Shiloh snapshot: Shot, rescued in hospital, he dies in hometown

After fighting in Sarah Bell's cotton field at Shiloh on April 6, 1862,
Private Otto Heimberger's 1st Illinois Light Artillery unit retreated here, near Bloody Pond. 

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Days after heavy rain in late April 1862, the Ohio River overflowed its banks in Mound City, Ill., threatening wounded soldiers from the Battle of Shiloh who filled a brick warehouse-turned-hospital.

"Mound City is entirely underwater," the Chicago Tribune warned, noting that pools of stagnant water could breed malaria and kill patients. "If we do not remove the wounded quickly, our men will die like sheep," the newspaper added. 

1912 image of building in Mound City, Ill., used
as military hospital. The warehouse was destroyed
 by fire in 1976. (A History of Southern Illinois)

Floodwaters surged onto the hospital’s first floor. Caregivers scrambled, placing 24-year-old Otto Heimburger and others from Battery A of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery on cots and slipping them through second-floor windows to safety. 

Heimburger had arrived by steamer around April 20, nursing a leg wound from the battle’s first day, April 6. His fiancée soon joined him, "watching him with incessant solicitude and love," a report noted. 

Afterward, caregivers loaded Heimberger and the wounded onto a north-bound flatboat. Later, attendants transferred them to an Illinois Central Railroad train, placing their stretchers across the tops of the seats in the last car. 

Among them, 21-year-old Private Charles B. Kimbell pleaded with surgeons not to amputate his leg. His father intervened upon arrival from Paducah, Ky., persuading the doctors to cancel the operation and saving his son’s life. 

The train carried the wounded 350 miles to Chicago, where friends met them and tended to them in private homes. But Heimberger — one of over 13,000 Union casualties at Shiloh — died on May 16, shattering his fiancée and a "large circle of friends." 

The next day at 2 p.m., Chicago Light Artillery soldiers and members of the Cigar Makers Association attended his funeral at 220 East Van Buren Street, a short walk from Lake Michigan.

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SOURCES

— Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1862.
— First Illinois Light Artillery Volunteers, Chicago, Cushing Printing Co., 1899, Page 48.