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Autograph Letter Signed while serving as Captain and Judge Advocate of the 125th U.S.Colored Infantry (“Buffalo Soldiers”) at Fort Craig, New Mexico Territory. 4 pp. with original postmarked mailing envelope, from which the stamp has been cut. 

To (his wife?) Mrs. Nellie Stanley, Enfield, New Hampshire: “…The Court Martial adjourned yesterday and tomorrow I start for my Post, it is quite a trip, it will take about five days to make it, it is so very warm and no water for the first one hundred miles. I almost dread it sometimes. I have made the trip several times now and will have to make it twice more if…[death?] does not get me, which I hourly think he will…The weather is very warm indeed and a person can hardly go out of doors in the day time… There is a man here taking Photographs…would have mine taken but you have so many of them, you would not care for a new one…I have got some Pictures of N.M. scenery, people etc. which I will send you soon. I feel in hopes our stay in N.M. is now short as I hear that the Regt. is on its way…when I think it over what shall I be able to do when I get out of the service, so long a soldier, it unfits a person for almost anything else. So much of my life and the best of my years spent for nothing, it makes me feel bad sometimes. I don’t suppose you would hardly know me….it has worn upon me a good deal.…” Enlisted as an Private in a New Hampshire Infantry regiment during the last year of the Civil War, Wheeler remained in the postwar Army, commissioned Captain of a regiment of African-American troops distinguished for bravery, who were the first “Buffalo Soldiers” sent to Fort Craig, a lonely ramshackle Army post established before the war near the Rio Grande to protect travelers and settlers from desperadoes and Apaches on the warpath. Beyond the Fort, across a “Journey of Death” desert – 99 dreary and desolate miles without any water wood or grass – was another isolated adobe fort, and another 65 miles beyond that, still another, both garrisoned by Buffalo Soldiers. This was the trip Wheeler was about to take again, which he so dreaded. The photographer to whom he refers may have been a man named Gaige who was active at New Mexican military posts shortly after the War. Most of Wheeler’s personal correspondence during his Army years – he later retired in New Hampshire - is now held by Southern Methodist University.