Dogs of the 11th Illinois: Old Heenan & Old Honesty

Burning Billy

Sergeant
Joined
Jul 6, 2016
"Thirty years after he was wounded in the Civil War, Frederick Ransom was nevertheless nostalgic about his time on the battlefield. So in 1893, the aging veteran, then living in the Illinois Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Quincy, decided to sketch scenes of conflict and camaraderie from his memories of the war.

Ransom could never have guessed what would happen to his pictorial diary. In late 2016, the sketchbook arrived at the UCLA Library Special Collections in a very fragile state, and a painstaking restoration was recently completed.

Ransom took what was readily available to him — an order book from a garden nursery business — and filled the blank back pages with nearly 100 intimate and detailed pictures and notes. Capturing both the profound and mundane details of a Union soldier’s life, Ransom’s drawings depict scenes from the battlefield and military ships, and from downtime around a campfire to the dogs of war."


Intimate details of life as a Civil War soldier depicted in rare sketches



The sketch of Old Heenan appears at 0:23 and Old Honesty at 0:26

The old soldier added the caption "Corporal of the Guard" to Old Honesty's sketch. I wonder what the story behind that was!
 
Back
Top