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Date Posted: 09:25:52 06/27/01 Wed
Author: Anonymous
Subject: News and Issues

Survivor's daughter, 94, attends rites
> By LORNA THACKERAY
> Of The Gazette Staff
> Seventh Cavalry blacksmith Henry W.B. Mechling was
> already a dying man when his daughter was born April
> 21, 1907.
>
> "He had heart trouble," the daughter, Minnie Grace
> Mechling Carey, told The Gazette in an interview
> Monday. "He got it while he was in the service. It had
> something to do with the cold."
>
> In fact, he had been ill since leaving the service in
> 1880 - four years after the Battle of the Little
> Bighorn. The winter after Custer's defeat, when the
> 7th Cavalry was still in the field, was punishing.
> Temperatures dropped to colder than 40 below. He
> wasn't the only soldier who complained of chronic
> illness after that miserable year.
>
> Carey and her older brother were late-in-life
> offspring of Mechling and his wife of 20 years. He was
> 55 when Carey was born.
>
> While she was growing up in their hometown of Mount
> Pleasant, Pa., Mechling resided at Soldiers' Home in
> Washington, D.C., where he could receive the medical
> care he needed. He died there in 1926. She saw him
> occasionally when her mother, ill herself, would call
> him home in emergencies. The family kept a lively
> correspondence during those years, but Carey never got
> to travel to Washington to visit.
>
> "We were so doggone poor, we didn't have any good
> clothes or any way to get there," she said.
>
> By the time she received the telegram telling her
> father's death, he had already been buried. Carey
> didn't get to visit his grave until 14 years later.
>
> Through the years and the separation, Carey never
> stopped honoring her father.
>
> On Monday, the 125th anniversary of the Little
> Bighorn, Carey, now a frail 94, read the names of
> members of her father's comrades in Company H during
> commemorative ceremonies at Little Bighorn Battlefield
> National Monument.
>
> "I hope I can get through it without crying," she said
> a few hours before the event.
>
> Carey, the last surviving child of 7th Cavalry
> troopers who rode with Custer to the Little Bighorn,
> has visited the battlefield five times since 1993,
> when she donated her father's belongings to the
> National Park Service museum.
>
> "To walk the ground where my father walked - you don't
> know what a wonderful feeling that was," she said. "I
> was just where my dad was, and I loved my dad. I love
> to come here."
>
> She uses a wheelchair now, and for this special
> occasion traveled from Pennsylvania to Montana with
> her daughters, Betty Myers of Bentlyville, Pa., and
> Sara McIlvaine of Sebring, Fla., and Sara's daughter
> Grace Wilson, who lives in Kentucky. Carey resides in
> Florida with McIlvaine.
>
> Carey gracefully signed autographs and posed for
> pictures with dozens of people who spotted her in the
> Fort Custer Trading Post Cafe across Highway 212 from
> the battlefield entrance. She had been interviewed and
> celebrated and had traveled all the way across the
> country in the last few days, but she smiled and
> answered questions from all who asked.
>
> She has a lot to be proud of. Her father survived the
> famous encounter with the Sioux and Cheyenne because
> he was assigned to Company H, one of several companies
> divided from Lt. Col. George Custer's immediate
> command just before the June 25, 1876, battle began.
>
> Mechling, reported as Mecklin in his citation for a
> Medal of Honor, was pinned down with the rest of the
> command under Maj. Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick
> Benteen about five miles away. The Sioux and Cheyenne
> laid siege to their position above the Little Bighorn
> River for two days. Mecklin won his medal for
> volunteering as a sharpshooter. His mission was to
> draw enemy fire away from other volunteers who risked
> their lives bringing water to the wounded and dying.
>
> He was awarded the Medal of Honor Aug. 29, 1878. The
> citation reads: "With two comrades during the entire
> engagement courageously held a position that secured
> water for the command."
>
> Carey inherited the Medal of Honor along with a unique
> collection of artifacts brought back by Mechling from
> his adventures out West. She said that after his
> discharge from the Army, Mechling stayed in Dakota
> territory and met Sitting Bull.
>
> "They were great friends," she said. Sitting Bull
> presented Mechling with a necklace made of bear claws
> and a bow and arrows. "The bow had little holes. In
> those little holes, they would take the venom of
> rattlesnakes and dip their arrows in it."
>
> Of all her father's possessions, it was his Bible that
> held the greatest meaning. Mechling's mother had given
> him the Bible when he entered the Army in 1875. From
> memory, Carey recited the inscription: "To my son,
> from your mother. Trust in God. Far from your home,
> but near to God. Good by. Mother."
>
> "When I was 12 years old, he presented it to me,"
> Carey said. On the inside, Mechling had written: "Dear
> Minnie, presented to my daughter Minnie Grace. Read
> and think of your God, and he will guide you through
> life. Your father, W.B. Mechling."
>
> For most of her life, she kept the precious objects at
> home under her bed.
>
> "I remember grandma taking me to the bedroom and
> spreading them out on the bed," Wilson said. "She
> would tell me the story about each one."
>
> Carey said her father didn't talk much about the
> battle or its aftermath, but he told her that he cut a
> button from Custer's jacket. The button was among the
> items Mechling gave to his daughter.
>
> Carey presented Mechling's collection to John Doerner,
> chief historian at Little Bighorn Battlefield National
> Monument, at Fort Lee, Va., quartermaster headquarters
> for the modern 7th Cavalry. Carey and her family had
> been invited to the fort where the Mechling Appomattox
> River Training Site was dedicated to his memory in
> 1993. Doerner brought the collection back to Montana.
>
> Mechling was discharged from the service at Fort
> Meade, S.D., on Aug. 4, 1880. Carey said he made at
> least one trip back to the Little Bighorn after the
> battle. He married Julia Stevenson of Ohio in 1885 and
> they eventually moved to Mount Pleasant. He opened a
> blacksmith's shop there, and then, with a partner,
> operated a shop in nearby Laurelville.
>
> Her brother, Henry Frederick Benteen Mechling, named
> for Mechling's commanding officer, was born in 1905,
> and Carey came two years later. Their life together
> didn't last long. Mechling had moved to the Soldiers'
> Home, and Julia was stricken with cancer. She died in
> 1919. Carey said that her father first found homes for
> the children with relatives. Later, they moved to a
> farm with a couple named Byers.
>
> Their father continued to supply money for clothes and
> paid for her to attend business school. At 18, she
> married. While in the process of moving, her husband
> stopped at the telegraph office in Uniontown, Pa. A
> telegram was waiting telling her that Mechling had
> died.

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