Women's Service in the West

During the Civil War, much attention was given to the Eastern Theater where troops defended Washington, D.C., and made repeated attempts to take the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. The United States west of the Appalachian Mountains was divided into three other theaters of the war: the Western Theater, the Trans-Mississippi Theater, and the Pacific Coast Theater. The Union forces in the West would prove decisive in the war. By seizing control of the Mississippi River, their efforts cut the Confederacy in half and blocked supplies to the rebels in the East. Sherman's march from the Western Theater to Georgia in 1864 helped bring the Confederacy to its breaking point.

Like their Eastern counterparts, women in the Western theaters of the Civil War offered their assistance to the war effort. Local aid societies contributed supplies and volunteers in camps and hospitals, with the largest organizations in the major cities such as St. Louis taking the lead. Although the U.S. Sanitary Commission had its representatives in the West, the Western Sanitary Commission helped to coordinate supplies for the trans-Mississippi region from Tennessee to Texas. The Western Sanitary Commission relied more on local leaders and local solutions than the top-down leadership of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in the East.

However, Western women often faced more challenges at home than Eastern women. Beyond the difficulty of topography, climate, and distance, pre-existing tensions among white settlers, as well as between settlers and American Indians, made their situation more precarious.

Distance limited the ability of some women to volunteer as nurses—railroads extending across the northern areas of the West allowed women to travel from home more easily than those in the southern areas. Women nurses worked at military general hospitals in the major cities, such as Benton Barracks in St. Louis, but could also be called to work on transports along the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

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Red Rover was a Confederate ship that was captured during the fighting around Island No. 10 on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. It was refitted with funds from the Western Sanitary Commission as a Union hospital ship in June 1862. Period accounts described the Red Rover as one of the most beautiful steamers on the Mississippi River with splendid accommodations for the sick and wounded.

Breckinridge was raised by her grandparents in Princeton, New Jersey. She traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, in April 1862 to serve as a nurse and then went to St. Louis where she visited many hospitals during the winter. Later, she served on hospital transports carrying soldiers from battlefields along the Mississippi River to general hospitals in the cities. Breckinridge returned to the East coast hoping to recover from the measles and return to her duties. In early May 1864, she arrived at the Episcopal Hospital in Philadelphia to receive more training as a nurse, but contracted a mild skin disease that left her weak and tired. In June 1864, she traveled with her brother's family to Niagara Falls where she became severely ill. Breckinridge died five weeks later.

Colfax of Michigan City, Indiana, spent many hours of her childhood assisting her mother as she visited and ministered to the sick. Widowed before the Civil War, Colfax was determined to volunteer as a nurse despite the objections of her mother and friends. In October 1861, she went to St. Louis and was the first female nurse assigned to the Fifth Street Hospital. She worked on the U.S. Sanitary Commission's transport Louisiana which carried wounded from the Battle of Shiloh to St. Louis, and later served on hospital transports along the Ohio River. In 1863 she worked at the general hospital at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. Colfax served as an Army nurse for two and a half years before returning home in early 1864.