Summary: His military service is accepted as genuine√

Date of Birth: 23rd December 1846.

Date of Death 25th July 1952 in Idaho.

Age at enlistment: officially eighteen in 1865, perhaps fourteen in 1861

Rank: private.

Unit: 51st Missouri Infantry (known)

Service: Infantryman. Probably his first service was in the summer and autumn of 1861. He definitely enlisted on April 4th 1865 and was mustered out on August 31st of that year.

Combat Experience: Very little that can be traced. Probably much more

Evidence of Service apart from his own accounts: Ancestry.com has replicas of his several documents for voluntary enlistment. These include a declaration, company enrolment, hospitalisation, a transfer and mustering out. Official Records got a triple check and does not know of him.

While he has some of the most traceable statistics among those veterans alive after January 1st 1952, confusion exists over his middle name. His 1860s military documents do not give him one. Professor Hoar, in contact with his family, writes Adam, newspapers say Aaron. This time these trails all lead to the same man.

Israel Aaron Broadsword was born in Putnam County Ohio into a farming family. He is only one of the few among the twenty-nine claimants in this book to have an undisputed birth date. As a boy he worked in Saint Joseph, Missouri for outfitters to wagon trains and mountaineers. His son William wrote to Professor Hoar in 1972, describing how the sight of a female slave being separated from her child and then being whipped down the street gave him a passionate hatred of slavery. This led Broadsword to joining the Troy Kansas Home Guard in 1859 and he would experience the violence of the Kanas conflict before the war began.

By Broadsword’s account repeated in newspapers and also in the recollections of one of his sons, he ran away from home aged fourteen to fight and was in Missouri’s battle of Lexington in September 1861. Soon after this his parents found him and took him home, but realised he would only run away again, so with their permission at age sixteen he enlisted.[1] This would put his second enlistment between the end of 1862 and the end of 1863. This fits with his son William’s account, who recalled that his father saw action several times against Quantrill, who was active in Missouri in those years but had moved to Kentucky by spring 1865.

However all his official documents have him enlisting aged eighteen on April 4th 1865. He would have seen very little if any fighting while on garrison duty at Saint Joseph Missouri as he was hospitalised on April 30th for an unspecified period. In the twilight days of the war the last Confederates active in Missouri were bushwhackers and isolated cavalry units, so while possible, it seems unlikely that Broadsword was a fighting soldier – at least at this point in time, but definitely after and probably before.

The previously cited newspaper interviews he did recall some details apparently from his earlier enlistment. In one an officer told the men not to abandon a cannon to the enemy and when another man asked how much it was worth and was told three hundred dollars, he suggested that they let the Confederates have it, all chip in and give the replacement cost to the government! Broadsword also mentioned the terrible taste of scarce buffalo meat.

Unfortunately more of his earlier experiences are at this stage, undocumented. He was mustered out on August 31st 1865, but re-enlisted in Company H, 19th Kansas Cavalry in 1868 where he reached the rank of Sergeant and became an Indian fighter under Custer’s command, probably at the Battle of Washita River in late 1868. The most famous representation of this battle is in Arthur Penn’s 1971 film Little Big Man. While this film seems to accurately capture the ruthless savagery and the unexpected nature of the attack and many of the more bizarre aspects; it does not show that the Seventh Cavalry were tracking a raiding party returning to the village. This group had been raiding settlers and brought Custer’s ferocious destruction to the apparently unknowing villagers.[2] A kidnapped white woman had also smuggled out a note pleading for rescue for herself and her toddler, they were among the fatalities, but it remains unclear who killed them.[3]

To what extent this surprise attack on a sleeping village where an American flag flew could be called a battle was then and still remains controversial. Of the hundred and three Cheyennes Custer supposedly killed, only eleven were warriors and Custer lost nineteen cavalrymen. Custer would claim in his official report that he had killed a hundred and eleven warriors, but Evan S. Connell in his Son of the Morning Star names all eleven killed Indian warriors and states that the other ninety-two were women, children and the elderly.[4] James Donovan also mentions Custer’s claim on casualties, but concludes that he was overstating, while Cheyenne estimates of thirty to forty fatalities of which half were warriors, were understatements.[5]

Broadsword’s role in this is unknown, he may not have even been there, but this man who loved army life resigned soon after. However he clearly admired Custer as his first child, born in 1885, was named George Custer Broadsword.[6] Comparing his earlier sense of injustice concerning a female slave to what happened to Cheyenne women at the Washita shows what war can do to people, or can possibly do. As a child Custer could not tolerate bullies and defended those attacked.

In 1870 Broadsword was employed as a wagon train scout, but quit over a wage dispute around halfway through the journey. After hauling freight for a time, he returned to farming and family life, having married in 1871. A physically strong man, he had a resilience and a toughness about him that not only got him through the 1850s border wars, the Civil War and the Indian War of the 1860s, but also the world of freighting and farming. The Broadswords had to battle prairie fires, hailstorms, drought and grasshopper plagues: despite this Israel Broadsword never gave up, never suffered a crushing defeat and showed the resilience that so many veterans, North and South, possessed. His son William recalled how after the death of his wife in 1900 he moved to Colorado, taking up farming there and around 1929-1930 he retired to live with his sons in Idaho. He took part in the 1949 Life magazine story which seemed to gain him public notice and he stayed in general good health until the last years. He is credited with being Missouri’s last Civil War veteran and the last living veteran in the North-West states. He would have also been among the last Indian fighters. Ten days before he died he was rushed to Spokane Hospital and his death was much noted in the North West media. Widely respected, at his funeral, the largest building in his town could not hold not even half of the mourners present.[7]

*

This is an abridged excerpt from America’s Last Civil War Participants: An Investigation by Garry Victor Hill. The full and illustrated text can be found for free at my website garryvictorhill.com.au/ Hopefully this will also soon be a free e-book. Twenty eight other claimed Civil War survivors alive after 1951 are also assessed.

[1] This account of Broadsword’s life is based on his enlistment documents and war record, Hoar’s segment on Broadsword. Vol. II pp857-859 and on four newspaper accounts. Professor Hoar uses several detailed passages from his son William and several other sources. The first newspaper source is an unsigned article, ‘Civil War Veteran Lives Peacefully On Idaho Farm.’ In The Register Guard May 4th 1951. p57. The second is an obituary article in The Spokesman Review July 26th 1952 p57. The last is the May 1951 Associated Press article.

[2] The raiding party is mentioned by James Donovan in his A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Big Horn: The Last Great Battle of the American West. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008. p63, p65.

[3] Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. 1984. London: Pan Books, 1986. pp181-182. The note is reproduced.

[4] O’Connell, p187.

[5] Donovan, p65.

[6] The Broadsword Family Tree. Ancestry.com

[7] Hoar, Vol II p857.