Scope and Content Note

The main portion of the Heuston papers consists of a series of letters written to his wife while Heuston was a member of the 22nd Wisconsin Volunteers, first as a private and later as a corporal. The letters cover a period of about three years from the middle of 1862 to the middle of 1865. These Civil War letters are valuable because in addition to being a rather long run of letters for the period, they contain information on the position of Northern Negroes and attempts at enlisting and educating them. The chronological list of the letters in Appendix I gives the places from which they were written and hence has value as an indication of their content. Heuston was hospitalized twice, but the information lost concerning his outfit and the war activities is made up in data about the medical care he received.

There are several additional items in the collection which offer information on the early history of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin. There are twelve miscellaneous letters and documents and a number of small notebooks which, for the most part, seem to be merely memoranda. These notebooks can only be described by listing them and attempting to sum up their individual contents:

• “Report of Collections made at 'Donation' in University Hall, Galesville, June 11, 1868” (names and amounts)
• Records of Town of Monteville, now Trempealeau
• Small notebook on Town of Trempealeau
• Small notebook on Trempealeau County history, and records of early land entries
• Small leather bound ledger[?] book
• Small leather bound notebook, cover missing, miscellaneous notes
• Two small notebooks containing historical notes. Notes on Perrot Fort, etc.
• Three small memoranda books