An Unidentified Trooper from Who Knows Where?

• Enlisting under an alias and providing a misleading age and place of birth was rife in the nineteenth century United States Army, and many of those who filled the ranks of the 7th Cavalry were no exception. Sergeant Major William H. Sharrow, a baker’s son from Sheriff Hutton, near York, had welched on a debt and claimed he was born “At Sea”, Thomas Causby Woolfitt, a convicted embezzler from Liverpool, who deserted his wife and young children, chose to enlist as Thomas Causby, and John Stuart Stuart Forbes, a Scottish banker’s son “on the run” from an unknown family  disgrace ‘borrowed’ his brother-in-law’s surname’ and became Private John S. Hiley.
•        On 21 March 1876, in Baltimore, Maryland, arecruit told Lt William Wallace that he was Jacob Doll, a 26-year-old baker from Russel in England. Not only is the surname Doll of German origin and rare in Great Britain but there is no village, town or city in England bearing the name ‘Russel’ or even ‘Russell’, which compounds the mystery. There is however a ‘Russell Town’ district of Bristol; a ‘Russel’s Green, Suffolk,’ a ‘Russell Green, Sussex,’ ‘and a ‘Kingston Russell, Dorset’?  Did he mean ‘Rushall,’ (some pronounce ‘Rus-al) in Herefordshire, Norfolk, Wiltshire and Walsall?  Or was it none of these places!
•       Records of Enlistments show Doll had brown eyes, black hair, a fair complexion and stood 5′ 7″ tall.  He was sent to the St Louis Depot and from there transferred to the 7th Cavalry and assigned to Company B, which he joined at St Paul, Minnesota, on 27 April 1876.
•        Doll was on detached service as a teamster with the Quartermaster Department in May who remained at the Powder River Depot and did not participate in the Little Bighorn battle. He deserted from Fort Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1877 and was never apprehended.
• So, who was Jacob Doll? Where did he really come from? His true identity and his fate remain unknown to this writer.