Remembering Our Civil War Heritage and
Heroes:
1861-1865
Nicholas Wall: Montana’s First Rebel
Prisoner of War and
Territorial Empire Builder
By
Ken Robison
For The River Press
June 26, 2013
This
continues a monthly series commemorating the 150th Anniversary of
the Civil War and the veterans that settled in Montana.
This month features Major Nick Wall who was captured and held as a Confederate prisoner
of war, banished to the western territories, and established a trading empire
in Territorial Montana. Descendants of Montana Civil War veterans are
encouraged to send their stories to mtcivilwar@yahoo.com.
Nicholas Wall was a man of many
talents and important firsts in Montana history. He was the first Confederate Prisoner of War
to come to (later) Montana Territory. He was a key member of the Montana Vigilantes
and among the most important founders of Montana Territory, yet few Montanans
have ever heard of Captain Nicholas Wall.
Nick Wall was born in 1820 in
Alexandria, Virginia. He was a young master of steamboats on the Mississippi
River in the 1840s and operated a steamboat agency in St. Louis during the
1850s. Wall lived with his family in St. Louis where they had one domestic female
slave in the household in 1860. Major Nick Wall was the Officer of Commissary
with the Missouri Volunteer Militia when they deployed to the southwestern
Missouri border with Kansas in late November 1860 to suppress raids by Kansas
Jayhawkers on the eve of the Civil War. As Commissary of the Brigade on this Southwest
Expedition, Major Wall made all purchases and issued all rations and stores.
The brigade returned to St. Louis in mid December to be welcomed home by
immense crowds.
By early May 1861, Missouri teetered on
the edge of secession. Missouri’s pro-secession Governor Claiborne Jackson supported
by Brig. Gen. Daniel M. Frost, commanding the Missouri Militia, and other
southern leaning officers on his staff including Major Wall were determined to
lead the state out of the Union. The Civil War began in Missouri on May 6, 1861
when the Missouri Militia was ordered into encampment at Camp Jackson at
Lindell’s Grove on the outskirts of St. Louis. Camp Jackson posed a symbolic and
potentially real threat to the Union in Missouri. In response, Captain
Nathaniel Lyon led loyal Union troops composed mostly of German immigrants into
deployment to surround Camp Jackson. In the face of overwhelming firepower, the
Missouri Militia surrendered without firing a shot and their secession flags
were hauled down.
Major Wall and the other officers and
men of the Missouri Militia were held as Confederate prisoners of war and
marched through the streets to the St. Louis Arsenal. During the march riots
and gunfire broke out and continued for two days. The prisoners including Major
Nick Wall were released on parole that required them to remain in St. Louis or
go to the western territories.
After signing his parole, Nick Wall’s
Civil War was over. During July 1861, Captain Wall commanded the steamboat Emilie in place of Captain Joe LaBarge
who ironically was removed from his command because of his pro-southern
leanings. In the spring of 1862 the Emilie
with Capt. LaBarge in command and Capt. Wall as Clerk departed St. Louis loaded
with 143 miners and adventurers bound for the gold fields of Idaho. Steamboat
clerks were responsible for the cargo and passengers.
The Emilie arrived at Fort Benton June 17, and Captain Nick Wall
stepped ashore in what would become Montana territory to establish the most
sophisticated trading empire of the 1860s. With the miners, Wall headed west, following
the Mullan Road to western Montana where gold had been discovered in quantities
at Gold Creek near today’s Drummond. Arriving near today’s Deer Lodge, Wall
leased cabins from Johnny Grant and set up a small store, doing a brisk
business with newly arriving miners.
Just weeks after his arrival, Wall had
a visitor at his store. Young Tom Cover arrived with a group of men who were out
of money and provisions. Looking Cover over, Wall advanced him life saving
provisions, and before long Cover, with another party, discovered gold on
Grasshopper Creek, the beginning of the Bannack boom. In payment Cover filed a
claim in Nick Wall’s name. Wall moved his store to Bannack and early on became
a partner with A. F. Graeter and others in the Bannack Ditch that furnished
water to the placer miners.
After a successful trading year, Nick
Wall returned overland to St. Louis for the winter, establishing a commuter
pattern he would follow throughout his Montana years. During the winter of
1862-63 Wall formed a partnership with wealthy St. Louis steamboat line owner
and merchant John J. Roe who was acquiring wealth from pork packing during the
Civil War.
On his return to the mountains in
early June 1863, Capt. Wall rode into Bannack and then on to Fort Benton to
receive a large shipment for John J. Roe & Company shipped up the Missouri
River by Capt. Joe LaBarge’s steamboat Shreveport
commanded by his brother John LaBarge. Through a combination of low water
and extremely bad judgment, Shreveport’s
freight was offloaded at Snake Point, an almost inaccessible point near Cow
Island. Disgusted at this setback to his new company, Capt. Wall immediately
sent a letter of protest and then returned to St. Louis to join John J. Roe in
seeking damages in district court from LaBarge, Harkness & Company. In
mid-September accompanied by young Edgar G. Maclay, Capt. Wall returned to
Bannack, and on November 1 Wall and Maclay arrived in the new boomtown of
Virginia City in the heart of Alter Gulch’s massive placer mining strikes. A
new John J. Roe & Company store opened, and Captain Wall erected a rather
pretentious looking house at the rear of the store. True to his nautical habit,
his home resembled the “Texas” on the upper level of steamboats.
With the mining boom at the big gold
strikes at Grasshopper Creek and Alder Gulch thousands of miners, merchants,
and adventurers flocked into this eastern region of the new Idaho Territory. In
the presence of huge amounts of gold and in the absence of civil authority or
organized government, travelers were subjected to robberies and murders.
“Miners courts” tried to fill the void and by mid December one of the
murderers, George Ives, was apprehended and brought to trial in Virginia City.
A young Civil War Union veteran,
Colonel Wilbur Fisk Sanders of Bannack, accepted the dangerous challenge of
prosecuting Ives, who was known as a close associate of Sheriff Henry Plummer
the leader of the gang of troublemakers. Despite threats to his life, Sanders
began to prosecute. Throughout the Ives trial, Col. Sanders was a guest of
Capt. Wall, and Wall’s men served as guards at the trial and at his home. Early
in the Ives trial, probably the night of December 20, 1863, Capt. Wall met
covertly in the back of Kinna & Nye’s store with four fellow Masons, Paris
S. Pfouts, Alvin W. Brookie, John Nye, and Wilbur F. Sanders. Mason bonds
trumped North-South sentiment, and out of this meeting came agreement to form a
vigilante movement to bring order out of the lawless chaos. After Ives’
conviction and hanging, Capt. Wall departed Virginia City by horseback for St.
Louis. His arrival at Salt Lake City on January 12, 1864 brought the first news
to the outside world of the vigilante actions to clean up the gold fields.
During this winter sojourn in St.
Louis, Capt. Wall and John J. Roe refined the next step in their plan, and by the
spring of 1864 their new steamboat line, the Montana and Idaho Transportation
Company, began operations directed by Roe’s son-in-law Capt. John G. Copelin.
By late April, Capt. Wall was back in Montana Territory just as it was being
formed, taking charge of Roe company operations. During this summer, E. G.
Maclay suggested to his boss that they begin an overland freighting operation,
thus perfected their network: shipping cargo up the Missouri River by company
boats; overland freighting the cargo by company wagon trains; and selling the
merchandise in John J. Roe & Company stores. Over the coming two years,
Capt. Wall built the overland freighting operation, forming the famed Diamond R
freighting line—the “R” representing their St. Louis moneyman, John J. Roe.
As his work force of men grew, Capt.
Wall attained the capability to raise a volunteer armed force at Fort Benton to
react to increasing incidents in May 1865 with Blackfoot renegades such as the
Ophir massacre on the Teton/Marias River by Calf Shirt’s band. Capt. Wall’s volunteer
force was later replace by the Montana Militia formed by Acting Gov. Thomas
Francis Meagher.
For the next two years, Capt. Wall
managed and built the powerful John J. Roe & Company operations in Montana.
As Last Chance Gulch boomed and the town of Helena grew, Wall moved his
company’s headquarters to Helena. Throughout his time in Montana Territory, he
was known and respected and the company prospered, but Capt. Wall remained quietly
out of politics. As the Montana placer mines faded, in June 1868 Capt. Wall
arranged the sale of the great John J. Roe & Company including the mammoth
Diamond R to E. G. Maclay & Company, a group that included men working for
the company.
Despite his withdrawal from management
of the company, Capt. Wall continued to spend summers in Montana Territory,
looking after his interests in the Bannack Ditch and mining properties. Mainly,
the popular Nicholas Wall, the first Confederate Civil War prisoner of war to
come to the Upper Missouri, visited the towns and friends he had made in his wartime
exile years. On October 2, 1880, Capt. Nicholas Wall passed away in St. Louis to
be interred in an exceptional mausoleum at Bellefontaine Cemetery.
Sources: [John J. Healy. Life and
Death on the Upper Missouri: The Frontier Sketches of Johnny Healy. Edited
Ken Robison; M. Hopewell. Camp Jackson History of the Missouri Volunteer
Militia of St. Louis. St. Louis: George Knapp & Co. Printer, 1861; Montana Post; Missouri Republican; Missouri
Democrat; St. Louis Globe-Democrat 3 Oct 1880; Edwin Ruthven Purple. Perilous Passage A Narrative of the Montana
Gold Rush, 1862-63; Hiram Martin Chittenden. History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River Life and
Adventures of Joseph La Barge Pioneer Navigator and Indian Trader for Fifty
Years identified With the Commerce of the Missouri Valley. New York:
Francis P. Harper, 1903; Hoffman Birney, Vigilantes;
Mable Ovitt, Golden Treasure; Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography, 3;
Photos:
1.
Nicholas Wall Family Mausoleum in Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis.
