The Bucktails
Driftwood, Cameron County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Famed Civil War volunteers departed from this point for Harrisburg, April 1861, where they were mustered into State service. A monument, erected in their honor, is just south of here. This highway and a State park are named for the Bucktails.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
When the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, hardy woodsmen and hunters from Pennsylvania's northern mountains answered the call, famously pinning deer tails to their caps as a badge of their marksmanship. From this point along the Sinnemahoning they set off in April 1861 for Harrisburg to be mustered into service as the men who would become known as the Bucktails. A nearby monument, a state highway, and a state park all keep their name alive.
Why it matters
The Bucktails became one of the Union's most celebrated regiments, and their departure from this remote valley shows how the war reached into every corner of rural America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1861, the United States came apart, and the call went out for volunteers. Across the North, ordinary men left farms, shops, and forests to answer it — and few places answered from harder country than the northern mountains of Pennsylvania.
This was rugged, thinly settled land, a world of steep ridges, deep hollows, and dense timber threaded by streams like the Sinnemahoning. The men who lived here were woodsmen and hunters, at home with a rifle and used to hardship. When war came, that everyday skill would become a military reputation.
Driftwood, tucked into this remote valley, was the kind of place a newspaper reader in a big city might never have heard of. Yet in April 1861 it became a starting point — the spot from which local volunteers set off to join a war that was reaching into every corner of the country.
People & events
From this point along the valley, in April 1861, a company of Pennsylvania volunteers departed for Harrisburg, the state capital, where they were mustered into service. They became part of the regiment remembered ever after as the Bucktails.
The name came from a badge these marksmen wore: a deer's tail fixed to the cap, a woodsman's boast that here was a man who could shoot. It set them apart, and it stuck. Their reputation as sharpshooters and hard fighters would follow them through the war.
Their leaving is honored close by. A monument stands just south of here in their memory, and the community kept their name on the land itself — carried by the state highway that runs through the valley and by a state park nearby. Few small places have marked their soldiers so thoroughly.
Its place in the American story
The Bucktails' departure from this narrow valley is a small window onto a vast truth about the Civil War: it drew its armies not from cities alone but from the whole sprawling countryside, reaching even the most out-of-the-way mountain settlements.
The Union was built, in part, from thousands of local companies like this one — neighbors who enlisted together, marched to a state capital, and were folded into the larger machinery of the war. Regiments carried the character of the places that raised them, and the Bucktails carried the mark of the northern woods.
That a distant valley could send its young men to Harrisburg and on into the great campaigns shows how total the conflict became. The war was not something that happened elsewhere; it began, for families here, on the day their sons set off from this very ground.
If you visit
This is a place to feel the setting as much as read the sign. You are deep in Pennsylvania's mountain country, where the roads follow the streams and the ridges rise close on either side — the same demanding landscape that shaped the men this marker honors.
Seek out the monument just south of here, raised in the Bucktails' memory. Standing beside it, you can picture the volunteers gathering in April 1861, at the start of a journey that would carry them far from home.
Notice, too, how the name lives on around you — on the highway you drove in on and at the state park nearby. Make it a stop on a trip through the northern tier, and let the quiet of the valley remind you that history's largest events began, again and again, in places exactly this small.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related events
- · American Civil War
- · Mustering of the Bucktail Regiment, April 1861
Themes & tags
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