St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1894-04-29

vivid events Of my life shall always look
back upon the night of February 8, 1864, as
being the strangest. M
Soon after dark Colonel Rose, Major Hamil-
ton and Captain Johnsen--the latter had been
in the tunnel for three or four days and was
reported missing = succeeded in getting
through with others who were directly in the
secret. Those who had heard of a tunnel,
but knew nothing of it except as a rumor,
became at once the most eager to get throw.
to Goods land"
AS is known, access to the hospital cellar
was had by taking up the bricks in the back
Of the fireplace in the Carey street end of the
diningroom or kitchen.
Among the rations served US by the con-
federates there were few tallow candles for
each of the immense rooms. These, as soon
as it became dark, were lit, and fastened to
posts in the different rooms, serving merely
to reveal the darkness. Every night at nine
O'Clock, beginning with post No. 1, the guards
would shout:
Mine o'clock! Post No. =! Lights out
up there. you ID Yanks p and at once the
tallow dips would be extinguished. AS soon
as the lights We're out this night the men, in
fireplace, forgetting all their previous self
denial and manliness IN their wild efforts to
get through to Gods land. About IL o'clock
some one started the cry: "The guards the
guardsp
Whereupon the prisoners, shouting and
struggling like demons about the fireplace,
made break for the stairs leading to the up
per rooms, and were soon lying, painting, on
the floors in their own sleeping places Those
who had The presence of mind not to be in
fuenced by the alarm had now a clear field
to themselves, and succeeded in getting
through.
Captain Moran says that one hundred and
nine men escaped. There were really one
hundred and ten, OF whom fifty were recap
tured. Had not the tunnel been discovered
on the afternoon of the 10th the prison
might have been emptied the following night
A curious incident, which 1 have never heard
recounted, followed the enemys discovery of
, the escape. The following morning, as was
usual, the prisoners were assembled into the
Upper Potomac room, to be counted into the
Upper Chickamauga Little Ross,'' we'll
known to all the prisoners, and who was SUBJ
sequently burned TO death in the Spottiswood
hotel in Richmond, kept tally as the men
passed through. He counted them by fives,
and when he discovered that ITO men were
gone, he hurried and reported the fact to
Turner, who received the statement with
open-eyed increduiity. "Why," he is re-
ported to have said to Ross, ''the number Of
men missing is divisible by five. You have
Simply madea mistake in your tally
If the prisoners had known the number of
men who had gone through the tunnel, they
could have made up the deficiency and so
avoided suspicion, by having the men pass
through the west room, climb up the posts
to the roof, crawl along the roof to the upper
Potomac room, drop down and be counted
again; but unfortunately they did not.
Turner appeared in person, to supervise
new count and, by this time, the prisoners,
learning that ''two hundred men were miss
ing" determined to make up the deficiency,
and they oyerdid it. It should be said that
in their rags and with their pale faces they