I could not carry a musket nor lead the men to battle; I could only serve my country by caring for, comforting, and sustaining the soldiers. CLARA BARTON. I broke the shackles and went to the field. CLARA BARTON. Washington, D. C., June 20, 1864. Dr. J. M. Barnes, Acting Surgeon General, U. S. A., Sir: The undersigned, Senators and Representatives of Massachusetts, desire you to extend to Miss Clara Barton of Worcester, Massachusetts, every _facility_ in your power to visit the army at any time or place that she may desire, for the purpose of administering to the comfort of our sick and wounded soldiers. Also that such supplies and assistants, as she may require, may be furnished with transportation. We are, very respectfully, H. L. DAWES, ALEX. H. RICE, D. W. GOOCH, JOHN D. BALDWIN, THOS. D. ELIOT, GEO. S. BOUTWELL, CHARLES SUMNER, HENRY WILSON, JNO. B. ALLEN, OAKES AMES, W. F. WASHBURNE. HER WARDROBE IN A HANDKERCHIEF—THE BATTLE SCENE On September 14, 1862, Clara Barton started from the City of Washington to the firing line, then at Harper’s Ferry. She took with her no Saratoga, no grip, no “go-to-meeting clothes.” The articles in her wardrobe on that eventful trip will never be known but it is known to a “dead certainty” that whatever “worldly goods” she did take with her were all tied up in a pocket handkerchief. Her only escort was a “mule skinner.” He, wearing the blue, held the one _jerk line_ to the team of six mules, animals known in the west as “Desert Canaries.” The vehicle in which Clara Barton took that eventful ride was an army freight wagon covered with canvas, such wagon sometimes called the “prairie schooner.” “In the Days of Old, the Days of Gold,” as “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” the “prairie schooner” was almost the exclusive vehicle of conveyance over the deserts for freight and passengers. It was in the “prairie schooner” that the Mormons went to Utah in 1848, and the Argonauts to California, in “’49 and ’50.” It was from a “prairie schooner” that, rising from a sick bunk and looking out over that beautiful valley of Salt Lake, Brigham Young exclaimed: “This is the Place!”