Volume II of Dan Clendaniel’s magisterial history of the 85th Pennsylvania, Such Hard and Severe Service, is now available.

Volume I ended with the regiment recovering from their exhaustive duties on Morris Island, South Carolina during the siege of Charleston and Fort Sumter in 1863. They had organized in 1861, fought at Seven Pines during the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia and during the Goldsboro Expedition in North Carolina in 1862, and in 1863 had been sent to the South Carolina front. By September of 1863, 177 soldiers had died from battlefield wounds or diseases. An additional 337 men had been dismissed from the regiment, mostly due to medical discharges while a handful transferred to other units.

Also, by late 1863, their commanding officer, Colonel Joshua B. Howell, was convalescing from a severe concussion from a shell explosion. Their lieutenant colonel, Henry A. Purviance, had been killed by friendly fire in the trenches around Battery Wagner on Morris Island. Of the original ten reimental captains, none remained in their position by late 1863, mostly due to medical discharges. Just one, Isaac M. Abraham, who had been promoted to major, remained with the regiment. New leadership was emerging from the lower ranks in each company.

Volume II begins with the regiment enjoying a break from the battlefield beginning in late 1863 and follows the regiment through to the end of the war. Chapters include “Whitemash Island,” “Bermuda Hundred Campaign,” “Diary of Captain Richard Dawson,” “The Exchange Fleet,” “Fort Gregg” and “The Appomattox Campaign.” A final chapter covers post-war reunions. In addition there are thirty pages of appendices.

*Three Years on the Nowhere Road:* discovering Hanshan in the Olympic Peninsula wilderness

 BJ Omanson's road to becoming a poet began about as far from the classroom as can be imagined. He had dropped out of high school five years earlier and had no intention of returning. He was 22, living alone in a primitive shelter above the Calawah River in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula and working in a little shake mill outside of Forks, Washington. 

His journey began one winter morning in a stand of old-growth Sitka spruce when a fellow mill-worker and ex-Sgt of Marines named Mitch handed him a sheaf of folded pages, worn at the corners and tearing at the creases.  They were poems that Mitch had copied out by hand and carried in his jacket pocket for months until finally deciding to pass them along. They were Gary Snyder's translations of the Cold Mountain Poems, written by a half-mad old hermit named Hanshan who lived in a cave overlooking the Yellow River in 8th-century China. 

For the rest of the winter, ensconced in his shelter with a small fire for warmth, seven miles from the nearest neighbor, Omanson read and re-read the ancient poems, along with other books of literature, ethnology and mysticism, and wrote his first cycle of poems. ---- 

Volume I of Three Years on the Nowhere Road chronicles that first winter on the Calawah, his hazardous work in the mills and on the steep, logged-over slopes, his encounters with a Sasquatch and other backwoods eccentrics, and his first steps on the arduous, solitary road to becoming a poet.