Post Hospital, Fort Scott, Kas., June 2nd/65.
My Dear Wife:
Your very kind letter of the 24th ult came to hand yesterday evening. I am thankful to hear that you were all well...
I have been paid in full by the U.S. up to the first day of Jan., 1865. Consequently there is on the 1st inst due me five months pay, $100. There is now due me total in bounty $240. This is my entire bounty due me from the U.S. There is due me $60 for clothing according to my descriptive list. Total due me if I now had my discharge, on final statement, $400...
(He gives a number of detailed figures of his finances during the past two years. MJM)
Now I can not tell you when I shall get pay. If I get pay before the first of next month, I shall only get 4 months pay, $80, as no bounty is due till July 1st...
Now for Ralph Smith. In the first place, I must say I think, with all his professed friendship, he has treated you very mean in promising the hay ground to Big Jo. (Big Jo is doubtless for Big John, not Big Joseph. I never heard of any Big Joe in that community; but there was a Big John Dvorak, and a Little John Dvorak, near neighbors. MJM)
Smith says he will give a Warranty Deed. This I do not doubt. But I do greatly fear that his warrantee would be worthless. It is very certain he could not make a good deed in his own name. There is 160 acres of land, or not quite, perhaps. The fraction that you are now living on contains, I am informed, 43 acres, which is all that is worth paying taxes. Then he proposes to take five acres with the mill privilege. This will take a piece of land 29 rods square, or very near, if I have made a right calculation. Well, he will of course, take it on the north side of Plum Creek. This will take in the former old dwelling, and come very near taking the house you live in. Smith, I presume would tell a different story, but Manly and myself know very near where the lines run. If I am right in what I say, this would not leave more than three or four acres of ground to be cultivated on the place. Furthermore, I believe that Smith is mean enough
(The letter ends abruptly here without signature, and this is the last of the Civil War Letters of Charles Norhood Mumford now known to exist. It is not impossible he was at Fort Scott some weeks longer, and that other letters were written from there. But most likely, he suddenly was informed, when he got to this point in this letter, that he was to be discharged at once, and decided not to finish the letter, put it away, and carried it home with him, unfinished. On July 30th, he and his son Manley received Warranty Deed from Ralph Smith and his wife to 114 acres of land; and it is the land about which he was writing. MJM)