History – even relatively recent history – has at least two
faces, depending on who is telling the tale.
Thomas Moonlight was a native of Boysack Muir, in St Vigeans, near
Arbroath, born in 1833 and emigrated to America at the age of twelve,
unaccountably bored with his situation as a junior assistant to a draper in
Scotland. For some years he was a farmer
in the gloriously named Kansas
settlement of Kickapoo (probably not as exotic as it sounds), but then joined
the U.S. Army in 1853 and became a famous and at times infamous soldier in the
American Civil War and then the subsequent Indian Wars.
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| Broken hero? Thomas Moonlight. |
Was there ever a
better name for a dashing adventurer than Colonel Moonlight? There is a legend about the origination of
this distinctive name. Some time in the
middle of the 17th century an Angus farmer and his wife sitting at
their hearth were disturbed by the sound of a crying baby at their
doorstep. They opened the door and
brought the chilled and abandoned bairn inside.
There was no clue as to who had left the child there. For some reason, whether it was whimsy or
some odd superstition, they did not give the foundling their own surname even
though they brought it up as one of their own, but they gave it the name of
‘Moonlight’, after the condition of the night on which he was found. A twist to this ancestral fable is attached to
Thomas’s contemporary, the intrepid George Fairweather Moonlight (1832-1884), a
gold-digger who sought his fortune in America and then New Zealand. Though he was actually born in Glenbervie in
the Mearns, legend says he was discovered as an abandoned child on the hard,
moonlit streets of Aberdeen one night. (Prosaic people may prefer to believe
that the Angus surname actually comes from the place-name Munlichty.)
When the war
between the states broke out Moonlight enlisted for the northern states as an
ordinary soldier. Quickly rising to the rank of orderly
sergeant, Moonlight went from strength
to strength in the subsequent campaigns and he eventually became colonel of the Eleventh
Kansas Cavalry. He dazzled at the
battled of Dry Wood, Pea Ridge and Westport.
Then he reigned in 1864 at the end of the Civil War. Although one army veteran recalled more that
40 years after Moonlight’s death that ‘there was no better or braver man in the
Civil War’, it remains hard to judge how effective a fighter he was in the
campaigns. He wrote his own account of
his military adventures, but a recent analysis has concluded that ‘He
caustically evaluated the performance of others while lauding his own actions’
(‘ “The Eagle of the 11th
Kansas”: Wartime Reminiscences of
Colonel Thomas Moonlight,’ K. Lindberg,
M. Matthews, T. Moonlight, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 62,
No. 1, Spring 2003.)
The record of
Moonlight’s reputation becomes distinctly darker when he re-enlisted to fight
the native Americans in 1865. Colonel
Moonlight has been blamed for the disastrous Battle of Platte Bridge. Moonlight was in charge of the famous Fort
Laramie when he sallied out with 500 men in search of his native enemies in May
1865. Unfortunately the force was led in
entirely the wrong direction. Things
worsened the following week when, on the 26th May, he captured two Oglala braves and had them
hanged. His men – or at least some of
them – warned him against his subsequent move:
leaving the corpses twisting on the gallows, to the fury of the local
population. The following month there
was a further misjudgement. He led a
lightning raid out of Laramie which exhausted the horses and let a large
section of his force to limp back to their base. A raid by Lakota braves deprived the
remainder of their steeds and the men were humiliatingly forced to walk 60
miles back to their fort. The colonel
was said to have been drunk during the episode and, even worse, had not put a
guard on his remaining horses. The
antagonized and ascendant Lakota Sioux and Cheyennes continued to raid army
camps and ambush stagecoaches and on 26th July 1865 a native force
of some thousands defeated the army at Platte Bridge. There were relatively few army casualties,
but the defeat was still humiliating. On
the 7th July Moonlight was thrown out of the army.
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| Fort Laramie. |
And yet, Moonlight
was not only a survivor, but proved by his native talent and character in the
equally ferocious area of politics and diplomacy. He became Secretary of State of Kansas in
1868. Four years later he became a
Democratic state senator and in 1887 he
was appointed governor of the Wyoming Territory. He became minister to Bolivia in 1893 and
died in Leavenworth, Kansas on 7th February 1899.
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| Advertisement in The Arbroath Directory, 1926, showing the surname still evident locally |
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