The Great Locomotive Chase

In honor of the 4th of July, Badass of the Week author Ben Thompson and Professor Pat Larash talk about some of America's first Medal of Honor recipients -- Union soldier John Alfred Wilson, hero of the Great Locomotive Chase, and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to ever receive the nation's highest award for battlefield bravery.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. A single locomotive flies around the Bend
with no cars in tow. The men inside frantically shovel
coal as if their lives depend on it. Suddenly, a
second locomotive roars around the bend right after the first,

(00:20):
But this one is going backwards. It's on fire, and
it's manned by angry Confederate soldiers determined to capture the
fleeing Union troops ahead of them. This isn't just any chase.
This is the Great Locomotive Chase. And Union soldiers John
Alfred Wilson and Mark Wood may be tired, exhausted, and unarmed,

(00:41):
but they've got to try something. They look at each
other and resolve to jump for it. Hello and welcome
back to another episode of Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I am here as always

(01:02):
with my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat Happy fourth
of July.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Happy fourth of July to YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Then, yeah, we are. We generally like to think of
ourselves as being a fairly international show. But today, on
the fourth of July, we are going to celebrate some
American badasses, and we have some really interesting stories that
we want to talk about, particularly as they relate to

(01:31):
the Medal of Honor, right.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Pat, Yeah, the Medal of Honor was the first and
to this day, highest award for military valor offered by
the US government. It was something created in eighteen sixty one.
The US looked at the British and said, oh, hey,
you have the Victoria Cross. Let's do something like that
for our people. And originally it was simply issued for

(01:56):
quote unquote gallantry in action. But over the years the
circumstances for receiving it have been really tightened up. And
to illustrate this, about twelve hundred Medals of Honor were
awarded during the Civil War, but then when they tightened
the restrictions in nineteen sixteen, over nine hundred of them

(02:17):
were revoked.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, and it's what you said. The Medal of Honor.
Now it has this very kind of sacred reputation as
being the highest award for bravery. And I think you know,
in looking through the annals of the Medal of Honor,
in many cases the person who received it was killed

(02:40):
in the action for which they received it. And talking
about the revoked awards, you know what ended up happening
was that there was only one award for bravery, and
it was the Medal of Honor. And you know, around
the time of World War One we started the US
government created different awards of different level. So you have

(03:00):
the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star and the
Bronze Star, and you know, there's a number of other
medals and there's a tier of them, and Medal of
Honor was at the top. And so they had given
out so many during the Civil War that they took
some of them back or lowered them to silver stars
or bronze stars, depending on what the action was the

(03:21):
recipient had taken. Everything that you mentioned is going to
be relevant as we go through the rest of the episode,
But what I wanted to start with was very quickly,
I wanted to talk about the most recent Medal of
Honor recipient, because we're going to talk about the first one,
and we're going to talk about the first and to
this day, only woman who has ever received one. We thought, hey,

(03:43):
fourth of July, let's let's get three American badasses in here,
and we'll start with the most recent Medal of Honor recipient. So,
as of the time of this recording. The most recent
medal of honor was awarded on the third of March,
March three, twenty twenty three, to Colonel Paris Davis. And
you know, with all of the acts of bravery and
heroism that are taking place along, you know, throughout the

(04:05):
United States military today and in recent memory, you would
think that perhaps this award would be for Afghanistan or
maybe Iraq or some other action that is being taken
somewhere in the world right now. But no, it's from
sixty years ago, and it's a Vietnam War hero was
the most recent recipient, which is kind of interesting, right, Pat.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, sounds like it was long overdue.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
So I want to talk about Paris Davis quickly. He
was born on May sixth, nineteen thirty nine. He studied
political science at Southern University on an ROTC scholarship and
shipped out to South Vietnam very early on before the war,
really even before the Vietnam War really kicked into gear.
He was a captain in the fifth Special Forces Group,

(04:52):
part of the first Special Forces, the Green Berets, the
same unit that we talked about when we were talking
about Robert Howard a few weeks ago. He was one
of the first black officers in the history of the
US Special Forces. The action for which he received the
Medal of Honor took place on June seventeenth, nineteen sixty five,
so this is really early on in the fighting. The

(05:12):
US hadn't kind of officially been involved yet at this point,
which may contribute to why it took so long for
him to receive the award. But he was an advisor.
He was He was there with three other Special Forces
green Berets training the eight hundred and eighty third Vietnamese
Regional Forces Company, so South Vietnamese Army, and just a

(05:36):
couple of American advisors kind of training and guiding them
and helping them out and you know, providing, you know, oversight,
but not really supposed to be too involved in the fighting.
But what happens is Captain Davis he gets winn that
there is a relatively large North Vietnamese Army base in
the region, and he leads the eight hundred and eighty

(05:58):
third on a mission to take it. The situation is right,
and he sees an opportunity and he is able to
get the drop on the base and he makes the
call to attack and they attack, and he is, you know,
very heroic in the battle that ensues. He kills several
of the enemy personally, including a hand to hand combat.

(06:20):
He gets wounded by a grenade, but he keeps going.
He captures the base, takes some gun positions, captures prisoners,
reorganizes his forces, and then starts calling in artillery and
airstrikes on enemy positions. So this very heroic battle to
take this NVA base that outnumbered his own guys, but
he was able to, through surprise and strategy, overcome that

(06:45):
and take a bunch of prisoners, which is great, except
that there were more North Vietnamese called in to assist,
and there's a big counter attack. Uh oh yeah, so
there's a counter attack, and now that he's taken this
he has to hold it. So North Vietnamese are attacking
the base that he's just captured. He's shot, he gets

(07:05):
into some hand to hand combat, gets wounded with a knife,
but kills that guy. He's heavily outnumbered now and starts
calling for evacuation, which I think reading some of these accounts,
like he was kind of hoping would have come a
little bit sooner, Like you get in there, you hit
this base, you capture the guys, you get out of there.
He's kind of soon as possible, right yeah, before they
can mass a counter attack, which is for whatever reason,

(07:27):
what happens in this situation. So now he's fighting for
his life, he and his guys. There's three other special
forces with him and then the eight hundred and eighty
third South Vietnamese Army. They're fighting for their lives, and
they're fighting for their lives for nineteen hours, which is
way too long to be on an operation like this.
You're not supposed to be fighting for nineteen hours straight.
You're supposed to get in and get out.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
You're not supposed to do anything for nineteen hours straight,
that's true.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, you got to sleep at some point, right yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah, But somehow he's pushing through.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
He's pushing through, and he's the commander, so he is
organizing the defense. A couple of his guys, two of
the other Americans get shot, many of the South Vietnamese
guys get shot. He's kind of like fighting for his life,
and the rescue helicopters eventually arrive, and he's got to
get the Americans out of there. I mean, he can't
leave his own guys, behind. He can't leave anybody behind,

(08:17):
but he's prioritizing some his Green Beret, his Cream Berey buddies.
And so he throws one of the guys on his back,
runs across like an open field towards this helicopter, throws
the guy in the helicopter, and the helicopter pilot's like,
all right, get in here. We got to get out
of here.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, I'm imagining the helicopter blades are worrying all this time,
the guys. The pilot's ready to leave, he wants to leave.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
He's yas Yeah, he's hovering right. This is I mean,
you can kind of picture the Vietnam War era, you know,
think about the movies you've seen with like the helicopter
blades kind of rippling the grass around him. There's gunfire
coming in everywhere, and he loads that guy onto the
HELLI end is like, no, there's another guy back. There's
another wounded American. I got to get him. So he

(09:01):
runs back one hundred and fifty yards across an open field,
being shot at by the enemy the entire time. Who Yeah,
grabs the second dude, brings him back to the helicopter,
puts him in a helicopter, and then the helicopter guy's like,
all right, man, that was very erogue. We get in
and Captain Davis is like, no, I'm staying. I have
to like organize the rest of these South Vietnamese and

(09:23):
go like, we got to hold this position. So the
helicopter leaves. Both those Americans that were put on it
they survived the battle, and Captain Davis goes back into
the battle and wins it. So he lives. He's wounded
several times, he's knifed, he's hit with a grenade, shrapnel
a couple of times, he shot a couple of times,

(09:44):
but he refuses extraction. He oversees the all of the
wounded getting out of there, and he spends the later
part of the battle radioing in coordinates for airstrikes until
the enemy is destroyed. That's impressive, pretty amazing. Yeah, he
continues through the entire Vietnam War like he doesn't. The
war's not over for him. In nineteen sixty five, he

(10:05):
survives the war. He retires in nineteen eighty five. At
some point he was the commander of the tenth Special Forces.
He retires as a colonel, which is pretty high ranking.
It's the one just below General and he received the
Silver Star for this action and was nominated for the
Medal of Honor, but for whatever reason, the paperwork got lost.
Oh no, yeah, and then he was he was re

(10:27):
suggested for it, and then that paperwork got lost. And
you know, we were talking about this with Robert Howard
a little bit, where you know, there's a chance that
it was like, you know, we don't want to give
the Medal of Honor to the American who was fighting
before the US had officially declared war against the Vietnamese.
There's some political reasoning behind this, and there's some maybe

(10:48):
he shouldn't have been maybe like he wasn't supposed to
be there, and that's a thing that So I don't
know why the paperwork got or maybe it just got lost.
That happens before falls behind the desk and that's you know.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Does yeah, and we're talking about literal paperwork here.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
So yeah, it's literal paperwork, like I don't know where
my birth certificate is, right like. Yeah. So anyway, a
campaign got started recently for him to get that upgrade
from the Silver Star to the Medal of Honor. And
the campaign was largely from people that were there like
some of his guys that maybe not necessarily the three

(11:25):
guys that were with him there, but he was part
of a Green Beret base in South Vietnam, and the
men that were there with him were like, this guy
deserve If anybody deserves it, it's this guy. So in
March twenty twenty three, he finally received it. He traveled
to the White House and got the metal put around
his neck and I'm gonna just kind of leave it.
With his words, he said that receiving it QUOTA prompted

(11:47):
a wave of memories of the men and women I
served with in Vietnam, from the members of the fifth
Special Forces Group and other US military units, to the
doctors and nurses who cared for are wounded. I'm so
very grateful to my family and friends with in the
military and elsewhere who kept alive the story of a
team A three twenty one at Camp Bongsun. I often
think of those fateful nineteen hours and what our team

(12:09):
did to make sure that no man was left behind
on the battlefield. So that is the most recent recipient.
Colonel Paris Davis of the Special Forces, And when we
come back from the break, we are going to talk
about the first man and the first and to this
day only woman who has ever received the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yes, and be advised, we are talking about the horrors
of the Civil War, including prisoner of war camps and
battlefield surgery. So consider this a content warning.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Okay, we are back and we are going to talk
about the first recipients of the Medal of Honor. And
one thing that makes me really happy when we talk
about this is that the first Medals of Honor were
given out for an event known pat as the Great Locomotive.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Chase, which sounds like say, a classic silent movie film
or something.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Like that, And I think they have made like plenty
of silent movies about this event. Yeah, the Great Locomotive Chase,
which is such just like a great, a great name
for a historical event, especially one that is going to
have such lasting significance culturally as this will.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
So what is the actual Great Locomotive Chase?

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Well, let's get into it. I am going to open
with a quote from Private John Alfred Wilson of the
twenty first Ohio Infantry. He says, experience has taught me
that man in the fix we were in is the
worst and most desperate creature on Earth and will do
things that seem utter impossibilities before their accomplishment. So that's

(13:52):
how I'm going to preface The Great Locomotive Chase. The
Great Locomotive Chase is the tale of two more than two,
but specifically we're going to focus on two Union troopers
who went on a very high risk, basically suicide sabotage
mission behind enemy lines. They get involved in a high
speed train chase that crosses several counties and eventually states.

(14:16):
They basically do battle with an entire regiment of Confederate
troops and they spend weeks on the run being pursued
by basically every able bodied man in the Confederacy. They
break out of a prison, and they eventually become the
first people to receive the Medal of Honor. So let's
start in April of eighteen sixty two. The Medal of
Honor was originally commissioned and approved in eighteen sixty one,

(14:41):
but the first ones are not awarded until over a
year after.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
That, so they came up with the concept of the
Medal of Honor before they had a specific person or
persons to confer.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
It upon exactly and they, you know, I had to
pass through all of the paperwork and stuff. They had
to make a congressional thing to approval to create the award,
and then they had to approve it for the army.
And I don't know all of the bureaucratic details of it,
because frankly they seem uninteresting. But I note that the
first people who received it got it a year or

(15:12):
so after it was created.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Okay, and here we are April eighteen sixty two.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
Yes, so there is a federal commander for the North
in the American Civil War. His name is Ormsby Mitchell,
which is a really fun name. He is trying to
capture Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is moving south through Tennessee in
the Western Campaign of the Civil War. The problem, however,

(15:37):
is that Chattanooga is a pretty short train ride away
from a couple hundred thousand Confederates in Atlanta, which is
one of like the main Confederate staging area's main Confederate bases,
and any attempt to capture Chattanooga was going to be
difficult because the Confederates were going to be able to
ferry tons of reinforcements very quickly along the rail lines,

(15:58):
and if you, as Ormsby Mitchell, wanted to take Chattanooga,
you're really going to have to cut off train access
from Atlanta. So he does a little bit of out
of the box thinking and decides that what he wants
to do is commission a crazy spy sabotage mission to

(16:18):
infiltrate beyond enemy lines and blow up the rail lines
in Confederate.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Territory SOUF cut off their supply lines.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, yes, railroads were much faster travel than horses and
using the roads and stuff and really vital anything else, yes, exactly,
really vital to moving men and equipment and ammunition in
the Civil War.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
So this is not just out of the box thinking.
It's out of the box car thinking.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
I see what you did there.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
I'll be here all week.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Well, he needs volunteers for this crazy mission that he's
coming up with, and one of the people who volunteer
for it is a guy named John Alfred Wilson. John
Alfred Wilson is he's twenty nine. He is a private,
which is just kind of a rifleman from the twenty
first Ohio Infantry Regiment. He's kind of he looks like
what you would picture when you picture a Union soldier

(17:14):
in the Civil War. He's kind of depicted with the
little kepie hat and he's got the facial hair that
you would expect for a soldier from this time period.
The photos of him, and there are photographs of him,
they're all, you know, that sipia tone, old style when
the camera shutter speed was so slow that you couldn't
smile for pictures. So he's kind of got this very

(17:35):
serious look on his face, and you know, it kind
of looks like the photos of him kind of look
like you know when you see pictures in like ghost movies,
you know, like that kind of thing. So he decides
he's going to the Federal High Command wants two dozen
people to volunteer for this mission, and he does. Okay.
He signs up alongside another man from his regiment, a

(17:58):
guy named Mark Wood, and they put on civilian clothes.
They cross the border into Tennessee and they spend four
days traveling on foot through enemy controlled territory dressed as civilians.
They are looking to get to the town of Marietta, Georgia,
where they will link up with eighteen other Union spies

(18:19):
at a train station. And their plan is that they
are going to steal a train, ride it from Marietta
up to Chattanooga, and wreak havoc on the train lines
the entire way to the best of their ability.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Whoo, that's quite a plan.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, it's very daring. And you know, like you said,
outside the box car, they're known as Andrews Raiders because
their commander was a guy named James Andrews. They are traveling,
you know, in groups of two, there's twenty of them total,
and they're carrying their six shooters under their coats. But
they are you know, that's it. They're trying to blend in.

(18:57):
So all they have is their handguns all board a
train called the General at Marietta station in Georgia, and
their plan is to steal this train. And so this
is you know, eighteen sixty two. The train starts to
leave from Marietta, Georgia. They travel for a few hours
and they of course stop for lunch because this is

(19:20):
before dining cars. And this is just it seems.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Like very stop for lunch.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah, it's a very eighteen sixty two thing to do.
You drive a little bit and then you stop, you
get out. There was a little hotel there that had
a cafe. The conductors and the people on the train.
They can sit on the train, or they can get
off and have a have a little bit of coffee
and tea, eat some breakfast. So they're outside Kennesaw and

(19:47):
everybody gets off and these twenty raiders, including Alfred Wilson,
they get back on the train. They storm the engine,
they commandeer the train at gunpoint, and they take off
with it and just kind of jack the train and
start heading up towards Chattanooga. And for the next several
hours they are trying to destroy the train line to

(20:11):
cut off the access for the Confederates to bring troops
from Atlanta to Chattanooga. They are pulling up. I mean,
their their equipment is limited. They didn't smuggle explosives in here,
and they didn't acquire any explosives, so their ability to
destroy the train lines are not great. James Andrews at
some point acquired a crowbar and was trying to use

(20:31):
that to like manually peel up railroad ties. They were
cutting telegraph lines to like prevent communications, but the best
way they could think to do that was to just
jump up and grab onto the telephone poles and swing
on them like a tarzan or something and break them
that way, or cut them with it, Yeah, cut the
lines with the knife. They're kind of doing everything they
can to destroy this this rail line. They're not particularly

(20:53):
like equipped. This isn't like a you know, a US
Army Engineer's corps with like bombs and you know, tea
and all that stuff. They're doing the best they can.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
And they were undercover, so they can't really publicly walk
around with a big truck of explosives.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
Right exactly. So they were able to smuggle guns on
like pistols on board and that was it. And so
now they're writing up to Chattuga and they're executing their mission.
They are, you know, like you said, addressed to civilians,
and they are just smashing and destroying and kind of
demoing the railroad lines to the best of their ability.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah. And the fact that they're in civilian clothing and
destroying stuff, sabotaging stuff behind enemy lines makes things particularly
risky because at this point you were supposed to treat
your prisoners of war in a certain way, but you
could execute spies. And if you see someone dressed not

(21:51):
in a uniform but in civilian clothing, i e. In disguise,
and if you see them sabotaging your stuff, if it
walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you know,
the Confederates, if they capture these guys, they're going to
think they're spies, which they kind of are, and they
could very easily just decide to hang them.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yes, and that is like not you know, like you said,
you are supposed to treat prisoners of war a certain way,
but spies are exempted from the you know, the rules
of war. Yeah, especially at this time. So this is
dangerous and what they're doing is dangerous and it's risky.
They are doing okay at it. And this is where
a big wrinkle comes into the Andrews Raiders plan because

(22:33):
the conductor of the General is a guy named William
Allen Fuller. Fuller is a He's from Georgia. He is
not a soldier. He is a train conductor by trade
and has been doing this for a long time. He's
got a big mustache. He is like a kind of
a hard ass Georgia guy and he does not like
getting trained act, especially by a bunch of Yankees. He

(22:56):
decides he's mad when he sees the train pull off,
and this is like he's not going to lose this train.
So fuller you know, was out there eating breakfast. The
train starts rolling away. He's running after it on foot
for a while, and then he eventually transfers over to
one of those little push cart things you see from
like like Wiley Coyote would use to like go down

(23:18):
the tracks with like the you know, the it looks
like a seesaw, but you just kind of cranking yourself.
He hops on one of those things and is like
to trail the locomotive. He spends the next fifty one
hours pursuing the General, either on foot or by the
hand car, and he eventually like gets to another station
on this hand car and he commandeers another train that

(23:40):
was heading south and puts it on the northbound track
and runs it backwards because he doesn't have time to
turn the train around. The Union guys are heading north.
He found a train that was heading south. He found
a few stragglers who happened to be from the first
Georgia Infantry Regiment. There were just some guys that were
hanging out. They were like bive whacked out there, and

(24:00):
he's like, you guys, get on the train. We're going
to drive backwards. He's kind of looking looking out the
side of the train go in the wrong direction on
the northbound track. He's very determined to get his train back,
and he is gaining on John Alfred Wilson and Andrews
Raiders because they are having to stop to destroy things.
They don't actually know they're being pursued. They suspect it.

(24:23):
They suspect that, you know, telegraph exists at this time period.
They expect that, you know, maybe the telegraph, Yeah, what's
getting around. They know they're probably being pursued, they don't
quite know the extent to which that is happening. They're
kind of destroying things and trying to like you know,
you know, especially at like bridge crossings, trying to do
their best to block people from coming after them. But

(24:45):
Fuller is on the move and he is not deterred
by any of the stuff that they've been doing to
destroy the tracks, so he at some point Andrews Raiders
they see the train coming towards them. They see this
train moving back cords towards them, and they're like, oh no,
like this guy's coming for us. So they detached the

(25:07):
last car of the locomotive. The Union soldiers detached the
last train car and just kind of leave it in
the track to block Fuller from pursuing them, and Fuller
just smashes it with his train, goes faster. He's in reverse,
kind of like a demolition derby, and he smashes into
that detached train car. It bursts into flames according to

(25:29):
some versions of the story, but he goes right through it. Wow, Yeah,
knocks it off the track, keeps going and catches up
to the train. I mean, the other thing to mention
here is that Andrews raiders are not like one guy
knew how to drive the train. But they're not trained guys.
They're not professional engineers.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah, they're messing things up guys.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
Yeah, they're there to cause havoc and be agents of chaos.
They're not experienced locomotive drivers. You know. Fuller is and
he is like not going to be deterred, and he
goes faster than them, and he catches them. And those
guys from the First Georgia they have rifles and they're
they're opening fire on the locomotive. So our friend John

(26:09):
Ulford Wilson, him and Mark Wood they jump off the
moving train to kind of escape what's happening here, and
they take off into the woods. Some of the First
Georgia guys are shooting at them as they run into
the forest, and now they're on the run and their
adventure is kind of just beginning. So went to think
about these guys. They're dressed in civilian clothes. They've got
six shooters on them that in the time of the
Civil War. It's not like a Clint Eastwood movie. You

(26:32):
don't just pop six new bullets in there is He's
not an easy thing to reload one of those things.
You kind of have stick shots for the foreseeable future. Yeah,
and they're being pursued by everything from like Confederate soldiers
to like civilians, like angry civilians, to like hunting dogs,
Like everybody's looking for these Union guys, these spies and

(26:53):
sabateurs who were wreaking so much hapoc and causing all
this chaos. Alfred Wilson and Mark Would they they're running
through the forest and they get into what Wilson very
funnily refers to as a ticklish situation, which is understatement
of the year, right, Yeah, that's his term for being
apprehended by Confederate cavalry and having the commander tell him

(27:15):
that we don't take prisoners, we execute them. But he
escapes that somehow. He captures a boat and takes it
fifty miles down the Tennessee River, eventually making it to
Union lines, or very close to Union lines. He bluffs
a group of Confederate scouts into thinking that he was
just like, you know, a civilian.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Good work.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, and he makes it back to Union lines in Stevenson, Alabama.
So you know, on foot by boat, bluffing his way
out of Confederate cavalry capture multiple times. He makes it
to Stevenson, Alabama and Union lines, except turns out steven
Saint Alabama had been retaken by the Confederacy a couple
weeks earlier, and he didn't realize that, and so when

(27:58):
he walks into Stevenson, Alabama, it's a Confederate stronghold now
and he's captured.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, because even though you have telegraphs, not everyone gets
all the memos all the time.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Yes, yes, so awkward. Oh yeah, fifty one hours on
the train and thirty six running through running through the
forest until he is captured because he didn't have the
good intelligence or good information on what was going on
in Stevenson, Alabama. So they're captured on site. It turns
out they were actually seven miles from friendly lines, so

(28:30):
they were really close, but they didn't they didn't get there.
They are brought before the Confederate commander in the sector,
a guy named General Ledbetter, and he says, you know,
we're gonna hang you as spies. You know, I'm sorry,
You're gonna be hung, and we're going to throw you
into an unmarked grave. And Wilson is pretty bad ass dude,
and we're going to see more this soon. But his

(28:50):
response to being told that he's going to be hung
as a spy, it's kind of like the sort of
response you'd see in an old cowboy movie. He says, quote,
hang me and be damned. But I tell you one
thing to remember. If you ever do come across one
of our men and hang him, look out that sooner
or later your own neck. Don't pay the penalty, because
this hanging business will be quite common about the time
this rebellion closes up. Wow, which I love it. Yeah,

(29:12):
I mean, if that was his last words, he would
be badass. It's not. Ledbetter doesn't like it. But he
does take him prisoner. He doesn't hang him on the spot.
He throws them into. He takes them down to Chattanooga,
the town they were planning on attacking. He's dragged through
the streets in chains, and he is thrown into a
horrible prison that is known among the prisoners as the Whole.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, and this is pretty awful. Being a prisoner of
war in the Civil War did not mean that you
were actually safe in any useful definition of the word.
No one expected the war to go on as long
as it did, so they didn't really invest in what
we would consider adequate prison facilities, and most prisons were

(29:55):
actually just giant, overcrowded messes like the Hole. And you
didn't have bathrooms, you didn't have reliable food, you didn't
have reliable medical care. And two of the most notorious
prisons of the war were like this, Andersonville in the South,
and there the situation was so bad the ward ended
up being hanged for war crimes. And in the North

(30:18):
you have Elmira, where prisoners had to camp outside in
the snow in the middle of the New York winter.
And about twelve to fifteen percent of all Civil War
POWs ended up dying in captivity. That's like one out
of every eight or maybe even one out of every six.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, really rough situations for prisoners in the Civil War.
And you know, the Union spies in the hole in
Chattanooga were not We're on the lower end of the
survivability spectrum when we are talking about prisoner of war
treatment during the Civil War. So Wilson's thrown into the hole,

(30:56):
and he's thrown in there with a bunch of his
other guys. So the rest of the guys from the
Great Locomotive Chase had already been captured and they were
all kind of there waiting for him. There were twenty
two prisoners. There were twenty guys on twenty of the raiders,
plus two other spies who had been captured that were
on their way to Marietta to be part of the
locomotive chase. They didn't actually get on board the locomotive.

(31:17):
They got captured before they got there. So twenty two
Union prisoners. They spend five months in a thirteen by
thirteen foot unventilated, unlit dirt room in the basement of
an old building in the stifling, suffocating, airless heat of
the Tennessee summer twenty two guys in a thirteen by

(31:37):
thirteen room for five months. Their chains were never removed,
their clothes became infested with lice, their food was mostly spoiled,
just corn meal and ransom meat, and they figured that
their lives couldn't possibly get any worse. And maybe they
were right, but things do get The situation does get

(31:58):
worse for John Alfred Wilson because eight of those raiders
do end up getting hung as spies, including Andrews the commander.
So after five months in the hole, Wilson is transferred
to a different prison. He ends up going to Fulton
County Prison in Atlanta, which is a much better situation

(32:18):
for him, a big improvement over the hole in Chattanooga.
He and the thirteen remaining prisoners, though, like you know,
even though the conditions have improved twenty percent, they still
know they got to They can't stick around if they
want to. They want to get out of here alive.
So of course, yeah, so they decide they're going to
organize a prison break because they haven't had enough time
being on the run, so they are going to break

(32:39):
out of Fulton County Prison. That's their plan, and This
is Atlanta. This is the heart of the Confederacy. This
is the headquarters for you know, several high ranking generals,
huge numbers of soldiers in the in the area.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
You know.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
This is this is a stronghold. This is a major
strong point for the Confederate military. They make their plans
and one night, when the guard comes to drop off
their food, the raiders attack. John Alfred Wilson has removed
a brick from the wall of his cell, and when

(33:15):
the guard comes in to drop off the food, Wilson
hits in with the brick, takes his keys, and starts
opening up the cells. Now we have a prison break
in the middle of Confederate controlled Atlanta. Wilson has to
fight his way out of the prison. He fights these
guys with a brick. He's fighting with his bare hands.
He has an empty bottle of whiskey that he found

(33:36):
in the barracks. He hits somebody that he and the
raiders they bust out of a jail and they head
off into town and they scatter in all different directions,
and the alarms are going and people are shooting at them,
and one shot hits so close to Wilson that the
wooden wall splinters up next to him and he gets
some splinters and some shrapnel in his leg. But they're
scattering and it's chaos. There's alarms, everybody's screaming and yelling,

(33:59):
and Wilson he ends up again with his friend Mark Wood,
who has gone through this entire or deal with him,
and they start running through the woods while dogs and
guys with guns and like I said, even some civilians
are chasing them. And they run and they make their
way through the woods. They don't really know where they are.
They don't know the geography of Georgia that well, but

(34:21):
they're gonna run for it, and they eventually make it
to the Chatathanchie River. They decide, like you know, they're
at the river, you know they're being pursued, but they
decide something really interesting. They decide that rather than getting
on the river and trying to go north, they are
going to take a boat. They steal somebody's boat and
they're gonna They decide they're going to go south. They're

(34:42):
going to go towards Florida.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
And it sounds counterintuitive, shouldn't they be heading towards the Union,
But it actually is really smart because they're heading towards water.
They're heading towards open water, and the Union has a
blockade all over the place, so they're going to have
Union boats all around. So all our guys have to
do is get to open water and take advantage of that.

(35:06):
And the Union blockade was a huge reason for the
Union victory. They were starving out the Confederacy, they were
blocking their supply lines, they were blocking international trade with
England and other places. So yeah, it actually was a
good idea to go south.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, and it does pay off for them, we will see.
So they cross roughly three hundred miles in the next
thirty days. So they're sailing downstream on a stolen boat
for a month. They're living off the land. Like I said,
they have no weapons. For food, they definitely didn't. Like
they got a brick and an empty bottle of whiskey
and this boat that they stole, and they're going downstream

(35:44):
in Georgia and Florida, they're scavenging farmland. At night, they'll like,
you know, pull the boat up on shore and try
to sneak into like see if there's anybody living nearby,
and try to steal food from them. They're doing whatever
they can. They start seeing alligators, which scare them. So
the way they have to fight off the alligators is
by hitting them with the oars and the paddles. At

(36:05):
one point, I love the story that at one point
a dolphin popped its head up out of the water,
and neither of these guys had ever seen a dolphin
before or knew what it was, so they just freaking
hit that thing too with the paddle.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Probably knew it was just a funny looking alligator.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah, who knows. I don't know what this I think.
I think if a dolphin popped its head up out
of the water next to my little rowboat and I
didn't know what it was, I'd probably want to hit
it too, you know, big mammal hit it. Yeah, And
so after thirty days, they're half dead, they're sunburned, they're
covered in mosquito bites, they've got scurvy, they've got yellow fever,

(36:41):
they're starving. But they finally reached the mouth of the
Chattahoochee River, and in the distance they see the federal blockade,
the Union ships that are preventing all Confederate shipping from
getting in or out of the Confederacy, And so they
they have to take. They have to make a canoe
by the time they get here, because at some point

(37:02):
during their adventure, their stolen boat was stolen from them
while they were sleeping.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
What goes around comes around, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
And so they had to make a boat from you know,
by basically just like bear grillsing it right, yeah, yeah,
a pictureing just like a homemade raft or a canoe
or something. And they have to take that out on
open water and out on the high seas, and they
get picked up by a federal gunboat on November tenth,
eighteen sixty two.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
So this whole adventure is taking about half a year.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yes, so it's a long time. It was supposed to be,
you know, a pretty short little sabotage mission. They left
in April eighteen sixty two, and now it's mid November
and they have finally like survived this ordeal and been
picked up by this Union gunboat. They were the only
of the prisoners that were being held in Fulton County Prison.

(37:50):
Eight of them escaped, made it out, weren't recaptured immediately
inside Atlanta, and of those eight, Wood and Wilson were
the only two who didn't get recaptured. Everybody else was
recaptured trying to make it back to Union lines. They
all went north, which was what the Confederates would expect
them to do, and they were all grabbed. Nobody else

(38:11):
was hanged, so they all of the others who were
captured ended up surviving the war, or at least surviving
this part of it. And Alfred Wilson and Mark Wood
they end up on this Union gunboat that sails to
Jamaica and a couple other cool places in the Caribbean,
and eventually he is returned to Washington, d C. Safe
and sound and is promptly imprisoned for violating a mandatory

(38:35):
curfew that he didn't know existed. He's still in civilian
clothes and he gets there and you're not supposed to
be out at night, so he's thrown in jail overnight,
and then the next it is like yeah. And then
the next day he meets Abraham Lincoln because they find
out who he was, and he meets Lincoln and he's
personally presented with the first ever batch of medals of

(38:57):
Honor for his service to the US Army.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Gratulations.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, so he isn't a guy named Jacob Parrott, who
was one of the Raiders who survived the whole is
credited as the first guy to receive a Medal of Honor.
The original presentation of these was on March twenty fifth,
eighteen sixty three, and most of the Raiders were eventually

(39:21):
returned to Union Lines via prisoner transfers or prisoner exchanges.
So the Andrews Raiders eventually all made it back to
the Union Lines, and this guy, Jacob Parrott, had had
like the hardest time of it in prison, and all
of the guys that were part of this crew decided
that Parrott should be the first guy to receive the
Medal of Honor. He had kind of taken a couple

(39:41):
of beatings in prison and had a really hard time
of it, but he lived and he got the first
Medal of Honor. John Alfred Wilson gets his several months
after the rest of Andrews Raiders because he was missing,
presumed dead, and didn't get his you know, the actions
for which he received the Medal of Honor were at
the same time as Drew's Raiders, but he wasn't present

(40:02):
to receive his medal until several months after everybody else
got theirs, but you know, you get the idea. I
like talking about Wilson because his story is, for me,
one of the more interesting ones. And it is also
because he wrote it down. He wrote down his autobiography.
It's called Hey, Yeah, the Adventures of alf Wilson, A
thrilling episode of the Dark Days of the Rebellion is

(40:24):
what it's called. And it's great. It's really funny, and
I mean, yeah, funny is not the right word. It's great.
It's really good and exciting, and it reads like an
adventure story, and you know, it's definitely worth a read.
John Alfred Wilson later rejoins his old unit in Ohio.
He survives the war, he gets married, he writes his memoirs,
and he lives to be seventy two years old, and

(40:46):
he is among the first recipients of the US Medal
of Honor.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah. Quite a story.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, great locomotive Chase. It's as exciting as the silent movie,
as you'd referenced earlier, I think.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, And actually I was thinking about it. There is
a silent movie about the Great Locomotive Chase, starring Buster Keaton,
and it's called The General. Oh and it's named after
the trailer yeah motive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's from nineteen
twenty six.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
Wow, really early. Yeah awesome. So that's that And if you,
you know, if you want more details, you can watch
the Silent Movie. I'm sure it's extremely historically accurate, or.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
You could read Alf Wilson's memoirs.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Which I definitely recommend you should do it. It's very good.
And so then when we come back, we are going
to talk about the first woman to ever receive the
Medal of Honor. So stick with us and we will
be right back.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Lieutenant Colonel W. W. Blackford of the first Virginia Cavalry
describes the situation as follows. Quote. Tables about breast high
had been erected, upon which the screaming victims we're having
legs and arms cut off. The surgeons and their assistants,
stripped to the waist and bespattered with blood, stood around,

(42:10):
some holding the poor fellows, while others, armed with long,
bloody knives and saws, cut and sawed away with frightful rapidity,
throwing the mangled limbs on a pile nearby as soon
as removed. So that's the situation. I want you to
keep in mind when we talk about Mary Edwards Walker,

(42:32):
this is the state of battlefield surgery in the Civil War.
So imagine artillery shells detonating, Imagine musketry rattling non stop
in the distance. And this is all over the groans
and agonizing cries of men who are dying. And while
that's going on, you still get flood after flood of

(42:55):
new arrivals into the quote unquote hospital. But this is
a frontline field hospital, so it's actually just an ordinary
single family home that got converted, got commandeered, the driveways
lined with horse drawn ambulance carts full of trauma victims,
and the quote emergency room is barely worthy of the name.

(43:18):
You've got this just house being used as an emergency
room and operating room and even a morgue. And we're
on the outskirts at Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the hospitals overworked,
exhausted nurses. They're trying to triage the wounded, between those
who were possibly treatable and those who weren't going to
make it. So that's in Chattanooga's outside the city walls.

(43:42):
The Union Army is pushing back to Chattanooga. They had
been totally womped at Chickamauga, and they're trying their very
best to hold the city against this ferocious Confederate counterattack.
And forty six thousand men of Braxton Bragg's Army of
Tennessee on the heights. They're overlooking the critical strategic rail

(44:03):
and communications center. And we know from the story of
the Great Locomotive Chase how important bows are. The Union
forces are backed up against the Tennessee River, and now
we've got an assault led by General George Thomas, rushing
up a steep ridge right into enemy positions. We've got
one hundred twelve cannons. There's murderous fire, and we're trying

(44:24):
trying to break out of the siege. And of course
soldiers get wounded, and those who were lucky enough to
find their way back to friendly lines find themselves here
in this little converted home, and now it is unsterilized.
A lot of the men have malaria. The surgeons are

(44:47):
using saws, and in some ways the only comfort was
a cup of cold water, and the nurses trying their
best to just say soothing things to them and ease
their pain suffering. In some small way, these nurses were
doing a very important job. And there were over ten
thousand women working as nurses in field hospitals across the

(45:08):
war zone in the Civil War, but Mary Edwards Walker
of the fifty second Ohio Volunteer Infantry was the only
one who served as a surgeon. She's also the only
woman in history ever to receive the Medal of Honor,
so she was maybe one hundred fifty years ahead of
her time. She was routinely criticized by both women and

(45:30):
men for her desire to wear quote unquote men's clothing,
which meant pants, because they were practical.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
You don't want to do battlefield surgery in a big hoopskirt?

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Why why not? So yeah, And she paid her own
way through Syracuse Medical College in eighteen fifty five, becoming
just the second woman in American history to complete official
physician training and work actually as an official doctor. And
when the Civil War broke out in eighteen sixty one, Walker,

(46:00):
excuse me, doctor Walker had already been running her own
private practice for six years. You know, she's looking at
the situation like, oh, there's a war going on. There
are only eighty six licensed surgeons in the Union Army
at the start of hostilities, So she tries to sign
up and offer her services. She was turned away by
every recruiting officer she approached, so she found another way.

(46:24):
Doctor Walker signed on as a volunteer nurse and she
worked on the front lines at the first Battle of
bull Run and then later that year as an unpaid
volunteer surgeon at Indiana Hospital.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yeah, and like you said, there it was pretty common
for there to be women nurses, especially even on the battlefield, right,
even if it was just to like bring cold water
and ice to like wounded men, or to identify people
for those stretcher teams to come pick up. That was
very common. But a surgeon's a woman surgeon. The only

(46:57):
one I know of is doctor Walker.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yeah, So her mo is I'll just show up wherever
people are dying and see if, yeah, maybe I can
fix them for free. She volunteers at the Battle of
Fredericksburg in eighteen sixty two. She's performing frontline operations and
she took control of a medical train that was ferrying
wounded men back to Washington. And her skills at surgery

(47:21):
were so good and her reputation was so good. Word
got around and Union General Ambrose Burnside heard about this,
he nominated her for a commission and okay. At first,
Dr Walker met with the usual resistance like okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
same old, same old, same old. But thanks to General

(47:43):
Burnside's recommendation, she finally was commissioned as an assistant surgeon
in the fifty second Ohio Volunteer Infantry. She was issued
a US Army's surgeon's uniform, and she was sent to
Tennessee to help treat wounded and dying men during the
Siege of Chattanooga as a surgeon rather than just a nurse. Now,

(48:06):
what did the job of a Civil War surgeon actually entail?

Speaker 1 (48:11):
So, like we said, with nurses, it's a lot of triage,
make tourniquits, clean wounds, change dressings, things like that. But
for a surgeon is very intense work. Kind of as
we've been saying with the quote you mentioned at the
beginning and some of the other things we've been talking about,
there's brutal wounds that are happening to people during the

(48:35):
Civil War. You have artillery canister fire cannon balls. I mean,
those are extremely damaging to the human body and in
a lot of cases those kind of just kind of
deal death right but the majority of the Civil War
surgical cases were from gunshot wounds. The problem with this

(48:55):
type of bullet is that it kind of mushrooms on impact,
and it is heavy and it hits hard, and so
it breaks bones on impact, kind of shatters bones. And
I mean picture like a fluorescent light bulb being hit
against a brick wall, Like that's kind of what the
minia ball does to the human femur. Perhaps that was
too gruesome of a description, but that is how it worked. So,

(49:16):
I mean, this is just the stuff that we got
to talk about. Yeah, you know, it ruptures blood vessels
and organs and all of these important things that people
keep inside their skin. And in a lot of cases,
the medical technology does not exist to effectively treat these wounds.
So if you got shot in the bone with a
mini ball, sometimes the only way to prevent and you're

(49:37):
in this kind of situation that we've been describing, these
very bad hospital situations. You know, not a lot of
sanitization happening, not sanitizing their tools barely, like like just
thrown a little bit of water on the table between patients.
There's a big risk of infection, and gangrene is a
big problem at this time.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah, you know with a lot of these, you know,
maybe they can di the dig the ball out, but
that that leg or that arm is not going to recover.
The bones are broken beyond repair, and for some of
these surgeons the only option was to cut the appendage off.
And you hear about this a lot, right when they
say that, you know, there's no organ transplants, there's no

(50:19):
internal surgeries, there's no blood transfusions. And they say that
if a soldier got hit in the head chester abdomen,
he had a ninety percent chance of death, and you
could just give him a little bit of morphine and
water and a shady tree for him to sit under.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
These his last moments.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Ray and wounds to the arms and legs, you had
better odds. Yeah, but three quarters of the operations being
performed in these hospitals is amputation.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
And if you got shot in one of your limbs,
you had maybe about forty eight hours to get that
amputated with a hacksaw, which remember is unsterilized because people
hadn't really figured out the whole sterilization thing yet. And
you're as the doctor, you're working in whatever conditions you're in,

(51:03):
which might be the kitchen counter of some family's home,
and so standard procedure was that if you were a
good surgeon, you could perform this operation in under ten minutes,
and you'd do it dozens of times in a row.
Bam bam, bam, and all while the city is being
pounded with artillery shells and stray bullets. And one nurse

(51:24):
at the Battle of Antietam recalled working on a guy
in the hospital of tent and then having a stray
bullet pass through the tent and through the sleeve of
her dress and then kills a patient right in front
of her, which may have been a more humane way
to go. It was a pretty grim situation. About twenty
five percent of people who underwent amputation surgery ended up

(51:45):
dying from infected wounds. And amidst all this chaos, doctor
Mary Edwards Walker continues to save human lives and it's
under hellish conditions, and yeah, the techniques are kind of barbaric,
but she does her best and she just keeps working
as a frontline surgeon throughout the three day Battle of Chattanooga.

(52:06):
So she's on a trip to Georgia to aid sick
and injured civilians she was ambushed by Confederate pickets and
they found her in her Union uniform. She was carrying
two pistols. They arrested her as a spy. And this
is a detail that may or may not actually have
been true. We can't prove it either way, but her

(52:27):
captors noted in their report that she argued quote enough
for a regiment of men. They recommended sending her to
a lunatic asylum for being a woman doctor, because of
course that's the craziest thing anyone could imagine. But instead
she was sent to Richmond and thrown into a jail
for Federal prisoners of war. She spent four months in

(52:51):
the prisoner of war camp. You can imagine what that
was like. She was then sent back to Yankee lines
as part of a prisoner exchange, and she she was
traded for a male Confederate surgeon, and she confessed lated
that she was very proud of that trade. Yeah, and
gave her the credit recognized her as a battlefield surgeon.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
There you go, right, And I think that surgeon was
a colonel or something too, so yeah, it's not bad. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
So she was sent back to the Union Army and
she was attached to General Sherman's army during the Atlanta Campaign.
After the Battle of Atlanta, she was appointed chief surgeon
at a women's military prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and there
she served until the end of the war. After her service,
she collected a well deserved army pension. She wrote a
couple of books. She became a women's suffrage activist, and

(53:42):
got arrested a couple times for wearing pants instead of
a dress.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
Yeah, and one thing I do want to mention with
Mary Edwards Walker is that we have spent a lot
of time talking about, like the gruesome details of Civil
War battlefield surgery, but Mary Edwards Walker did not perform amputations.
She didn't like it. She thought it was barbaric and medieval,
and she was really against the practice. So she would

(54:09):
do what she could to help people, and she was
performing some surgeries, but she was really opposed to these
kind of hold the guy down and amputate his arm
with the saw thing. So she you know, there weren't
a lot of other options available at the time, but
she did a lot of work to try to come
up with some new strategies, some new ways to treat

(54:30):
patients because She just thought that this was too brutal
and too like I said, you know, medieval, And so
I think that that is an interesting detail about her.
She was, you said, before her time, and I think
that there's a lot of truth to that, because she
was really interested in trying to find a better way
of dealing with these these types of injuries.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Yeah. During her time in the Union Army, doctor Mary
Edwards Walker had been recommended for promotion both by General
George Henry Thomas and also by General William Tocums, a Sherman,
but she was not technically a uniformed service member and
so these requests for promotion could not be granted. But

(55:14):
she did receive recognition. She was awarded the Congressional Medal
of Honor in eighteen sixty six, and over the years,
over the decades, there have been one point eight million
women who have served in the US military. She's the
only one to ever receive this award. And when the

(55:35):
federal government changed the guidelines for the Medal of Honor
in nineteen seventeen, they actually tried to go back on
this and joink it from her. They restricted the Medal
of Honor by stipulating that it could only be awarded
for actions that occurred in combat. And that's why retroactively,
about nine hundred people got theirs taken away from them,

(55:57):
and that included doctor Walker. And she didn't stand for this.
She just told him to go get bent. And no,
I'm not giving me on quite those words, but that attitude, well, no,
this is nonsen time. Yea. She wore the medal until
her death in nineteen nineteen, and it was actually officially

(56:19):
reinstated by order of President Jimmy Carter in nineteen seventy seven,
So even though it had.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
Been revoked for sixty years, it's no longer revoked. And
she is the only woman in US history to receive
the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Yeah. Yeah, So that's our three Medal of Honor American
heroes for today's episode.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Yeah, so three really good stories American Heroes Medal of
Honor recipients. Just kind of very patriotic Fourth of July
stuff happening on the show today, and we are going
to well, we have some something interesting planned for the
next couple of episodes, because the next and two episodes

(57:03):
for the rest of you know, for the next two
weeks in July, we are going to talk about some
I don't know how should we say this less fondly
remembered American badasses badass Americans, but perhaps not quite as
patriotic as as the three we talked about today. So yeah,
I think we're going to leave it with that, and

(57:25):
thank you guys so much for listening, and we are
going to see you next week with another one.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.

(57:54):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.

(58:14):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as We'll
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