When 19-year-old Ira Dutton, of Janesville, enlisted to fight in the Civil War, he had no idea it would lead him halfway around the world as a religious recluse.

Dutton's infantry unit saw little combat but lost nearly 200 men to disease. He spent much of the war tending the sick and burying the dead. Afterward, he stayed in the South, tracing missing soldiers, collecting their remains and settling survivors' claims.

These horrors finally pushed him over the edge, and by his own account, he spent the next decade in a drunken stupor.

When he emerged from the gutter in 1876, he began to study religion and in 1883 joined the Trappist Monastery at Gethsemane, Ky.

But Dutton discovered that a life of silent prayer could not compensate for his sins. Learning about Father Damien De Veuster ("Damien the Leper") in 1886, he made his way to Hawaii, where he introduced himself as "Brother Joseph" and joined the tiny relief corps at Damien's colony of exiled native Hawaiian lepers.

Dutton never returned to civilization. Instead, for the next 45 years he built latrines, bandaged sores, cleaned clinics and served meals to the diseased and despised. He accepted no pay and directed his military pension to the monks at Gethsemane.

In the late 1920s, he wrote a Wisconsin friend, "I am sort of an old relic now, but still on duty, very happy. Am almost ashamed to say, am inclined to be jolly."

Dutton finally died in Hawaii in 1931 after nearly half a century of selfless service.

-- Wisconsin Historical Society
www.wisconsinhistory.org

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