Earlier this year while doing some routine collections work we ran across a very small, nearly microscopic fossil. After a bit of research we identified it as a fragment of jaw from an early bat (NDGS 1691).

Image of NDGS 1691, right upper jaw (maxilla) with four teeth (P4-M3) of a fossil bat.

Due to the nature of powered flight, bats are pretty fragile animals. One needs to be relatively lightweight to be a successful flier, therefore most bats are relatively small and delicate creatures. As you can imagine, animals that are fragile and airborne have a relatively low chance of fossilizing. Adding to this, bats also tend to live and roost in caves and trees which are areas that are not very conducive for fossilization. Due to these factors, fossil bats are pretty rare, so this was a pretty cool discovery.

What makes this discovery even more exciting is the information about how old the bat was. The fossil record of bats contains many large gaps where no known fossils have been recovered. Some of these gaps might be as few as four million years or as many as 15 million years. Considering that for most fossil animals we have a nearly continuous record of evolution from its first appearance to its extinction or to modern times, these are large gaps. Some paleontologists argue that the fossil record of bats is the least known of all fossil animals. Using a system called biostratigraphy, we identified the associated animals found with the bat fossil and determined that this bat fossil was approximately 33 million years old. This age happens to be right in the middle of one of those large gaps where only one other bat fossil is known. That specimen, located at another museum, has since been lost to science, so this specimen is now the only existing bat fossil from this time period. We filled in a large hole in the fossil record of bats! Some might say a missing link had been found.

This bat will most likely be a new species of animal previously unknown to science. It helps us to understand the early evolution of bats and will be studied for years to come. The two other North Dakota Geological Survey paleontologists and I visit the site where this fossil was found every summer and hope to find more. This locality is one of our more productive sites. Who knows, maybe next summer we will find another bat or some other animal to fill in another gap.

“An excellent soldier. A true man loyal, honest cleanly & of sweet disposition. Death ere thou hast killed another good & brave & true as he. Time shall throw a dart at thee.”

Company Descriptive Book
Fort Rice, Dakota Territory
May 11, 1865

What would prompt a hard-bitten file clerk at a desolate outpost in Dakota Territory to write the preceding eulogy for one young soldier?

We may never know the answer to that question, but the State Archives and a subscription-based internet military site reveal this and other stories of a band of “volunteer” soldiers in Dakota Territory.

The eulogy is an anomaly among the 24,000 military records I recently researched to gain a better understanding of 645 Civil War soldiers assigned to the 1st United States Volunteer Infantry (1st USVI). The regiment is probably better known as the “Galvanized Yankees.”

The story of how the soldiers came to occupy Fort Rice, a Dakota Territory military post named after a Civil War casualty, is too long to recount in its entirety here. Here is the short version: President Abraham Lincoln was forced to get creative in finding enough troops to fight on the fronts of two contemporaneous wars. The American Civil War was raging in the East and the aftermath of the US-Dakota War of 1862 was smoldering in the Midwest. To address the troop shortage, Lincoln made an offer to Confederate prisoners of war; in exchange for a vow of loyalty to the Union Army, he would send them to the Midwest to “subdue” the Native Americans instead of sending them back to the Civil War.

Many books, stories and articles have been written about the “Galvanized Yankees” at Fort Rice. For my purposes, though, a more thorough study of the individual soldiers was required. After slogging through the military records, I had a much clearer picture of the individuals and personalities involved.

As with the eulogy to Private George Sampson of Company D at the beginning of this post, hints of their stories began to emerge. Private Sampson was a Virginia farm kid. He was described as being 17 years of age, 5 feet, 9 inches in height with blue eyes, light hair, and a light complexion. He died in the Fort Rice hospital on May 14, 1865, of “Typhus Fever.” Unfortunately, it is never revealed why he was singled out for such a unique epitaph and why his superior officer would paraphrase a 17^th-century English poem in his honor.

Left: Private George Sampson’s headstone, Custer National Cemetery, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (Crow Agency, Montana). The soldiers, including Private Sampson, were disinterred from the Fort Rice cemetery in the early 1900s and reinterred at the Custer National Cemetery
Right: Entry for Private George S. Sampson, Company Descriptive Book, 1865

A composite image of the soldiers at Fort Rice is difficult to assemble. Some details, though, can be noted:

The soldiers, as in most wars, were young. They ranged from 14 to 51 years of age with an average of 24 years. Private Clinton Millsaps, also from Company D and another farm kid, was born in Tennessee. He was the youngest of the lot at the age of 14 and measured in at 4 feet, 10 inches tall, which was 2 inches taller than the Springfield muzzleloading rifle he carried. He also had blue eyes, light hair, and a light complexion. At the tender age of 14 he had several things in common with his fellow soldiers: he was already a veteran of the Civil War, he had served time in a Union military prison, and he had survived the trip to Dakota Territory. Unlike Private Sampson and 101 other individuals at Fort Rice, he would survive to return home after his regiment was disbanded. He served as a “musician” at Fort Rice, probably deemed too short to fight.

The majority of the soldiers at Fort Rice were illiterate, as evidenced by the “x” on the signature line of their Union army “vow of allegiance.” Privates Millsaps and Sampson signed their names to the papers; 337 other members of the regiment (52%) signed with an “x.”

The soldiers of the 1st USVI, the first permanent troops at Fort Rice, were mostly southern kids. They hailed from 19 eastern states, with North Carolina being the most represented at 269 individuals. The remainder of the regiment was populated by men from 20 foreign countries including Prussia, Switzerland, and Ireland.

Fifty-two different professions were embodied at Fort Rice. Their occupations included slaters, coopers, weavers and teamsters. The majority (457 of them) listed “Farmer” as their occupation prior to the Civil War. Despite their collective knowledge, agriculture at Fort Rice was mostly a failure. The grasshoppers were able to muster more troops than the army.

Many more stories were revealed in the archives, but my space has come to an end. The stories of desertions, drownings, “accidental” shootings, court martials, sentences of “death by musketry,” acquittals, deaths from various diseases, and even a couple of deaths at the hands of the Native Americans they had come to subdue must wait for another day.