St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 72

The "Little Old Maid" Who Herself Immorta I I The American Red Cross, in Celebrating Its Fiftieth Anniversary, Reminds the World of Clara Barton. etter nrtlten by Barton to ypl President AnJreu with endorsements, belon the Prendcnt, General Grant and others. Cross chapter, steamed down to New Orleati! and back, distribuU'v food and clnthir.i: for homeless triple and ft-eil fnr Clara Barton, as she looked at the time of the Civil War. By KEITH KERMAN fie Pott-Ditpatch Sunday Magaxine Staff mm. 1 ly, and Clara Barton and 30 a 1 a ts, three of them women, were soon on the ground.

From Friday night to Wednesday morning she worked, with two hours' sleep, and left the field with their starvint; livestock. There wen ukuiv other rHif'f i -sions during the sunpniifi years of Clara Barton's dency of the Red Cross, and she usually took the field to dinct personally the rescue work. A famine following a drouth ir, Texas, a cyclone at Mount Vernon. Illinois, in 1888, the Johnstown flood brought her and her array of mercy to the scene of desolation. Under her direction, also, the American lied Cross sent relief expeditions to Russia in time of famine and to Armenia after a series of massa HROl'GH the last four decades of the nineteenth century a little old maid from New England kept bobbitip up in the wake of disaster.

On battlefields of the Civ a train load of wounded just as the enemy cavalry came into view. Clara Barton wasn't sat 1 ri7 isfied with what she was accomplishing. There was still too much delay in getting help to suffering men. So she tried to reach the field before the battle did. A "tip" given to her in Washington enabled her to reach Burn- she came to call herself.

Her father was a farmer, reasonably well to do. When she was 15, a phrenologist, practitioner of what was then regarded as a science, felt the bumps on Clara's head and advised teaching as a good vocation for her. He said the fearful, shrinking child needed responsibility. He also said she would always be of a sensitive nature. "She will never assert herself for herself But for others she will be perfectly fearless." Apparently.

Freud, Adler and Meyer, In collaboration, could scarcelv have gauged more accurately the girl strength and weakness. A school teacher Clara became, and a school teacher she remained for almost 20 years. Then she suffered a nervous collapse and her voice failed. She gave up teaching, and presently became a clerk in the Patent Office in Washington. Miss Barton had been engaged in this work for several years when the Civil War began.

Wounded men from the first battle of Bull Run were taken to Washington hospitals and Clara Barton was among the women who hurried to the hospitals to care for them. But she soon saw that there were plenty of women for that task; there was a greater need to collect supplies and make them available to the wounded before they reached, the hospitals. side's army on the eve of the bat siue army on tne eve or tne Dai- AhSutMt if- tie of Antietam. She traveled in Wg jjjfa A- an army wagon drawn by mules h- )rjtjJb' and loaded with supplies; her triJt' jtfv personal baggage consisted of a fj-W cres. In 189 8 Miss Barton labored among starving, homei- ss Cubans, victims of the revolt against Spain, and when war between the United States a .1 Spain she led a Red Cross contingent of nurses and other relief workers to Cuba, where they helped for the soldiers wounded in the tattle of San Juan Hill and fed th- starving refugees from Santiago.

At San Juan she gave supplies to Colonel Roosevelt for some of the sick among his Rouch Riders, and was edified by the sitl.i of the Colonel, himself, carrying away on his back the sack of goods for his men. nations. At the time of Miss Barton's first acquaintance with it, the Red Cross compact had been accepted by 3 1 nations. She was deeply impressed with the organiza few things tied in a handkerchief. She saved time on the trip by driving at night around the long army train that was resting on Its way from Harper's Ferry to Antietam; when the train got under way again in HEN a tidal wave wreck Texas, in 1 -ars as Barton was almost lO MISS BARTON arranged for Si some women in Worcester, Massachusetts, to send her medical sup old.

But within five days there, commanding lie relief Her hair was still brown and were bright; she was still mentally and physically. But the Red Cross outur. Barton in that it became to ev tion and soon had an opportunity to see It at work. The Franco-Prussian War began in July, 18 70, and within 10 days Clara Barton was on her way to the front to serve under the Red Cross. She had forgotten she was an invalid.

She visited several battlefields, and later organized relief for the distressed inhabitants of Strasa-burg, Paris and Lyons. Miss Barton returned to America determined that the United States should become a member nation of the Red Cross. For several years illness kept her from doing much to further this design, but when her health improved, she went at the job in earnest. She besieged three administrations those of Hayes, Garfield and Arthur and in 1882 the fight was won. At the request of President Arthur, the Senate confirmed the adhesion of the United States to the Treaty of Geneva.

Hit the morning her wagon was just behind the cannon. From that time on, throughout the war, it was her endeavor to "follow the cannon." She worked at Antietam from the beginning of the battle until the last of the wounded had received attention. Much of the time she was at a field surgical station established on a farm just behind a line of artillery. The smoke of battle was so dense there at times that those who were caring for the wounded could scarcely see. Out in the open, Clara Bar service of mercy on other battlefields, including Fredericksburg, where a shell fragment tore away a piece of her dress, and the Wilderness, whose wounded were rescued from neglect through sure she was able to bring to bear in official quarters.

In 1864 she was appointed Superintendent of the Department of Nurses for the Army of the James and she served in this capacity for the remainder of the war. It was her first official service in the il War and the Franco-Prussian War, on the flooded Ohio and Mississippi in 1884. in the drouth regions of Texas in '8fi. at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the flood of '89; in Cuba in '98, in Galveston. Texas, after the tidal wave of 1900 there she was, busy, tireless and indomitable, giving first aid, medicine, food, clothing.

When official red tape impeded her mission, she con fronted her opponents with such an intensity of purpose that she created a queer illusion of physical Impressive-noss; many who saw her at such thought this woman, five feet two inches in height, was tall and imposing. And in these moments of stress her normally treble voice, instead of becoming shrill sank to a pitch almost masculine. She usually got her way. For five years, in intervals between active field work for the relief of suffering, she hounded Presidents, Cabinet members and Senators on behalf of a humanitarian project untii she got her way in that. In those days her name was as familiar in America as that of Anne Lindbergh is today.

The American National Red Cross, observing this year its fiftieth anniversary, is reminding a rather forgetful world of this New England spinster. For she was Clara Barton, founder of the American branch of the great international relief organization. In her house in Washington the first national Red Cross society was organized in 1S81, and she was chosen president, an office she filled for 2 3 years. The life of Clara Barton was full of contrast between what she was and what she did. Her career was spectacular, but she was not.

Biographers say she was timid when a child, abnormally sensitive, feminine, sedate and a thorough lady. Yet she could endure the grime and horrors of battlefields and disregard their dangers; could boss a gang of rough mule drivers; could ignore any question of propriety in being the only woman among thousands of men in the field. The key, apparently, was a strength of humanitarian feeling that lifted her above temperamental limitations; something that enabled her also to forget physical Ills and withstand the hardships of active service as long as there was need for her. Clara Barton was born on Christmas day, 1821. at North Oxford, Massachusetts.

Her name, originally, was not Clara, but Clarissa Harlowe, after Richardson's anguished heroine, but her friends called her Clara, and so rn.tn-ln for the detailed personal su of one person for the kind asement that she gave it. she resigned, and the Armrk Cross was reorganized. wi President of the United States ident. At Glen Echo. Maryl.u building which she had ere headquarters for the Red Cr lived for the remainder of i active and busy until her las.

She died at the age of 90. Si 1 1 Clara Barton, as she looked in 1902. i. good deal of physical work EFORE this, however, Miss Barton had felt certain of success. t.l.

and had organized, on May 21, plies and food and set up a distributing agency. She took two rooms in a business building in Washing, lived iB one and kept her stores in the other. But this did not solve the problem of giving aid as soon as it was needed. She decided to go to the front, taking the needed material to the battlefield. But first she went to New England and New Jersey and established sources of supply obtained assurances from individuals and organizations that they would send her the things she would take to the soldiers.

She obtained passes, arranged for transportation of her goods, established co-operative relations with the Sanitary Commission, the official relief agency. She went at her work in a businesslike way. Not the actual binding of the wounds although she did that, too, when she could but the systemization of relief, so that it could be given as effectively and speedily as possible, was Clara Barton's important work. In August of 1862 she had. her first battlefield experience.

It was just after the battle at Cedar Mountain. Miss Barton worked for five days and nights, with three hours' sleep. When news of the second battle of Bull Run reached Washington, she hastened to the field on a train bearing her supplies, and fed soup and wine and coffee to the wounded, until they were placed on the train for Alexandria. The battle of Chantilly followed quick- with housekeeping and gardi: well as much writing. She at-food and her bed was a rot.

fare and hard work" was her for long life. Clara Barton received much She was decorated by foreign 1 ments Germany, Serbia. Turkey, Spain. Men of high ily respected and trusted her norhnna Ihprp wpre times wis ton knelt to give a wounded soldier a drink of water; as she raised his head with one arm a bullet cut through her sleeve and killed him. Another man, facing a long wait for the attention of surgeons, asked her to cut a bullet out of his cheek; she did it with her pocket knife.

When her supply of food was gone, she found that three cases of wine had been packed in Indian meal, and with that she made gruel, which was carried in buckets to wounded men on the battlefield. When surgeons in her sector had to stop work at night, because the supply of candles had given out, with a thousand men needing attention. Miss Barton provided lanterns from the stores she had brought. The ex-3choolma'am continued her war, her previous relief work having been done as an independent volunteer. After the war Clara Barton spent four years obtaining Information about missing soldiers for their families.

She also had the graves of Union soldiers who died in Anderson-ville Prison identified and marked. During this time she began lecturing on her war experiences, with marked success. But in 1869 her health and voice suddenly failed again and she was sent to Europe to recover. In Switzerland she learned about the Red Cross, an international body for the "improvement of the fate of the military wounded in arms in a campaign," which had been created in 1864 by the Treaty of Geneva, signed originally by the representatives of 12 1881, the American Association of the Red Cross. On August 22 of the same year she formed the first local cha, -ter at Dansville, New York, where she had lived while recovering her health.

And before the Government had acted on the treaty, theRed Cross had done its first relief work in the United States after a forest fire in Michigan. In 1884 there were devastating floods on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivera. Clara Barton chartered a boat, the John V. Troop, and went down the Ohio distributing supplies. It was the first Red Cross relief boat on American waters.

Then she proceeded to St. Louis, chartered the Mat-tie Bell and, accompanied by officers of the newly-formed St. Louis Red t.i se hf for not a 11 distinctions hardly made up f'-r lack of husband and children, Clara Barton was not a man-hater, a mannish woman. However, she spinster by She had her youth and middle years. That did not marry, thus preserving world a heart of splendid tendtr and a strong, practical mind, on if one chooses, regard as destin laye four.

Sunday Magazine Louis tott-Dipaieh -October IB, 1 0.7 J..