Adam Dohr

Adam’s Story

The Grave That Reached for Me

I have never had an experience like I did at the Fort Douglas cemetery. Most cemeteries are quiet places, so when someone reaches out to have their story told, it’s a surprise.

At Fort Douglas, the air was buzzing and full of static, there were so many reaching. It was overwhelming, a feeling somewhere between a tickle and an itch. But with so many grabbing at me, it was actually the quiet one who caught my attention. He was so polite, he merely said, “…Please.” I stood and cried at his gravestone because I could feel how young he was; and it’s hard to explain, but I felt like he really needed his mother.

The only information I had to go on was his name and his company. Adam Dohr was a member of Company D, of the 2nd US cavalry. From those simple facts, his life was reassembled.

A Shepherd’s Son in Filz

He was born Johann Adam Dohr at 5 pm on January 9th, 1850 in Filz, a tiny village in the rolling green highlands and narrow rocky gorges of the Prussian Rhineland. His parents were Anna Maria Wilms and Carl Dohr, the village shepherd.

Adam and his three older brothers probably watched their father leave every morning with the community’s sheep, and then return at dusk herding them like a river of wool through the village lanes to their homes. As he got older, Adam likely worked alongside his father. He would have been familiar with the animals, and familiar with the weight of a shepherd’s staff in his hands.

On May 8, 1866, sixteen-year-old Adam was confirmed at St. Stephanus in Lutzerath, a village about five miles from Filz. In a bit of synchronicity for our shepherd’s son, the pulpit of St. Stephanus contains an eighteenth-century Rococo panel depicting the Good Shepherd.

Crossing an Ocean

Four years later, the next record I found Adam in was the 1870 US Census.

Somewhere between those two records, Adam crossed an ocean.

Many young men in rural Prussian villages were facing poor economic prospects because there wasn’t enough land to inherit anything that might be profitable, especially for the youngest sons like Adam. In 1866 Prussia fought a war against Austria, and trouble was brewing with France. If poverty didn’t get them, conscription into the army would. We can’t say why Adam himself left, but young men were fleeing to America by the thousands, and Adam was with them.

Chicago

By June of 1870 Adam was boarding with a Prussian family in the Chicago Sixth ward, an industrial area close to the train tracks in what is the Chinatown area today. Chicago in 1870 was a chaotic, muddy, rapidly expanding city of nearly 300,000 people. I can just imagine what a boy raised in the quiet heathlands of Filz might have thought about the noise, lakefront winds, and bustling factories of Chicago.

Fourteen months after Adam's appearance in the census, the Great Chicago Fire burned for two days and left 100,000 people homeless. Adam was living ten blocks away-- far enough to spare his home, but close enough to see the flames and choke on the smoke.

I can picture Adam watching the crowds of terrified people who had fled south into his neighborhood, carrying whatever they had managed to save. It must have felt like a nightmare.

In the aftermath, Adam's corner of the city became part of the enormous relief effort. A railroad station on Twenty-second Street, only a couple of blocks from his home, was designated as an official food distribution point for the homeless.

Chicago started rebuilding almost before the ashes cooled. Clearing the ruins and rebuilding the city created an enormous need for labor. For a twenty-one-year-old day laborer like Adam, there was plenty of work to be found.

Two years after the fire, Chicago was hit by another crisis. The Panic of 1873 triggered a severe economic depression that swept across the country. Construction slowed, businesses failed, and unemployment soared. For day laborers like Adam, whose livelihoods depended on finding someone who needed a pair of hands that day, work became much harder to find.

Soldier’s Clothing

It was in the middle of this economic uncertainty that Adam made his next move: On November 12, 1873, he enlisted in the United States Army. There, he would be guaranteed food, clothes, and housing...and a reliable paycheck.

Adam’s military record paints a picture of a slight man, only 5’5 ¼”, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a light complexion. His age was given as 22, but his birth record shows he was actually 23. He had enlisted in a Chicago recruiting office for a term of five years.

By December, barely a month after his enlistment, the shepherd's son from Filz was already 1,200 miles away at Camp Douglas in the Utah Territory, listed on the post return as a new recruit in Company D of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry. I haven’t found specifically why his company was in Utah, but after the Civil War the 2nd Cavalry was heavily involved in conflicts across the western frontier as the United States expanded onto Native lands and tribes fought against their displacement.

I have no evidence of what Adam may have participated in as a cavalryman. But I do know that he was a brand new baby recruit, freshly stationed at Camp Douglas, and preparing to mount guard on the evening of March 17, 1874.

The Accident

The Salt Lake Herald later reported the details:

“On Tuesday evening, Private [Dohr]… accidentally shot himself… He was preparing to mount guard, and after loading his carbine at the guard quarters, used the weapon to steady himself off the door steps which were covered in snow. In lifting the carbine again the hammer struck against the step and the gun was discharged, the bullet entering the body beneath the groin, passing upward, and coming out near the back of the neck.”

His military Final Statement document indicated he lived through the night and died the next morning at 10:40 am.

It was a horrific accident. And in my mind I see Adam, steadying himself on his gun the way he may have steadied himself a thousand times on his father’s shepherd staff—but this time, the staff went off. What echoes in my mind is that Adam died from being a shepherd’s son in soldier’s clothing.

The only consolation from the grief that hit me after reading the article was understanding that the military surgeons at the time regularly used morphine and laudanum for catastrophic wounds. They would have tried to keep him comfortable. He would not have suffered consciously.

What I Could Give Back

Unconsciously, however, is perhaps another question. I keep returning to the feeling I had at his grave, that he really needed his mother. He is about the same age as my son, and I realized as I cried over his life and his death throughout this project, that I have been seeing Adam through my mother-eyes the entire time.

I hope you are at peace now, my young soldier.

This rock is for you.

The Rock

A memorial rock for Adam has been painted and placed at his grave in Fort Douglas Cemetery.

This rock is a black floral mandala on a natural ochre-colored stone. I wanted to bring some contrast to his stark white gravestone.

Records That Returned Adam