HER WARDROBE IN A HANDKERCHIEF—THE BATTLE SCENE
On September 14, 1862, Clara Barton started from the City of Washington to the firing line, then at Harper’s Ferry. She took with her no Saratoga, no grip, no “go-to-meeting clothes.” The articles in her wardrobe on that eventful trip will never be known but it is known to a “dead certainty” that whatever “worldly goods” she did take with her were all tied up in a pocket handkerchief.
Her only escort was a “mule skinner.” He, wearing the blue, held the one jerk line to the team of six mules, animals known in the west as “Desert Canaries.” The vehicle in which Clara Barton took that eventful ride was an army freight wagon covered with canvas, such wagon sometimes called the “prairie schooner.” “In the Days of Old, the Days of Gold,” as “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” the “prairie schooner” was almost the exclusive vehicle of conveyance over the deserts for freight and passengers. It was in the “prairie schooner” that the Mormons went to Utah in 1848, and the Argonauts to California, in “’49 and ’50.” It was from a “prairie schooner” that, rising from a sick bunk and looking out over that beautiful valley of Salt Lake, Brigham Young exclaimed: “This is the Place!”
After an eighty-mile ride bumping over stones and dykes and ditches, up and down the hills of Maryland, Clara Barton arrived at the battlefield. There, side by side, cold in death with upturned faces, were the brave boys of the Northern blue and the Southern gray. In closing a description of this battle scene Clara Barton says: “There in the darkness God’s angel of Wrath and Death had swept and, foe facing foe, the souls of men went out. The giant rocks, hanging above our heads, seemed to frown upon the scene, and the sighing trees which hung lovingly upon their rugged edge dropped low and wept their pitying dews upon the livid brows and ghastly wounds beneath.”