Katie Hanson - Another One Bites the Dust

In 1879, the story of Katie (or Kate) Hanson swept across the country.  She had disappeared twenty-two years prior, and newspapers reported that the mystery had finally been solved.  The romantic tale began in Pennsylvania when the eighteen-year-old fell in love with a man named Johnson.  The couple relished each other's company and specifically loved sharing adventures hunting and fishing in the woods.  But that came to an end when Hanson's father commanded her to desist in associating with the young man, whom he deemed "worthless."  Katie could not reconcile her feelings for Johnson and her father's lack of approval.  To her, the only option was to dissolve the relationship, which she chose to accomplish by running away in male disguise..  A search ensued, but after a couple of years, Katie's parents gave her up for dead.  According to them, she must have either been shot and killed in a hunting accident or became lost in the woods and perished.

But she was very much alive and had procured a job working on a steamboat.  However, she ended up abandoning this position in order to enlist in an Ohio regiment upon the outbreak of war.  Katie flourished in the army and was promoted to sergeant in 1863.  She served in this capacity until the following year when her captain, James Hopkins, confronted her with his long-standing suspicions of her true identity.  Caught off guard, Hanson admitted the truth and begged Hopkins to allow her to continue serving as a soldier.  Her pleas fell on deaf ears though, and she was removed from the ranks and forced to wear feminine clothing.  Katie, however, continued to serve, but as a nurse in a hospital instead.  And who did she soon have in her care but her captain who was wounded in a skirmish.  The two fell in love, married after the war, and moved to Cuba.  There, a vacationing Colonel Grant Wilson of Philadelphia who was aware of her disappearance, had encountered the couple and upon his arrival to New York, he traveled to Pennsylvania to report to Katie's family that she had been found.  Thus ended the quarter-of-a-century-year-old mystery.

And that is the account you will commonly see.  But there was more.  The story of Katie Hanson was revived in 1882, several years after it originally appeared, when reporters included it in a piece about the death of another woman soldier in Nashville that year.  This reemergence prompted the staff of one New York newspaper to reveal the truth about this story.

It's kind of funny that the reporter did not realize just how far his creation had reached.  It appeared in newspapers across the country, not just in Pennsylvania.  And they ranged from small, community papers to large, prominent publications such as The New York Times.

Well this certainly explains why my genealogical efforts to find these people failed miserably.



And thus, Katie Hanson joins the ranks of such false female soldiers as Ellen Levasay and Charlotte Hope, among others.


 Until next formation....rest.