Custer and the Michigan Cavalry Brigade need no introduction to collectors or students of the Civil War. This is an excellent condition copy of the revised US Army Regulations of 1863 belonging to an officer of the 1^st Michigan Cavalry who was wounded in action at Trevilian Station in 1864, “Custer’s first last stand” in the words of one historian, and who also happens to be the older brother of renowned western lawman Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame, with the two possibly together after the war in Helena, Montana, before Seth Bullock headed to Deadwood and Joseph headed for California.

This is a very good condition, clean copy of the US Army’s 1861 regulations with an appendix “containing the changes and laws affecting army regulations and articles of war to June 25, 1863” and was printed in Washington by the Government Printing Office and dated 1863 at the bottom of the title page, and bound in their standard blue cloth with gilt title. Boldly inscribed in period brown ink on the flyleaf is: “Lt. J.H. Bullock / 1” Mich Cavalry / A.C S./ 2 Brigade / 3d Division / CC,” with the initials signifying “Acting Commissary of Subsistence” and “Cavalry Corps.”

Joseph Henry Bullock was born in Amherstburg, in Canada West (now Ontario) in1840. His mother died about1860 about the same year his father, a former British army sergeant-major, was reportedly forced to resign as County Treasurer due to missing funds and fled across the border to Detroit. Joseph followed by August 1861 when he enlisted at Detroit and mustered in as private in Co. E of the 1^st Michigan Cavalry on August 24. The record and battle honors of the regiment and their service in the Michigan Cavalry Brigade under Custer would be tedious to repeat here and is readily available accessible online or in print. Suffice it to say, they were extremely active, mustering in on Sept. 13, 1861, credited with some 67 skirmishes and engagements from March 1862 at Winchester, VA, all the way to Appomattox in April 1865, including, of course, the cavalry fighting at Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Campaign, fighting in the Shenandoah, etc., in which they lost 14 officers and 150 enlisted men just in killed or mortally wounded.

Bullock was promoted to Quartermaster Sergeant Oct. 1, 1862, and then to 1^st Lieutenant and Commissary on Nov. 1, 1862, a position that put him on the regimental staff dealing with the regiment’s rations and food supply, something that in cavalry regiments was split off from the duties of the Quartermaster who had to deal with hardgoods and equipment not only for men, but for horses as well. We do not have Bullock’s full records, but the post does not seem to have been a desk job, at least on campaign, and particularly on a raid where the command might be expected to live off the land. He was certainly with them on the Trevilian raid and is mentioned by name in Custer’s official report of the second day’s fighting, on June 12, when he was wounded. The battle was two-day affair with Sheridan leading the divisions of Torbert and Gregg to destroy parts of the Virginia Central Railroad and then link up with Union forces at Charlottesville. On June 11 Confederate cavalry got to Trevillian Station first, Custer managed to get in their rear and then found himself cut off and surrounded, a precursor to the Little Big Horn, until Sheridan fought his way through and relieved him. On the afternoon of June 12 there was even more desperate fighting as Torbert attacked Confederate lines northwest of the station, launching seven different assaults that ended in a stalemate, with Union losses again falling heavily on Custer’s men, including Lt. Bullock. How serious the wound was is unclear, but he was discharged on August 30, 1864, and he applied for an invalid pension in May 1869.

After discharge Bullock returned to Detroit, where he married in 1869 and held several civic positions as a clerk: Assistant Clerk in the Recorders Court in 1868 and Deputy County Clerk in 1871. He seems to have headed west about 1874. A note in the Nov. 10, 1874, issue of the Detroit Free Press says that he had been elected Sheriff at Helena, Montana Territory. This may be a misunderstood report about his younger brother Seth Bullock, born in 1847, who had settled in Helena in 1867, and in 1873 was elected County Sheriff, though it may imply the brothers were, for a time anyway, operating together, something along the lines of the Earp brothers, though it looks like Joseph may have had enough of fighting. Seth Bullock made his way to Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, and to television fame, in 1876. Joseph, if he did really stop in Helena, kept going west: we find him in 1880 with wife and two daughters in Los Angeles, where he is listed as a farmer. He died there in August 1885, a local paper merely mentioning his passing and calling him, “an old dairyman.”

This is an interesting volume, everything you need to know about the inner workings of the Civil War U.S. Army, with a solid identification to an officer in one of the most famous units of the war, who also got wounded in one of its best known engagements, and has some interesting family and western connections to say the least- along with plenty of room for more research.  [sr][ph:L]

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