Reuben Aaron Waller was born into slavery in Kentucky on January 5, 1840.  His age is a matter of record; many plantations kept a system of registering slaves’ birth and ancestry.  Through records kept by white midwives, Reuben established his birth date as January 5, 1840.

His first memory was the falling stars in 1849, which led slaves and masters alike to fear a soon-coming Judgment Day.  He also remembers haring about the 1856 Border Rebellion War (between Kansas and Missouri), followed by the Great Comet of 1860, just before the Civil War.  “We all got scared at the comet as its tail reached from West to East.  It did look frightful.  As we think of it now we believed it was a token of the great Civil War and the completing of our freedom, 400,000 of us,” he later recalled.

In El Dorado, Waller lived at 816 S. Atchison.  He outlived four wives, raising his six children to become responsible, well-respected citizens.

His father was a distiller and young Reuben began learning the art of making whiskey when he was ten years old.  Eleven years later when the Civil War broke out, he and his father were “sold South” to help make whiskey for Confederate troops.  Together they brought $2,800 on the auction block.  When he was over 100 years old, Waller still carried a small memento of his life as a slave – a thin dime minted in 1839, part of the purchase price once paid for his grandfather.

As the Civil War wore on, he became a body servant for a Confederate general in the Civil War, following his master into 29 battles.  He was present at Appomattox Courthouse to hear the weighty discussions between General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant, and saw Lee surrender his sword to Grant.

Reuben remembered seeing white soldiers on both sides rush to their opponents in that hour, embracing one another.  He saw a million former slaves suddenly given a birthright.  “Never,” he said, “was there such a cosmic display of love as was shown at Appomattox on that day.”

Waller told how the South’s forces were compelled to surrender by starvation.  Defiantly, he claimed that Lee’s army was made up of the “fightingest” men that this or any other country could produce.  He said the starvation was brought about by the conduct of slaves destroying their masters’ establishments, having been inspired by northern propaganda.

Military life appealed to Waller.  While with Stonewall Jackson’s cavalry, he had engendered a great liking for the cavalry soldiers.  He enlisted in the army in July of 1867 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to fight in the Indian war then raging in Kansas and Colorado.

Stationed fifty miles off Chief Black Kettle’s reservation in 1870, he witnessed Custer plowing through the encampment.  Riding over the battleground on a later day, to his undying sorrow Rube Waller viewed the bodies of women, children and braves lying frozen in the snow.  He declared that that was one of the most uncalled-for, bloody assaults in the history of the nation.  Because of this action, Chief Rain-in-the-Face declared that he would “cut out Custer’s heart”, a promise made good six years later at “Custer’s Last Stand”.

Traveling the famous Chisholm Trail twice, Waller remembered it as a swath a quarter mile wide wherein there was not one sprig of grass, bare as a floor from thousands of cattle taking care of any vegetation that might have grown there.