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Note: On March 10, 1903, an obituary appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle written in the exaggerated fustian style of the times as follows: "For James Corgan, twenty years a soldier in the Nation’s army, taps has sounded just as the country was about to reward him for his long and faithful service. There are few of these long-term men left in the line, and those few are treated kindly, when the time for discharge comes. Corgan lay in the Presidio Hospital eagerly watching and waiting for the documents from the Secretary of War which would grant him his discharge and a commission in the Soldiers’ Home at Washington. The other day the longed-for papers arrived, but just a few minutes ahead of them an unseen orderly from the Great Commander approached the grizzled old veteran bearing his release from life’s army, and his commission to enter the Soldiers’ Home across the Great Divide. Quick to obey a command from his superior officer, the old soldier answered the summons, and the papers from Washington were laid in his dead hands." The obituary is not wholly accurate. James Corgan served almost twenty-eight years in the US Infantry. He was neither grizzled nor old at the time of his death, not yet having attained the age of 57. To judge from the few photos we have, he dressed nattily in collar and black silk tie or elegant cravat when on furlough visiting family in Aurora, and all of this on the pay of a private, a rank he retained his entire career in uniform. What possessed a man of education to serve at remote military outposts of the Old West on low pay and poor food for decades on end? How did Corgan endure years of mind-numbing tedium and poor housing in distant Montana, Colorado, the Dakotas, and other places, interspersed but briefly by intense moments of action and terror? Corgan served four years in Utah during which the regimental record is silent as to the occurrence of a single event of note. Yet, this was a man who traveled as a raw recruit in 1875 by rail, steamboat, and on foot over 1,700 miles with 196 other enlistees from Newport Barracks, Kentucky, to Ft. Shaw, Montana, only to arrive with three fewer men than had set out, all three killed by Indians, two with throats slit, and one scalped. Corgan chased over 500 miles on foot after the Nez Percé Indians to fight at the Battle of the Big Hole in 1877. He was present at the conclusion of what many consider to be the last engagement of the Indian Wars, at the Battle of Leech Lake, Minnesota, in 1898. He traveled 326 miles by rail in 1894 to Grand Forks, North Dakota, to help enforce a court order during the Great Northern Railway Strike of 1894, only to find further advance to Devils Lake impossible because, well, the railroad men were on strike. Though James is gone, he is not forgotten. Uncle Joe wrote of him some thirty years ago in A Brief & True Account…. Corgan, who always spelled his name as such, was brother to our great grandmother, Julia Cargan McCormick. His story continues in Part II.
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