The Bucktails
Smethport, McKean County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
At the call of Col. Thos. L. Kane, 100 Civil War volunteers assembled here on Apr. 24, 1861, to go to Harrisburg. Tails of buck deer, worn as distinctive insignia, provided the name of the famed 42d Regiment, of which they were the core.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Col. Thomas L. Kane rallied about 100 volunteers who gathered at Smethport on the 24th before marching off to Harrisburg. These backwoods marksmen pinned tails of buck deer to their caps as a badge of identity, giving rise to the celebrated nickname "the Bucktails." They formed the core of the famed 42nd Pennsylvania Regiment, which earned a reputation as some of the Union's finest sharpshooters.
Why it matters
The Bucktails carried the grit of Pennsylvania's northern frontier into the Union army, becoming one of the war's most storied regiments.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In April of 1861, the United States cracked in two. The firing on Fort Sumter turned a long political crisis into open war, and across the North, ordinary communities suddenly faced an extraordinary question: who would go, and how soon?
Up in the rugged northern country of Pennsylvania, this was a land of forests, hills, and hard, self-reliant living. Its people were woodsmen and hunters, at home with a rifle and the outdoors in a way city recruits rarely were. When the call to arms came, that frontier temperament went to war with them.
The response was swift. Within days of the war's outbreak, men were gathering, organizing, and preparing to march — part of the great, sudden mobilization that swept the loyal states in the spring of 1861.
People & events
On April 24, 1861 — barely more than a week after the war began — about a hundred volunteers assembled at Smethport at the call of Colonel Thomas L. Kane. From here they set out for Harrisburg, the state capital and the gathering point for Pennsylvania's soldiers.
These were not polished parade-ground troops. They were backwoods marksmen, and they marked themselves with a badge drawn straight from their world: the tail of a buck deer, worn on the cap. It was a fitting emblem for men whose skill with a rifle came from the hunt, and it gave them a name that stuck — the Bucktails.
That hundred formed the core of what became the celebrated 42nd Regiment. What began as a local muster of neighbors and hunters grew into one of the war's most distinctive units, its deer-tail insignia becoming a mark of identity and pride carried far from these northern hills.
Its place in the American story
The Union army was not summoned into being by a central command so much as assembled, town by town, from gatherings exactly like this one. The Civil War was fought by communities that raised their own companies and sent their own sons — and the character of those places went into the ranks with them.
The Bucktails carried the particular grit of Pennsylvania's frontier into that army: the marksmanship, the toughness, the ease in the field that came from a life lived close to the woods. They became one of the more storied regiments of the war, their reputation an outsized legacy for a unit that started with a hundred men and a handful of deer tails.
In that sense, this small assembly stands for something much larger. Multiply this scene across hundreds of Northern towns and you have the making of the Union army itself — local loyalty, local skill, and local men, gathered at a moment's notice and marched off into the nation's greatest trial.
If you visit
This is a place to stand and reckon with a date. On a single spring day in 1861, roughly a hundred men gathered at this spot and stepped out of ordinary life into a war that would test the whole country. Let the specific, human scale of that sink in.
Let the deer-tail badge anchor your imagination. Picture caps marked with the tail of a buck — a homemade emblem, born of the hunt, that would become famous. It ties the men directly to the northern Pennsylvania country around you, a land that shaped them before the army ever did.
As a road-trip stop, this rewards a moment of quiet reflection more than a long visit. Take in the town and the surrounding hill country, think about the neighbors who marched from here toward Harrisburg and beyond, and you will feel how the great national story of the Civil War was built from countless local departures — including this one.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Col. Thomas L. Kane
Related events
- · American Civil War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
McKean County
Smethport, PA · est. 1981
Formed in 1804 from Lycoming County and named for Pennsylvania governor Thomas McKean, this northern county long drew its living from oil, gas, and timber. In 1861 the county seat of Smethport became a mustering ground when the celebrated "Bucktails" gathered here, a hard-fighting Civil War regiment known for the deer tails pinned to their caps. The name marked a rugged frontier people answering the Union's call.
Thomas L. Kane
Kane, PA · est. 1980
Thomas L. Kane was one of 19th-century America's most fascinating idealists: a Civil War general who raised and led the famed "Bucktail Regiment" of Pennsylvania riflemen, and an outspoken friend of the persecuted Mormons when few others would defend them. He founded the borough of Kane in the northern Pennsylvania wilderness and was breveted major general in 1863. He died in 1883 and lies buried at the chapel he directed to be built here in the late 1870s.
Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument
Warren, PA
In the decades after the Civil War, towns across the North raised "Soldiers' and Sailors'" monuments to the local men who had marched off to preserve the Union. Warren County, in Pennsylvania's northwestern oil-and-timber country, honored its own with this granite tribute, its verses drawn from Theodore O'Hara's famous elegy "The Bivouac of the Dead." The lines about silent tents on "fame's eternal camping ground" became a fixture of American war memorials, binding a small county's grief to a national vocabulary of mourning.
The Bucktails
Driftwood, PA · est. 1950
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.