51A-H10.1

Today promised to be a big day.  Wednesday is the first day of the week I can put in twenty pull requests instead of sixteen.  And this Wednesday I was going to finish Mary E. Walker's microfilm, and look at the rest of the 51st Congress Senate Private Acts and move on to the 52nd.  The cherry: legislation pulled 51A-H10.1, the Committee on Invalid Pension's file on the Army Nurses Pension Act.  All kinds of good things lined up.
And it didn't disappoint.  Walker is finished and I'm in the midst of transcribing the documents; the 51st and 52nd Congress Private Acts are done, and I have a couple extra nurses who weren't on my list. And 51A-H10.1 is photographed.  I feel virtuous.
51A wasn't what I expected though.  I was hoping for correspondance between committee members and members of the WRC arguing for support, letters between committee members debating the merits of the bill, or discussing who they needed to persuade and how to go about it.  I didn't get much of that, though.  There were two identical letters, sent to George Seney and D.B. Henderson by Kate B. Sherwood, the Chairman of the National Pension and Relief Committee for the WRC, presenting the Army Nurses Bill and asking for support.  There's no indication of whether or not either Congressman gave the bill their support.
There were also more of the petitions I'd found earlier--apparently Indiana sent theirs in late.  Their late arrival necessitated a letter from Armilla Cheney, the WRC treasurer explaining the situation, and a letter from Clara Barton to Mr. Cogswell forwarding them on to him.
I don't remember if I mentioned this in previous posts, but Barton was an active member of the WRC.  She served on the WRC Pension Committee until the bill finally passed, and also served as National Chaplain for a number of years.  She was so often in D.C. that the Pension Committee effectively made her their agent in the capitol.  What exactly being that agent entaled I didn't know until I read this letter, which reveals a little of what Barton was up to.  Apparently, the petitions I looked at earlier were sent to Barton, and she in turn sent them to Senator Blaire, the head of the Committee on Invalid Pensions and a strong advocate for the Nurses Pension Act.  When these stragglers arrived, Barton sent them on to Mr. Cogswell to add to the petition; as Barton put it, "from the size of that 'cart wheel' roll one would judge that it needed no further accessories--but vast as the sea is, the drops still fall in it and the little brooks flow to it, so I suppose it's all right."
I also found an intriguing little pamphlet tucked in the folder: Joint Resolution No. 3. from the General Assembly and Governor of Iowa, "asking Congress to enact a law providing for pensioning certain women enrolled as Army Nurses."
Any ideas why Iowa of all states is endorsing the Nurses Pension Act?