These are tough times. But we are a tough people, we humans. I came across a story last week about how strong people can be, how they can–as Faulkner said–endure the most extraordinary things. Sometimes we’re just too ornery to quit.

It was a rabbit hole, and I am infamous for not knowing when to stop. The rabbits multiplied in their little warren so much that this became two stories. If you like human interest stories, I promise this pays off.

The starting point was two weeks ago, when I failed a little history quiz. It was the Saturday Times Flashback test, the one where you have to put historical events in order. This ought to be my wheelhouse, but there’s always that one trick question that mars my perfect score and makes me curse the quiz-writer.

For this November 8th quiz, you had to guess the approximate date for when was “the last Civil War pension check distributed”? You had hints–it was either before or after 1957 and before or after 1823. I thought I had this one for sure! Definitely before 1957 but after 1823. A man was in the Civil War, let’s say as young as age 15, then his child maybe was born as late as 1880 and died in… NOPE! Not even close. She was born in 1930 and died in 2020. WTF?!? Yes, WTF indeed.

That was just the start of this intriguing story about the father Mose and the daughter Irene. Most of the info we have is about Mose, who fought in the Civil War–on both sides. Much of the legwork was laid out in a 2014 a Daily Mail story augmented by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael M. Phillips. Irene was tracked down by Lorraine Orton, a historian with the Women’s Relief Corps, and her husband Jerry, who found Irene after thirty years in a nursing home.

The news articles follow the journalist rules, laying out key known facts. But I find myself trying to understand the people. What kind of a person does THIS? What kind of a person could live through THAT? Today: “Uncle” Mose’s story. Tomorrow: Lydia and Irene’ story.

MOSE

Mose Triplett was born in 1846, up in the hills that mark the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. The Blue Ridge Mountains, Watauga County. Phenomenally beautiful place. Ripped apart last year by hurricane Helene, still not recovered. MAGA country. Moonshine country. We visited friends there back in 2016, and that blue-on-blue horizon stays with me.

Mose had at least one brother and worked on the family land. We don’t know much, except that they raised chickens and pigs…and probably had a distillery. There are a ton of Tripletts sprinkled across Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, many whose ancestors were in the Revolutionary War and received land. One married the niece of Zachary Taylor. Not much is known about Mose Triplett, until war drifted west into the mountains like smoke from the coast of the Carolinas. The most detailed records in Mose’s life are about the war.

WAR

Mose signed up with the 53rd North Carolina regiment at age 16, the year after Fort Sumter. That was young. Records say the average age in the South was around 24, although each year, the age dropped a few years. More teenagers made up the troops in 1865, after so many had died. What persuaded Mose to do it? His brother enlisted, so was he being companionable? Off on a lark, trying to get away from farm chores? Later on, both North and South instituted a draft, but not in 1862.

He was in the army hospital for half of his first year, unknown reasons. Soldiers regularly died from transmitted diseases as well as from seeing action. Typhoid, dysentery, and tuberculosis ran right through the camps. Spoiler alert: Mose lived into his nineties. Did recovery as a teenager improve his immune system?

There wasn’t much fighting up in the mountains near home–very difficult terrain. Seems like he could have just hunkered down somewhere if he didn’t want to fight. Why go? Sure, patriotism, but he couldn’t write his name (signed papers with an X) so he likely didn’t read the papers. Later on, he would claim that he was never in the Confederate army and that his family and neighbors were Lincoln supporters and didn’t care for all this new Democratic sentiment. There were few slave owners up here. As one article said, the mountain people had no interest in helping the plantation people–those wealthy aristocrats with their free labor, who got rich when others had to struggle to scratch out a living. Who did he think he was fighting for? Or did he just enjoy shooting at things?

Out of the hospital in 1863, Mose was reassigned to the 26th North Carolina Infantry Regiment. The new group was run by stricter, military institute types and absorbed into Lee’s Army of Virginia. After all, Lee was the quintessential strict, military institute type. The Confederates had begun winning battles, and Lee was taking them north, crossing into Pennsylvania, trying to hurt the Union enough for them to give up and leave the South alone.

Mose was now far from home, seeing some hot fighting, e.g. in Fredericksburg. He was again posted to a Confederate hospital. Decades later, a Wilkes County Census would list Mose as shot in the shoulder, so perhaps that put him in the ward this time. This time, after the hospital stay, he slipped away, officially listed as a deserter on June 26th.

Five days later, his regiment would march into the humid woods of Pennsylvania, sweating in their heavy uniforms as they tried running up through the trees to shoot at Union men, stationed behind rocks. July 1, 1863 was an ignominious day for the North Carolina 26th. Eight hundred went in, 86 killed and 500 wounded, and, two days later, the remaining 200 dead in Pickett’s Charge. The 26th was infamously the unit that saw the worse casualties in the war. Mose had left early, literally dodging the bullets.

SIDES

Over a year later, Mose surfaced in the hills on the Tennessee/North Carolina border again. He signed up again–where had he been? Maybe hunkering near home. Disillusioned certainly. In early 1864, along with dozens of others from Watauga County, Mose signed up on the Union side. The tiny nearby town of Boone, NC, was apparently a hotbed for Union enlistment, paying bonuses. (At the war’s end, Mose’s records said he was owed a $100 bonus, though he owed the army more than that for uniforms. Strange math. Always strange math in war.)

Mose signed up with Commander George Washington Kirk, a hothead whose Tennessee raiders became infamous for riding into Confederate supply posts to take supplies and destroy resources and transportation depots. Locally, the group were considered “hooligans and turncoats.” But it sounds a lot more fun than running up a humid Pennsylvania ridge in a woolen uniform in July while being picked off by people behind rocks; the Gettysburg records say the NC Regiment men died still in “perfect formation.”

Mose clearly had a lot of Confederate companions on the Union side, but that few months of shooting and mayhem cost him. After returning home to North Carolina, he would be cursed by his neighbors, treated as a social outcast for the remainder for the next 73 years.

A LIVING

Twenty years pass before Mose resurfaces in (available) records. The scuttlebutt was that he sat up there in the hills, drinking moonshine, playing the banjo, and reminiscing. Mose was an ornery cuss, known as “Uncle Mose” to some and to others as that man who liked to shoot walnuts on the trees with his Civil War pistol just so you knew he had a loaded gun at all times. They say he pulled the fangs off rattlesnakes and let them roam his property. One reporter said that he’s wearing a snakeskin around his neck in that photo, the only one ever taken of Mose Triplett. Did the war make him ornery? Or being called traitor every time he went into town for some cornmeal? Or was it living off the proceeds from his “distillery” business?

Sometime during the 1880s, he married Mary Watson, a woman two years his senior. It was Mary’s second marriage, and genealogy records note she had two children from her first marriage. She had none with Mose, marrying him in her late thirties. However, her great-niece Dorothy Killian, who kept the family stories, said that her grandmother was raised by Mose and Mary, so they were nurturing to somebody.

Also in the mid-1880s, Mose applied for a Civil War pension, both on his own and through his Congressman. We don’t know if he received money, but an 1880 Wilkes County census lists him with several others, noting their injuries. The others claimed they had dysentery; Mose said he had been shot.

In 1920, when Mose was 74, his wife Mary died. He had no children of his own, though they called him “Uncle Mose.” He likely needed someone to take care of him, as that dinner was not going to cook itself. He remarried, this time to 28-year-old Elida “Lydia” Hall. Nearly thirty, Lydia’s prospects for marriage were probably also thin. Why else attach yourself to an ornery cuss who sold moonshine and sat on the porch all day with a gun?

The Gettysburg 75th reunion was held in 1938. Mose decided to go with others from North Carolina, along with a caregiver. Reporters talked to him on a “pallet” so he may have been on his last legs. They housed him with the Confederate side. However, he told a reporter on the way home that he was not a Reb, had always been Union, and had fooled everybody by being with the Union the entire time. His caregiver didn’t know, nor did those in the Reb tents at the reunion with him. Which part was true anyway? Was he on the Confederate record but Union at heart? All the veterans at the 75th reunion would have been in their 90s or 100s. Who knows who would have recognized anybody?

Mose didn’t apparently shake hands or make peace with the other side. How can you make peace with the other side when you fought on both sides? Fought everybody, in spirit, for 92 years? Mose died of cancer, a few days after the long journey home. Gettysburg got him in the end.

They put up a grave marker in the hills, marking his service. There’s a group in Wilkes County, North Carolina, that decorates the graves with confederate flag. Mose ‘s grave has none.

TOMORROW: The Fierce Triplett Women