Friday, May 23, 2003 | 5:13 a.m.
To hear the passion with which Bruce Montgomery talks about the Civil War, one would think he was there.
Montgomery, one of only a couple of hundred Civil War veterans' grandsons who are still alive, speaks with great pride of how his grandfather, James Skees, fought with the 7th Illinois Infantry under Gen. William Sherman at battles that included Shilo, Tenn.; Corinth, Miss.; and Bentonville, N.C. He proudly shows off his grandfather's age-beaten photo album that includes a photo Sherman gave his grandfather.
"It's a young Sherman without his full beard," said Montgomery, a Las Vegas resident of 43 years who turns 90 on Sunday. "You don't usually see photos of Sherman without a full beard."
Montgomery will add his lineage to the Sons of Union Veterans William B. Keith Camp 12 this week. At a Decoration Day ceremony Friday, he will become the 18th member of the group who can trace his roots to the Civil War and will be the chapter's only grandson of a Civil War veteran. The ceremony, which marks the traditional day that graves of the Civil War dead were decorated, is at 6:30 p.m. at Woodlawn Cemetery.
Virtually every other military-related group will celebrate Memorial Day on Sunday and Monday in accordance with the federal holiday that was adopted in 1971. However, the Sons and Daughters of Union Veterans hold true to the original Memorial Day order that was issued by Gen. John Logan on May 5, 1868.
It reads in part that Memorial Day is to be observed on May 30 "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land."
Friday's ceremony will be at the site of the graves of Yankee William Keith of Iowa -- for whom the local chapter is named -- and Rebel Joseph Graham of Virginia. Years after the war both settled in Las Vegas, met and became good friends.
They are buried side-by-side at Woodlawn Cemetery in a grave with a tall stone that has been designated as a Civil War monument by the national office of the Sons of Union Veterans.
Despite his longevity and deep admiration of the Civil War, Montgomery, a native of Illinois who was born two years after his grandfather died in 1911 at age 75, had never joined a Civil War organization. He says this is the first time such an opportunity has presented itself.
Montgomery says he is grateful for acceptance by that organization, calling it a wonderful birthday gift.
"I have always had a great interest in the Civil War because I have family who fought on both sides," he said. "My grandfather's two older brothers fought for the Confederacy. Also, I probably have more books on the Civil War than many libraries have."
Although Montgomery says his memory is fading with age, he rattles off 19th century dates of important family events with seemingly little effort.
"My grandmother, Nancy Elizabeth Reynolds of Kentucky, was the daughter of a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson Reynolds," Montgomery said. "Before his wedding day in 1831, he bought his bride, Polly, a slave to help her get ready for her wedding. They kept her after that because Polly wanted someone else to do the cooking and cleaning. I still have that bill of sale somewhere around here."
Montgomery says he is disappointed that schoolchildren nationwide are being taught what he feels are inaccurate lessons that the Civil War was fought mainly to abolish slavery. He says that was only one of a number of issues that centered around a hotly contested main issue.
"The Civil War was fought over something that is still an important issue today -- it's states' rights," he said. "The federal government in the North stuck its nose in everything back then. The hot-blooded Southerners didn't like that and took issue with it."
Ed Gobel, curator of the Gobel-Lowden Veterans Museum in Las Vegas, checked with, among others, the U.S. Census Bureau, Veterans Affairs Department, Sons of Union Veterans and the Charleston, S.C., Historical Society and determined that "the number of sons of Civil War veterans living, from several sources, seems to be 13 as of a year ago -- eight sons of Confederate veterans and five sons of Union veterans.
"As of Jan. 1, 2003, we found there were 246 grandsons of Civil War veterans of both sides still alive. What's strange is that no one seems to have kept good track of the granddaughters of Civil War veterans. We can't get a good number on that," Sons of the Union Veterans spokesman Len Becker, a great-grandson of a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic, said.
When Montgomery was a child, his mother told him stories of Skees' exploits in the war, including how he was mustered out of the Army in April 1864 in Rome, Ga., in the heart of Dixie, and had to find his way home.
"The first thing he did was lose his uniform," Montgomery said, noting that hostilities were still at a fever pitch, although the South by then had been soundly defeated. "He put on civilian clothes and walked most of the way back to Illinois. Because he was from a part of Illinois that was near Kentucky, he had sort of a Southern accent, so he did OK with the people he would meet along the way."
Montgomery settled in Las Vegas in 1959 and eventually worked as a carpenter at every Southern Nevada school that existed in the early 1960s from Searchlight to Indian Springs.
Today Montgomery lives alone and cares for himself. He walks around his northwest Las Vegas apartment with the help of a cane and drives his motorized wheelchair to catch a public bus that takes him to the grocery store. Montgomery prepares his meals daily and says he enjoys his independence.
Recently, he read a clipping of a Sun story about the Sons of Union Veterans and called Becker.
"I was ecstatic," Becker said. "It is so rare to find a grandson of a Civil War veteran. And Bruce had everything so well documented that I knew his application would be approved with no problem. Everything checked out about his ancestors when I did a computer search to verify it."
Preserving Civil War history is of vital importance to the Sons of Union Veterans, especially in Nevada, which became a Union state during the Civil War.
The organization and its sister group, the Daughters of Union Veterans, have since 1997 identified eight Civil War dead in Las Vegas and one in Goodsprings. The organizations have secured military markers for Keith, Graham and two men at Woodlawn Cemetery who had been buried in unmarked graves.
Montgomery says he isn't concerned that he is joining the group so late in life. "I'll do what I can to help them preserve history," he said.
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