological dig of the main church floor in Lommersum found Frankish graves deep down. Did Dorweiler ancestors date back to the Franks, described by some as Germanic with a Celtic intermixing?
If the reasons for leaving Lommersum, thereafter, did not include religion, then, what other things mattered? There had been a lot of "conquest drama", with people tired of sending the men and boys off to war each time some nobles wanted more land.
After the Dorweilers left, the latest ruling prince-barons (the Prussians), would join with Bavaria and some other "Germanies" to make a larger country. Other Germanics stayed out of the new place (Austria, Holland, Norway, Denmark, the German end of Belgium and Luxembourg, etc.).
No longer asked to be in the nobles' wars, once here, the family was still affected by the repeated boundary changing and renaming of places back home. Each US Census asked for birthplace. They may have preferred to say what did not change in their lifetime, the town name, not the latest and changeable country name. USA officials making up a list of allowed census answers did not understand this.
Answers that were most true were not often enough on the interviewer's list of acceptable birth places. If not allowed to say Lommersum, they may have settled for "in the Rhine River valley", but that was not allowed either. Nor could they say "what we are is a mix, including not just German, but French and/or Spanish and/or Belgian".
What was allowed? In 1860 and 1870 censuses, the allowed name for their their birthplace was Prussia. By 1880, the allowed name was Germany.
Names tell stories of ethnicity. Paul/Paulus is seen more on the French-Celtic side of the Germanics, maybe the very old French dialect called Walloon, its remnant speakers left in Belgium. The name Christian, however, is almost totally on the Scandinavian end. How would his name happen under Prussian rule?
If their father, John Joseph Dorweiler, had been sent on one of the long Prussian military stints to acquire new lands, he may have served at the northe end of Prussia's "empire", extending into what was called Pommern by them, Pomerania by the British, other names by other peoples. Broadly defined, Pommern stretched along the northern seacoast, past Denmark, boundaries abutting Germanic-and-Polish-speaking places, almost to Russia. Multiple cities along both sides of its Baltic sea were Hanseatic, part of a trading league in pre-Prussian days, mixings of ethnicities created by the trading, with names mixed accordingly.
The kings of Denmark often used Christian as one of their names. If their father respected someone, an ethnic Dane he met called Christian, naming a son for that person was a way to remember him.
Their farming village of Lommersum was on the Catholic side of the Rhine River, part of an arrow of land pointing toward the city of Cologne in Alsace-Lorraine, and, a bit beyond that, toward France. The French end of Belgium is near, but closer to the sea. There is a delicious recipe finished in the oven. a flour-dredged, well-seasoned round steak, sauteed stove-top, then covered with tomatoes and sauteed onions that make a tenderizing sauce as it bakes for 40 minutes. This is made in the Dorweilers' part of Iowa, served at some German weddings, a recipe that this writer had not encountered elsewhere, until she went to a Belgian restaurant in Washington, DC. Maybe Christian and Paul made this dish for the other German-American soldiers when they had a rest time (for garrison duty of some months, the soldiers were said to dwell on river boats?) . Christian would get a furlough back home, for a time, Paul said, in his diary.
Some say that the good times fill a person's head as he lays dying. We hope this happened for Christian.
When kept deep in the South, Paul would report in his diary having to "forage" for food He clearly did not like this. (It meant, not just hunting, but taking what others raised to make a living. )
More Sources, a Sampling:
"History of Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, Iowa", very nicely done, published in 1884, multiple writers, collated by Union Publishing Company, of Springfield, Illinois-- See especially pages 451-452, with biographies for brothers Philip, Paul and Henry, plus their Bonnstetter in-laws, who came from Baden, arrived in New Orleans, Michael in 1848, German Revolution in timing, with Martin following in 1852, both working first in St. Louis, then going to other places before Kossuth County, Michael working in mines in Sierra County, California for a bit, then off to Guttenberg by 1858. (Multiple searchable formats are at archive.org, Hathitrust.org has copies, with Google's formatting of the book harder to search, but downloadable as Kindle.)
.
"The Western Turner Rifles"-- See 17thMissouri.com/Story.html
Death toll and military action, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ringgold_Gap
Effects of War on Catoosa County, Georgia:
Part 1
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofChickamauga.aspx
Part 2
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofRinggoldGap.aspx
"Cleburne watched the group advance with his field glasses. He told Lt. Richard W. Goldthdwaute [Goldthwaite?] to hold artillery fire until the Federals reached the farm.
According to Bohannon: "Suddenly, Cleburne almost sprang into the air, clapped his knee and in his broad Irish brogue shouted 'Now then boys, give it to 'em boys!'"
Confederate Pvt. William Gibson recognized how the Federal troops fell on the ground and, from the way their hats, caps, guns and accoutrements went flying in the air, he said he had no doubt the whole line was annihilated, exclaiming, 'By Jove, boys, it killed them all.' "
That was not the end. The South would lose, despite thinking it was winning.
"Historian Clark writes that when the Yankees moved back [for Sherman's march], they burned what they did not take with them.
" 'Ringgold was a ghost town,' he wrote. 'What had been the most enterprising town in North Georgia, with flourishing businesses, nice stores and beautiful homes, was left a forest of soot covered chimneys.' "
Christian's brother and co-soldier, Paul Dorweiler, wrote the above in his Civil War diary in 1863. Paul's eldest daughter, born post-war, was Margaret (1874-1971). A teacher, she translated Paul's diary "from the German", noting her father wrote little more in his diary, once Christian had died. Her translation was in 1938, seventy-five years after the diary was written. Paul's descendants in Minnesota preserved a copy. Many decades later, they sent excerpts to a local newspaper.
About Christian Dorweiler's death in northwest Georgia, the news article said:
"In the heat of battle Paul had time only to carve the letters 'C Dor' on a tree trunk to mark his grave, according to [living relative born in the 1930s]. The military later exhumed Christian's body and moved it ..."
STONES FOR SOLDIERS. Having computers now, we can search the military cemeteries. Sadly, Christian's name is not listed individually, event though his relative believed his body was retrieved. Soldiers remains could be exhumed for a mass re-burial elsewhere, or instead, might became part of a group honored "in memory of", any monument bodiless then called a cenotaph.
Having a special monument involved the regiment's state government or survivors wishing to pay for one. Such group monuments were erected at or near places where they fought and usually named no one individually, at best, named the regiments. Sites were often made into national parks, organized around Gettysburg and other national cemeteries. For example, New York State and Vermont had many dead there, so both erected tall obelisk monuments at Gettysburg, dated 1893 and 1899, respectively (SOURCE: Wikipedia's article, "List of monuments of the Gettysburg Battlefield", as viewed in Dec. 2023. Many have monuments on that list, including confederate states with heavy fatalities there. NPS.gov has accumulated many, not all names, for its "Soldiers and Sailors Database" (NPS=National Park Service). Different spellings might have to be tried, as muster lists sometimes were quickly made, without a double-check, might have become too faded read clearly, so spelling guesses were made.
Alternatives? If wanting a stone naming their soldier, families could buy a marker with both him and his regiment named. They could either have it installed at their home cemetery, in the home town, or at some national cemetery giving its permission to install a private stone on the grounds (Arlington).
His brother Paul is on the list, top left, of soldiers serving in Christian's company. Paul survived. His special stone is local, at West Bend, where they attended church. It has "GAR" inscribed (Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans' group, with Paul a member.) Again, Paul's stone is not a cenotaph, unlike monuments for some others killed in the War. That full truth was often deemed too awful for young ears. "Many were buried at Gettysburg", nothing precise said, as to who the many had been, might work, or something similar, even if not true for Christian.
THE DEADLY BATTLE. The brothers' regiment was were on its way to a major victory at Chattanooga, but Christian did not make it there. He died in north Georgia, while approaching its guarded border with Tennessee, going through a key pass. Their regiment was charged with chasing Confederate troops hoping to escape on a train with depot guarded by the pass, both sides, federal and confederate, made weary by a battle the day prior.
Those Christian's regiment chased would make it through the key mountain gap first, at/near the small town of Ringgold. Ringgold lay about 8 miles south of the desired border. Apparently under-aware of the larger number of northern soldiers that would accumulate on the other side, at their next destination of Chattanooga, Tenn., the confederates victorious at Ringgold, on the day of Christian's death, would, soon enough, themselves. be on the losing side at Chattanooga.
Why cross the state line there? There are old maps saved at the Library of Congress, that building right next to the National Archives, the two places providing details for the multiple histories written.
The chief reason-- Those fleeing could ride from Ringgold, instead of walk. They merely had to wait for the train.
Ringgold's rail depot was alongside a track going through the mountain pass and then onward, over the 8 miles to Tenn. Bypassing the "Alabama Road", bypassing a "Federal road" , the latter, on one old map marked "unused", the coming train boardable at the edge of Ringgold's winding brook. Over eons, each new flood of the brook made its course a bit flatter, a bit wider, and, thus, easier to travel. The train's route took advantage, the broad spots giving room to wait with the cargo and horses and equipment that needed to be loaded up and taken along.
The second advantage of Ringgold to those being chased? A disadvantage to those doing the chasing?
The terrain suddenly changed there.
By arriving first, the fleeing side could send snipers to the high spots now suddenly above. They could set up an ambush-like situation, point their guns at pursuers while waiting for the train. They could do so. Therefore, they did do so.
Third? The old population of Ringgold would abandon the place, out of the line of fire, less to feel guilty about, should shooting start. Maybe the population already had started to leave, guessing what was coming.
Fourth? Some said, later, that what had attracted the escaping confederates was Ringgold's "short-cut location". Just as St. Louis was described as the gateway to the newest part of the Midwest, an easier-than-average way to go in, stock up, and then move up the Miss. River, Ringgold was a similar shortcut for southern people wishing to access the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers, fur-traders and natives and other old-timers earlier using the pass if going to or from the Tennessee River.
The town of Chattanooga was easily reached once past Ringgold. Flowing under a key bridge at Chattanooga was the Tennessee River, its passage downhill to the Ohio essentially taking it north. After 250 miles of flow, the Tennessee joined the busy Ohio River, just past Tennessee's northern edge, at Paducah, Kentucky. Turning to go along the Ohio, it was then possible to reach Cincinnati, then Cleveland and the Great Lakes and more, without needing to go up the Mississippi River first. It was a shortcut, yes. General Grant had to stop the confederates from taking that shortcut.
When Christian's regiment and its own skilled sharpshooters approached Ringgold, it became the union side's "turn to die". The shooters above them could fire downward from two sides, then duck out of sight.
Shots came from ahead, up on White Oak Mountain, on the northeast side.
Shots also came from behind, up on Taylors Ridge, immediately southwest.
Farmers living around Christian's death site would later complain of the numerous bones too long strewn about. The official recorders of death at such sites might not re-enter and check bodies in time for good identifications, as the area might stay besieged for too many weeks. This was said to be true for much of northwest Georgia's side of the contested Tennessee border.
War tends toward chaos.
Many families asked, "What happened to him?"
The number of dead seemed enormous. Lists of recruitments were found, here and there, with attempts to gather them up and follow-up on each name. What seemed unavoidable? The results were too easily incomplete.
Paper and ink could not always be found to write things down, post-battle. For example, some months earlier, upon capturing critical Vicksburg, in July, 1863, Union soldiers found the paper shortage at Vicksburg severe, so severe, that newspapers there were being printed on the back of wallpaper, reported by the NPS. SOURCE: National Park Service's historians and e-books, especially its Vicksburg pages. These, for now, include NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/sec9.htm#2
Where else to search for his name? The combined national cemeteries, via the VA, run a "National Gravesite Locator". It covers confederate and union graves, plus burials from other wars. See it at GraveLocator.Cem.Va.Gov
PLAYING DETECTIVE-- CEMETERY LOCATOR INSTRUCTIONS. (Section might be removed after enough have seen this.)
These instructions may help in finding other soldiers. Our example is Christian and his guessed locations.
LOCATION. Search first, for deaths occurring in November of 1863, when Christian Dorweiler died, looking for surnames beginning with D. A first location to try? Specify the "Gettysburg National Cemetery". (Gettysburg's battle was often taught in school history classes, so well-remembered by northern school children. Not only was a battle there, but Lincoln spoke there. It was a crossroads with major arteries. Going eastish from Gettysburg, to Baltimore and DC, meant the White House could be reached. Going northwestish, through a thumb of Penn that bypassed Pittsburg, to touch Lake Erie, meant western NY state and eastern Ohio were both accessible. The last of Lee's soldiers escaping Gettysburg were said to be chased out by Vermonters. They would have been well aware that, if upstate NY invaded, Vermont was just beyond. Michigan regiments were also there, as Michigan was just beyond Ohio.)
DATE. Second, what if a mistake was made in entering someone's burial date? As a second test, keep 1863, but remove November, still looking at D's again, keeping Gettysburg. You will see two things: (1) The deaths of Gettysburg's Ds were almost all in July of 1863, as Gettysburg's battle date July, not November. And (2), Gettysburg's deaths of 1863 came almost entirely from infantries of just two states easily accessed from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania itself and next-door NY. Both states were highly populated. Their soldiers were defending their homes from an imminent invasion, assisted by troops from other states, but bearing the bulk of the battle burden themselves. )
REVISING LOCATION. If Gettysburg's deaths were the ones in July, where were the Nov. deaths buried? By specifying Chattanooga instead of Gettysburg, you finally will see the November dates needed for Christian's fellow troops. There's no state of origin designated, as they came from a battalion with multi-state recruitment. (The German "turnverein" at St. Louis, helping to staff a Missouri regiment, had sent out recruiters to other states. Many young German-Americans responded, including Chris and his older brother Paul and others from Guttenberg, Iowa, with Paul's diary describing their trip to St. Louis for training.)
To keep in mind, after repeated battles, plus campsite illnesses, regiments became reduced in size. The reduced ones needed to fold into larger, to stay above a critical size. What's more, the generals Grant and Sherman realized they needed, not a normal force, but an overwhelming force, as they approached the confederated troops aggregating at certain spots.
LIFE BEFORE WAR. The brothers were born in a very old place called Lommersum, that, circa 2008, was folded into the larger town of Weilerswist. He, three brothers and a sister immigrated with their parents. As a clue to finding their records, brother Paul had told a historian that he arrived in his 13th year.
What do we find, when we look? They settled, at first, in Clayton County, Iowa, near Minnesota and Wisconsin, their county right on the Mississippi River, north of Dubuque. They would farm and they would work in mines, at the edge of the river town of Guttenberg, where other German immigrants had come.
In a generation or two, all would speak English. However, for the first years in a new place, being around other German speakers meant that fewer mistakes were made, that bibles and prayer books and letters from "the old country" could be read, that everyone knew children understood their grandmothers' instructions, not believable to pretend they did not. Paul's diary was, thus, written in German.
THE SEVENTEENTH MISSOURI. The two Dorweilers began with the 17th Missouri in St. Louis. They and the others from the Guttenberg area are named in the image shown upper left, their subset shown in an old Clayton County source. The original 17th's commander was German-speaking, a city engineer from St. Louis, with experience in the Mexican-American War. He was killed at Vicksburg. One source said a grenade had been tossed his way, while the commanding engineer inspected a ditch.
That commander had reported to a higher-up German-speaker (more in Turnverein notes below) . That higher officer brought troops with him, from Belleville, Illinois, which was under 20 miles away from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River. That higher officer was said to be in charge of more than the 17th, the combined groups said to be 75% German-American. Named Osterhaus, now a Colonel, he'd had military experience in the German Revolution of 1848. (Some modern Germans explain 1848 as an essential, though unsuccessful, first step, on the way to democracy for ordinary people, instead of the older way of reserving democracy for nobles. See, for example, Bundestag.de/en/parliament/history/parliamentarism/1848/1848-200350).
As the key battles shrank varied units' numbers, their original 17th Missouri was folded into the 15th Missouri.
THE YEAR 1863, AT TWO OF THREE KEY PLACES. 1863 was busy for the 15th/17th Missouri. Their time in Vicksburg began with losses in May, their commander to die later of his serious injuries, at which point the 17th then reported to Osterhaus. Vicksburg ended with a victory in July, their grenade-damaged commander managing to stay alive, hearing of the victory, before dying of his wounds.
By then, enlarged forces of regiments and states banding together for what came next were supervised by a general, Ulysses Grant. A separate action, involving other troops elsewhere, not their regiment, a big and key battle eastward was at Gettysburg, like Vicksburg in that it was in July (with Lee defeated).
A few months passed. The Tennessee-Georgia border was contested soon enough, in November, this time, involving them.
Causing Christian's and many others' deaths, their losing battle was on unfamiliar terrain, on Nov. 23rd, shot at from above. Victory waited until later for the soldiers remaining, including his brother Paul. By then, they'd come under General Sherman, as well. The combination would defeat the Confederates' Tennessee Army, some key battles won at Chattanooga in November. Recall that Christian's death was while approaching Chattanooga, not at Chattanooga.
A National Park Service page for Vicksburg, the one cited above, noted that Confederate leader Jefferson Davis aimed to take St. Louis, by using his "Trans-Mississippi" troops. (The Trans-Mississippi troops were drawn from Confederate states bordering the Mississippi River, stretching, from Missouri, down to Mississippi and Louisiana. on uncomfortably close to St. Louis, the battle of Pea Ridge was fought barely outside the state, in Arkansas, ending essentially as the Missouri federal sharpshooters slowed down the confederates so the latter ran out of ammunition, had to leave to go back south, those retreating ending at places such as Vicksburg.) St. Louis was considered the gateway in particular to the new states of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota if approached from the Mississippi River. Vicksburg was considerably south. If the Union took Vicksburg, it stopped major movement that aimed for St. Louis and the frontier land beyond. It thus also stopped any future expansion of slavery by Jefferson Davis supporters into those places, a key reason for seceding was anger over not being granted new slave states. (The last "slam dunk" had been Missouri, its 1820 arrangement by the south-dominated US Congress called a compromise, yet, not feeling like one, to ministers preaching against slavery. The worst of the south had kept its numeric advantage in the U.S. House, still having every 100,000 slaves counted as if 60,000 slavery-loving white landowners. Maine was, thus, created in 1820, mainly out of Mass., and given two new senators, to make up for Missouri's new two.)
GERMAN TURNVEREIN. "Where is he?"
Once it was clear many families could be given no official answer, the solution seemed to be the building of monuments dedicated to sets of soldiers. To support the Union, the German "Turnverein" groups, especially from St. Louis, had recruited volunteers across multiple states. The cities approached by recruiters included Milwaukee and Detroit, the states included Iowa and others (a detailed source, still viewable as of 2021, is at 17thMissouri.com/story.html).
Pennsylvania had many German-Americans die at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg National Cemetery, thus, has many Germans with named graves. It has monuments for those who could not be named one-by-one, mostly for specific Pennsylvania regiments.
In contrast, monuments at the Vicksburg National Military Park are done differently, one monument per state of the affected regiments. (Iowa, thus, has a monument there, south of the Visitor Center; the national cemetery itself lies at the Park's opposite end, northwest of the Center.)
Both Union and Confederate states have monuments (relatives of both shed tears over the deaths), but only if sending regiments to fight at Vicksburg. Union states' monuments run along the Park's east edge. Confederate states' instead run along the Park's west edge. A map showing Vicksburg monuments and battle sites was viewed here: NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/images/map.pdf
For Vicksburg, the National Parks Service also maintains a few monuments dedicated to the Missouri 17th and its sharpshooter line, in memory of deaths on May 22, 1863. These decorative monuments apparently are not kept at Vicksburg, but at scattered locations in Nashville, Tenn., that part of Tennessee more tolerant of them, as not as gung-ho for secession as, say, some parts around Memphis had been.
For Ringgold Gap, where Christian died, only one monument there remembers the soldiers who died there, the New Yorkers. They were "singled out", as, related to greater population size, they were said to be the most numerous among the dead.
THE TURNVEREIN & WESTERN TURNER RIFLES. Paul and Christian had joined the German-speaking 17th Missouri Infantry, when it was under Col. Francis Hassendeubel. The Missouri Volunteers' most skilled group was known as the Western Turner Rifles. They were called that, not because their chief officer's name was Turner, but due to using tumbling exercises, the exercise of strenuous turns on the ground and maybe through the air building endurance, useful for long marches.
Again, after the deaths of too many, including engineer Hassendeubel, at Vicksburg in May, 1863, and Christian, in Nov., in Georgia, their 17th Missouri would join with the 15th Missouri Infantry, which had also seen a shrinkage of numbers. This did not happen until after Christian died. The whole was then given the 15th's name. The new arrangement put Paul under Gen. Sherman. The Dorweilers' unit was still called Company K; members of the 17, such as Christian, lost before the merger, were named as if they had always been in the 15th (top left)
DIARY PRESERVERS. Christian's brother Paul named a son Louis Christian Dorweiler, in memory of this Christian.
Namesake Louis Christian settled in Minnesota, served from there, as a non-partisan legislator. Two of Louis' sons had, by their 1920 US Census, gone to Hamel, Minnesota (in the Medina area of Hennepin County, west of Minneapolis). They would keep the family copy of their Aunt Margaret's translation.
Eighty years after her translation, Louis Christian's descendants in Hamel would let parts be put into print, done on Jan. 2 of 2020. The quotes above came from that. More bits of the diary, with family comment, were viewed while archived online at:
HomeTownSource.com/press_and_news/community/Medina
WHY FIGHT FOR ST. LOUIS? Mere young farmers from eastern Iowa, their larger family not yet moved westward to Kossuth County, Christian Dorweiler and his brother Paul traveled with others through Illinois, before crossing over the Mississippi R., into half-Confederate Missouri, that indirect way in avoiding the more pro-slavery subset of Missouri counties. Accompanied by others from Clayton County, Iowa, they were to join an unusual Union regiment that intended to fight for freeing the slaves, called the Western Turner Rifles. (Sebastian Eckart of Guttenberg, also in the Fifteenth's Company K , must have been known well by the Dorweilers. Decades later, when Sebastian left his wife a widow, she would marry Philip Dorweiler, also widowed by then. He was the older brother of Christian and Paul, active in Kossuth County in varied ways.)
Paul finished the war alive. Christian died at the Civil War's "Battle of Ringgold Gap", with Gen. Osterhaus, at the direction of Hooker, pursuing the confederates' Tennessee Army. The confederates, in escaping from a prior loss at Missionary Ridge, had burned a bridge that the union troops would need to follow them, causing the union troops to spend a night about two-and-a-half miles outside of Ringgold Gap. That let the confederates arrange the next set-up.
In particular, confederates under Cleburne were to guard the low part inside the mountain gap approach with two cannons. The goal, for both sides, confederate and federal, was to reach Chattanooga, TN, on the other side. The events are covered in varied sources, but Wiki historians give a good summary, saying how it all began:
"Around 8:00 a.m. on the morning of November 27, Hooker dispatched Major General Peter Osterhaus and his division to scout the area. While out, they encountered Cleburne's watchmen, who raced back to the Ringgold Gap to inform Cleburne of their encounter and the impending battle.[11]"
"Hooker saw a small line of infantrymen and decided to deploy his forces into the gap without his artillery.[26]... Woods' troops [Union side] were halted by gunfire from Taylor's Ridge and cannon fire from within the gap. To counter the opposition, Osterhaus sent the 76th Ohio and 4th Iowa to attack the Confederate forces on Taylor's Ridge.[29] The initial volley disorganized Osterhaus's division[27] and his Union forces were unable to advance from their position for the remainder of the battle.[28]" [NOTE: This would have been the point at which Christian Dorweiler died, unable to advance, yet fired upon from two sides.]
"Grant arrived near the gap, and the scattered position of his army made him decide to return to Chattanooga... [On the Confederate side, ] Cleburne had lost 20 killed and 201 wounded during the battle.[31] Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded.... Hooker was severely criticized for his conduct of the battle..."
Later, brother Paul would mention Christian's day and place of death to a county historian, after moving further west in Iowa, from Guttenberg, to Kossuth County. Otherwise, there seems to have been no record made. There seemed to be little recognition that his death happened, of the sacrifice both men made for the greater good.
The double defeat for the confederates, first, of the Trans-Mississippi Army at Vicksburg, then, of the Tennessee Army at Chattanooga, far exceeded the federal's Ringgold loss, in-between. The net effect meant the the western portion of the confederates was more or less finished. The danger of a big invasion by them, up northward, at St. Louis, was gone. Guarding of railroads and depots and other light work were the main tasks left in the Trans-Mississippi area, along with stopping shipments via Mexico of weapons ordered from foreign countries by the south. At the War's very end, there was a task unspoken of, supervising the return across the Texas-Mexico border, back into the States, of those non-believers in slavery and secession who'd escaped into Mexico.
The War would not fully end until the eastern portion of the confederacy capitulated, future actions stretching along the seaboard, from Atlanta, up toward North Carolina. Sherman had been hoping to make it to the horrific and sizeable prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, to set free the Union prisoners not yet dead, but Georgia was too under the confederates for that to be possible. Being unable to rescue those at Andersonville, plus other things, were believed to motivate the severity of Sherman's later "March to the Sea", the extreme destruction of Atlanta.
Read about Osterhaus here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5897385/peter-joseph-osterhaus
Osterhaus was another to pay a steep price. His first wife died while he was gone from St. Louis, that wife leaving him with a small child. At war's end, he became a diplomat, representing the US in France. After many years, he and his second wife retired in Germany, where he would be buried in a Jewish cemetery. His two sons spent considerable time in the States. One would retire as a rear admiral in the US Navy, after called back into action for WW I. The other died in Illinois, American enough to join the Elks, though he and his wife kept their Turner club membership going.
THE 17th MISSOURI, OR 15th MISSOURI? There are discrepancies in stories, as usual, so one cannot rely solely on the first sources viewed, but must check multiple sources. One source said their regiment was the 17th, another instead gave their names among the detailed list of the 15th's Company K, shown above left. Instead of an error, it became clear the two had merged.
According to CivilWarArchive.com, regarding Missouri troops, the 17h's history ended with Gen. Sherman, his "March to the sea November 15-December 10. Non-veterans mustered out September and October, 1864."
The site then says "Veterans and Recruits transferred to 15th Missouri Infantry December, 1864." The site's summary of losses said, "Regiment lost during service 6 Officers and 62 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 3 Officers and 148 Enlisted men by disease. Total 219."
That 68 lost in battle looks peculiarly small? When, for the Ringgold battle alone, a source above said "Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded"?
The 15th's count excluded those serving from New York regiments. The excess of deaths at Ringgold Gap were largely inflicted upon the more numerous New Yorkers, hence, their special monument at Ringgold.
MYSTERY-- Why go all the way to Missouri to join a Union regiment?
Paul would comment to a Kossuth County, Iowa, historian that the Iowa regiments had already filled their quotas, when he and Christian tried to sign up.
Where else to go? Minnesota was a short distance north, while Wisconsin lay across the nearby Mississippi River. They would instead go southward, down the Mississippi R., on the Illinois side, before crossing over to the St. Louis area.
Why be involved, at all? Newspapers spoke of the issues. Many of the German-Americans new to the country subscribed to newspapers, some in English, those in German easier to read for the women rarely leaving the household. Abolition would be a topic read about, once in America, just as freeing the remaining serfs was still a topic in parts of Europe.
Depending on where they lived, many German-speaking families in "big enough" towns had formed "turner" clubs, or tumbling societies, these were for family recreation and for general socializing, not just for health. The town had to be large enough to recruit sufficient members to pay for a building and equipment. St. Louis had been large enough. Some places still have gymnastics societies and singing groups and bowling alleys run by descendant organizers.
Many thought and talked about things, then decided they were abolitionist. (This did not mean radicals who bombed buildings. It meant sincere, ordinary people, who thought slavery should be abolished, as, like serfdom, it simply was morally wrong. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".)
How did tumbling and abolitionism join together? Had the brothers read in Iowa papers about the German-American "turners" in St. Louis, Missouri, training to fight on the Union side, in the pending US Civil War? It's possible. More likely, the Turnverein recruiters found them and were highly persuasive.
The Missouri group would be called the Western Turner Rifles, among other things. Paul's Civil War diary mentioned them, but Margaret's translation in 1938, seventy years after the war ended, had a problem.
Those capable of proof-reading for accuracy were long dead. The phrase "Turner" was mis-read as "Purner", in addition to Iowa's "Guttenberg" mistakenly being spelled like Germany's "Guttenburg".
Paul's diary, as translated and put into print in Jan of 2020, said:
"1861. Sunday morning, the 13th of October, we left Guttenberg (Iowa)…. On Tuesday evening, we left Dubuque (Iowa) and were quartered in the 'Western House.' After a long tedious journey through swampy prairies, Pana (Ill.) was reached at noon. Here we changed cars and proceeded on to Illinois town. We could see over the Mississippi River. We reached headquarters, the Purner Rifle Regiment, at eight o'clock in the evening.
Again, they had no captain surnamed Turner. Instead, their family fitness clubs taught members how to "turn themselves this way and that", to do stunts, as an athletic sport. Once the Turner Rifles of St. Louis were on the march as Union soldiers, they would earn a reputation for moving quickly and for their endurance.
Other sources tell us more: Missouri's 17th and its "Western Turner Rifles" were said to have, as a founder and trainer, the 17th's future commander, Col. Franz Hassendeubel. He had worked as an engineer for the city of St. Louis. The decade prior had been one in which people learned that a safe water supply and sanitizing of sewage was needed to stop cholera from returning and spreading inside cities. The work of civil engineers thus to set-up the needed water and/or sewer pipes, in addition to the normal work of building roads and bridges. His presence helped keep low the death-by-disease problem of so many camps in the War. That explains why he was inspecting a ditch when killed, his dark hair and beard making him an easy-to-spot target.
Col. Hassendeubel, like Christian, would not accompany Paul to an end-of-war "mustering out" in 1865. The Col. died first, in July of 1963, presumably still sincere in his desire to end slavery. (The Colonel's body was identifiable, died of his injuries in bed, so his family could ship it back home. )
After the Col.'s death, General Osterhaus and Capt. Woods remained of the three officers originally in charge. In November, the day before Chris died, there would be multiple deaths on Missionary Ridge- a warning. Things went "from bad, to worse" in Ringgold Pass, between a tall mountain (White Oak) and a high ridge (Taylor) , with snipers atop both. Christian Dorweiler and many others, mainly from New York state, died. The word ambush was not used, but the death rate high, the dying fast, with no lingering deaths in hospitals.
Since the troops were enroute to Chattanooga, the surrounding territory and maybe that city confederate, most bones/remains were not buried right away, judging from stories told at a Ringgold, Georgia, web site. Some local farmers said they could not bear to look at the dead bodies littering their fields. Some farmers left permanently, in reaction to the sight. (The bodies left behind would be from both sides, but Union deaths far outnumbered Confederate that day.)
PAUL. The war ended. The witness to the death of Chris, his brother Paul, would return home to Clayton County, Iowa. Could he act as if unaffected? Like many, some waiting for nightmares and night sweats to end, his decision to marry seemed delayed
Sometime between his muster out in 1865 and a land record in 1873, Paul would go across northern Iowa, heading southwestish to Fort Dodge, Iowa. He would file for homesteading land, with his father, their father using John instead of J.J. or Johann Joseph. They would claim 80 acres each. Brother Philip and brother-in-law Michael Bonstetter would follow, filing some months later.
Kossuth County's founders had been admirers of the Hungarian called Louis Kossuth, so named the county for him. Kossuth had come to the States in the 1840s, to speak of freeing the remaining serfs in Europe, trying to raise money for a fight in Hungary, in particular, which was, at the time, inside the Austrian empire. The similarities with southern slavery were too strong to be ignored.
Once all were in Kossuth County, Paul, his youngest brother, called Henry (working on and then taking over Johan Joseph's land), the eldest brother Philip, and their sister's spouse, Michael Bonstatter, would expand their farms. They each raised a family. These were things Christian would have enjoyed as well. For him, it was not to be.
Paul would live and die at the north edge of what finally would be called Garfield Twp. , but not until 1895, named for President Garfield, assassinated, out east, in 1881, dying in Cleveland.
A local historian, in writing a book in 1884 about Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, included biographies for both Paul and Henry Dorweiler. Such books were based on interviews and letters from the people discussed. They were as accurate as obituaries, maybe more accurate, as many people discussed were still alive and provided their own information. Paul would, at that time, recall Sherman's run through Georgia, participating in that March, which occurred some months after Christian died at Ringgold. Paul also remembered Missionary Ridge, which happened the day before Christian died.
Learning more about Christian's specifics would require physically visiting the National Archives in DC and hoping the paperwork was not too faded or otherwise ruined. His mother may have collected a pension based on his service, so would have provided family paperwork to justify that.
Paul's remembering him was fortunate, as little else online mentions Christian, apart from the Company K listing, upper left. We've found his name at his parents' house at census time and a pension card at FamilySearch. (It might be a pension stipend for his later-widowed mother?)
His sister's original name of Catharina would be a name on the French/Frankish side of the Germanics. Older brother Philip was listed in a French way at their immigration as Phillipe. What caused Catharina to change the other part of her name, Anna, to Antoinette, in later records in Kossuth County? A memory of living close to the Walloons speaking a very old form of French, similar to commoner latin, not so-called Classical Latin? As their church village of Lommersum had been close to multi-lingual Cologne and to what became Belgium, where both Walloon-French and Flemish-German might be spoken?
The same local county historian writing the two biographies in the 1880s reported that they emigrated as a family in 1852. That date allowed finding the old passenger list online at FamilySearch.org, showing them arriving in NY, pre-Ellis Island, on a ship out of Antwerp, reached from Lommersum by going through Belgium. The ship listing them as passengers was "Bar. Maria" (the Barque called Maria).
The port clerks noted all people listed on the page as German, a concession to how Brits speak about Germanics, as the German dialects have no "Jay" sound, the immigrants would have instead called themselves "Deutsch", for the language spoken. Just one occupation was listed for all, "cultivar", their dialect's term for farmers and gardeners .
FAMILY'S ORIGIN. Christian came to the States with his parents and siblings, the siblings to end in Kossuth County to be Philip, Paul, Henry and "Katharine". ("Katarina" was in an old source, but the more Irish spelling replaced it, one favored by nuns or schoolmates they may have encountered once in Kossuth County, Iowa). Their birth records back in Germany called them:
Philip Jacob, Paulus, Henricus, and Anna Catharina. Their father was listed at that point as Johann Dorweiler, their surname spelled just as they spelled it here, sounding like DOOR-why-ler to our non-German ears. Their father had earlier a more French-appearing form to his name, applying until Napoleon lost control and the Prussians preferring Johann were put in charge.
What was his birthplace? "Lommersum" is on their father's stone, painted where an old and fading carving once would have been, which was the old church town and birthplace.. It states their year of arrival in Clayton County, Iowa, plus "Township and Range" numbers that exactly match those which surveyors had put in descriptions of Paul's and John's acreage in Kossuth County, when they filed at Fort Dodge.
Their land was at the very north end of their numbered township, not to be given a name until later, once it held elections, only then called Garfield Twp. Yet, before then, earlier, township residents were so few in number that the Dorweilers and Bonnsetters were listed under neighboring Cresco Twp for census and military purposes.
Cresco had, as its post office, Algona, the seat of Kossuth County. In contrast, when separate from Cresco, Garfield would get their mail from West Bend, a postal zone straddling two counties, the cemetery of its Catholic church in the other county, Palo Alto.
To summarize their location: They were south of Kossuth County's seat at Algona, east of their Catholic Church in West Bend (Palo Alto County), and also near the church at St. Joseph (Kossuth County).
The birthplace of Lommersum has stumped people, perhaps as its address has changed. We found it at the German version of Wiki. A very old village, named a thousand years ago or more, Lommersum has combined in modern times with another, changing the Dorweilers' old address, from Lommersum, to Weilerswist. How is the name DorWEILER related to WEILERSwist? Weiler apparently is the word used for a very small village, a hamlet or "four corners" with a few houses and a church and school, surrounded by farms.
Geographers and historians writing at the German version of Wiki tell us Lommersum was sometimes called "little Spain", as the village had been under that country for a time. This was in addition to time spent under France. Spain had been put under Napoleon's brother for a time, who would be the father of Napoleon 3.
By the time the Dorweilers left, however, Lommersum was under Prussia's Lutheran rulers. The religious wars ended long ago, so there was no discriminations that way, people say. However, Lommersum did not pick Prussia, instead Prussia picked it, building its empire, competing with the French and Austrians. Their placement under the Prussians was agreed to at a conference in Vienna when a partition of places was set, with Poland also probably unhappy with its outcome, being divided among three countries, not left as its own country.
Religious issues were not a reason to come to the States. The religious wars of the Deutschlanders were long ago, long over. Catholics had lived in peace since the late 1600s and were allowed their own religion.
The last burnings of the Catholic churches ended in the late 1600s, so the Dorweiler's surviving birth records in Lommersum go back that far. The earliest found is a Balthazar Dorweiler (b. 1680, parents "Joanni", which is perhaps an old French, or Walloon, way to spell John, and "Annae Margarethae").
An archeological dig of the main church floor in Lommersum found Frankish graves deep down. Did Dorweiler ancestors date back to the Franks, described by some as Germanic with a Celtic intermixing?
If the reasons for leaving Lommersum, thereafter, did not include religion, then, what other things mattered? There had been a lot of "conquest drama", with people tired of sending the men and boys off to war each time some nobles wanted more land.
After the Dorweilers left, the latest ruling prince-barons (the Prussians), would join with Bavaria and some other "Germanies" to make a larger country. Other Germanics stayed out of the new place (Austria, Holland, Norway, Denmark, the German end of Belgium and Luxembourg, etc.).
No longer asked to be in the nobles' wars, once here, the family was still affected by the repeated boundary changing and renaming of places back home. Each US Census asked for birthplace. They may have preferred to say what did not change in their lifetime, the town name, not the latest and changeable country name. USA officials making up a list of allowed census answers did not understand this.
Answers that were most true were not often enough on the interviewer's list of acceptable birth places. If not allowed to say Lommersum, they may have settled for "in the Rhine River valley", but that was not allowed either. Nor could they say "what we are is a mix, including not just German, but French and/or Spanish and/or Belgian".
What was allowed? In 1860 and 1870 censuses, the allowed name for their their birthplace was Prussia. By 1880, the allowed name was Germany.
Names tell stories of ethnicity. Paul/Paulus is seen more on the French-Celtic side of the Germanics, maybe the very old French dialect called Walloon, its remnant speakers left in Belgium. The name Christian, however, is almost totally on the Scandinavian end. How would his name happen under Prussian rule?
If their father, John Joseph Dorweiler, had been sent on one of the long Prussian military stints to acquire new lands, he may have served at the northe end of Prussia's "empire", extending into what was called Pommern by them, Pomerania by the British, other names by other peoples. Broadly defined, Pommern stretched along the northern seacoast, past Denmark, boundaries abutting Germanic-and-Polish-speaking places, almost to Russia. Multiple cities along both sides of its Baltic sea were Hanseatic, part of a trading league in pre-Prussian days, mixings of ethnicities created by the trading, with names mixed accordingly.
The kings of Denmark often used Christian as one of their names. If their father respected someone, an ethnic Dane he met called Christian, naming a son for that person was a way to remember him.
Their farming village of Lommersum was on the Catholic side of the Rhine River, part of an arrow of land pointing toward the city of Cologne in Alsace-Lorraine, and, a bit beyond that, toward France. The French end of Belgium is near, but closer to the sea. There is a delicious recipe finished in the oven. a flour-dredged, well-seasoned round steak, sauteed stove-top, then covered with tomatoes and sauteed onions that make a tenderizing sauce as it bakes for 40 minutes. This is made in the Dorweilers' part of Iowa, served at some German weddings, a recipe that this writer had not encountered elsewhere, until she went to a Belgian restaurant in Washington, DC. Maybe Christian and Paul made this dish for the other German-American soldiers when they had a rest time (for garrison duty of some months, the soldiers were said to dwell on river boats?) . Christian would get a furlough back home, for a time, Paul said, in his diary.
Some say that the good times fill a person's head as he lays dying. We hope this happened for Christian.
When kept deep in the South, Paul would report in his diary having to "forage" for food He clearly did not like this. (It meant, not just hunting, but taking what others raised to make a living. )
More Sources, a Sampling:
"History of Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, Iowa", very nicely done, published in 1884, multiple writers, collated by Union Publishing Company, of Springfield, Illinois-- See especially pages 451-452, with biographies for brothers Philip, Paul and Henry, plus their Bonnstetter in-laws, who came from Baden, arrived in New Orleans, Michael in 1848, German Revolution in timing, with Martin following in 1852, both working first in St. Louis, then going to other places before Kossuth County, Michael working in mines in Sierra County, California for a bit, then off to Guttenberg by 1858. (Multiple searchable formats are at archive.org, Hathitrust.org has copies, with Google's formatting of the book harder to search, but downloadable as Kindle.)
.
"The Western Turner Rifles"-- See 17thMissouri.com/Story.html
Death toll and military action, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ringgold_Gap
Effects of War on Catoosa County, Georgia:
Part 1
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofChickamauga.aspx
Part 2
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofRinggoldGap.aspx
"Cleburne watched the group advance with his field glasses. He told Lt. Richard W. Goldthdwaute [Goldthwaite?] to hold artillery fire until the Federals reached the farm.
According to Bohannon: "Suddenly, Cleburne almost sprang into the air, clapped his knee and in his broad Irish brogue shouted 'Now then boys, give it to 'em boys!'"
Confederate Pvt. William Gibson recognized how the Federal troops fell on the ground and, from the way their hats, caps, guns and accoutrements went flying in the air, he said he had no doubt the whole line was annihilated, exclaiming, 'By Jove, boys, it killed them all.' "
That was not the end. The South would lose, despite thinking it was winning.
"Historian Clark writes that when the Yankees moved back [for Sherman's march], they burned what they did not take with them.
" 'Ringgold was a ghost town,' he wrote. 'What had been the most enterprising town in North Georgia, with flourishing businesses, nice stores and beautiful homes, was left a forest of soot covered chimneys.' "
Nov. 28 — I buried my brother.
Christian's brother and co-soldier, Paul Dorweiler, wrote the above in his Civil War diary in 1863. Paul's eldest daughter, born post-war, was Margaret (1874-1971). A teacher, she translated Paul's diary "from the German", noting her father wrote little more in his diary, once Christian had died. Her translation was in 1938, seventy-five years after the diary was written. Paul's descendants in Minnesota preserved a copy. Many decades later, they sent excerpts to a local newspaper.
About Christian Dorweiler's death in northwest Georgia, the news article said:
"In the heat of battle Paul had time only to carve the letters 'C Dor' on a tree trunk to mark his grave, according to [living relative born in the 1930s]. The military later exhumed Christian's body and moved it ..."
STONES FOR SOLDIERS. Having computers now, we can search the military cemeteries. Sadly, Christian's name is not listed individually, event though his relative believed his body was retrieved. Soldiers remains could be exhumed for a mass re-burial elsewhere, or instead, might became part of a group honored "in memory of", any monument bodiless then called a cenotaph.
Having a special monument involved the regiment's state government or survivors wishing to pay for one. Such group monuments were erected at or near places where they fought and usually named no one individually, at best, named the regiments. Sites were often made into national parks, organized around Gettysburg and other national cemeteries. For example, New York State and Vermont had many dead there, so both erected tall obelisk monuments at Gettysburg, dated 1893 and 1899, respectively (SOURCE: Wikipedia's article, "List of monuments of the Gettysburg Battlefield", as viewed in Dec. 2023. Many have monuments on that list, including confederate states with heavy fatalities there. NPS.gov has accumulated many, not all names, for its "Soldiers and Sailors Database" (NPS=National Park Service). Different spellings might have to be tried, as muster lists sometimes were quickly made, without a double-check, might have become too faded read clearly, so spelling guesses were made.
Alternatives? If wanting a stone naming their soldier, families could buy a marker with both him and his regiment named. They could either have it installed at their home cemetery, in the home town, or at some national cemetery giving its permission to install a private stone on the grounds (Arlington).
His brother Paul is on the list, top left, of soldiers serving in Christian's company. Paul survived. His special stone is local, at West Bend, where they attended church. It has "GAR" inscribed (Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans' group, with Paul a member.) Again, Paul's stone is not a cenotaph, unlike monuments for some others killed in the War. That full truth was often deemed too awful for young ears. "Many were buried at Gettysburg", nothing precise said, as to who the many had been, might work, or something similar, even if not true for Christian.
THE DEADLY BATTLE. The brothers' regiment was were on its way to a major victory at Chattanooga, but Christian did not make it there. He died in north Georgia, while approaching its guarded border with Tennessee, going through a key pass. Their regiment was charged with chasing Confederate troops hoping to escape on a train with depot guarded by the pass, both sides, federal and confederate, made weary by a battle the day prior.
Those Christian's regiment chased would make it through the key mountain gap first, at/near the small town of Ringgold. Ringgold lay about 8 miles south of the desired border. Apparently under-aware of the larger number of northern soldiers that would accumulate on the other side, at their next destination of Chattanooga, Tenn., the confederates victorious at Ringgold, on the day of Christian's death, would, soon enough, themselves. be on the losing side at Chattanooga.
Why cross the state line there? There are old maps saved at the Library of Congress, that building right next to the National Archives, the two places providing details for the multiple histories written.
The chief reason-- Those fleeing could ride from Ringgold, instead of walk. They merely had to wait for the train.
Ringgold's rail depot was alongside a track going through the mountain pass and then onward, over the 8 miles to Tenn. Bypassing the "Alabama Road", bypassing a "Federal road" , the latter, on one old map marked "unused", the coming train boardable at the edge of Ringgold's winding brook. Over eons, each new flood of the brook made its course a bit flatter, a bit wider, and, thus, easier to travel. The train's route took advantage, the broad spots giving room to wait with the cargo and horses and equipment that needed to be loaded up and taken along.
The second advantage of Ringgold to those being chased? A disadvantage to those doing the chasing?
The terrain suddenly changed there.
By arriving first, the fleeing side could send snipers to the high spots now suddenly above. They could set up an ambush-like situation, point their guns at pursuers while waiting for the train. They could do so. Therefore, they did do so.
Third? The old population of Ringgold would abandon the place, out of the line of fire, less to feel guilty about, should shooting start. Maybe the population already had started to leave, guessing what was coming.
Fourth? Some said, later, that what had attracted the escaping confederates was Ringgold's "short-cut location". Just as St. Louis was described as the gateway to the newest part of the Midwest, an easier-than-average way to go in, stock up, and then move up the Miss. River, Ringgold was a similar shortcut for southern people wishing to access the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers, fur-traders and natives and other old-timers earlier using the pass if going to or from the Tennessee River.
The town of Chattanooga was easily reached once past Ringgold. Flowing under a key bridge at Chattanooga was the Tennessee River, its passage downhill to the Ohio essentially taking it north. After 250 miles of flow, the Tennessee joined the busy Ohio River, just past Tennessee's northern edge, at Paducah, Kentucky. Turning to go along the Ohio, it was then possible to reach Cincinnati, then Cleveland and the Great Lakes and more, without needing to go up the Mississippi River first. It was a shortcut, yes. General Grant had to stop the confederates from taking that shortcut.
When Christian's regiment and its own skilled sharpshooters approached Ringgold, it became the union side's "turn to die". The shooters above them could fire downward from two sides, then duck out of sight.
Shots came from ahead, up on White Oak Mountain, on the northeast side.
Shots also came from behind, up on Taylors Ridge, immediately southwest.
Farmers living around Christian's death site would later complain of the numerous bones too long strewn about. The official recorders of death at such sites might not re-enter and check bodies in time for good identifications, as the area might stay besieged for too many weeks. This was said to be true for much of northwest Georgia's side of the contested Tennessee border.
War tends toward chaos.
Many families asked, "What happened to him?"
The number of dead seemed enormous. Lists of recruitments were found, here and there, with attempts to gather them up and follow-up on each name. What seemed unavoidable? The results were too easily incomplete.
Paper and ink could not always be found to write things down, post-battle. For example, some months earlier, upon capturing critical Vicksburg, in July, 1863, Union soldiers found the paper shortage at Vicksburg severe, so severe, that newspapers there were being printed on the back of wallpaper, reported by the NPS. SOURCE: National Park Service's historians and e-books, especially its Vicksburg pages. These, for now, include NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/sec9.htm#2
Where else to search for his name? The combined national cemeteries, via the VA, run a "National Gravesite Locator". It covers confederate and union graves, plus burials from other wars. See it at GraveLocator.Cem.Va.Gov
PLAYING DETECTIVE-- CEMETERY LOCATOR INSTRUCTIONS. (Section might be removed after enough have seen this.)
These instructions may help in finding other soldiers. Our example is Christian and his guessed locations.
LOCATION. Search first, for deaths occurring in November of 1863, when Christian Dorweiler died, looking for surnames beginning with D. A first location to try? Specify the "Gettysburg National Cemetery". (Gettysburg's battle was often taught in school history classes, so well-remembered by northern school children. Not only was a battle there, but Lincoln spoke there. It was a crossroads with major arteries. Going eastish from Gettysburg, to Baltimore and DC, meant the White House could be reached. Going northwestish, through a thumb of Penn that bypassed Pittsburg, to touch Lake Erie, meant western NY state and eastern Ohio were both accessible. The last of Lee's soldiers escaping Gettysburg were said to be chased out by Vermonters. They would have been well aware that, if upstate NY invaded, Vermont was just beyond. Michigan regiments were also there, as Michigan was just beyond Ohio.)
DATE. Second, what if a mistake was made in entering someone's burial date? As a second test, keep 1863, but remove November, still looking at D's again, keeping Gettysburg. You will see two things: (1) The deaths of Gettysburg's Ds were almost all in July of 1863, as Gettysburg's battle date July, not November. And (2), Gettysburg's deaths of 1863 came almost entirely from infantries of just two states easily accessed from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania itself and next-door NY. Both states were highly populated. Their soldiers were defending their homes from an imminent invasion, assisted by troops from other states, but bearing the bulk of the battle burden themselves. )
REVISING LOCATION. If Gettysburg's deaths were the ones in July, where were the Nov. deaths buried? By specifying Chattanooga instead of Gettysburg, you finally will see the November dates needed for Christian's fellow troops. There's no state of origin designated, as they came from a battalion with multi-state recruitment. (The German "turnverein" at St. Louis, helping to staff a Missouri regiment, had sent out recruiters to other states. Many young German-Americans responded, including Chris and his older brother Paul and others from Guttenberg, Iowa, with Paul's diary describing their trip to St. Louis for training.)
To keep in mind, after repeated battles, plus campsite illnesses, regiments became reduced in size. The reduced ones needed to fold into larger, to stay above a critical size. What's more, the generals Grant and Sherman realized they needed, not a normal force, but an overwhelming force, as they approached the confederated troops aggregating at certain spots.
LIFE BEFORE WAR. The brothers were born in a very old place called Lommersum, that, circa 2008, was folded into the larger town of Weilerswist. He, three brothers and a sister immigrated with their parents. As a clue to finding their records, brother Paul had told a historian that he arrived in his 13th year.
What do we find, when we look? They settled, at first, in Clayton County, Iowa, near Minnesota and Wisconsin, their county right on the Mississippi River, north of Dubuque. They would farm and they would work in mines, at the edge of the river town of Guttenberg, where other German immigrants had come.
In a generation or two, all would speak English. However, for the first years in a new place, being around other German speakers meant that fewer mistakes were made, that bibles and prayer books and letters from "the old country" could be read, that everyone knew children understood their grandmothers' instructions, not believable to pretend they did not. Paul's diary was, thus, written in German.
THE SEVENTEENTH MISSOURI. The two Dorweilers began with the 17th Missouri in St. Louis. They and the others from the Guttenberg area are named in the image shown upper left, their subset shown in an old Clayton County source. The original 17th's commander was German-speaking, a city engineer from St. Louis, with experience in the Mexican-American War. He was killed at Vicksburg. One source said a grenade had been tossed his way, while the commanding engineer inspected a ditch.
That commander had reported to a higher-up German-speaker (more in Turnverein notes below) . That higher officer brought troops with him, from Belleville, Illinois, which was under 20 miles away from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River. That higher officer was said to be in charge of more than the 17th, the combined groups said to be 75% German-American. Named Osterhaus, now a Colonel, he'd had military experience in the German Revolution of 1848. (Some modern Germans explain 1848 as an essential, though unsuccessful, first step, on the way to democracy for ordinary people, instead of the older way of reserving democracy for nobles. See, for example, Bundestag.de/en/parliament/history/parliamentarism/1848/1848-200350).
As the key battles shrank varied units' numbers, their original 17th Missouri was folded into the 15th Missouri.
THE YEAR 1863, AT TWO OF THREE KEY PLACES. 1863 was busy for the 15th/17th Missouri. Their time in Vicksburg began with losses in May, their commander to die later of his serious injuries, at which point the 17th then reported to Osterhaus. Vicksburg ended with a victory in July, their grenade-damaged commander managing to stay alive, hearing of the victory, before dying of his wounds.
By then, enlarged forces of regiments and states banding together for what came next were supervised by a general, Ulysses Grant. A separate action, involving other troops elsewhere, not their regiment, a big and key battle eastward was at Gettysburg, like Vicksburg in that it was in July (with Lee defeated).
A few months passed. The Tennessee-Georgia border was contested soon enough, in November, this time, involving them.
Causing Christian's and many others' deaths, their losing battle was on unfamiliar terrain, on Nov. 23rd, shot at from above. Victory waited until later for the soldiers remaining, including his brother Paul. By then, they'd come under General Sherman, as well. The combination would defeat the Confederates' Tennessee Army, some key battles won at Chattanooga in November. Recall that Christian's death was while approaching Chattanooga, not at Chattanooga.
A National Park Service page for Vicksburg, the one cited above, noted that Confederate leader Jefferson Davis aimed to take St. Louis, by using his "Trans-Mississippi" troops. (The Trans-Mississippi troops were drawn from Confederate states bordering the Mississippi River, stretching, from Missouri, down to Mississippi and Louisiana. on uncomfortably close to St. Louis, the battle of Pea Ridge was fought barely outside the state, in Arkansas, ending essentially as the Missouri federal sharpshooters slowed down the confederates so the latter ran out of ammunition, had to leave to go back south, those retreating ending at places such as Vicksburg.) St. Louis was considered the gateway in particular to the new states of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota if approached from the Mississippi River. Vicksburg was considerably south. If the Union took Vicksburg, it stopped major movement that aimed for St. Louis and the frontier land beyond. It thus also stopped any future expansion of slavery by Jefferson Davis supporters into those places, a key reason for seceding was anger over not being granted new slave states. (The last "slam dunk" had been Missouri, its 1820 arrangement by the south-dominated US Congress called a compromise, yet, not feeling like one, to ministers preaching against slavery. The worst of the south had kept its numeric advantage in the U.S. House, still having every 100,000 slaves counted as if 60,000 slavery-loving white landowners. Maine was, thus, created in 1820, mainly out of Mass., and given two new senators, to make up for Missouri's new two.)
GERMAN TURNVEREIN. "Where is he?"
Once it was clear many families could be given no official answer, the solution seemed to be the building of monuments dedicated to sets of soldiers. To support the Union, the German "Turnverein" groups, especially from St. Louis, had recruited volunteers across multiple states. The cities approached by recruiters included Milwaukee and Detroit, the states included Iowa and others (a detailed source, still viewable as of 2021, is at 17thMissouri.com/story.html).
Pennsylvania had many German-Americans die at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg National Cemetery, thus, has many Germans with named graves. It has monuments for those who could not be named one-by-one, mostly for specific Pennsylvania regiments.
In contrast, monuments at the Vicksburg National Military Park are done differently, one monument per state of the affected regiments. (Iowa, thus, has a monument there, south of the Visitor Center; the national cemetery itself lies at the Park's opposite end, northwest of the Center.)
Both Union and Confederate states have monuments (relatives of both shed tears over the deaths), but only if sending regiments to fight at Vicksburg. Union states' monuments run along the Park's east edge. Confederate states' instead run along the Park's west edge. A map showing Vicksburg monuments and battle sites was viewed here: NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/images/map.pdf
For Vicksburg, the National Parks Service also maintains a few monuments dedicated to the Missouri 17th and its sharpshooter line, in memory of deaths on May 22, 1863. These decorative monuments apparently are not kept at Vicksburg, but at scattered locations in Nashville, Tenn., that part of Tennessee more tolerant of them, as not as gung-ho for secession as, say, some parts around Memphis had been.
For Ringgold Gap, where Christian died, only one monument there remembers the soldiers who died there, the New Yorkers. They were "singled out", as, related to greater population size, they were said to be the most numerous among the dead.
THE TURNVEREIN & WESTERN TURNER RIFLES. Paul and Christian had joined the German-speaking 17th Missouri Infantry, when it was under Col. Francis Hassendeubel. The Missouri Volunteers' most skilled group was known as the Western Turner Rifles. They were called that, not because their chief officer's name was Turner, but due to using tumbling exercises, the exercise of strenuous turns on the ground and maybe through the air building endurance, useful for long marches.
Again, after the deaths of too many, including engineer Hassendeubel, at Vicksburg in May, 1863, and Christian, in Nov., in Georgia, their 17th Missouri would join with the 15th Missouri Infantry, which had also seen a shrinkage of numbers. This did not happen until after Christian died. The whole was then given the 15th's name. The new arrangement put Paul under Gen. Sherman. The Dorweilers' unit was still called Company K; members of the 17, such as Christian, lost before the merger, were named as if they had always been in the 15th (top left)
DIARY PRESERVERS. Christian's brother Paul named a son Louis Christian Dorweiler, in memory of this Christian.
Namesake Louis Christian settled in Minnesota, served from there, as a non-partisan legislator. Two of Louis' sons had, by their 1920 US Census, gone to Hamel, Minnesota (in the Medina area of Hennepin County, west of Minneapolis). They would keep the family copy of their Aunt Margaret's translation.
Eighty years after her translation, Louis Christian's descendants in Hamel would let parts be put into print, done on Jan. 2 of 2020. The quotes above came from that. More bits of the diary, with family comment, were viewed while archived online at:
HomeTownSource.com/press_and_news/community/Medina
WHY FIGHT FOR ST. LOUIS? Mere young farmers from eastern Iowa, their larger family not yet moved westward to Kossuth County, Christian Dorweiler and his brother Paul traveled with others through Illinois, before crossing over the Mississippi R., into half-Confederate Missouri, that indirect way in avoiding the more pro-slavery subset of Missouri counties. Accompanied by others from Clayton County, Iowa, they were to join an unusual Union regiment that intended to fight for freeing the slaves, called the Western Turner Rifles. (Sebastian Eckart of Guttenberg, also in the Fifteenth's Company K , must have been known well by the Dorweilers. Decades later, when Sebastian left his wife a widow, she would marry Philip Dorweiler, also widowed by then. He was the older brother of Christian and Paul, active in Kossuth County in varied ways.)
Paul finished the war alive. Christian died at the Civil War's "Battle of Ringgold Gap", with Gen. Osterhaus, at the direction of Hooker, pursuing the confederates' Tennessee Army. The confederates, in escaping from a prior loss at Missionary Ridge, had burned a bridge that the union troops would need to follow them, causing the union troops to spend a night about two-and-a-half miles outside of Ringgold Gap. That let the confederates arrange the next set-up.
In particular, confederates under Cleburne were to guard the low part inside the mountain gap approach with two cannons. The goal, for both sides, confederate and federal, was to reach Chattanooga, TN, on the other side. The events are covered in varied sources, but Wiki historians give a good summary, saying how it all began:
"Around 8:00 a.m. on the morning of November 27, Hooker dispatched Major General Peter Osterhaus and his division to scout the area. While out, they encountered Cleburne's watchmen, who raced back to the Ringgold Gap to inform Cleburne of their encounter and the impending battle.[11]"
"Hooker saw a small line of infantrymen and decided to deploy his forces into the gap without his artillery.[26]... Woods' troops [Union side] were halted by gunfire from Taylor's Ridge and cannon fire from within the gap. To counter the opposition, Osterhaus sent the 76th Ohio and 4th Iowa to attack the Confederate forces on Taylor's Ridge.[29] The initial volley disorganized Osterhaus's division[27] and his Union forces were unable to advance from their position for the remainder of the battle.[28]" [NOTE: This would have been the point at which Christian Dorweiler died, unable to advance, yet fired upon from two sides.]
"Grant arrived near the gap, and the scattered position of his army made him decide to return to Chattanooga... [On the Confederate side, ] Cleburne had lost 20 killed and 201 wounded during the battle.[31] Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded.... Hooker was severely criticized for his conduct of the battle..."
Later, brother Paul would mention Christian's day and place of death to a county historian, after moving further west in Iowa, from Guttenberg, to Kossuth County. Otherwise, there seems to have been no record made. There seemed to be little recognition that his death happened, of the sacrifice both men made for the greater good.
The double defeat for the confederates, first, of the Trans-Mississippi Army at Vicksburg, then, of the Tennessee Army at Chattanooga, far exceeded the federal's Ringgold loss, in-between. The net effect meant the the western portion of the confederates was more or less finished. The danger of a big invasion by them, up northward, at St. Louis, was gone. Guarding of railroads and depots and other light work were the main tasks left in the Trans-Mississippi area, along with stopping shipments via Mexico of weapons ordered from foreign countries by the south. At the War's very end, there was a task unspoken of, supervising the return across the Texas-Mexico border, back into the States, of those non-believers in slavery and secession who'd escaped into Mexico.
The War would not fully end until the eastern portion of the confederacy capitulated, future actions stretching along the seaboard, from Atlanta, up toward North Carolina. Sherman had been hoping to make it to the horrific and sizeable prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, to set free the Union prisoners not yet dead, but Georgia was too under the confederates for that to be possible. Being unable to rescue those at Andersonville, plus other things, were believed to motivate the severity of Sherman's later "March to the Sea", the extreme destruction of Atlanta.
Read about Osterhaus here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5897385/peter-joseph-osterhaus
Osterhaus was another to pay a steep price. His first wife died while he was gone from St. Louis, that wife leaving him with a small child. At war's end, he became a diplomat, representing the US in France. After many years, he and his second wife retired in Germany, where he would be buried in a Jewish cemetery. His two sons spent considerable time in the States. One would retire as a rear admiral in the US Navy, after called back into action for WW I. The other died in Illinois, American enough to join the Elks, though he and his wife kept their Turner club membership going.
THE 17th MISSOURI, OR 15th MISSOURI? There are discrepancies in stories, as usual, so one cannot rely solely on the first sources viewed, but must check multiple sources. One source said their regiment was the 17th, another instead gave their names among the detailed list of the 15th's Company K, shown above left. Instead of an error, it became clear the two had merged.
According to CivilWarArchive.com, regarding Missouri troops, the 17h's history ended with Gen. Sherman, his "March to the sea November 15-December 10. Non-veterans mustered out September and October, 1864."
The site then says "Veterans and Recruits transferred to 15th Missouri Infantry December, 1864." The site's summary of losses said, "Regiment lost during service 6 Officers and 62 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 3 Officers and 148 Enlisted men by disease. Total 219."
That 68 lost in battle looks peculiarly small? When, for the Ringgold battle alone, a source above said "Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded"?
The 15th's count excluded those serving from New York regiments. The excess of deaths at Ringgold Gap were largely inflicted upon the more numerous New Yorkers, hence, their special monument at Ringgold.
MYSTERY-- Why go all the way to Missouri to join a Union regiment?
Paul would comment to a Kossuth County, Iowa, historian that the Iowa regiments had already filled their quotas, when he and Christian tried to sign up.
Where else to go? Minnesota was a short distance north, while Wisconsin lay across the nearby Mississippi River. They would instead go southward, down the Mississippi R., on the Illinois side, before crossing over to the St. Louis area.
Why be involved, at all? Newspapers spoke of the issues. Many of the German-Americans new to the country subscribed to newspapers, some in English, those in German easier to read for the women rarely leaving the household. Abolition would be a topic read about, once in America, just as freeing the remaining serfs was still a topic in parts of Europe.
Depending on where they lived, many German-speaking families in "big enough" towns had formed "turner" clubs, or tumbling societies, these were for family recreation and for general socializing, not just for health. The town had to be large enough to recruit sufficient members to pay for a building and equipment. St. Louis had been large enough. Some places still have gymnastics societies and singing groups and bowling alleys run by descendant organizers.
Many thought and talked about things, then decided they were abolitionist. (This did not mean radicals who bombed buildings. It meant sincere, ordinary people, who thought slavery should be abolished, as, like serfdom, it simply was morally wrong. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".)
How did tumbling and abolitionism join together? Had the brothers read in Iowa papers about the German-American "turners" in St. Louis, Missouri, training to fight on the Union side, in the pending US Civil War? It's possible. More likely, the Turnverein recruiters found them and were highly persuasive.
The Missouri group would be called the Western Turner Rifles, among other things. Paul's Civil War diary mentioned them, but Margaret's translation in 1938, seventy years after the war ended, had a problem.
Those capable of proof-reading for accuracy were long dead. The phrase "Turner" was mis-read as "Purner", in addition to Iowa's "Guttenberg" mistakenly being spelled like Germany's "Guttenburg".
Paul's diary, as translated and put into print in Jan of 2020, said:
"1861. Sunday morning, the 13th of October, we left Guttenberg (Iowa)…. On Tuesday evening, we left Dubuque (Iowa) and were quartered in the 'Western House.' After a long tedious journey through swampy prairies, Pana (Ill.) was reached at noon. Here we changed cars and proceeded on to Illinois town. We could see over the Mississippi River. We reached headquarters, the Purner Rifle Regiment, at eight o'clock in the evening.
Again, they had no captain surnamed Turner. Instead, their family fitness clubs taught members how to "turn themselves this way and that", to do stunts, as an athletic sport. Once the Turner Rifles of St. Louis were on the march as Union soldiers, they would earn a reputation for moving quickly and for their endurance.
Other sources tell us more: Missouri's 17th and its "Western Turner Rifles" were said to have, as a founder and trainer, the 17th's future commander, Col. Franz Hassendeubel. He had worked as an engineer for the city of St. Louis. The decade prior had been one in which people learned that a safe water supply and sanitizing of sewage was needed to stop cholera from returning and spreading inside cities. The work of civil engineers thus to set-up the needed water and/or sewer pipes, in addition to the normal work of building roads and bridges. His presence helped keep low the death-by-disease problem of so many camps in the War. That explains why he was inspecting a ditch when killed, his dark hair and beard making him an easy-to-spot target.
Col. Hassendeubel, like Christian, would not accompany Paul to an end-of-war "mustering out" in 1865. The Col. died first, in July of 1963, presumably still sincere in his desire to end slavery. (The Colonel's body was identifiable, died of his injuries in bed, so his family could ship it back home. )
After the Col.'s death, General Osterhaus and Capt. Woods remained of the three officers originally in charge. In November, the day before Chris died, there would be multiple deaths on Missionary Ridge- a warning. Things went "from bad, to worse" in Ringgold Pass, between a tall mountain (White Oak) and a high ridge (Taylor) , with snipers atop both. Christian Dorweiler and many others, mainly from New York state, died. The word ambush was not used, but the death rate high, the dying fast, with no lingering deaths in hospitals.
Since the troops were enroute to Chattanooga, the surrounding territory and maybe that city confederate, most bones/remains were not buried right away, judging from stories told at a Ringgold, Georgia, web site. Some local farmers said they could not bear to look at the dead bodies littering their fields. Some farmers left permanently, in reaction to the sight. (The bodies left behind would be from both sides, but Union deaths far outnumbered Confederate that day.)
PAUL. The war ended. The witness to the death of Chris, his brother Paul, would return home to Clayton County, Iowa. Could he act as if unaffected? Like many, some waiting for nightmares and night sweats to end, his decision to marry seemed delayed
Sometime between his muster out in 1865 and a land record in 1873, Paul would go across northern Iowa, heading southwestish to Fort Dodge, Iowa. He would file for homesteading land, with his father, their father using John instead of J.J. or Johann Joseph. They would claim 80 acres each. Brother Philip and brother-in-law Michael Bonstetter would follow, filing some months later.
Kossuth County's founders had been admirers of the Hungarian called Louis Kossuth, so named the county for him. Kossuth had come to the States in the 1840s, to speak of freeing the remaining serfs in Europe, trying to raise money for a fight in Hungary, in particular, which was, at the time, inside the Austrian empire. The similarities with southern slavery were too strong to be ignored.
Once all were in Kossuth County, Paul, his youngest brother, called Henry (working on and then taking over Johan Joseph's land), the eldest brother Philip, and their sister's spouse, Michael Bonstatter, would expand their farms. They each raised a family. These were things Christian would have enjoyed as well. For him, it was not to be.
Paul would live and die at the north edge of what finally would be called Garfield Twp. , but not until 1895, named for President Garfield, assassinated, out east, in 1881, dying in Cleveland.
A local historian, in writing a book in 1884 about Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, included biographies for both Paul and Henry Dorweiler. Such books were based on interviews and letters from the people discussed. They were as accurate as obituaries, maybe more accurate, as many people discussed were still alive and provided their own information. Paul would, at that time, recall Sherman's run through Georgia, participating in that March, which occurred some months after Christian died at Ringgold. Paul also remembered Missionary Ridge, which happened the day before Christian died.
Learning more about Christian's specifics would require physically visiting the National Archives in DC and hoping the paperwork was not too faded or otherwise ruined. His mother may have collected a pension based on his service, so would have provided family paperwork to justify that.
Paul's remembering him was fortunate, as little else online mentions Christian, apart from the Company K listing, upper left. We've found his name at his parents' house at census time and a pension card at FamilySearch. (It might be a pension stipend for his later-widowed mother?)
His sister's original name of Catharina would be a name on the French/Frankish side of the Germanics. Older brother Philip was listed in a French way at their immigration as Phillipe. What caused Catharina to change the other part of her name, Anna, to Antoinette, in later records in Kossuth County? A memory of living close to the Walloons speaking a very old form of French, similar to commoner latin, not so-called Classical Latin? As their church village of Lommersum had been close to multi-lingual Cologne and to what became Belgium, where both Walloon-French and Flemish-German might be spoken?
The same local county historian writing the two biographies in the 1880s reported that they emigrated as a family in 1852. That date allowed finding the old passenger list online at FamilySearch.org, showing them arriving in NY, pre-Ellis Island, on a ship out of Antwerp, reached from Lommersum by going through Belgium. The ship listing them as passengers was "Bar. Maria" (the Barque called Maria).
The port clerks noted all people listed on the page as German, a concession to how Brits speak about Germanics, as the German dialects have no "Jay" sound, the immigrants would have instead called themselves "Deutsch", for the language spoken. Just one occupation was listed for all, "cultivar", their dialect's term for farmers and gardeners .
FAMILY'S ORIGIN. Christian came to the States with his parents and siblings, the siblings to end in Kossuth County to be Philip, Paul, Henry and "Katharine". ("Katarina" was in an old source, but the more Irish spelling replaced it, one favored by nuns or schoolmates they may have encountered once in Kossuth County, Iowa). Their birth records back in Germany called them:
Philip Jacob, Paulus, Henricus, and Anna Catharina. Their father was listed at that point as Johann Dorweiler, their surname spelled just as they spelled it here, sounding like DOOR-why-ler to our non-German ears. Their father had earlier a more French-appearing form to his name, applying until Napoleon lost control and the Prussians preferring Johann were put in charge.
What was his birthplace? "Lommersum" is on their father's stone, painted where an old and fading carving once would have been, which was the old church town and birthplace.. It states their year of arrival in Clayton County, Iowa, plus "Township and Range" numbers that exactly match those which surveyors had put in descriptions of Paul's and John's acreage in Kossuth County, when they filed at Fort Dodge.
Their land was at the very north end of their numbered township, not to be given a name until later, once it held elections, only then called Garfield Twp. Yet, before then, earlier, township residents were so few in number that the Dorweilers and Bonnsetters were listed under neighboring Cresco Twp for census and military purposes.
Cresco had, as its post office, Algona, the seat of Kossuth County. In contrast, when separate from Cresco, Garfield would get their mail from West Bend, a postal zone straddling two counties, the cemetery of its Catholic church in the other county, Palo Alto.
To summarize their location: They were south of Kossuth County's seat at Algona, east of their Catholic Church in West Bend (Palo Alto County), and also near the church at St. Joseph (Kossuth County).
The birthplace of Lommersum has stumped people, perhaps as its address has changed. We found it at the German version of Wiki. A very old village, named a thousand years ago or more, Lommersum has combined in modern times with another, changing the Dorweilers' old address, from Lommersum, to Weilerswist. How is the name DorWEILER related to WEILERSwist? Weiler apparently is the word used for a very small village, a hamlet or "four corners" with a few houses and a church and school, surrounded by farms.
Geographers and historians writing at the German version of Wiki tell us Lommersum was sometimes called "little Spain", as the village had been under that country for a time. This was in addition to time spent under France. Spain had been put under Napoleon's brother for a time, who would be the father of Napoleon 3.
By the time the Dorweilers left, however, Lommersum was under Prussia's Lutheran rulers. The religious wars ended long ago, so there was no discriminations that way, people say. However, Lommersum did not pick Prussia, instead Prussia picked it, building its empire, competing with the French and Austrians. Their placement under the Prussians was agreed to at a conference in Vienna when a partition of places was set, with Poland also probably unhappy with its outcome, being divided among three countries, not left as its own country.
Religious issues were not a reason to come to the States. The religious wars of the Deutschlanders were long ago, long over. Catholics had lived in peace since the late 1600s and were allowed their own religion.
The last burnings of the Catholic churches ended in the late 1600s, so the Dorweiler's surviving birth records in Lommersum go back that far. The earliest found is a Balthazar Dorweiler (b. 1680, parents "Joanni", which is perhaps an old French, or Walloon, way to spell John, and "Annae Margarethae").
An archeological dig of the main church floor in Lommersum found Frankish graves deep down. Did Dorweiler ancestors date back to the Franks, described by some as Germanic with a Celtic intermixing?
If the reasons for leaving Lommersum, thereafter, did not include religion, then, what other things mattered? There had been a lot of "conquest drama", with people tired of sending the men and boys off to war each time some nobles wanted more land.
After the Dorweilers left, the latest ruling prince-barons (the Prussians), would join with Bavaria and some other "Germanies" to make a larger country. Other Germanics stayed out of the new place (Austria, Holland, Norway, Denmark, the German end of Belgium and Luxembourg, etc.).
No longer asked to be in the nobles' wars, once here, the family was still affected by the repeated boundary changing and renaming of places back home. Each US Census asked for birthplace. They may have preferred to say what did not change in their lifetime, the town name, not the latest and changeable country name. USA officials making up a list of allowed census answers did not understand this.
Answers that were most true were not often enough on the interviewer's list of acceptable birth places. If not allowed to say Lommersum, they may have settled for "in the Rhine River valley", but that was not allowed either. Nor could they say "what we are is a mix, including not just German, but French and/or Spanish and/or Belgian".
What was allowed? In 1860 and 1870 censuses, the allowed name for their their birthplace was Prussia. By 1880, the allowed name was Germany.
Names tell stories of ethnicity. Paul/Paulus is seen more on the French-Celtic side of the Germanics, maybe the very old French dialect called Walloon, its remnant speakers left in Belgium. The name Christian, however, is almost totally on the Scandinavian end. How would his name happen under Prussian rule?
If their father, John Joseph Dorweiler, had been sent on one of the long Prussian military stints to acquire new lands, he may have served at the northe end of Prussia's "empire", extending into what was called Pommern by them, Pomerania by the British, other names by other peoples. Broadly defined, Pommern stretched along the northern seacoast, past Denmark, boundaries abutting Germanic-and-Polish-speaking places, almost to Russia. Multiple cities along both sides of its Baltic sea were Hanseatic, part of a trading league in pre-Prussian days, mixings of ethnicities created by the trading, with names mixed accordingly.
The kings of Denmark often used Christian as one of their names. If their father respected someone, an ethnic Dane he met called Christian, naming a son for that person was a way to remember him.
Their farming village of Lommersum was on the Catholic side of the Rhine River, part of an arrow of land pointing toward the city of Cologne in Alsace-Lorraine, and, a bit beyond that, toward France. The French end of Belgium is near, but closer to the sea. There is a delicious recipe finished in the oven. a flour-dredged, well-seasoned round steak, sauteed stove-top, then covered with tomatoes and sauteed onions that make a tenderizing sauce as it bakes for 40 minutes. This is made in the Dorweilers' part of Iowa, served at some German weddings, a recipe that this writer had not encountered elsewhere, until she went to a Belgian restaurant in Washington, DC. Maybe Christian and Paul made this dish for the other German-American soldiers when they had a rest time (for garrison duty of some months, the soldiers were said to dwell on river boats?) . Christian would get a furlough back home, for a time, Paul said, in his diary.
Some say that the good times fill a person's head as he lays dying. We hope this happened for Christian.
When kept deep in the South, Paul would report in his diary having to "forage" for food He clearly did not like this. (It meant, not just hunting, but taking what others raised to make a living. )
More Sources, a Sampling:
"History of Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, Iowa", very nicely done, published in 1884, multiple writers, collated by Union Publishing Company, of Springfield, Illinois-- See especially pages 451-452, with biographies for brothers Philip, Paul and Henry, plus their Bonnstetter in-laws, who came from Baden, arrived in New Orleans, Michael in 1848, German Revolution in timing, with Martin following in 1852, both working first in St. Louis, then going to other places before Kossuth County, Michael working in mines in Sierra County, California for a bit, then off to Guttenberg by 1858. (Multiple searchable formats are at archive.org, Hathitrust.org has copies, with Google's formatting of the book harder to search, but downloadable as Kindle.)
.
"The Western Turner Rifles"-- See 17thMissouri.com/Story.html
Death toll and military action, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ringgold_Gap
Effects of War on Catoosa County, Georgia:
Part 1
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofChickamauga.aspx
Part 2
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofRinggoldGap.aspx
"Cleburne watched the group advance with his field glasses. He told Lt. Richard W. Goldthdwaute [Goldthwaite?] to hold artillery fire until the Federals reached the farm.
According to Bohannon: "Suddenly, Cleburne almost sprang into the air, clapped his knee and in his broad Irish brogue shouted 'Now then boys, give it to 'em boys!'"
Confederate Pvt. William Gibson recognized how the Federal troops fell on the ground and, from the way their hats, caps, guns and accoutrements went flying in the air, he said he had no doubt the whole line was annihilated, exclaiming, 'By Jove, boys, it killed them all.' "
That was not the end. The South would lose, despite thinking it was winning.
"Historian Clark writes that when the Yankees moved back [for Sherman's march], they burned what they did not take with them.
" 'Ringgold was a ghost town,' he wrote. 'What had been the most enterprising town in North Georgia, with flourishing businesses, nice stores and beautiful homes, was left a forest of soot covered chimneys.' "
Christian's brother and co-soldier, Paul Dorweiler, wrote the above in his Civil War diary in 1863. Paul's eldest daughter, born post-war, was Margaret (1874-1971). A teacher, she translated Paul's diary "from the German", noting her father wrote little more in his diary, once Christian had died. Her translation was in 1938, seventy-five years after the diary was written. Paul's descendants in Minnesota preserved a copy. Many decades later, they sent excerpts to a local newspaper.
About Christian Dorweiler's death in northwest Georgia, the news article said:
"In the heat of battle Paul had time only to carve the letters 'C Dor' on a tree trunk to mark his grave, according to [living relative born in the 1930s]. The military later exhumed Christian's body and moved it ..."
STONES FOR SOLDIERS. Having computers now, we can search the military cemeteries. Sadly, Christian's name is not listed individually, event though his relative believed his body was retrieved. Soldiers remains could be exhumed for a mass re-burial elsewhere, or instead, might became part of a group honored "in memory of", any monument bodiless then called a cenotaph.
Having a special monument involved the regiment's state government or survivors wishing to pay for one. Such group monuments were erected at or near places where they fought and usually named no one individually, at best, named the regiments. Sites were often made into national parks, organized around Gettysburg and other national cemeteries. For example, New York State and Vermont had many dead there, so both erected tall obelisk monuments at Gettysburg, dated 1893 and 1899, respectively (SOURCE: Wikipedia's article, "List of monuments of the Gettysburg Battlefield", as viewed in Dec. 2023. Many have monuments on that list, including confederate states with heavy fatalities there. NPS.gov has accumulated many, not all names, for its "Soldiers and Sailors Database" (NPS=National Park Service). Different spellings might have to be tried, as muster lists sometimes were quickly made, without a double-check, might have become too faded read clearly, so spelling guesses were made.
Alternatives? If wanting a stone naming their soldier, families could buy a marker with both him and his regiment named. They could either have it installed at their home cemetery, in the home town, or at some national cemetery giving its permission to install a private stone on the grounds (Arlington).
His brother Paul is on the list, top left, of soldiers serving in Christian's company. Paul survived. His special stone is local, at West Bend, where they attended church. It has "GAR" inscribed (Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans' group, with Paul a member.) Again, Paul's stone is not a cenotaph, unlike monuments for some others killed in the War. That full truth was often deemed too awful for young ears. "Many were buried at Gettysburg", nothing precise said, as to who the many had been, might work, or something similar, even if not true for Christian.
THE DEADLY BATTLE. The brothers' regiment was were on its way to a major victory at Chattanooga, but Christian did not make it there. He died in north Georgia, while approaching its guarded border with Tennessee, going through a key pass. Their regiment was charged with chasing Confederate troops hoping to escape on a train with depot guarded by the pass, both sides, federal and confederate, made weary by a battle the day prior.
Those Christian's regiment chased would make it through the key mountain gap first, at/near the small town of Ringgold. Ringgold lay about 8 miles south of the desired border. Apparently under-aware of the larger number of northern soldiers that would accumulate on the other side, at their next destination of Chattanooga, Tenn., the confederates victorious at Ringgold, on the day of Christian's death, would, soon enough, themselves. be on the losing side at Chattanooga.
Why cross the state line there? There are old maps saved at the Library of Congress, that building right next to the National Archives, the two places providing details for the multiple histories written.
The chief reason-- Those fleeing could ride from Ringgold, instead of walk. They merely had to wait for the train.
Ringgold's rail depot was alongside a track going through the mountain pass and then onward, over the 8 miles to Tenn. Bypassing the "Alabama Road", bypassing a "Federal road" , the latter, on one old map marked "unused", the coming train boardable at the edge of Ringgold's winding brook. Over eons, each new flood of the brook made its course a bit flatter, a bit wider, and, thus, easier to travel. The train's route took advantage, the broad spots giving room to wait with the cargo and horses and equipment that needed to be loaded up and taken along.
The second advantage of Ringgold to those being chased? A disadvantage to those doing the chasing?
The terrain suddenly changed there.
By arriving first, the fleeing side could send snipers to the high spots now suddenly above. They could set up an ambush-like situation, point their guns at pursuers while waiting for the train. They could do so. Therefore, they did do so.
Third? The old population of Ringgold would abandon the place, out of the line of fire, less to feel guilty about, should shooting start. Maybe the population already had started to leave, guessing what was coming.
Fourth? Some said, later, that what had attracted the escaping confederates was Ringgold's "short-cut location". Just as St. Louis was described as the gateway to the newest part of the Midwest, an easier-than-average way to go in, stock up, and then move up the Miss. River, Ringgold was a similar shortcut for southern people wishing to access the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers, fur-traders and natives and other old-timers earlier using the pass if going to or from the Tennessee River.
The town of Chattanooga was easily reached once past Ringgold. Flowing under a key bridge at Chattanooga was the Tennessee River, its passage downhill to the Ohio essentially taking it north. After 250 miles of flow, the Tennessee joined the busy Ohio River, just past Tennessee's northern edge, at Paducah, Kentucky. Turning to go along the Ohio, it was then possible to reach Cincinnati, then Cleveland and the Great Lakes and more, without needing to go up the Mississippi River first. It was a shortcut, yes. General Grant had to stop the confederates from taking that shortcut.
When Christian's regiment and its own skilled sharpshooters approached Ringgold, it became the union side's "turn to die". The shooters above them could fire downward from two sides, then duck out of sight.
Shots came from ahead, up on White Oak Mountain, on the northeast side.
Shots also came from behind, up on Taylors Ridge, immediately southwest.
Farmers living around Christian's death site would later complain of the numerous bones too long strewn about. The official recorders of death at such sites might not re-enter and check bodies in time for good identifications, as the area might stay besieged for too many weeks. This was said to be true for much of northwest Georgia's side of the contested Tennessee border.
War tends toward chaos.
Many families asked, "What happened to him?"
The number of dead seemed enormous. Lists of recruitments were found, here and there, with attempts to gather them up and follow-up on each name. What seemed unavoidable? The results were too easily incomplete.
Paper and ink could not always be found to write things down, post-battle. For example, some months earlier, upon capturing critical Vicksburg, in July, 1863, Union soldiers found the paper shortage at Vicksburg severe, so severe, that newspapers there were being printed on the back of wallpaper, reported by the NPS. SOURCE: National Park Service's historians and e-books, especially its Vicksburg pages. These, for now, include NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/sec9.htm#2
Where else to search for his name? The combined national cemeteries, via the VA, run a "National Gravesite Locator". It covers confederate and union graves, plus burials from other wars. See it at GraveLocator.Cem.Va.Gov
PLAYING DETECTIVE-- CEMETERY LOCATOR INSTRUCTIONS. (Section might be removed after enough have seen this.)
These instructions may help in finding other soldiers. Our example is Christian and his guessed locations.
LOCATION. Search first, for deaths occurring in November of 1863, when Christian Dorweiler died, looking for surnames beginning with D. A first location to try? Specify the "Gettysburg National Cemetery". (Gettysburg's battle was often taught in school history classes, so well-remembered by northern school children. Not only was a battle there, but Lincoln spoke there. It was a crossroads with major arteries. Going eastish from Gettysburg, to Baltimore and DC, meant the White House could be reached. Going northwestish, through a thumb of Penn that bypassed Pittsburg, to touch Lake Erie, meant western NY state and eastern Ohio were both accessible. The last of Lee's soldiers escaping Gettysburg were said to be chased out by Vermonters. They would have been well aware that, if upstate NY invaded, Vermont was just beyond. Michigan regiments were also there, as Michigan was just beyond Ohio.)
DATE. Second, what if a mistake was made in entering someone's burial date? As a second test, keep 1863, but remove November, still looking at D's again, keeping Gettysburg. You will see two things: (1) The deaths of Gettysburg's Ds were almost all in July of 1863, as Gettysburg's battle date July, not November. And (2), Gettysburg's deaths of 1863 came almost entirely from infantries of just two states easily accessed from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania itself and next-door NY. Both states were highly populated. Their soldiers were defending their homes from an imminent invasion, assisted by troops from other states, but bearing the bulk of the battle burden themselves. )
REVISING LOCATION. If Gettysburg's deaths were the ones in July, where were the Nov. deaths buried? By specifying Chattanooga instead of Gettysburg, you finally will see the November dates needed for Christian's fellow troops. There's no state of origin designated, as they came from a battalion with multi-state recruitment. (The German "turnverein" at St. Louis, helping to staff a Missouri regiment, had sent out recruiters to other states. Many young German-Americans responded, including Chris and his older brother Paul and others from Guttenberg, Iowa, with Paul's diary describing their trip to St. Louis for training.)
To keep in mind, after repeated battles, plus campsite illnesses, regiments became reduced in size. The reduced ones needed to fold into larger, to stay above a critical size. What's more, the generals Grant and Sherman realized they needed, not a normal force, but an overwhelming force, as they approached the confederated troops aggregating at certain spots.
LIFE BEFORE WAR. The brothers were born in a very old place called Lommersum, that, circa 2008, was folded into the larger town of Weilerswist. He, three brothers and a sister immigrated with their parents. As a clue to finding their records, brother Paul had told a historian that he arrived in his 13th year.
What do we find, when we look? They settled, at first, in Clayton County, Iowa, near Minnesota and Wisconsin, their county right on the Mississippi River, north of Dubuque. They would farm and they would work in mines, at the edge of the river town of Guttenberg, where other German immigrants had come.
In a generation or two, all would speak English. However, for the first years in a new place, being around other German speakers meant that fewer mistakes were made, that bibles and prayer books and letters from "the old country" could be read, that everyone knew children understood their grandmothers' instructions, not believable to pretend they did not. Paul's diary was, thus, written in German.
THE SEVENTEENTH MISSOURI. The two Dorweilers began with the 17th Missouri in St. Louis. They and the others from the Guttenberg area are named in the image shown upper left, their subset shown in an old Clayton County source. The original 17th's commander was German-speaking, a city engineer from St. Louis, with experience in the Mexican-American War. He was killed at Vicksburg. One source said a grenade had been tossed his way, while the commanding engineer inspected a ditch.
That commander had reported to a higher-up German-speaker (more in Turnverein notes below) . That higher officer brought troops with him, from Belleville, Illinois, which was under 20 miles away from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River. That higher officer was said to be in charge of more than the 17th, the combined groups said to be 75% German-American. Named Osterhaus, now a Colonel, he'd had military experience in the German Revolution of 1848. (Some modern Germans explain 1848 as an essential, though unsuccessful, first step, on the way to democracy for ordinary people, instead of the older way of reserving democracy for nobles. See, for example, Bundestag.de/en/parliament/history/parliamentarism/1848/1848-200350).
As the key battles shrank varied units' numbers, their original 17th Missouri was folded into the 15th Missouri.
THE YEAR 1863, AT TWO OF THREE KEY PLACES. 1863 was busy for the 15th/17th Missouri. Their time in Vicksburg began with losses in May, their commander to die later of his serious injuries, at which point the 17th then reported to Osterhaus. Vicksburg ended with a victory in July, their grenade-damaged commander managing to stay alive, hearing of the victory, before dying of his wounds.
By then, enlarged forces of regiments and states banding together for what came next were supervised by a general, Ulysses Grant. A separate action, involving other troops elsewhere, not their regiment, a big and key battle eastward was at Gettysburg, like Vicksburg in that it was in July (with Lee defeated).
A few months passed. The Tennessee-Georgia border was contested soon enough, in November, this time, involving them.
Causing Christian's and many others' deaths, their losing battle was on unfamiliar terrain, on Nov. 23rd, shot at from above. Victory waited until later for the soldiers remaining, including his brother Paul. By then, they'd come under General Sherman, as well. The combination would defeat the Confederates' Tennessee Army, some key battles won at Chattanooga in November. Recall that Christian's death was while approaching Chattanooga, not at Chattanooga.
A National Park Service page for Vicksburg, the one cited above, noted that Confederate leader Jefferson Davis aimed to take St. Louis, by using his "Trans-Mississippi" troops. (The Trans-Mississippi troops were drawn from Confederate states bordering the Mississippi River, stretching, from Missouri, down to Mississippi and Louisiana. on uncomfortably close to St. Louis, the battle of Pea Ridge was fought barely outside the state, in Arkansas, ending essentially as the Missouri federal sharpshooters slowed down the confederates so the latter ran out of ammunition, had to leave to go back south, those retreating ending at places such as Vicksburg.) St. Louis was considered the gateway in particular to the new states of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota if approached from the Mississippi River. Vicksburg was considerably south. If the Union took Vicksburg, it stopped major movement that aimed for St. Louis and the frontier land beyond. It thus also stopped any future expansion of slavery by Jefferson Davis supporters into those places, a key reason for seceding was anger over not being granted new slave states. (The last "slam dunk" had been Missouri, its 1820 arrangement by the south-dominated US Congress called a compromise, yet, not feeling like one, to ministers preaching against slavery. The worst of the south had kept its numeric advantage in the U.S. House, still having every 100,000 slaves counted as if 60,000 slavery-loving white landowners. Maine was, thus, created in 1820, mainly out of Mass., and given two new senators, to make up for Missouri's new two.)
GERMAN TURNVEREIN. "Where is he?"
Once it was clear many families could be given no official answer, the solution seemed to be the building of monuments dedicated to sets of soldiers. To support the Union, the German "Turnverein" groups, especially from St. Louis, had recruited volunteers across multiple states. The cities approached by recruiters included Milwaukee and Detroit, the states included Iowa and others (a detailed source, still viewable as of 2021, is at 17thMissouri.com/story.html).
Pennsylvania had many German-Americans die at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg National Cemetery, thus, has many Germans with named graves. It has monuments for those who could not be named one-by-one, mostly for specific Pennsylvania regiments.
In contrast, monuments at the Vicksburg National Military Park are done differently, one monument per state of the affected regiments. (Iowa, thus, has a monument there, south of the Visitor Center; the national cemetery itself lies at the Park's opposite end, northwest of the Center.)
Both Union and Confederate states have monuments (relatives of both shed tears over the deaths), but only if sending regiments to fight at Vicksburg. Union states' monuments run along the Park's east edge. Confederate states' instead run along the Park's west edge. A map showing Vicksburg monuments and battle sites was viewed here: NPS.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/24/images/map.pdf
For Vicksburg, the National Parks Service also maintains a few monuments dedicated to the Missouri 17th and its sharpshooter line, in memory of deaths on May 22, 1863. These decorative monuments apparently are not kept at Vicksburg, but at scattered locations in Nashville, Tenn., that part of Tennessee more tolerant of them, as not as gung-ho for secession as, say, some parts around Memphis had been.
For Ringgold Gap, where Christian died, only one monument there remembers the soldiers who died there, the New Yorkers. They were "singled out", as, related to greater population size, they were said to be the most numerous among the dead.
THE TURNVEREIN & WESTERN TURNER RIFLES. Paul and Christian had joined the German-speaking 17th Missouri Infantry, when it was under Col. Francis Hassendeubel. The Missouri Volunteers' most skilled group was known as the Western Turner Rifles. They were called that, not because their chief officer's name was Turner, but due to using tumbling exercises, the exercise of strenuous turns on the ground and maybe through the air building endurance, useful for long marches.
Again, after the deaths of too many, including engineer Hassendeubel, at Vicksburg in May, 1863, and Christian, in Nov., in Georgia, their 17th Missouri would join with the 15th Missouri Infantry, which had also seen a shrinkage of numbers. This did not happen until after Christian died. The whole was then given the 15th's name. The new arrangement put Paul under Gen. Sherman. The Dorweilers' unit was still called Company K; members of the 17, such as Christian, lost before the merger, were named as if they had always been in the 15th (top left)
DIARY PRESERVERS. Christian's brother Paul named a son Louis Christian Dorweiler, in memory of this Christian.
Namesake Louis Christian settled in Minnesota, served from there, as a non-partisan legislator. Two of Louis' sons had, by their 1920 US Census, gone to Hamel, Minnesota (in the Medina area of Hennepin County, west of Minneapolis). They would keep the family copy of their Aunt Margaret's translation.
Eighty years after her translation, Louis Christian's descendants in Hamel would let parts be put into print, done on Jan. 2 of 2020. The quotes above came from that. More bits of the diary, with family comment, were viewed while archived online at:
HomeTownSource.com/press_and_news/community/Medina
WHY FIGHT FOR ST. LOUIS? Mere young farmers from eastern Iowa, their larger family not yet moved westward to Kossuth County, Christian Dorweiler and his brother Paul traveled with others through Illinois, before crossing over the Mississippi R., into half-Confederate Missouri, that indirect way in avoiding the more pro-slavery subset of Missouri counties. Accompanied by others from Clayton County, Iowa, they were to join an unusual Union regiment that intended to fight for freeing the slaves, called the Western Turner Rifles. (Sebastian Eckart of Guttenberg, also in the Fifteenth's Company K , must have been known well by the Dorweilers. Decades later, when Sebastian left his wife a widow, she would marry Philip Dorweiler, also widowed by then. He was the older brother of Christian and Paul, active in Kossuth County in varied ways.)
Paul finished the war alive. Christian died at the Civil War's "Battle of Ringgold Gap", with Gen. Osterhaus, at the direction of Hooker, pursuing the confederates' Tennessee Army. The confederates, in escaping from a prior loss at Missionary Ridge, had burned a bridge that the union troops would need to follow them, causing the union troops to spend a night about two-and-a-half miles outside of Ringgold Gap. That let the confederates arrange the next set-up.
In particular, confederates under Cleburne were to guard the low part inside the mountain gap approach with two cannons. The goal, for both sides, confederate and federal, was to reach Chattanooga, TN, on the other side. The events are covered in varied sources, but Wiki historians give a good summary, saying how it all began:
"Around 8:00 a.m. on the morning of November 27, Hooker dispatched Major General Peter Osterhaus and his division to scout the area. While out, they encountered Cleburne's watchmen, who raced back to the Ringgold Gap to inform Cleburne of their encounter and the impending battle.[11]"
"Hooker saw a small line of infantrymen and decided to deploy his forces into the gap without his artillery.[26]... Woods' troops [Union side] were halted by gunfire from Taylor's Ridge and cannon fire from within the gap. To counter the opposition, Osterhaus sent the 76th Ohio and 4th Iowa to attack the Confederate forces on Taylor's Ridge.[29] The initial volley disorganized Osterhaus's division[27] and his Union forces were unable to advance from their position for the remainder of the battle.[28]" [NOTE: This would have been the point at which Christian Dorweiler died, unable to advance, yet fired upon from two sides.]
"Grant arrived near the gap, and the scattered position of his army made him decide to return to Chattanooga... [On the Confederate side, ] Cleburne had lost 20 killed and 201 wounded during the battle.[31] Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded.... Hooker was severely criticized for his conduct of the battle..."
Later, brother Paul would mention Christian's day and place of death to a county historian, after moving further west in Iowa, from Guttenberg, to Kossuth County. Otherwise, there seems to have been no record made. There seemed to be little recognition that his death happened, of the sacrifice both men made for the greater good.
The double defeat for the confederates, first, of the Trans-Mississippi Army at Vicksburg, then, of the Tennessee Army at Chattanooga, far exceeded the federal's Ringgold loss, in-between. The net effect meant the the western portion of the confederates was more or less finished. The danger of a big invasion by them, up northward, at St. Louis, was gone. Guarding of railroads and depots and other light work were the main tasks left in the Trans-Mississippi area, along with stopping shipments via Mexico of weapons ordered from foreign countries by the south. At the War's very end, there was a task unspoken of, supervising the return across the Texas-Mexico border, back into the States, of those non-believers in slavery and secession who'd escaped into Mexico.
The War would not fully end until the eastern portion of the confederacy capitulated, future actions stretching along the seaboard, from Atlanta, up toward North Carolina. Sherman had been hoping to make it to the horrific and sizeable prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, to set free the Union prisoners not yet dead, but Georgia was too under the confederates for that to be possible. Being unable to rescue those at Andersonville, plus other things, were believed to motivate the severity of Sherman's later "March to the Sea", the extreme destruction of Atlanta.
Read about Osterhaus here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5897385/peter-joseph-osterhaus
Osterhaus was another to pay a steep price. His first wife died while he was gone from St. Louis, that wife leaving him with a small child. At war's end, he became a diplomat, representing the US in France. After many years, he and his second wife retired in Germany, where he would be buried in a Jewish cemetery. His two sons spent considerable time in the States. One would retire as a rear admiral in the US Navy, after called back into action for WW I. The other died in Illinois, American enough to join the Elks, though he and his wife kept their Turner club membership going.
THE 17th MISSOURI, OR 15th MISSOURI? There are discrepancies in stories, as usual, so one cannot rely solely on the first sources viewed, but must check multiple sources. One source said their regiment was the 17th, another instead gave their names among the detailed list of the 15th's Company K, shown above left. Instead of an error, it became clear the two had merged.
According to CivilWarArchive.com, regarding Missouri troops, the 17h's history ended with Gen. Sherman, his "March to the sea November 15-December 10. Non-veterans mustered out September and October, 1864."
The site then says "Veterans and Recruits transferred to 15th Missouri Infantry December, 1864." The site's summary of losses said, "Regiment lost during service 6 Officers and 62 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 3 Officers and 148 Enlisted men by disease. Total 219."
That 68 lost in battle looks peculiarly small? When, for the Ringgold battle alone, a source above said "Union casualties totaled 509 killed and wounded"?
The 15th's count excluded those serving from New York regiments. The excess of deaths at Ringgold Gap were largely inflicted upon the more numerous New Yorkers, hence, their special monument at Ringgold.
MYSTERY-- Why go all the way to Missouri to join a Union regiment?
Paul would comment to a Kossuth County, Iowa, historian that the Iowa regiments had already filled their quotas, when he and Christian tried to sign up.
Where else to go? Minnesota was a short distance north, while Wisconsin lay across the nearby Mississippi River. They would instead go southward, down the Mississippi R., on the Illinois side, before crossing over to the St. Louis area.
Why be involved, at all? Newspapers spoke of the issues. Many of the German-Americans new to the country subscribed to newspapers, some in English, those in German easier to read for the women rarely leaving the household. Abolition would be a topic read about, once in America, just as freeing the remaining serfs was still a topic in parts of Europe.
Depending on where they lived, many German-speaking families in "big enough" towns had formed "turner" clubs, or tumbling societies, these were for family recreation and for general socializing, not just for health. The town had to be large enough to recruit sufficient members to pay for a building and equipment. St. Louis had been large enough. Some places still have gymnastics societies and singing groups and bowling alleys run by descendant organizers.
Many thought and talked about things, then decided they were abolitionist. (This did not mean radicals who bombed buildings. It meant sincere, ordinary people, who thought slavery should be abolished, as, like serfdom, it simply was morally wrong. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".)
How did tumbling and abolitionism join together? Had the brothers read in Iowa papers about the German-American "turners" in St. Louis, Missouri, training to fight on the Union side, in the pending US Civil War? It's possible. More likely, the Turnverein recruiters found them and were highly persuasive.
The Missouri group would be called the Western Turner Rifles, among other things. Paul's Civil War diary mentioned them, but Margaret's translation in 1938, seventy years after the war ended, had a problem.
Those capable of proof-reading for accuracy were long dead. The phrase "Turner" was mis-read as "Purner", in addition to Iowa's "Guttenberg" mistakenly being spelled like Germany's "Guttenburg".
Paul's diary, as translated and put into print in Jan of 2020, said:
"1861. Sunday morning, the 13th of October, we left Guttenberg (Iowa)…. On Tuesday evening, we left Dubuque (Iowa) and were quartered in the 'Western House.' After a long tedious journey through swampy prairies, Pana (Ill.) was reached at noon. Here we changed cars and proceeded on to Illinois town. We could see over the Mississippi River. We reached headquarters, the Purner Rifle Regiment, at eight o'clock in the evening.
Again, they had no captain surnamed Turner. Instead, their family fitness clubs taught members how to "turn themselves this way and that", to do stunts, as an athletic sport. Once the Turner Rifles of St. Louis were on the march as Union soldiers, they would earn a reputation for moving quickly and for their endurance.
Other sources tell us more: Missouri's 17th and its "Western Turner Rifles" were said to have, as a founder and trainer, the 17th's future commander, Col. Franz Hassendeubel. He had worked as an engineer for the city of St. Louis. The decade prior had been one in which people learned that a safe water supply and sanitizing of sewage was needed to stop cholera from returning and spreading inside cities. The work of civil engineers thus to set-up the needed water and/or sewer pipes, in addition to the normal work of building roads and bridges. His presence helped keep low the death-by-disease problem of so many camps in the War. That explains why he was inspecting a ditch when killed, his dark hair and beard making him an easy-to-spot target.
Col. Hassendeubel, like Christian, would not accompany Paul to an end-of-war "mustering out" in 1865. The Col. died first, in July of 1963, presumably still sincere in his desire to end slavery. (The Colonel's body was identifiable, died of his injuries in bed, so his family could ship it back home. )
After the Col.'s death, General Osterhaus and Capt. Woods remained of the three officers originally in charge. In November, the day before Chris died, there would be multiple deaths on Missionary Ridge- a warning. Things went "from bad, to worse" in Ringgold Pass, between a tall mountain (White Oak) and a high ridge (Taylor) , with snipers atop both. Christian Dorweiler and many others, mainly from New York state, died. The word ambush was not used, but the death rate high, the dying fast, with no lingering deaths in hospitals.
Since the troops were enroute to Chattanooga, the surrounding territory and maybe that city confederate, most bones/remains were not buried right away, judging from stories told at a Ringgold, Georgia, web site. Some local farmers said they could not bear to look at the dead bodies littering their fields. Some farmers left permanently, in reaction to the sight. (The bodies left behind would be from both sides, but Union deaths far outnumbered Confederate that day.)
PAUL. The war ended. The witness to the death of Chris, his brother Paul, would return home to Clayton County, Iowa. Could he act as if unaffected? Like many, some waiting for nightmares and night sweats to end, his decision to marry seemed delayed
Sometime between his muster out in 1865 and a land record in 1873, Paul would go across northern Iowa, heading southwestish to Fort Dodge, Iowa. He would file for homesteading land, with his father, their father using John instead of J.J. or Johann Joseph. They would claim 80 acres each. Brother Philip and brother-in-law Michael Bonstetter would follow, filing some months later.
Kossuth County's founders had been admirers of the Hungarian called Louis Kossuth, so named the county for him. Kossuth had come to the States in the 1840s, to speak of freeing the remaining serfs in Europe, trying to raise money for a fight in Hungary, in particular, which was, at the time, inside the Austrian empire. The similarities with southern slavery were too strong to be ignored.
Once all were in Kossuth County, Paul, his youngest brother, called Henry (working on and then taking over Johan Joseph's land), the eldest brother Philip, and their sister's spouse, Michael Bonstatter, would expand their farms. They each raised a family. These were things Christian would have enjoyed as well. For him, it was not to be.
Paul would live and die at the north edge of what finally would be called Garfield Twp. , but not until 1895, named for President Garfield, assassinated, out east, in 1881, dying in Cleveland.
A local historian, in writing a book in 1884 about Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, included biographies for both Paul and Henry Dorweiler. Such books were based on interviews and letters from the people discussed. They were as accurate as obituaries, maybe more accurate, as many people discussed were still alive and provided their own information. Paul would, at that time, recall Sherman's run through Georgia, participating in that March, which occurred some months after Christian died at Ringgold. Paul also remembered Missionary Ridge, which happened the day before Christian died.
Learning more about Christian's specifics would require physically visiting the National Archives in DC and hoping the paperwork was not too faded or otherwise ruined. His mother may have collected a pension based on his service, so would have provided family paperwork to justify that.
Paul's remembering him was fortunate, as little else online mentions Christian, apart from the Company K listing, upper left. We've found his name at his parents' house at census time and a pension card at FamilySearch. (It might be a pension stipend for his later-widowed mother?)
His sister's original name of Catharina would be a name on the French/Frankish side of the Germanics. Older brother Philip was listed in a French way at their immigration as Phillipe. What caused Catharina to change the other part of her name, Anna, to Antoinette, in later records in Kossuth County? A memory of living close to the Walloons speaking a very old form of French, similar to commoner latin, not so-called Classical Latin? As their church village of Lommersum had been close to multi-lingual Cologne and to what became Belgium, where both Walloon-French and Flemish-German might be spoken?
The same local county historian writing the two biographies in the 1880s reported that they emigrated as a family in 1852. That date allowed finding the old passenger list online at FamilySearch.org, showing them arriving in NY, pre-Ellis Island, on a ship out of Antwerp, reached from Lommersum by going through Belgium. The ship listing them as passengers was "Bar. Maria" (the Barque called Maria).
The port clerks noted all people listed on the page as German, a concession to how Brits speak about Germanics, as the German dialects have no "Jay" sound, the immigrants would have instead called themselves "Deutsch", for the language spoken. Just one occupation was listed for all, "cultivar", their dialect's term for farmers and gardeners .
FAMILY'S ORIGIN. Christian came to the States with his parents and siblings, the siblings to end in Kossuth County to be Philip, Paul, Henry and "Katharine". ("Katarina" was in an old source, but the more Irish spelling replaced it, one favored by nuns or schoolmates they may have encountered once in Kossuth County, Iowa). Their birth records back in Germany called them:
Philip Jacob, Paulus, Henricus, and Anna Catharina. Their father was listed at that point as Johann Dorweiler, their surname spelled just as they spelled it here, sounding like DOOR-why-ler to our non-German ears. Their father had earlier a more French-appearing form to his name, applying until Napoleon lost control and the Prussians preferring Johann were put in charge.
What was his birthplace? "Lommersum" is on their father's stone, painted where an old and fading carving once would have been, which was the old church town and birthplace.. It states their year of arrival in Clayton County, Iowa, plus "Township and Range" numbers that exactly match those which surveyors had put in descriptions of Paul's and John's acreage in Kossuth County, when they filed at Fort Dodge.
Their land was at the very north end of their numbered township, not to be given a name until later, once it held elections, only then called Garfield Twp. Yet, before then, earlier, township residents were so few in number that the Dorweilers and Bonnsetters were listed under neighboring Cresco Twp for census and military purposes.
Cresco had, as its post office, Algona, the seat of Kossuth County. In contrast, when separate from Cresco, Garfield would get their mail from West Bend, a postal zone straddling two counties, the cemetery of its Catholic church in the other county, Palo Alto.
To summarize their location: They were south of Kossuth County's seat at Algona, east of their Catholic Church in West Bend (Palo Alto County), and also near the church at St. Joseph (Kossuth County).
The birthplace of Lommersum has stumped people, perhaps as its address has changed. We found it at the German version of Wiki. A very old village, named a thousand years ago or more, Lommersum has combined in modern times with another, changing the Dorweilers' old address, from Lommersum, to Weilerswist. How is the name DorWEILER related to WEILERSwist? Weiler apparently is the word used for a very small village, a hamlet or "four corners" with a few houses and a church and school, surrounded by farms.
Geographers and historians writing at the German version of Wiki tell us Lommersum was sometimes called "little Spain", as the village had been under that country for a time. This was in addition to time spent under France. Spain had been put under Napoleon's brother for a time, who would be the father of Napoleon 3.
By the time the Dorweilers left, however, Lommersum was under Prussia's Lutheran rulers. The religious wars ended long ago, so there was no discriminations that way, people say. However, Lommersum did not pick Prussia, instead Prussia picked it, building its empire, competing with the French and Austrians. Their placement under the Prussians was agreed to at a conference in Vienna when a partition of places was set, with Poland also probably unhappy with its outcome, being divided among three countries, not left as its own country.
Religious issues were not a reason to come to the States. The religious wars of the Deutschlanders were long ago, long over. Catholics had lived in peace since the late 1600s and were allowed their own religion.
The last burnings of the Catholic churches ended in the late 1600s, so the Dorweiler's surviving birth records in Lommersum go back that far. The earliest found is a Balthazar Dorweiler (b. 1680, parents "Joanni", which is perhaps an old French, or Walloon, way to spell John, and "Annae Margarethae").
An archeological dig of the main church floor in Lommersum found Frankish graves deep down. Did Dorweiler ancestors date back to the Franks, described by some as Germanic with a Celtic intermixing?
If the reasons for leaving Lommersum, thereafter, did not include religion, then, what other things mattered? There had been a lot of "conquest drama", with people tired of sending the men and boys off to war each time some nobles wanted more land.
After the Dorweilers left, the latest ruling prince-barons (the Prussians), would join with Bavaria and some other "Germanies" to make a larger country. Other Germanics stayed out of the new place (Austria, Holland, Norway, Denmark, the German end of Belgium and Luxembourg, etc.).
No longer asked to be in the nobles' wars, once here, the family was still affected by the repeated boundary changing and renaming of places back home. Each US Census asked for birthplace. They may have preferred to say what did not change in their lifetime, the town name, not the latest and changeable country name. USA officials making up a list of allowed census answers did not understand this.
Answers that were most true were not often enough on the interviewer's list of acceptable birth places. If not allowed to say Lommersum, they may have settled for "in the Rhine River valley", but that was not allowed either. Nor could they say "what we are is a mix, including not just German, but French and/or Spanish and/or Belgian".
What was allowed? In 1860 and 1870 censuses, the allowed name for their their birthplace was Prussia. By 1880, the allowed name was Germany.
Names tell stories of ethnicity. Paul/Paulus is seen more on the French-Celtic side of the Germanics, maybe the very old French dialect called Walloon, its remnant speakers left in Belgium. The name Christian, however, is almost totally on the Scandinavian end. How would his name happen under Prussian rule?
If their father, John Joseph Dorweiler, had been sent on one of the long Prussian military stints to acquire new lands, he may have served at the northe end of Prussia's "empire", extending into what was called Pommern by them, Pomerania by the British, other names by other peoples. Broadly defined, Pommern stretched along the northern seacoast, past Denmark, boundaries abutting Germanic-and-Polish-speaking places, almost to Russia. Multiple cities along both sides of its Baltic sea were Hanseatic, part of a trading league in pre-Prussian days, mixings of ethnicities created by the trading, with names mixed accordingly.
The kings of Denmark often used Christian as one of their names. If their father respected someone, an ethnic Dane he met called Christian, naming a son for that person was a way to remember him.
Their farming village of Lommersum was on the Catholic side of the Rhine River, part of an arrow of land pointing toward the city of Cologne in Alsace-Lorraine, and, a bit beyond that, toward France. The French end of Belgium is near, but closer to the sea. There is a delicious recipe finished in the oven. a flour-dredged, well-seasoned round steak, sauteed stove-top, then covered with tomatoes and sauteed onions that make a tenderizing sauce as it bakes for 40 minutes. This is made in the Dorweilers' part of Iowa, served at some German weddings, a recipe that this writer had not encountered elsewhere, until she went to a Belgian restaurant in Washington, DC. Maybe Christian and Paul made this dish for the other German-American soldiers when they had a rest time (for garrison duty of some months, the soldiers were said to dwell on river boats?) . Christian would get a furlough back home, for a time, Paul said, in his diary.
Some say that the good times fill a person's head as he lays dying. We hope this happened for Christian.
When kept deep in the South, Paul would report in his diary having to "forage" for food He clearly did not like this. (It meant, not just hunting, but taking what others raised to make a living. )
More Sources, a Sampling:
"History of Kossuth and Humboldt Counties, Iowa", very nicely done, published in 1884, multiple writers, collated by Union Publishing Company, of Springfield, Illinois-- See especially pages 451-452, with biographies for brothers Philip, Paul and Henry, plus their Bonnstetter in-laws, who came from Baden, arrived in New Orleans, Michael in 1848, German Revolution in timing, with Martin following in 1852, both working first in St. Louis, then going to other places before Kossuth County, Michael working in mines in Sierra County, California for a bit, then off to Guttenberg by 1858. (Multiple searchable formats are at archive.org, Hathitrust.org has copies, with Google's formatting of the book harder to search, but downloadable as Kindle.)
.
"The Western Turner Rifles"-- See 17thMissouri.com/Story.html
Death toll and military action, see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ringgold_Gap
Effects of War on Catoosa County, Georgia:
Part 1
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofChickamauga.aspx
Part 2
CityofRinggoldGa.gov/BattleofRinggoldGap.aspx
"Cleburne watched the group advance with his field glasses. He told Lt. Richard W. Goldthdwaute [Goldthwaite?] to hold artillery fire until the Federals reached the farm.
According to Bohannon: "Suddenly, Cleburne almost sprang into the air, clapped his knee and in his broad Irish brogue shouted 'Now then boys, give it to 'em boys!'"
Confederate Pvt. William Gibson recognized how the Federal troops fell on the ground and, from the way their hats, caps, guns and accoutrements went flying in the air, he said he had no doubt the whole line was annihilated, exclaiming, 'By Jove, boys, it killed them all.' "
That was not the end. The South would lose, despite thinking it was winning.
"Historian Clark writes that when the Yankees moved back [for Sherman's march], they burned what they did not take with them.
" 'Ringgold was a ghost town,' he wrote. 'What had been the most enterprising town in North Georgia, with flourishing businesses, nice stores and beautiful homes, was left a forest of soot covered chimneys.' "
Gravesite Details
Buried at Catoosa County death site, by brother and fellow soldier under a tree marked "C Dor". Some think bodies were exhumed and reburied. Many were remembered at nearby Chattanooga. Cenotaph monuments common for groups.
Family Members
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