DEBUNKED?

The day Albert Woolson died in Duluth, a man few had ever heard of stepped forward in a small town in Oklahoma and announced that he now was the last surviving Union soldier in America. Louis Nicholas Baker said he was a year older than Woolson, had enlisted with a Missouri company of Yankee volunteers, and, just like Woolson, had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, if only for three months. His claim in Guthrie, Oklahoma, touched off an investigation that spread to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Until then, Baker had mostly been known around town simply as “Grampa.” For years he sat quietly alone on the stone steps of a Division Street office building in downtown Guthrie. Occasionally he was spotted at the local recreation parlor, where he liked to play Pitch, but he did not say much there either. For years he had seemed spry and healthy, and he hurried out each day for a two-and-a-half-mile walk. But mostly he loafed around the streets and bragged about his Pitch playing. “I have the championship touch,” he boasted. He never wore a tie and rarely dressed up. “I don’t want all the fussin’ around,” he said.

He still smoked—a pipe and cigar—and though his eyesight was almost gone, he managed to get through the morning newspaper with help from a large magnifying glass. For hours he sat on the steps in front of the office building, reading every item in the paper until the sun slid behind the building and it was time to walk home.

Baker said he had been born in France and brought to this country by his parents when he was eight. They farmed around St. Louis, then pushed west to Kansas, and in 1889 he hitched up a covered wagon and dropped down into Indian Territory in the years before Oklahoma became a state. He settled in the Pleasant Valley region north of Guthrie and claimed to be the only surviving original homesteader of Pleasant Valley.

He claimed he was the last of a lot of things. He said he was one of the few living members of the Anti–Horse Thief Association, first organized in Clark County, Missouri, in 1854, and thirty-five years later in Oklahoma Territory. He could show a few delegate ribbons presented by the local lodge. He said he had served with the Union Protective and Detective Association and that he once holstered a revolver and patrolled Payne County as a deputy sheriff. He had joined other fraternal organizations as well, like the Modern Woodmen and the Owl Lodge. But in 1918 he had given up homesteading, farming, and chasing horse rustlers and retired. He moved to a thirty-six-acre lot on the west end of Guthrie, where he kept a cow and planted a vegetable garden.

Baker said he had seen four wars but could name only three. He complained that “civilization is gettin’ worse all the time.” In September 1945, at the close of World War II, he had twenty grandchildren, but only one was in uniform. That fall a seventy-nine-year-old sister, twenty-one years younger than Baker, visited from Illinois to mark his 100th birthday. The family managed to coax the old man off his downtown stoop and to a granddaughter’s home for a small open house. The next morning he returned to his perch at Division and Oklahoma streets.

At 103 he sold the cow, plowed over the garden, and moved in with a daughter. He gave his seven children a couple of farm plots and other property he said was worth $40,000. “What would I want with it?” he asked. “I kept enough money in the bank to buy everything I want.” He said he was the last living person in town to have started a savings account at the Guthrie Bank the day it opened. “I’ve never borrowed a penny,” he swore. “I paid cash, or I did without.”

Another year and another birthday later, when the few remaining Union veterans were meeting for their final Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) convention in Indianapolis in 1949, Guthrie townspeople and reporters were surprised to find Baker still sitting on his stoop. Shouldn’t he have been in Indianapolis? “I come to town just like I do every day,” he replied. He never took part in any GAR events and had never applied for a Civil War pension. He said no one would find his name on the GAR rolls, either.

Where did he serve? What battles did he fight? “Ohio volunteers,” Baker answered, but he could not remember the name of the company or its unit number. (Missouri must have slipped his mind.)

He was more interested about turning 104. “I heard them talking something about a party,” he said with a grin.

On the morning of August 2, 1956, Albert Woolson died in Minnesota. By then Baker, by his own count, was a month shy of 111. And that afternoon news from the radio started buzzing around the town square. But Baker was no longer on his stoop; now he was confined to a bed in a Guthrie nursing home. There he told anyone who asked that he had never wanted to make a “hullabaloo” out of his three months in the war. Why did he pass on seeking a Civil War pension? “I didn’t need it,” he said.

His relatives said his Union army discharge papers had been lost long ago; in fact they had never even seen them. His daughter, Mrs. J. A. Yeager, doubted the family could come up with any proof. The old man in the nursing home could not be of much help. “He’s doing pretty well,” she said. “They sit him up for brief periods during the day, but they can’t leave him up too long because his arteries are hardening. The doctor said there is nothing the matter with him, other than hardening of the arteries. He looks good.”

The newspaper in the state capital started looking into Baker’s story. The Daily Oklahoman checked with Washington, D.C., sources and found the record of a Louis I. Baker of Illinois, a similarly named Civil War veteran listed in the National Archives. He had been part of Company E of the 6th regiment of the Missouri infantry. The records gave no exact birth date for this Baker, and other documents did not match with the Louis Baker in Guthrie. The Louis Baker of Illinois had been born in Luxembourg and was twenty-nine when he enlisted in June 1861. He entered the Union army at St. Louis and spent three years—not three months—until he was honorably discharged out of Chattanooga.

The newspaper asked the Haskin Service, a document research company in Washington, to dig deeper. In November 1956 the Haskin researchers issued their final report, “Another Union Veteran?” They had located the other Louis I. Baker—different from Guthrie’s Louis Nicholas Baker—who was “a carpenter by trade” in Illinois. They found that he had applied for and started earning a $20-a-month Civil War pension in 1879, based in part on several Civil War wounds, unlike the Oklahoma Baker, who had boasted he never bothered to seek a pension because “I didn’t need it.” The Illinois Baker had married and fathered two children; the Oklahoma Baker had seven. And the Illinois Baker had died in 1909. “If still living,” the report noted, the Illinois “Louis Baker would now be 124 years old.”

So Louis Nicholas Baker, whiling away his afternoons in downtown Guthrie, somehow had heard of the Louis I. Baker in Illinois and tried to steal his identity, or perhaps he had innocently confused himself in his old age. But none of it mattered much longer. In January 1957 the Oklahoma pioneer died at the Resthaven nursing home in Guthrie—five months after Woolson in Minnesota. His obituary gave him some of the recognition he had sought late in life. It noted that he had “claimed” to be the last Yankee soldier of the Civil War. And it left it at that.

ONLY THREE CONFEDERATES now remained.

William Allen Lundy hobbled around Crestview, Florida, with a wooden sawhorse rigged to his waist for support. He put his age at 108 when Woolson died. When asked for his secret, he had no answer. “I eat anything,” he said, his chin grizzled in whiskers, a brushed suede hat atop his head. “Anything I can get to eat.”

Frail and wrinkled, he no longer was as alert as in years past. “I used to have a big time and get around but I don’t do no more rambling,” he said. “I walk around the house a little. That’s all I can do. I ain’t strong enough, somehow.” Most of his life “Uncle Bill” had stayed off tobacco, and he looked down at those who chewed.

Liquor? “When I can get it,” he said.

How much? “Many and many a gallon.” Liquor store prices were too high, he said. But Lundy had long ago developed a homemade recipe. “I’d still make it if I could.”

How is it he had lived so long? “Keep away from them doctors, and take a little nip all along.” And, of course, “living right.”

After suffering a stroke, Lundy moved in with a son and his family in Crestview on the Florida Panhandle. Winters he spent inside, with the venetian blinds lowered just enough to cut the glare from the sun. When the phone rang, he seldom answered. “Women on it,” he complained. “Yak, yak, yak! All the time.” In the summers he sat outside, partly to avoid the phone.

He was immensely proud of his Confederate heritage. In April 1952, at 104, he told the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine that he had but one regret: “I just wish I could have had one of those fast jet planes when I served in the Confederate Guard. I bet I would have scared hell out of every one of those Yankees.” Asked if he approved of Southern slaves winning their freedom after the Civil War, Lundy said, “Yes, I’m glad. Sometimes they were abused, and besides, it’s not the wish of the Lord for any man to be a slave.”

He said he was born in Alabama in January 1848 and served in the Coffee County Home Guard when he was fifteen. He moved to Florida around 1890, settling on a farm in the Murder Creek community near Laurel Hill. In old age one of his ten children would sometimes drive him into town, but Lundy insisted, “I can drive a car as good as anybody.” He said he was still a remarkable shot with a rifle and could knock a squirrel out of the highest tree in Yellow River Swamp. He could catch any sort of fish too, pulling them right out of the water. He especially enjoyed picnics, and always won a trophy for being the oldest one there.

Life magazine photographed Lundy in 1953 at his son’s farm. They found the old man in big thick boots, dark denim overalls, and a gray coat. He sat on a rickety old stool next to a broken fence board, a cane in each fist, the suede hat crowning his silver hair. They shot him hobbling around with his sawhorse too. “You are here to take my picture,” he told the photographer. “But you will go away, and I will forget that you were ever here.”

Another photographer, Bruce Roberts, drove up from Tampa the following year and took pictures of Lundy around the farmhouse, playing checkers, breezing himself with a church fan, and wrapping the Stars and Bars around his legs on the porch. “He wasn’t boastful. He was polite and cooperative, and I was really impressed,” Roberts recalled. “He wasn’t claiming to have been in any great battles or shooting people off of horses, and he said very clearly it was just a Home Guard. And he certainly was accepted by the local people. He played the part well.”

In November Lundy bagged one of the first deer of the fall season on the sprawling Eglin Air Force Base hunting reserve. He measured the buck at six points and 140 pounds. He said the deer “ran right out in front of me and lifted up his head in the right position for me to paste him right between the eyes.… I’ll be back next week and get another one.” He said he loved hunting: “It makes me feel good, just like I do after taking a good swig of homemade skeeter juice.” Sports Illustrated gave him a one-paragraph mention in its “Pat on the Back” column, noting that for a man who once “hunted Yankees in the Civil War, Lundy can still handle a gun pretty well at 106.” Lundy had his picture taken with the buck’s carcass strapped on the hood of his black sedan. He stood ramrod straight, rifle in hand; on this occasion, he did not need any sawhorse to hold him up.

He reached 107 in January 1955 and celebrated by digging into his favorite meal: corn pone, fresh pork, ham, turnip greens, baked hens with dressing, and “tater” pie. A television crew from Pensacola put him on the news. He remembered that he once guarded a bridge near Elba, Alabama, as part of the state’s Home Guard, and they were under strict orders not to fire unless Union soldiers tried to take the bridge. Luckily, he said, “they did not.” “I have always been sorry I didn’t shoot one or two of them,” he added, and yet, “I’m not mad at anybody.” Not anymore, not after all this time. “Not even [at] a Yankee.”

In the spring he lined up in cap and gown with fifty-eight Crestview students and was awarded a high school diploma. It was just an honorary degree, and he had been invited because two of his grandnieces were graduating. He sat in the front row and thought the whole thing a lark. He kept staring at his diploma, although it was doubtful he could read. “I’m going to have it framed,” he said. “Hang it on the wall. And I might start teaching school.”

Two weeks after Woolson passed on, a writer visited Crestview and asked Lundy about his exploits in the Civil War. Lundy said he would grant the interview, but only if first he could hold the writer’s two small daughters in his arms. “Someday,” he said, “they can say that a Confederate soldier held them and kissed their rosy cheeks.”

He then gave quite a different account from what he had told before, especially about his age and what had happened on that bridge. In the past he had said he was fifteen and only served with the Home Guard, not the Confederate army; he also said he had strict orders never to fire his rifle. This time he told another story.

“I was conscripted into the Confederate army in March 1865 when I was boy of only fourteen years of age,” he said. “The entire country was at war! We were hearing of the intention of General James Harrison Wilson to burn the city of Selma, Alabama. On April 2, I was stationed at the entrance to a bridge on the main road into town. I saw the first horse troops as they headed toward my bridge. I aimed my gun on the leader and would have killed him for sure, but something told me not to fire my gun. For that brief moment, as I hesitated, the Union officer passed by and did not see me. If it had not been for that small voice saying, ‘Don’t fire your gun,’ I could have killed my first and only Yankee.”

Plenty of people believed him. Gen. Nathan Farragut Twining, the Air Force chief of staff, presented him with a special gold medallion. Lundy gazed at the prize for a long time and then held it aloft. “It’s real gold!” he beamed.

On his last birthday he reached 109. Two thousand people attended a party in the Crestview High gymnasium. He wore a faded Confederate hat and climbed the stage while hanging onto a blueberry-root cane. Two pretty girls helped him up. A chorus sang “Way Down upon the Swanee River.” “We’ve done all the hating we ought to do,” Lundy told everyone. Then he commenced to kissing the girls. They paid little mind, and gave him 109 silver dollars and a birthday cake. He said he would rather kiss girls than eat cake.

In March 1957 he underwent a gallbladder operation in Pensacola. He had prostate trouble too, and his kidneys were distressed. A doctor from Wisconsin performed the surgery, and said Lundy pulled through “much like a younger man might have.” Once past the danger point, the old man lay around the hospital waiting to go home, telling nurses and the staff how he once had fired several “potshots” at Yankees on that bridge—offering yet another version of the encounter near Elba.

“Uncle Bill” Lundy found his way into a pile of national magazines as one of the last living Confederates, despite a stack of birth, census, and pension records that documented otherwise. (Courtesy of Progressive Farmer magazine)

He eventually went home to Crestview. For the Fourth of July, he was named an honorary member of the Ground Observer Corps at the air base, just in case any Soviet fighter pilots might slip through the Florida cloud cover. A winsome brunette pinned the silver wings on his chest. It was hot that afternoon, nearly 100 degrees, but Lundy looked perfectly pleased. “I can whip ’em, I’ll protect ’em,” he said of his new assignment. “I joined up to spot Russian planes. It’s getting so I can’t walk much anymore, so I thought I’d take to flying.” A colonel handed him a certificate to go with the honorary wings but Lundy was not impressed. “The colonel ain’t as pretty as a gal,” he quipped. When the ceremony came to a close, he glanced around and asked, “Anyone got a nip?”

Progressive Farmer magazine put Lundy on their cover in August 1957. “Fought With Lee,” read the caption. He wore his suede hat, a string tie, and a broad grin. “Indestructible,” the editors proudly said of their cover boy. “Have you ever seen a more expressive twinkle in any eye?” They caught up with him at home, where he had hung a massive five-foot Confederate flag on the wall beside his bed. He spent most of his time there now, relaxing. The Crestview Chamber of Commerce suggested he fly the flag outside for everyone to enjoy. No, Lundy said. “I want it where I can see it.”

He talked about the war but did not mention any bridge. This time he said he had protected the Coffee County Courthouse. He said he never fired any potshots, either. But mostly Lundy wanted to chat about women. “The ladies are just as pretty as they were when I was young,” he declared. “I think they look better.”

A few days later he was driven to the hospital with a high fever, never having recovered fully from the gallbladder surgery. There he died. They shaved his beard and cut his long hair. His family could not find his old Confederate uniform. It must have crumbled away years ago, they guessed. A local sewing circle had been making a new Confederate general’s uniform for Lundy when he took sick, but he died before they could finish. So his family dressed him in a simple gray suit, white shirt, and gray tie. They took the flag off the wall and spread it over his casket. That was his wish; he had asked them repeatedly to remember to cover him in his Stars and Bars. After his burial in Laurel Hill, Florida, his son Charles brought the flag home and tacked it back up.

Was a Confederate flag–draped casket the proper final salute for William Lundy?

Census records show he actually was born in May 1860. When soldiers marched off to the war, Lundy had not yet learned to walk. According to the records, he was about twelve years younger than he claimed. In the federal censuses for 1910 and 1930, he did not even mention that he had served in the Civil War. He also had problems securing a Civil War pension and only was approved when the Florida state legislature took the extraordinary step of passing a special act to pay him the money.

Like many veterans, he first filed a pension claim in the bottom years of the Great Depression. He said he had served in 1864 in something called “Company Brown” in Alabama’s Home Guard. He was discharged, he claimed, at the “close of war.” Two comrades, one named Adams, the other Mason, filed affidavits on his behalf.

For two years his application lingered in Tallahassee, so he filed it again in October 1933, this time writing that he had served with Company D of the Fourth Alabama Cavalry. Gen. James McKinley, the adjutant general in the War Department in Washington, searched the records and came up empty. “The name William A. Lundy has not been found on the muster rolls on file in this office of Company D,” he wrote to the Florida state comptroller. Nor, for that matter, did Lundy appear with “any Confederate States Army organization numerically designated 4th.”

Lundy filed another claim. Now eighty-five (he claimed), he insisted that he had worn Confederate gray from March 1864 through May 1865.

He was turned down again. So he bypassed the bureaucrats and appealed directly to the politicians. In 1939 the state legislature rose to his defense. The lawmakers fudged his age a bit and then rammed his pension through:

WHEREAS W. A. LUNDY, of Okaloosa County, Florida, is now Ninety-one (91) years of age and in feeble and weakened physical condition so as to incapacitate him for work to support himself, and he is in destitute circumstances and greatly in need of a pension;

AND WHEREAS W. A. LUNDY has resided in the County of Okaloosa for more than fifty (50) years and is one of its oldest citizens;

AND WHEREAS W. A. LUNDY at the age of sixteen (16) years enlisted in the Confederate services in the Home Guards in Coffee County, Alabama, and rendered valuable services therein to the Confederate Cause.

The state awarded him $40 a month for “the remainder of his natural life or until otherwise provided by law.”

Lundy wanted more: a bump up to at least $75 a month. He said the Home Guards were as tough as any Confederate fighting outfit. He appealed to the state for an increase. In August 1941 the secretary of the Florida Board of Pensions declined to raise his pay. But over the years other cost-of-living increases came through; by 1953 his monthly pension stipend had risen to $150.

By then Florida and Alabama were each claiming Lundy as their own last Confederate rebel; both states touted him as their own. His Florida hometown planted a sign on the city outskirts: “Welcome to Crestview, Home of Uncle Bill Lundy.” In the city park they flew a Confederate flag in his honor. When he died, they carried him to a small hilltop rise in a cemetery just a few miles south of the Alabama-Florida line. In death, though buried clean shaven and minus a Confederate uniform, everyone wanted a piece of Uncle Bill.

THAT LEFT TWO. FROM WHAT WAS once a mighty Confederate war machine of hundreds of thousands, the ranks had thinned to two wizened veterans. The Civil War Centennial was just a few years away. Could either of them hang on?

John Salling was a tall, thin, wiry man. He did not march with any Confederate regiment or serve with any Home Guard. His task during the war, as he described it, was a short stint digging saltpeter for the Confederacy near his cabin on a slope of the Appalachian Mountains. He was about thirteen or fourteen then, he guessed. Now he seldom left his flyspeck of a town along the Clinch River at Slant, Virginia, but he crowded his last years promoting himself as one of the last Civil War veterans. He did it with a wide, infectious grin.

It was difficult not to like the old man. A saltpeter miner, a moonshiner, a logger, a railroader, a mountain farmer, he was full of cornball wisdom and hillbilly humor—a regular knee-slapping sort of feller. He lived so deep in the hills and hollows of southwestern Virginia, it nearly was Tennessee. When fame and celebrity rousted him out of the mountains in the 1950s, he relished every precious moment.

“I’m not a scholar,” Salling said during the final Confederate reunion in Norfolk, Virginia. “I’ve never had a fight. I’ve never been locked up in jail. I’ve been a great hand to visit the sick. I’ve given more than I’ve got, and I always tried to treat everybody right.”

He missed the Saturday nights of his youth, when “everybody got together for a square dance and there was plenty of good, hard cider to pep you up.” Sometimes he played the fiddle, his mouth free to puff cigars. Once he told that story to a doctor, and the physician looked him straight in the face and said, “John, you’ve been a hellcat, haven’t you?”

Like Lundy, Salling wrapped himself in the Confederate flag, and he loved the ladies: “I never met one I didn’t like.” Unlike Lundy, Salling had his own Confederate general’s uniform and the honorary title too. He wore both with gusto.

His early years had been remarkably tough, even for a mountain boy. He could recall backbreaking days carving a life out of those hills: “Many a day I’ve split one hundred or more fence rails out of cedar logs for ten cents a day and then went home and plowed my land with oxen.” Yet when he grew old, unhitched the oxen, and stopped cooking the cider, Salling still cut quite a youthful figure. Well into his 100s, his hair remained jet black, his appetite as hearty as ever. He drank a half-gallon of milk every day. His teeth might be gone, but he could see for miles, he said, and his hearing had held up, though sometimes when a storm blew through he would squiggle a hearing aid into place. “Can’t hear thunder without it,” he said.

Reporters would ask him to explain his thick, dark hair. “Always wearing a hat and never washing my hair. Maybe every five years or so.”

What did he have for breakfast? “Three or four eggs, coffee, plenty of sausage and fatback, puffed wheat, and plenty of bread.”

Dinner? “Fat meat when possible, fried chicken, soup beans, and cornbread.”

Did he take vitamins? “They ain’t much, I’m telling you. We had plenty of good food back in the old days that had more of them things in it than all the pills you can get today. And we were never sick with colds and such, either.”

What about the moonshine? “I’ve made a sight of brandy. Good likker never did hurt no man, if he knew how to drink it.… I found more excitement making illegal whisky than in the Civil War.”

The country life? “I’ve kept my nose out of other people’s business and have tried to get along with everybody.”

Big cities? “I don’t like to be about big towns. I’m plain about that.”

Religion? “The Lord has been merciful on me a great deal more than I have been on Him.”

And the central question: Why do men fight, why do men go to war? Salling lifted his long, thin finger and tapped it twice on his forehead. “They’re touched!” he said.

He was born, he said, in May 1846, and that is the date engraved on his six-foot-tall memorial stone on a hillside just down the road from the Salling family cemetery. Erected by the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, it honors him as “General” John Salling, “Virginia’s Last Confederate Veteran.”

According to family lore, Salling was one of four children born in Scott County, Virginia, to his fourteen-year-old mother, a slave named Caroline Matilda Salling. They raised him up in the hills; hardly had he learned to talk than he picked up the English lilt that had arrived with his father’s ancestors from Britain. Not long after the Civil War, he married Mary Flanary of Stony Creek, Virginia; their life together spanned seventy years and seven children. She died in 1939 and Salling started to push past 100, but still he rose each morning and walked the mile into town to pick up the mail, trade barbs with the locals, and walk home.

What no one knew around town was that the 1860 federal census showed that Salling had been born in 1856, ten years later than he claimed. The records indicate that he was born in Scott County to Caroline M. Salling, and that she was twenty-six years old at the time, not fourteen. The 1880 census puts his birth year in 1859, making Salling even younger, and it notes the African American blood on his mother’s side. The records describe him as a “mulatto.” His wife is listed simply as “Mary.” The 1910 census put him younger still: born in 1860, the year before the war guns sounded and the Confederacy needed any saltpeter.

In the Depression year of 1933, however, Salling went looking for a pension. He filed his papers in March. “I was in the branch that made saltpeter,” he wrote to state officials in Richmond. For his disability, Salling listed “old age.” He reported that he earned only $50 a year from a little farming. Asked whether there was a group of Confederate veterans in his community, he replied, “no, there is not.” Asked to name any wartime comrades, he came up with only one: a James Salling. Unable to read or write, he signed the papers with his X.

Gen. James McKinley, the War Department adjutant general, wrote that “the name John Salling has not been found on the rolls on file in this office of any Confederate States army organization. The records show that one John Salling served as an expressman in the Quartermaster Confederate Army at Fort Smith, during the month of November 1862, but the date of commencement and termination of his service has not been found.” Nor could McKinley find any record of a James Salling in the Confederate services.

James K. Johnson, the Virginia state pension clerk, searched the state archives in Richmond for a James Salling, but the closest match was a James R. Collings or Collins from Scott County, who had served as a captain of Company D of the 25th Virginia Regiment. Johnson wrote back to John Salling and mentioned the expressman named John Salling at Fort Smith. But, he added, “We do not imagine this applies to your service, as in 1862 you were merely a boy.”

Johnson noted that the state required a sworn statement that Salling truly had “enlisted in the Confederate army before entering the salt-peter works, or during this time you were employed in the salt-peter work, and detailed as an enlisted Confederate soldier.” He continued: “It is rather a peculiar coincidence we have two applications from Scott County recently, one from James Salling, who claims to be 84 years of age, and worked in salt-peter works, also one in the name of John Salling, received this month, who claims to be the same age and to have been in the same works. Is it possible that James Salling and John Salling are one and the same person? Please let us hear from you.”

John Salling replied that he served under a James R. Collins (as a friend spelled it) “to work in salt-peter mines.” He signed his X.

State officials moved cautiously, concerned that these two Sallings in the mountains might be brothers or cousins who were trying to fool them. They asked for more proof, telling the pair to sort it out. The Sallings told Richmond they were not related; they just happened to have the same last name and had worked together digging saltpeter.

The state ultimately granted James Salling a pension, and in 1934 his wife, Lydia Salling, filed for a widow’s pension when her husband of nearly sixty years died. But she had no idea which branch of the army he had served in, and could not name any of his superior officers. “I don’t know,” she wrote on the application. She signed her X, and the widow pension came through.

As for John Salling the Appalachian moonshiner, he did not respond to the discrepancies in his pension application. Once challenged about his service, he backed off. According to the records, he never was awarded a Civil War pension. But through the subsequent years he stuck to his story about digging saltpeter. At the start of the war, many young men volunteered for that duty to keep from being drawn into a Confederate combat unit. This was particularly true in the mountain regions, where people often were less willing to embrace the Southern cause and many remained loyal to the Union.

Salling said he spent a year in Lawson’s Saltpeter Cave on Copper Ridge. It was dirty, backbreaking work. Called “peter boys,” they wore caps and suspenders, sliding their small bodies into the mouths of caves at sunrise and slithering out at dusk. Often they crawled on all fours, with candles or burning splinters to light the way. By the time they reached manhood, their bodies carried the ravages of the mines—chronic back pain from the heavy bags heaved through the narrow passages, and lungs scarred from the dust and dirty air. Many died young.

“Yes, I dug saltpeter during the time of the war,” Salling said in a January 1959 interview. “I helped from under floors; I never worked in no mine. I helped get it out from under floors and they put it in sacks and hauled it off from there. And Captain Collins was the peter man.”

He did not remember any fighting around Slant, he said. “Not that I can remember. I couldn’t remember that.” But he did recall seeing “lots” of soldiers. “They wore gray, gray stuff,” he said; many carried “old army guns.”

Did he ever shoot a Yankee? “No.”

Did he meet Robert E. Lee or any other high officers in the Confederacy? “No, no, I didn’t.… But I do recollect that Stonewall Jackson got killed, and General Lee fell down.”

Did he remember the day news drifted into the hills that the war was over? “No, I can’t remember.… I couldn’t tell what year it was.”

How old was he when the war ended? “I just couldn’t tell exactly. I couldn’t tell you exactly.”

The war he could not remember became his life; it defined him in old age, it brought fame, medals, and a fancy gray general’s uniform that he wore for special occasions. Sometimes it turned his mountain humor into little nuggets of wisdom. “Wars are uncalled for,” he told the Washington Post. “Wars are all part of some scheme or for a man who wants himself put on a monument.”

But mostly he kept up the cornball humor, as in the story he told the Richmond News Leader about two U.S. revenue agents who showed up in Slant to arrest him for cooking whiskey and take him to jail in nearby Abingdon, Virginia. “The way to go into the moonshining business is first to make friends with the revenuers,” Salling said. “Then everything should be lean and pure to make good likker. One night, I was up there in the holler alone. It was drizzling rain. I thought I saw a flash of light, and then somebody knocked at the door. I just had my hand over the still cap to test the singlings when they called for me to open up. It was two local revenuers, federal men, and I knew ’em both.”

Salling asked, “Want a drink of likker, boys?” “Yes, bad,” one agent said. So, Salling continued, “both of ’em took a drink. I told ’em I had a leak in my cap, and one of ’em fixed the leak while the other one shoveled the fire. Well, I says to ’em, ‘Boys, we’ll all go to Abingdon now.’ ”

One of the agents went home with a keg of whiskey, the other a quart. Now there was no way they could haul Salling in for what they had just done. But they did not leave without a word of warning against mountain hooch. Salling replied, “I says to ’em, ‘I ought to caution you. Don’t you fellers say nothing about finding this still.’ ” One of the agents assured him that his secret was safe: “This is the best place to make likker I ever saw.”

Salling loved to show off his still and explain his recipe: six bushels of finely ground cornmeal, a bushel of rye meal, a half bushel of corn sprouts ground down for malt, and three or four gallons of molasses. But most visitors did not want to learn about whiskey; they wanted to hear about the war.

So Salling would tell them he had attended the seventy-fifth blue and gray reunion at Gettysburg in 1938, one of his rare trips off the mountain, and had watched the president light the eternal flame. An amazing feat, he thought.

“Me and a couple of Yankees set together and listened to President Roosevelt speak. He didn’t have nothin’ to start from much, but he said he was going to set a light up there that would burn forever. I set up close to one of them Yankee fellers and I said, ‘Now, ain’t that a mystery?’ This here Yankee took a drink of likker and said, ‘Well, he won’t never do it.’ ”

Old Salling would slap his knee at that one, grinning with a mouthful of gums. Other times he would let his family turn the tables on him. “Course he still likes a pretty girl,” said his daughter, Nancy Thompson. “You ought to see the shines he cuts when he sees one coming up the road. And when he gets a spoonful of likker in ’im, he’s equal to a Holston preacher. He can preach a sermon then!”

Wife Mary died in 1939, and John carried on. Many afternoons he went fishing, a pastime he learned skipping school when he tired of “larnin’.” Once during World War II he felt a knot on his face and visited a hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee. He refused to be X-rayed because he did not trust pictures. Because it was a veterans’ hospital, the staff first wanted to make sure he was entitled to treatment.

“The doctor asked me what war I was in,” Salling recalled. “And I said, ‘Hell, I was a Rebel.’ ‘Hell fire,’ he says. ‘You can’t stay here. Uncle Sam had rather see a German or a Jap in here than a Rebel.’ ”

In 1951 he left the mountains for his first airplane ride. He flew across the state to Norfolk, Virginia, for the last Confederate reunion. He dressed in his general’s uniform with medals ablaze. When they landed, he asked for a drink; at the Gettysburg reunion, he had taken his share of spirits with the rest of them. “I might do a little preaching, too,” he hinted.

He was 104, he said, his hair still jet black and—miraculously—his hearing suddenly improved. It must have been the plane flight, he thought: “I feel that I can hear better way up in the sky.”

He almost did not make the event. He had been down with a cold and in bed at home and felt it best to stay put. But then he thought he should make an appearance for the sake of the Old Dominion. To get him to Norfolk, the Pentagon sent the plane. So he waved in the parades, reviewed the bands, and crossed his heart at “Dixie.” He had himself a barrel of fun. “Whiskey won’t hurt you if you know how to drink,” he assured everyone. “You just tip it up and pour it down.”

He flew again to Richmond two years later, climbing unassisted out of the plane at Byrd Field. It was a stopover on his way to West Virginia, where he would be honored by the Patriotic Sons of America. He wore a new Confederate uniform donated by the Women’s Army Corps at Fort Myer, Virginia. He covered his chest in medals again. He hoped to live as old as Methuselah. “I want to set a new record,” he said.

Reporters on the tarmac wanted his thoughts about U.S. involvement in Korea. “They shouldn’t be over there,” he replied. “There shouldn’t be any war. I’ve lived all this time and have never been in jail and never had a fight. If I can get along with other people that well for 107 years, I don’t see why nations can’t get along as well.”

Salling traveled up to Washington to “confer” with his congressman, again in full Confederate splendor. In Richmond the General Assembly granted him a special $500 soldier’s bonus, and he snagged an honorary military pension of $135.45 a month as well. By 1955 everyone was calling him “General” Salling or “Uncle John.” Back home he sat in his mountain cabin with the embroidered picture of Jesus on the wall and waved from the window. Sometimes he made hay: “There’s a woman flirting with me now,” he teased once. “But she’s eighty-two. Who wants a woman that old?”

In February 1956 he caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Doctors made him quit his daily snort. Some thought this might be the end, and neighbors and newsmen started gathering around the cabin. Salling sent out a note: “I’m not dead yet.”

A trio of dubious Confederate veterans hobnob at the 1951 Confederate reunion in Norfolk, Virginia. Left to right: William “Billy-Dan” Townsend of Olla, Louisiana, John Salling of Slant, Virginia, and William J. Bush of Fitzgerald, Georgia. (Courtesy of the Main Library, Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk, Virginia)

At 109 he was loaded up with gifts. The Army gave him a gold medallion: on one side pictures of Grant and Lee, with the Union and Confederate crests on the other. The governor in Richmond presented him with a Confederate gray shirt; the Texas Rangers gave him a ten-gallon hat. Old John Salling poured on the country charm. “I might even take a bath,” he cracked.

But time was closing in. At 111 he said he felt “like a two-year-old egg—rotten.” To cheer him up, a local city club bought him a new leather recliner. At 112 the Civil War Centennial Commission visited Slant and awarded him an honorary membership “in recognition of your distinction as a veteran of the Civil War.” A hundred-car motorcade rolled through the tiny mountain hamlet and up the hillside to present him with a framed, hand-inscribed, water-colored certificate. In his wheelchair out on the porch, wrapped in a thick blanket even though it was May, he just squinted at the crowd. They filled up the four-room cabin and a good part of his thirty acres, where most days his harness and team of mules stood around doing nothing.

In January 1959 an oral historian came to the mountains. They talked about home and the Appalachians and how the farthest north Salling had ever been was Gettysburg. But the old man seemed confused and distracted, lost in his cave of memories. To keep him focused, the interviewer buttered him up.

“Uncle John, I think you’re the most favorite, famous citizen.”

“Well,” Salling said, “I’ll have to tell you a little joke.” He rambled on with a story about a knife and a plug of tobacco, but it made little sense. The interviewer tried to bring him back to the topic of the Civil War.

“We had good men on both sides,” Salling said. But he wandered off some more, telling of his grandmother Tildy and how the Indians had scalped her father. He talked some about hair and moonshine too.

The interviewer tried again to refocus him on the war. He pressed him about the mines and the Confederacy, about Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Did he have a part in the war or not?

Old John Salling, 112 years old (if he was to be believed), leaned back in his wheelchair. He paused a good long while. “I aim to tell a man the truth,” he said, “or nothing at all.”

He died of pneumonia six weeks later. They brought his body back from the hospital in Kingsport, Tennessee, and to his home in Slant. They lowered the flags, and a bugler played the long sorrowful notes due a fallen soldier. They dressed him in Confederate gray and covered his copper casket with the Stars and Bars. Thousands turned out for his funeral. Full military honors were awarded the man who said he had dug saltpeter.

Of the many wreaths, flowers, and floral arrangements that decorated the funeral, one came pinned with a short sympathy note from Walter Williams, the Confederate veteran scrunched up in bed in his daughter’s extra bedroom in Houston.

“Am I the last one?” Williams asked, his words barely a whisper, his breathing faint and shallow. “Well, I always wanted to stay here until they were all gone, to see what happened.”