Daniel Dow, soilder at age ten
A few weeks ago we carried a column on William Owen Van Vaxen Goodlow, who was born a slave, later fought for the Union during the Civil War, and eventually settled near Wales to farm and raise his family. The column prompted an inquiry as to whether there are other black Civil War veterans buried in our county.
I don’t know. But I do know I heard from an authentic local historian named Gale Eshelman asking if I was aware that a veteran of the Revolutionary War was buried not far from here. I did the math and was skeptical. That war cranked up in 1776 and Cornwallis threw in the towel in 1781. A soldier twenty years old when the war ended would have been a very old man when whites started settling here, and he’d have been 108 when the Burlington to Missouri road opened things up.
With that Eshelman showed me a photograph. The tombstone bore the name Daniel Dow, said he had died on February 7, 1860 at the age of 88, and was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. I was still doubtful. Born in 1771, Dow would have been four years old when the war broke out at Lexington. I know Washington took ‘em young, but surely not that young.
A little digging into the matter proves me wrong. People who have gone to great lengths to research rosters of the Revolutionary War have established that Dow was born in Connecticut, the son of a minister, and that he did, in fact, enlist at the age of nine or ten. Boys like Daniel Dow were not taken to be front-line soldiers, serving instead as messengers and doing non-combat duties, but they were often not far from the fighting.
After the war Dow became a teen-ager, married, and settled for a time in upstate New York. Two of his sons went west, eventually making their homes near College Springs. In 1857 Dow and two of his grandsons joined them. It was written that the elder Dow, then 85 years old, walked most of the distance from the Mississippi to Page County.
An account printed in the Clarinda Journal says a granddaughter of Dow recalled him speaking of the Revolution, saying he regretted that he had not engaged in combat in any major battles.
On a related note, a man named Richard Cotter is buried in an old cemetery north of Elliott. Cotter’s stone tells us he died in 1875 at the age of 77, and that he was a “Hero of the War of 1812.” Cotter would have been just twelve or thirteen when that war kicked off with the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. The details of what a boy his age did to merit being called a “hero” we don’t know. If anyone does we’d like to hear about it.