ers;"
fellows undeserving the name of citizens, who, when the Republic called
for their services, ran away to Canada, or, gaining some remote covert
in the forest, defied the few officials who could be spared from the
front, to enforce law at home. But to the honor of our people it can be
truthfully said, that these weak-hearts were comparatively few in
number. Such there were, however; and to a party of them the
"skedaddlers' fort" owes its existence. It was built at about the time
the first "draft" of men was ordered in 1862. There were two or three
leading spirits, and altogether a gang of eighteen or twenty men banded
together in that vicinity to elude the enrollment. They "skedaddled" one
night--that was the time this ugly word originated--and took refuge in
the woods with their guns; and not long after, it is supposed, they
built this log fortalice in the depths of the wilderness.

In the dubious state of public feeling at that time, the people of the
county did not say much, directly, about the skedaddlers. No one, not of
the gang, knew who or how many were at the fort. At one time it was
rumored that there were a hundred armed men in the woods, probably an
exaggeration. Several farmers lost young cattle, which it was supposed
were stolen to supply food for the fort. One story was, that a number of
cows had been driven into the woods, to furnish a supply of milk. It is
hardly probable that these men could have been so ignorant as to think
that they would be able to resist the power of the government, if
official action were taken against them, although the fact of their
building a fort gave color to such a supposition. The wildest boasts
were made, indirectly, through sympathizers with them. Ten thousand
troops, it was asserted, could not drive them out of the woods! The
skedaddlers, it was said, were about to set up a new State there in the
wild lands and declare themselves free of the United States! Another
threat was that they would get "set off" and join Canada. If a Federal
soldier showed his blue coat in those woods (so rumor said), he would
suddenly meet a fate so strange that nobody could describe it!

Some months passed, when a boy named Samuel Murch--an older brother of
Willis and Ben--who trapped in the woods every fall, discovered the fort
one day and reconnoitered it. He had followed a cow's tracks up from the
cleared land. Several men were seen by him about the stockade, and there
was a large camp-