Louisa Hawkins Canby - General's Wife

General's Wife

Soon after the defeat of the Confederates in New Mexico, General and Mrs. Canby were reassigned back East where Canby spent more than a year in bureaucratic service in Pennsylvania, New York, and Washington, D.C. sometimes as an unofficial administrative assistant to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. It was not until 1864 that Canby was allowed out from behind a desk, and he and Mrs. Canby were sent to the Trans-Mississippi region, eventually finding a home in New Orleans where Louisa stayed while her husband supported the Union’s impending defeat of Confederate forces, which happened to include the remnants of Sibley’s brigade; although, by this time, Sibley himself had been court-martialed for dereliction of duty during the Battle of Bisland. (Relieved of his command, he had gone to Richmond, Virginia.)

Shortly before his forty-seventh birthday, General Canby was shot by a sniper while on an inspection tour up the Mississippi and White rivers. His wound was a painful but “through-and-through” gunshot to the pelvis. He arrived home the day after his birthday, and Louisa immediately put him to bed and nursed him back to health during the next month.

Following the war, General Canby was retained by the army as one of only ten brigadier generals and served as military commander of various districts throughout the South. In an 1873 newspaper article, Mrs. Lew Wallace (née Susan Arnold Elston) would recall that Louisa practiced charity, tending to give things away to the needy wherever she went in the South, endearing herself to the local populace, but at some cost to her household. "I can hardly keep anything, there is so much suffering about us," Louisa wrote Wallace from New Orleans. She sometimes pled the case of someone in need to her husband if she thought he might help. Mrs. Wallace also said that Louisa was far more sociable than her husband and that she, rather than he, would arranged for any gatherings at the Canby residence.

The Canbys next moved to Portland, Oregon where the general became commander of the Department of Columbia. This Pacific Northwest command encompassed Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. In 1872 the Modoc War broke out, involving both Oregon and northern California. On April 11, 1873 Modoc leader Kintpuash (also known as Captain Jack) killed the unarmed Canby and several members of his party during peace talks. Canby had written frankly to Louisa about his misapprehensions over the negotiations with the Modocs. A chief concern (which proved to be prophetic) was that Captain Jack so feared treachery that he might be capable of committing treachery preemptively. On the day of his death Canby received a letter from his wife in Portland. She had written, "I think over all sorts of Modoc treachery till I am becoming a nervous, hysterical woman and will have to get away from Oregon to get over it." Louisa found her husband’s death so unbearable that she spent a week in bed. His body was shuttled from place to place for more than a month before it reached Indianapolis, Indiana and was finally buried at Crown Hill Cemetery. With the support of her brother, Colonel John Hawkins, Louisa devoted the last sixteen years of her life to promoting the memory of her husband.