Unwanted, Untrained & Indispensable

Unwanted, Untrained and Indispensable. Fort D. , Their names may not be recorded in the official records, but thousands of women volunteered their time, labor and money during the Civil War. As a teenager, Julia Gill, a future resident of Cape Girardeau, volunteered her services as a nurse, traveling with her aunt, one of the Sisters of the Holy Cross Order, to the hospital in Mound City, IL. As hospital ships such as the USS Red Rover arrived, Gill cared for the sick, wounded and dying. She received a pension for her services, and her tombstone in Old Lorimier Cemetery reads "U.S. Army Nurse." , Among the first troops to arrive in Cape Girardeau in 1861 was the 17th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, including Lieutenant William S. Reynolds and his wife, Belle. As a newlywed, Belle made the decision to follow her husband's regiment including its campaign in southern Missouri and on the river during the fall of 1861 and winter of 1862. On April 6th, 1862, she was near a little, log chapel known as the Shiloh Meeting House in Tennessee when "we were startled by cannon balls howling over our heads." As Reynolds rode to battle, he asked "What will you do, Belle?" She took on the role of nurse and protector of the transport ship carrying the wounded. After the war, she pursued a medical degree and traveled as far as the Philippines as a representative of Clara Barton's Red Cross. , Cordelia Harvey, widow of the governor of Wisconsin, volunteered as a sanitary agent and wrote "In the fall of 1862, I found myself in Cape Girardeau, where hospitals were being improvised for the immediate use of the sick and dying then being brought in from swamps by the returning regiments and up the rivers in closely crowded hospital boats. These hospitals were mere sheds filled with cots as thick as they could stand with scarcely room for one person to pass between them. Pneumonia, typhoid and camp fevers and that fearful scourge of the southern swamps and rivers, chronic diarrhea, occupied every bed." , In November 1861 during one of General Grant's visits to Cape Girardeau, Captain John Wesley Powell, commander of the forts, asked for a leave to marry his half cousin, Emma Dean. Married on November 28 in Detroit, the newlyweds traveled back to Cape Girardeau for their honeymoon. April 6th, 1862 found Emma at the dock in Savannah, TN as a transport ship brought a badly-wounded Wes back from the Battle of Shiloh. She cared for Powell as he recovered from the amputation of his arm. For the remainder of the war, she traveled with her husband and the army, serving as a nurse when needed. She died in 1924 and is buried with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.