Beta Brotherhood

Page 46

1862

Beta’s Darkest Hour “. . . some chapters were split in two. Even the founders were involved on both sides… Ryan helped recruit and organize… Gordon and his two teenage sons entered the Confederate Army... [and] lost everything in the war. More tragically, John Holt Duncan also fought for the south, and lost his leg. [His prosthetic leg, below, was recovered after his death and resides in the Beta museum in Oxford.] It is a curious story, reported by his nephew, D.H. Chamberlain (not a Beta) in 1924:” “On the outbreak of the Civil War [Duncan] left as captain of a company of cavalry and fought under General Price all through the Arkansas and Missouri campaigns and was in the battle farthest north on Price’s operations where he was wounded and left behind at a farm house in Missouri. Before the retreat, Confederate surgeons amputated his right leg. A few days after the Confederates retreated, the Federals found he had been taken in and cared for by this farmer and his family, and promptly took the farmer, stood him up against the barn and riddled his body with bullets, and would have also killed Judge Duncan had it not been for the intercession of the weeping

wife and children of the slain farmer. They nursed him until his wounds had healed and then smuggled him through into the Confederate lines, then some 200 miles south of the farm house where he had been taken care of. From that time till he became superannuated and went to the Old Soldiers’ home in Austin, Texas, where he died, he spent nearly everything he made in caring for and educating the children of the Missouri family who had befriended him and who had lost husband and father because of the humanity they had shown.” — The Faithful Home of the Three Stars pg. 78

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Beta Brotherhood by Beta Theta Pi - Issuu