After being sworn in I was sent into a room adjoining and put on my first uniform. There was a near-sighted, cross-eyed fellow in this room who had charge of affairs. There was a long table piled with clothing. It was the worst lot of shoddy that ever came from a factory. At this time I was small, even for my age. I had to take a pair of pants that were many sizes too large. Then we hunted over the pile of pea-jackets and got the smallest one, and it was just too much of a fit.
Then my hat! Oh, such a hat! It was black, high crown, about a four-inch rim, a green cord around it, a brass bugle on the front, and it had a large fluffy black feather plume from the band up and angling over the crown.
That day I had a daguerreotype picture of myself taken, and when the artist showed it to me I felt so big that President Lincoln's overcoat would not have made me a pair of mittens.
Shoes came next, and I got a fit. Then came a knapsack and haversack. The knapsack I loaded up with two suits of underclothes and a fatigue blouse. Then came a pair of dog-hair blankets; and when I strapped the whole outfit on my back I must have looked like Atlas carrying the world.
I now started for home on a three days' leave of absence. That evening I boldly walked into the kitchen where my mother was preparing the evening meal. At sight of me she threw up both of her hands, exclaiming "Great Cæsar!"
I said, "No mother, I am neither Cæsar nor Brutus, but I am a Union soldier."
One could have taken two seamless grain sacks, cut the bottom out and run a gee-string through and made equally as good-fitting a pair of pants as I had on.
On returning to Lawrence I found the recruiting camp up the river a little way from town. It was near the Kansas river and close by a big spring that I remembered of being at many times during the summer of 1857. After staying at this camp a few days we marched south to a block-house on the Osage river, twelve miles north of Fort Scott, Kansas. This block-house was called at the time Fort Lincoln. From there we marched back to Paola, where my regiment was mustered into the service; and a few days afterward the wounded from the Prairie Grove battle passed through Paola to the Leavenworth hospital.