Nellie E. Butler

Last week my friend Anthony came to the Archives to help me with my research.  On top of the many abuses I heaped upon him, I also asked him to write a guest blog post about what he'd discovered.  And for some strange reason he agreed to do it.  Thanks, Anthony!

Coming to the National Archives for the first time, I was not quite sure to expect.  I had a vague idea—I do family history research—but I had never been to an archive of comparable size and importance.  At first I was nervous, but I forgot to be as I explored my first file.  Sheer fascination bore all before it.

Today, I met seven women through letters, affidavits and the occasional heated argument.  Each woman had a distinct and interesting story, but one particular woman transcended the merely interesting.  The heading of the newspaper clipping in her file grabbed my attention: MYSTERY OF AN OLD ARMY NURSE.

The story sounded rather like a case for Holmes or Poirot.  In the summer of 1898, a penniless old woman was deposited at a San Francisco hotel by two “friends”, neither of whom were ever heard from again.  She was described by the hotel’s proprietor as “not wholly rational”, and it is obvious that she was senile.  According to the author of the article,

“She talks in a rambling manner and makes many references to people, but no sense can be made of her remarks.  This afternoon she seemed brighter than usual and talked considerably of Bar Harbor, but she could not answer any direct questions about places or people.”

Nellie E. Butler
(Pension File 1138434, 864505 at the National Archives)

Enough information could be teased from her incoherent conversation to identify her as one Nellie Butler, a widowed former army nurse.  Her husband had been killed at Fort Donelson, and her service had left her permanently injured in one leg.  Apart from these few facts, as the author rather melodramatically put it, “her past [was] shrouded in mystery”.  Only one acquaintance could be found, a woman who had known Mrs. Butler a year.  She knew nothing of Mrs. Butler’s past.  “Her residence previous to coming here is unknown and her purpose is no better understood,” the author wrote. 

In poor health, Mrs. Butler was moved to the local hospital, where she was “near to death”.  According to the other records in her pension file, Nellie Butler died within three months of the newspaper article’s appearance.

Reading this, one is left with the same set of questions asked 114 years ago by the San Francisco newspaper.  Who was Nellie Butler?  Why did she come to San Francisco?  Most importantly, how did she come to die alone?

The first is answered easily enough, though certain facts escape the record.  Mrs. Butler’s maiden name is notably absent (she was already a widow when she became a nurse), as is her place of birth.  Born in 1839, her first husband was Howard Martin, the man killed at Fort Donelson.  She also lost a brother in the war.  Elizabeth Martin, as she was called then, served as a nurse between 1863 and ’65, at the end of which time she was working at a hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She was a field nurse during some of this period, and received her leg wound at Cold Harbor.  Two years after the war, she married her second husband, David Butler, in Contra Costa County, California, where she would spend most of the remainder of her life.  In 1876, the Butlers suffered a house fire, in which Mrs. Butler lost vital evidence concerning her war service.  This later created some difficulty for her in obtaining a pension.  In the 1880s, Mr. Butler became an invalid, and by the time Mrs. Butler began her quest for a pension in 1892, they were close to destitution.  After receiving a pension of $12 a month in 1894, the pension records are silent until the notice of her death in 1898.

That is who Nellie Butler was, as far as the pension records allow us to see.  Little in them offers an explanation of the strange and sad end of her life.  Mrs. Butler did not have children with either of her husbands, and apart from the brother who died in the war, there is no evidence she had any close relatives.  No other aspect of the record sheds any light on Mrs. Butler’s isolation.  We who read her story can only wonder, as the people of a century ago wondered, what led this brave and determined woman to wander witless from her home to die among strangers.