The stone gives you the dates. This page is the dash.
The man standing here
Near six feet tall. Light complexion. Blue eyes. That is how Dan Story — who kept
his company's rolls and wrote out his description once a month for three years —
swore he looked, under oath, in 1899.
Deposition of Dan Story, taken by commission, Navarro County, Texas, August 1899.
The dash, as his own records tell it
March 1862. At about twenty-five, he joined Captain Molloy's
company in Limestone County, mustered at Navarro County into what became Company B of
Bass's Regiment — the 20th Texas Cavalry. He brought his own horse, valued at $165,
and $20 of equipment.
Company Muster-in Roll and Muster Roll, his compiled service record.
July 1862. He signed his name for a $50 enlistment bounty at
Camp McCulloch. That signature — Clendennen, in his own spelling — still exists.
Three separate record systems, decades apart, agree on this fifty dollars.
Register of Payments & signed receipt (service record); War Department abstract, 1910.
The war. About a year mounted, then the regiment was
dismounted and he served on foot; near the end he was detailed to shop duty at Fort
Washita, Indian Territory, and was there when the war closed. The army's surviving
rolls stop in May 1862 — not because he left, but because the later Confederate rolls
did not survive. His comrades carried the story the paper couldn't.
Depositions of Dan Story and James D. Hamilton, 1899; War Department reply, 1910.
The years after. A farmer. By 1899 he was sixty-two, living
at Alder Branch, Anderson County, Texas — thirty acres of land he'd paid fifty dollars
on and still owed a hundred and fifteen, two pony horses, a sow and pigs and a barrow, a hip that had come
out of joint, and lungs that bled.
His sworn pension application, July 22, 1899.
September 21, 1899. The State of Texas, having heard his
neighbors, his doctor, his old comrades, and his county judge, approved his pension as
an indigent Confederate veteran under the Act of May 12, 1899.
County certificates, Aug. 1899; Comptroller's approval, Sept. 21, 1899.
"I kept the records and had to make out his description, age &c.
about once a month, for about three years." — Dan Story, sworn deposition, 1899
The people who stood up for him
Dan Story, comrade
James D. Hamilton, comrade
W. L. Noland, witness
J. B. Bennett, witness
Dr. R. A. McQueen, physician
Judge G. W. Hudson, Anderson Co.
Some of them may rest near him.
Every one of them is part of his story — and he is part of theirs.