History is a trail of tears....
Reflections on family and the roads past
The Red Book has been with me for nearly six decades now. A few have seen it; a cousin who became a Mormon borrowed it once, probably to arrange posthumous baptisms or some such thing, and later his sister made some copies. But few others in our far-flung family know of it and the treasures, the stories it holds.
When I was a small boy, I loved to visit my great-grandfather, Ruben Valentine Senior, a retired farmer and maker of fine violins like his father, Charles Berry Senior, a veteran of the War Between the States, the American Civil War, who was the son of that old man Valentine Senior, who — as I heard many years later from a distant English cousin — was a veteran of Waterloo as a boy.
I spent many happy hours rummaging through the drawer of photographs in the dining room of the house that Ruben built on his homestead, and asking him about the people whose faded images I found there. Many he remembered, some he did not, and then one day he and his daughter decided to make a present for me with all the photographs he could still, in his eighties, identify. Those he no longer recognized were discarded, alas.
So on some occasion, a birthday or Christmas, I no longer remember, they gave me that Red Book, which has been a source of inspiration for research and a personal link to mostly forgotten histories.
Some of those histories probably now exist only in my head unless a few others in the family my age or older heard them and remember. These bread crumbs on the trail of tears, the old man deaf from the cannon fire in his youth who decided to learn Spanish at age 80 because the local paper had begun publishing a column in that language and he felt it important to stay informed, his son who, dying of disease in the southern swampland on his interrupted way to fight the Spanish in Cuba and others have comforted me many times in my own adversities and given me a sense that if they can persist, so can I. That dying Spanish-American War veteran nearly made it to his ninety-ninth birthday but for a month and a day. Never abandon hope.
In the pages to follow, I will share the text and images surviving from Charles Berry Senior’s part in Sherman’s March to the Sea and its aftermath. Some of these records can be found in the public Internet space, in a university archive and an Iowa history page, for example, but most have been lost, and I may be the last one to have any copies of them, so I will share what I have and what I remember from the many stories told to me as a child, for the sake of posterity and whatever part of it may care,