Pity the Pomo--The Bad Day on Bloody Island Was One More Massacre of Peaceful Native People

  

Pomo survivors of the massacre on the island in Clear Lake were gunned down by militia men as they swam to shore.  The few who got away were hunted along the Russian River and 50 more were killed over the next days.

May 15, 1850 was a very bad day for the Pomo, a Native American people from northern California that you have probably never heard of.  Because no one wants to talk about them, or what happened that gruesome day when Lt. Nathaniel Lyon led troopers of the U.S. First Dragoons Regiment, against a village on an island in Clear Lake.  Sketchy and contradictory accounts claim that between 100 and 400 mostly women, children, and old men were killed and another 50 or more were run down and slaughtered as they tried to escape along the Russian River.

Of course massacres of Native villages were not even then something new.  They were, you should pardon the expression, as American as apple pie.  And before the first protest, let me acknowledge that there were also massacres of white settlers committed by various tribes.  What should probably be called the 400-year-long War of the Conquest of North America was brutal and terrible—a conquering people on one side and a desperate, doomed defense on the other, quarter not asked and seldom given. 

The trouble is after all these years, even after school textbooks have taken a more sympathetic view of the native resistance, popular culture has kept the memories of hair-raising, bloody Red savages committing unspeakable atrocities on nice settler women in gingham and sunbonnets and their innocent, adorable blond children alive and well.  Burning villages and troopers tossing papooses on their saber tips, not so much.

And it is also important to remember that the cycle of massacre and mayhem generally started with the invader/settlers.  Way back in 1637 in the Pequot War, English colonists and Mohegan and Narragansett allies, launched a night attack on a large Pequot village on the Mystic River in present-day Connecticut, where they burned the inhabitants in their homes and killed all survivors, for total fatalities of about 600–700.  And the village that was attacked had not even been involved in the minor depredations in Massachusetts Bay which started the war.

That also started a pattern.  White militia and later regular troops could not tell “good Indians” from “Bad Indians.”  They all looked alike to them, and frankly they did not give a damn.  Time after time peaceful bands, even allies, were attacked and brutalized because they were easy to find and at hand.  Notable instances include the massacre of the Praying Indians—a village of Lenape (a/k/a Delaware) who had been converted by pacifist Moravian missionaries—by Pennsylvania Militia in 1782 and the infamous Sand Creek Massacre by the Colorado Volunteer Cavalry who attacked and massacred Black Kettle’s peaceful Cheyenne who were flying an American flag in 1864.  The Bloody River Massacre, as we shall see, fit into the same familiar pattern.

Since native warriors were notoriously hard for militias or Army troops to engage in the field—they tended to break up into small groups after raids and melt into whatever wilderness was available—settler troops early on began seeking out villages which, even if hostile were usually empty of warriors.  That became pretty much standard U.S. Army operational tactics in the Indian warfare after General William Henry Harrison and his troops pushed deep into Shawnee territory to attack Prophetstown, seat of Tecumseh’s and the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa’s confederacy.  The idea was to disrupt the food supply of the tribes and to force them to come to the defense of their homes.  After destroying several impotent villages, Harrison finally fell upon the main camp of hostiles defending Prophetstown and decisively whooped them at the Battle of Tippecanoe.  After that searches and attacks on villages became standard operating procedure.  Again, the hapless Pomo fell victim to the same strategy.

The Pomo had one of the most unfortunate of histories.  At the dawn of the 19th Century it is estimated about 10,000 of the loosely related peoples now lumped together as Pomo lived in a broad swath of northern California as hunter/gatherers and fishers who also traded with neighboring tribes for items using the magnesium-rich red clay of the region which was used in making beads, dyes, and face paint.  Not politically united, they lived in small bands or clans and spoke 7 related, but mutually unintelligible languages.

They had largely escaped the slavery and misery of the Mission Indian further south.  But as Europeans pressed more deeply into north, they came under pressure.  They were attacked by Russian fur traders who wanted to force them to abandon their traditional hunting and fishing to trap for trade goods.  Then the Dons of California began to arrive with pieces of paper from a far-off king giving them huge land grants.

Without central leadership and lacking a well-developed warrior culture the Pomo around the Big Valley Region and Clear Lake, were easily turned into semi-enslaved peons on Salvador Vallejo’s vast 1844 grant from Mexico, Rancho Lupyomi.  The men were turned into vaqueros as Vallejo and his brother introduced beef cattle to the range.  Women were discouraged from traditional fishing and foraging and some were turned into house servants.  Life was hard, and punishments cruel, but it was about to get worse.  Much worse.

  

When engaging in seasonal fishing in Norther California lakes, Pomo bands built tule reed structures like this.  Elsewhere they built a variety of crude huts out of whatever materials were available.

That same year American settlers aided by explorer and U.S. Army Captain John C. Frémont acting on his own authority established the Bear Flag Republic.  Meanwhile the United States and Mexico went to war.  Commodore David Stockton and the Pacific Squadron arrived to claim California and General Stephen Kearny led 150 Dragoons overland from Kansas via Santa Fe, New Mexico.  After several battles with the Californios, California was secured and later ceded by Mexico to the U.S. in the treaty of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Under the circumstances American settlers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone were able to force a purchase of a large number of Vallejo’s cattle and established a ranchero of their own in 1847.   With a handful of hired men, they raided Pomo villages, rounded up men women and children, and made them build a stockade in which to imprison themselves.  All arms, down to simple knives and hatchets, as well as fishing gear were confiscated.  With their wives and children held hostage, the men were once again used as vaqueros—and in back breaking labor building the grand hacienda and outbuildings, digging wells, erecting fencing, and other work.  Women and girls were called to the house as sex slaves for the masters and beaten, sometimes to death if they resisted.

Rations for the enslaved Pomo were four cups of crudely milled flour a day—no meat or protein. It was hardly enough to survive on and soon many were dying of starvation and disease.  Then, things got even worse.

In 1849 Kelsey took 50 of the Pomo men as laborers on expedition to the new gold fields to try back-breaking placer mining.  Kelsey got sick.  His claim did not produce and in desperation he sold all of his slave’s rations to other miners.  Most of the Pomo starved to death and only two made it back with Kelsey.

The remaining Pomo at the hacienda were becoming desperate.  Under the leadership of Chief Augustine two of the men stole Stone’s horse in an attempt to kill a cow and smuggle the meat back to the stockade.  But in a thunderstorm, Stone’s horse ran off.  Knowing that the enraged Stone would wreck vengeance, horrible vengeance, Augustine had his wife, a maid in the hacienda, pour water on all of Kelsey and Stone’s gunpowder rendering it useless.  At dawn the men armed only with a handful of hastily made and crude bows, cudgels, farm tools, and stones attacked the house in force.  Kelsey quickly fell with an arrow and died.  Stone tried to escape by a window and to run for cover.  It is said that Augustine personally found him and crushed his head with a rock.

The Pomo knew there would be trouble.  They hastily gathered all of the provisions they could carry, rounded up the families, and fled north hoping to join up with other Pomo bands.

                                 Nathaniel Lyon as a Brigadier General and Commander of the Department of  the West during the Civil War.

Word of the killing quickly reached a U.S. garrison and Lt. Lyons set out in pursuit.  He got word of a large Pomo fishing camp on an island known to the Indians as Badon-napo-ti (Island Village), at the north end of Clear Lake.  Lyons assumed the fugitive Pomo had headed there.  He was wrong, those Pomo steered clear of the lake as they made a dash north towards Oregon Territory.  The Pomo on the island did not even speak the same language and were, as far as they knew, at peace with the United States. Most were Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake and from a band from the Robinson Rancheria.  Most able bodied men were off hunting in the north leaving the fishing and drying of the catch to their women and children.

When Lyon arrived on the scene he recognized that the Island afforded the Indians some natural protection.  He quickly sent to the Arsenal at Benicia where he obtained two small brass field guns and two whale boats that were hauled overland.  Outfitting each boat with the cannon in the prow, he launched them in secret from the southern shore of the lake.  Meanwhile highly undisciplined mounted militia joined his Dragoons.

On the morning of the attack Lyon opened fire on the village from the boats attacking the south end of the island.  That naturally sent the inhabitants of the camp stampeding in a panic to the north of the island where they were cut down by musket fire from the wooded shore.  The cavalry then splashed across the shallow water and began cutting down everyone they encountered with saber slashes.  Babies and small children were bayonetted by dismounted troops and their bodies thrown into the water.

The Army encountered virtually no resistance.  Lyon reported three light injuries.  Almost every living person on the island was killed.  Many of those who tried to escape in the water were shot as they swam or drowned.  A few made it to shore and a desperate run for safety.

One six year old girl, Ni’ka managed to escape the slaughter by hiding under the water and breathing through tulle reed.  Later known as Lucy More she became a folk hero to her people and her descendants continue to work to memorialize the massacre.

Lyon ordered his men to pursue the escapees and as noted over the next few days they hunted down and killed about 50 survivors.  A general war against all native people in the north continued for months with members of any and all tribes ruthlessly killed whenever they were encountered.  Large numbers of usually drunken Militia did most of this dirty work, but the Dragoons also participated.

Lyon, already cited for bravery in the Mexican War for capturing enemy cannon in the Battle for Mexico City, was proclaimed a hero all over again and his advancement in the Army was assured.  He was soon sent to Bloody Kansas where conflicts with Missouri Border Ruffians made him an ardent anti-slavery man and loyal Republican.  In 1861 as commander of the St. Louis Armory, he kept the powder and weapons there out of the hands of the pro-Confederate state government, secretly armed Republican Wide Awake militia, and attacked Governor’s Jackson’s camp, marching his prisoners through St. Louis.  He also ordered his troops to fire on rioting southern sympathizers killing 75.

For his ruthless efficiency, Lyon was promoted to Brigadier General and made Commander of the Department of the West, relieving the incompetent but politically well-connected John C. Frémont.  Lyon at the head of Federal regulars and four quickly mustered and armed regiments of loyal Unionist Missouri Volunteers pursued Jackson and his troops across the state.  After forcing the Rebels out of the capital of Jefferson City, he beat them at the Battle of Booneville, forcing them to retreat to the southwest.

On August 10, 1861 he caught up to the force of the Missouri Militia and Confederate troops under the command of Ben McCulloch near Springfield at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. Lyon was killed during the battle while trying to rally his outnumbered soldiers. Although the battle was a technical Confederate victory, it broke the power of the south to operate conventional forces in the state and kept Missouri in the Union. That made Lyon one of the first great martyr heroes of the Union.

Keeping the noble hero’s reputation untarnished only partly explains how the Massacre at Bloody Island was quickly stripped from California’s collective memory.

As for the scattered Pomo survivors of the nasty little war, they lived on in small bands, many of them back in virtual slavery to local rancheros.  Later, despite pleas for a unified reservation with enough land to hunt and fish, the local bands were assigned small Rancherias on marginal land.  They were among the poorest of California Indians, and that is saying a lot.  They survived on the tiny plots through much of the 20th Century but current policy aims to move them to urban areas.

As brief as it is, the original Bloody Island historical maker was riddled with errors and glorified the massacre as a battle.  Protesters have smeared the marker with red paint in protest.  A more historically correct marker was erected near the passing highway in 2005 by the state of California and the decedents of a Pomo girl who survived the massacre by hiding in the lake and breathing through a tule reed.

As for the battle ground, Clear Lake was drained and “reclaimed” for agriculture in the 1930’s.  The island is now a mound rising from the dusty lake bed.  It is a California State Park.  In 1942 an outfit called the Native Sons of the Golden West erected a historical marker a third of a mile off of U.S. Highway 20 noting that it was the site of a Battle between Cavalry under “Captain” Lyon and Indians under Chief Augustine.  It attracted few visitors as the entire episode goes unmentioned in California history texts.

 The new state marker.

Just to set matters straight, however, a second plaque was erected in 2005 by the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Lucy Moore Foundation, telling the story in greater, and more accurate detail.

 

The Last Poor Bastard Killed in Action in the Civil War

  

 

Pvt. John J. Williams, last Union battle death in the Civil War, looked mighty dashing in his embroidered jacket.  But he died in the Texas dust fighting a doomed rear-guard action against an overwhelming Rebel cavalry force.

No one wants to be the last person killed in a war.  Particularly a war that has essentially been over for more than a month.  A war in which 144,000 Union soldiers were killed in combat (total deaths over 300,000) as were 72,500 Confederates (total dead 260,000.)  What may have once at least been seen as a heroic sacrifice in a noble cause seems heartbreakingly pointless at the last possible moment.  But Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana Volunteer Infantry became the last battle casualty anyway on May 13, 1865. 

The Battle of Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Texas was a needles waste of life that resulted in a fruitless Confederate victory.  Despite the surrender of Robert E. Lee on April 9, the Confederate Trans-Mississippi District, which included Texas, refused to surrender.  Skirmishing continued near the Mexican border as Federal troops tried to disrupt continued contraband trade. 

At one point the Union held all of the Texas ports to prevent oceanic trade and had strong garrisons along the Rio Grande in Eastern Texas.  But troops and naval units had been transferred to the eastern theater to wrap up the war there leaving coastal defenses only on Matagorda Peninsula and on the northern tip of Brazos Island at Brazos Santiago Depot near Confederate Fort Brown outside Brownsville. 

After word reached the area of the fall of the Confederate government, a local gentlemen’s agreement was reached to suspend offensive operations to avoid unnecessary loss of life.  

                             Col. Theodore Barrett ordered the useless final attack.

But for unknown reasons Union Col. Theodore H. Barrett decided to move against Ft. Brown.  Barrett ordered Lt. Col David Branson to move out on the evening of May 11.  Branson commanded 250 men of the 62nd U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) Infantry and 50 men of the 2nd Texas Volunteer Cavalry, a unit made up of Texas Unionists who were fighting that day dismounted. 

The operation went awry from the beginning.  Foul weather prevented a planned crossing to the mainland at Point Isobel.  After hours of delay Branson finally got his troops ashore at Boca Chica.  Around 2 am May 12 his troops surrounded a Confederate camp on the White Ranch but found it empty.  Branson decided to let his exhausted men sleep but ordered them to conceal themselves in brush and hollows on the ranch to avoid detection from Rebel scouts.  But Mexicans, whose income was tied heavily to the contraband trade, spied the Federal movements and alerted Ft. Brown.

Aware that he had been spotted, Branson the moved out at 8:30 to attack a Rebel camp and supply depot at Palmito Ranch.  Along the way they skirmished with out-numbered Confederate cavalry before dispersing them and occupying the camp after a short fight. 

Branson decided to rest and feed his men while beginning to destroy supplies.  Around 3 a.m. the following morning the full force of Capt. W. N. Robinson’s 190 man company of the Lt. Col. George H. Gidding’s Texas Cavalry Battalion re-appeared.  Alarmed, Branson ordered a fall back under pressure to White’s Ranch and sent word to Col. Barrett for reinforcements.  

Positions and maneuvering in the Battle of Palmito Ranch.

Barrett arrived early on the 13th with 200 men from the 34th Indiana and assumed command.  He ordered his combined force of about 500 men to advance again on Palmito Ranch.  After a sharp engagement with the cavalry in the thickets along the Rio Grande, Robinson’s Rebel troops again fell back until they were reinforced by 300 hundred men from Ft. Brown under the command of Col. John Salmon (Rip) Ford including men of his own Second Texas Cavalry, Col. Santos Benavides’ Texas Cavalry Regiment, additional companies from Giddings’s battalion, and a six-gun battery of field artillery under the command of Capt. O. G. Jones.

With a significant cavalry force and artillery, Ford caught the exposed union infantry in the open at Palmito Ranch.  The Confederates opened with an artillery barrage at 4 p.m..  Union forces were flanked by Robinson attacking from the left by the river and by two other companies of Gidding’s Battalion on the right.  Then the rest of Ford’s cavalry charged the center, breaking the Union line and sending them into a rout.  

Looking more parade ground organized than it probably was, this painting of the Battle of Palmito Ranch show Confederate artillery fire exploding in Union ranks as the cavalry charges the center of the line and the Northerners were trapped between flank attacks.  The Yankee loss and Rebel victory were both ultimately meaningless.

Panicked, Barrett ordered 46 Indiana men to form a screen to cover his retreat.  They were quickly overwhelmed and killed or captured.  It looked like the cavalry might cut through the main force until a second line of 140 men of the 62nd Colored  running from the Rio Grande to three-quarters of a mile inland did the slow the Confederate attack enough to allow the Union forces to get away to the coast where they were reinforced from Brazos Santiago and put under the protection from guns on Navy costal patrol boats. 

Ford told his troops, “Boys, we have done finely. We will let well enough alone and retire.”  The final running fight lasted a little over four hours. 

The Federals forces lost 111 men and four officers captured, 4 killed including the unfortunate Pvt. Williams, and 30 wounded.  The Confederates reported a less than a dozen wounded and three captured. 

On May 26 Rebel forces in Texas surrendered and Col. Barrett soon after took command of Ft. Brown.  Major General Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi District became the last major commander to formally surrender on June 2.  

 

The official State of Texas historical marker for the battle.  Texans make a big deal about the final battle and victory of the war.  Union historians barely mention it in a footnote.

Smith, Ford, and most of the other senior commanders in that district and in Texas soon crossed into Mexico on a promise of land grants from Emperor Maximilian and to assist French troops should the massive Army under General Philip Sheridan that was posted to the border attempt to intervene directly in the brewing Mexican civil war.  Once again, they picked the losing side of a war.  Some returned to the U.S, where they were active in resistance to Reconstruction and supported establishment of Jim Crow laws.

Iconic Nurse Heroines Inspired National Nurses

 

This is National Nurses Week.  As well it should be. 

In 2001 the iconic heroes of 9/11 were the firefighters—both the ones who rushed into the twin towers after the aircraft impacts and those covered in ash and grief in the hours and days after the buildings collapsed.  In war time they have often been soldiers like those who stormed the beaches of Normandy or raised the flag on Iwo Jima.  In the aftermath of earthquakes, floods, tornados, and other natural disasters they are the rescuers searching frantically for survivors.

During the Coronavirus pandemic the iconic heroes were the nurses.  Sure, other got and deserved attention—first responders, doctors and other medical personnel, scientists seeking treatments or vaccines, and even other usually ignored essential workers including grocery clerks, truck drivers and delivery persons, custodians and cleaners.  But nurses riveted our attention and sympathy with their tireless devotion in the midst of overwhelming chaos and suffering.

It is no accident that the celebration of nurses is centered on the woman often considered the mother of the profession and its secular patron saint.  Americans also look to a home-grown inspiration.

Britain and America each have iconic nurse heroines.  But other than sharing a common calling, horrific experience in war, and a steely determination, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton could not have been more different.

Florence Nightingale after her return from the Crimean War.  After Queen Victoria  herself she was the most famous and admired woman in Britain.

Nightingale was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and member of the British ruling class.  Barton came from a struggling but respectable family of middling means.  Nightingale struggled to gain acceptance for nursing as a respectable occupation for gentle women.  Spinster Barton had no choice but to work spending years as a school mistress before volunteering without training to serve the Civil War wounded. 

Nightingale came from a family with Unitarian connections but was a devoted Anglican.  Barton was raised a Universalist who had no religious affiliation in later life, but credited her ethic to her childhood faith. Nightingale was interested in the professionalization of nursing, sanitation practices, and what we would now describe as holistic medicine.  Barton cared about the amelioration of suffering and building a new model of active charity and volunteerism. 

Disabled by illness and perhaps Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Nightingale had to largely retire from active nursing and administration within a few years of returning from the Crimean War and spent the rest of her long life as a semi-invalid, writer, and researcher.  She never embraced feminism, was in fact openly critical of it and cultivated the support and friendship of powerful men.  Barton, although necessarily careful to curry support for the American Red Cross from the President and Congress, was supportive of women’s suffrage.

  Clara Barton, America's Angel of the Battlefield, was inspired by Nightingale but very different from her.

But, of course, Nightingale’s famous example inspired and motivated Barton in her own career.

Florence Nightingale was named for the city of Florence, then the capital of the Duchy of Tuscany on May 12, 1820.  Her father, born William Shore, inherited a rich country estate from his mother’s family and assumed their name, Nightingale. 

In 1825 the family returned to England where they took up residence in a large and elegant new country home on the familial estate, Lea Hall in Derbyshire.  The following year her father bought a second estate, Embley Park, in Hampshire.  Soon after he was appointed the High Sheriff of Hampshire.  The family divided their years between the two country seats.

Nightingale was home tutored, like most of her class, but benefited from parents who allowed her to study deeply beyond the narrow instruction usual for women of her class and place.  By her late teens she was as academically accomplished as most university educated men.

Her mother, despite progressive social views and ardent abolitionism, was a Victorian traditionalist when it came to the role of women.  She strongly opposed young Florence’s announcement that she was determined to find a career in service, and particularly in nursing.  Women nurses were not unheard of.  But other than Catholic and Anglican nursing orders, it was considered an unskilled job for the lowest orders of society.  Because they were required to come into close physical contact with patients, including men, it was assumed that they were degraded and likely to service their charges sexually as well.  In fact, secular nurses were often regarded as little more than prostitutes.

Despite her mother’s opposition, in 1844 Nightingale launched a round of visiting hospitals in London and elsewhere, observing conditions and techniques, and eventually volunteering her services.  She rejected an ardent suitor, politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, for fear that marriage would interfere with her calling.  She continued her hospital visits for 14 years, eventually attracting the attention and support of others.

Florence Nightingale as a teen-age beauty about the time she renounced romance and declared her determination to pursue nursing.

In 1849 Nightingale undertook extensive travels in Europe, Turkey, and Egypt.  He mother probably hoped the Grand Tour would divert her from her purpose.  She was dead wrong.  She used the trip to make visits to hospitals and study nursing techniques. In Egypt she visited a convent of nursing sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Alexandria, where she was impressed by the order and discipline that made their care superior to anything she had found in Europe. 

Later she spent considerable time at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany. The institute had been founded for the care of the destitute in 1833 and had grown into a training school for women teachers and nurses.  She described the event as the turning point of her life.  She returned to the Institute in 1851 for four months of medical training—the only formal nursing education she ever received.  She vowed to establish similar training programs in England.  Her accounts of her experiences there, The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc, was her first major publication and drew attention for her plans in England. 

Nightingale’s sister also published her extensive correspondence describing in detail her experience in Egypt and “The Orient” which showed her as a gifted travel writer and astute observer of life and customs in other lands.

During these travels Nightingale also made contact with important British political figures also traveling abroad, especially Sidney Herbert, who she met in Rome.  Herbert was a former Secretary at War in the Tory government Sir Robert Peel and would be called back to that post during the Crimean War.  He became a lifelong devoted friend and supporter of Nightingale. 

Back home, Nightingale resumed her round of hospital visits will arguing for opening nursing to respectable women and for formal schooling for them. 

In 1852 she finally got a position where she could put her ideas into practice as the Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London.  It may not have been tending to the poor as she one day hoped to do, but it was a start.  In her relatively short tenure at the Institute, she inaugurated formal training for her nurses.

About the same time, probably against his wife’s wishes but bowing to the inevitable, Florence’s father settled a £500 annual income on her allowing her to live comfortably while pursuing her career.

What interrupted Nightingale’s new job was the onset of the Crimean War, as foolish a major power conflict as was ever fought.  France under the newly minted Emperor Napoleon III, Britain and Russia chest bumped over the rotting but still alive corpse of the Ottoman Empire.  The immediate cause of the war, Russia’s occupation of Ottoman provinces along the Danube ostensibly in defense of Orthodox rights, was voided when Austria threatened to join the coalition against the Tsar and Russia withdrew its troops.  Undeterred, the war went on anyway, fought mostly in naval actions on the Black Sea beginning in 1853 and on the Crimean Peninsula with the siege of the port of Sevastopol beginning in September of 1854.  Large, stupidly led Ottoman, French, and British Armies slogged it out against stubborn Russian resistance, cholera, and other epidemics.

Although the gallant but futile Charge of the Light Brigade was the most famous battle of the Crimean War most troops on all sides suffered in wet, rat infested trenches under artillery fire and died by the thousands of exposure and multiple disease infestations at overwhelmed hospitals.

Considered the first modern war because of the use of steam powered war ships, iron clad floating batteries, railroads, telegraph lines, and massed artillery, the war quickly turned into a charnel house.  And for the first time reporters traveling with the armies got word back to London and Paris by wire within hours of actual events.  Newspapers quickly filled with grim stories.

Word also got back to England about the suffering of the British wounded in comparison to the French, who had better organized medical services and hospitals.  Nightingale offered her services and her friend Herbert, back as Secretary at War, quickly accepted the offer and promised her full support and all of the supplies she needed.

Nightingale set sail for the war zone on October 21, 1854 in charge of a hastily recruited force of nurses including 10 Roman Catholic nuns, 8 Anglican Sisters of Mercy, 6 nurses from St. John’s Institute, and 14 from various other hospitals.  

Nightingale rejected the services of Jamaican traditional healer/doctor Mary Seacole who made it to the Crimea on her own and served much closer to the front lines than Florence. 

She declined the services of Mary Seacole a Black Jamaican traditional doctor.  Seacole traveled to the Crimea anyway at her own expense and served valiantly near the front lines.  Briefly honored upon her return to England, her memory was virtually erased as Nightingale’s reputation soared.

Florence’s group arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari, Istanbul, 250 miles across the Black Sea from the Crimea.  Thousands of British wounded were warehoused there with almost no support.  This would be Nightingales main base throughout the war.

She found appalling conditions:

There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or clothes, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin . . .

We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The butter is most filthy; it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for, until they arrive from France . . .

Nightingale appealed through correspondent William Russell of the The Times for supplies and assistance.  The Times organized relief drives and supplies began to trickle in by year’s end.  

Contemporary illustrations in the British Press could not begin to capture the horror and suffering amid the primitive conditions at Nightingale's hospital at Scutari.

Despite improvements and the best efforts of her overworked nurses, death rates actually climbed in the hospital in the months after Nightingale's arrival due to sanitary conditions and overcrowding.  Cholera, typhus, and typhoid swept the wards.  Over 4,000 men died there over the winter.

Meanwhile the government commissioned a prefabricated hospital and dispatched it to the scene under the civilian leadership of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes.  When it arrived and was set up nearby, its death rates were less than 1/10th of those at Suctari under Nightingale’s care. 

In March of 1865 a Sanitary Commission arrived from home which flushed the sewers at Suctari, after which deaths dropped sharply.  Nightingale did not recognize the connection however, and credited the improvement to nutrition and nursing care. 

Despite their limitations, Florence and her nurses worked tirelessly, none more so than their leader.  In addition to her administrative duties, she spent much time in the wards.  And because the prejudice against nurses persisted among Army authorities, only Nightingale was allowed on the wards at night to aid the ill trained and sometimes brutal male orderlies.  She visited bedsides carrying a lantern, earning her the nickname Lady of the Lamp among her charges.

Nightingale's depiction as the Lady With the Lamp for her night visits to her patients in the wards at her Suctari hospital became her iconic image celebrated in the British press, in art, and even by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Russell spread the word of her service back home where she was hailed as a hero.  The Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses was set up under the stewardship Herbert while she was still abroad and an astonishing £ 45,000 was raised by 1859.

In May of 1855 Nightingale finally made it to the Crimea, inspecting hospitals near the front at Balaclava.  While there, she fell ill with “Crimea Fever” and lay dangerously near death for 12 days.  She returned to Suctari weakened.  But she resumed her duties and even returned Balaclava in March of 1856, remaining there until after active fighting ceased on the peninsula and the hospitals there were closed in July.

In August Nightingale boarded a French ship and returned privately to England where she was hailed as a great heroine.  She was introduced to Queen Victoria herself and presented the monarch with a report on conditions.  Her fame even crossed the Atlantic where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized her in Santa Filomena

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

In 1860 with money from the Nightingale Fund the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital opened in London.  Nurses there were trained in a course of study designed by Florence.  She was, however, too ill to accept the superintendency of the new school.  She also raised money for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital   near her family home.  But her days as an active nurse and administer were over.

Nightingale busied herself with a close study of statistics from the various hospitals and medical facilities in the war.  What she discovered caused her to dramatically re-assess her own views.  In 1859 she published her findings in Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army in which she acknowledged the supreme importance of sanitation in reducing hospital deaths.  In 1859 an Army medical college was opened at Chatham and the first military hospital was established in Woolwich in 1861 following the advice laid out by Nightingale.

The cover and title page of Nightingale's hugely influential Notes on Nursing published in 1860.  Clara Barton read it, although she did not adopt all of Florence's program.

That was followed in 1860 with Notes on Nursing which laid down the educational program adopted at the St. Thomas school and others throughout Britain. 

When the Sepoy Rebellion broke out in India in 1857, Nightingale volunteered once more to go abroad.  But her health would not permit it.  Instead she undertook a deep study of India and wrote many articles about the sub-continent over the next several years, including a detailed proposal for digging wells in Indian villages.

Nightingale as a semi-invalid late in life.

Nightingale continued to write and was honored time and again over the next decades.  She participated as far as she was able in events like the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. 

Nightingale died in London, on August 13 1910 at the age of ninety and was buried in the family plot at East Wellow, Hampshire after an offer of internment in Westminster Abbey was turned down by her family. Memorial services took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral.