The legacy of the Red Rover

This article has been altered to correct information about the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

The USS Red Rover, a side-wheel packet boat and the Navy's first hospital ship, has a history with Mound City, Illinois. It was repaired there and brought hundreds of wounded soldiers to the hospital during the Civil War. The boat's name may have originated from the children's game, Red Rover, or possibly James Fenimore Cooper's 1827 novel about an integrated group of friends chasing a pirate named the Red Rover.

The original belief that the boat was built in Cape Girardeau in 1859 and sold to the Confederate Army in 1861 for $30,000 as a barracks ship has been challenged. A Cape Girardeau Historic Site Map from 1975 locates the construction site of the Red Rover on a levy southeast of Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus. Recent research siting the Louisville Daily Courier places the construction of the Red Rover in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1857. Sites such as Wikipedia and the Naval History and Heritage Command still list its origin in Cape Girardeau. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine, The NPS Wilson's Creek site, Brown Water Navy, the Inland Waterways Journal and an entry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all support the Louisville 1857 date.

The boat was 256 feet long, 40.9 feet wide, 7.6 feet deep, with an engine run by 28-inch cylinders having an 8-foot piston stroke run by five boilers. After being disabled by a shell at the battle of Island No. 10 near New Madrid, Missouri, the crew from the Mound City gunboat repaired it and brought the captured boat to Cairo, Illinois. Once repaired, it went to St. Louis, was refitted and became the Navy's first hospital boat. It boasted a 300-ton ice box, operating room, bathrooms, two kitchens, medical dispensary, sanitary supplies for three months, bedding, window blinds of gauze and an elevator between the boiler deck and main deck.

Traveling the Mississippi River, the boat brought wounded back to hospitals in Memphis, Tennessee, or Mound City and supplies to other Union hospitals. Nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Cross volunteered as nurses, leading to the development of the US Navy Nurses Corps. In early 1865 the Red Rover returned to Mound City and on Nov. 29, 1865, the boat was sold at auction for $4,500, ending its military service, and was later scrapped.

It was the first of its kind to have an integrated crew. Ann Bradford Stokes (1830-1903), an escaped slave, volunteered as a nurse in 1863-1864. She was given the rank of "first class boy" and paid a wage. After leaving, she married Gilbert Stokes, a black man who also served on the Red Rover. Ann applied for and was denied a widow's military pension in the 1880s. After learning to read and write, she reapplied for a military pension on her own merits of service in 1890 and received a $12 per month pension, normal for a nurse.

When recruits for the Navy are sent to Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois, they visit the Branch Medical Clinic Red Rover for checkups and inoculations. The Red Rover itself may be gone, but its legacy lives on.