An item from the Legion Magazine.

African-American Union soldiers are shown at Dutch Gap, Virginia, in November 1864 wearing typical Union uniforms and wielding the 1853 Enfield rifles used by U.S. Colored Troops.[U.S. Library of Congress]

Archeologists discover suspected graves of massacred Black Civil War unit

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

In January 1865, just over three months before the U.S. Civil War ended, the 80 men of Company ‘E,’ 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry, were ordered to drive 900 cattle 140 kilometres west from their base at Camp Nelson in Kentucky to Louisville.

Louisville was a Union stronghold and operations base for the war’s western theatre—the centre of planning, supply, recruiting and transportation for numerous campaigns throughout the four-year struggle between the states. The beef was destined to help feed the city and its 100,000 blue-coated troops.

The men, most of whom had escaped slavery to enlist, spread out over a large area, driving the animals across the cold, snow-covered Kentucky countryside. Then, on Jan. 25, those at the rear of the herd—known in cowboy parlance as drag riders, or “drags”—were attacked by Confederate guerrillas just outside Simpsonville.

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One in Six Million is the third, and most serious, book by author Amy Fish. [https://amyfishwrites.com/]

Author Amy Fish Talks Canadian Altruism for a Holocaust survivor

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Canadian author Amy Fish is first to acknowledge “I usually write funny books,” from The Art of Complaining Effectively to I Wanted Fries with That. Her latest tome, however, is seemingly anything but humorous, charting the exploits of a Holocaust survivor as she finally learns the truth behind her lost familial roots.

The newly released book is entitled One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, while the man it refers to is a Canadian ceiling salesman-turned-genealogist willing to lend a hand.

This is the story of Maria and Stanley, told by their Montreal-based biographer.