Death & Legacy
Of the deceased soldiers Rosetta wrote, they lay "sometimes in heaps and in rows… with distorted features, among mangled and dead horses, trampled in mud, and thrown in all conceivable sorts of places. You can distinctly hear, over the whole field, the hum and hissing of decomposition." The Red River campaign claimed several lives including Wakeman's. She contracted chronic diarrhea which she eventually died of on June 19, 1864 in the Marine USA General Hospital in New Orleans. Wakeman was not the only one; thousands of Union soldiers were killed by drinking water contaminated by rotting animals. Wakeman's identity was not revealed during her burial as her headstone reads “Lyons Wakeman.”
Read more about this topic: Sarah Rosetta Wakeman
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or legacy:
“Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)