CHAPTER XIX
THE TWENTY-FIRST IOWA INFANTRY
THIS regiment was made up largely of companies raised in the Third Congressional District. Company A, however, had been recruited in Mitchell, Worth and Black Hawk counties for the Eighteenth, but, as that regiment was full, it was placed in the Twenty-first. Companies B, D and G were raised in Clayton County; C, E, I and F in Dubuque; H and K in Delaware; making nine hundred seventy-six men. The field officers first commissioned were: Colonel Samuel Merrill, Lieutenant-Colonel C. W. Dunlap, Major S. G. Van Anda, Adjutant Horace Poole. The Twenty-first went into camp near Dubuque late in August, 1862, where it remained until the 16th of September, then embarking on a steamer for St. Louis. From there proceeding to Rolla it was armed and equipped and for a month drilled for service. On the 18th of October, after a march to Salem, it was placed in a brigade with the Ninety-ninth Illinois, Thirty-third Missouri, artillery and cavalry under command of General Fitz-Henry Warren, of Iowa. Early in November the command marched to Hartsville. On the night of the 24th the brigade train was moving from Rolla to Hartsville, when it was attacked by a large force of mounted men, captured and burned. The small guard in charge was nearly all killed or captured after a short resistance. Three of the slain and fifteen of the prisoners were members of the Twenty-first Regiment, which at once marched to the scene of the disaster. The enemy had disappeared, leaving only the charred wreck of the train.
