The soldier was a queer "critter" and could adapt himself to any circumstance. He could cook, wash dishes, preach, pray, fight, build bridges, build railroads, scale mountains, dig wells, dig canals, edit papers, eat three square meals a day or go without and find fault; and so with this experience of years,--the eventful years of 1861 and 1865 before me, when the door is shut and I am no longer effective and cannot very well retire--to the poor-house, have concluded to write a book. I am not so important a character as either Grant, Sherman, Sheridan or Logan; but I did my share toward making them great. I'll never have a monument erected to my memory unless I pay for it myself; but my conscience is clear, for I served more than three years in Uncle Sam's army and I have never regretted it and have no apologies to make. I did not go for pay, bounty or pension, although I got both the former when I did enlist and am living in the enjoyment of the latter now. I would not like to say how much my pension is, but it is not one hundred a month by "a large majority"--and so, I have concluded, upon the whole, to profit by a portion of my experience in the great "Sioux War" in Minnesota and Dakota in 1862 (for I campaigned both North and South) and write a book and thus "stand off" the wolf in my old age. When peace was declared, the great armies were ordered home and the "Boys in Blue" became citizens again. The majority of us have passed over the hill-top and are going down the western slope of life, leaving our comrades by the wayside. In a few years more there will be but a corporal's guard left and "the place that knows us now will know us no more forever." The poor-house will catch some and the Soldiers' Home others; but the bread of charity can never be so sweet and palatable as is that derived from one's own earnings,--hence this little book of personal experiences and exciting events of these exciting years--1862 and 1863. In it I deal in facts and personal experiences, and the experiences of others who passed through the trying ordeal, as narrated to me. As one grows old, memory in some sense is unreliable. It cannot hold on as it once did. The recollection of the incidents of youth remains, while the more recent occurrences have often but a slender hold on our memories; often creeps in touching dates, but the recollections of August, 1862, and the months that followed, are indeed vivid; the impress is so indelibly graven on our memories that time has not effaced them. The characters spoken of I knew personally, some for years; the locations were familiar to me, the buildings homely as they appear, are correct in size and in style of architecture and some of them I helped to build. The narrative is as I would relate to you, were we at one of our "Camp Fires." It is turning back the pages of memory, but in the mental review it seems but yesterday that the sad events occurred.