She wore the medal as part of a deliberately constructed public identity. The combination of men’s formal dress and a military decoration that the Army had officially said she was no longer entitled to was a form of argument: I earned this, I will not pretend I did not, the bureaucratic decision to strike my name from your rolls does not change what I did or what it was worth. The refusal to return the medal was not defiance for its own sake but a continuation of her consistent position that the prohibition was unjust and that she was not going to validate it by compliance.
By the time the restoration came in 1977, the physical medal had presumably been with Walker since her burial in 1919. She was buried in her black suit, the American flag on her casket. The formal restoration was administrative: a name returned to a list, an official record corrected. The physical medal had never, in Walker’s lifetime or after, been surrendered.
## The Pension Record as Documentation
The disability pension Walker received for the physical consequences of her imprisonment at Castle Thunder deserves attention as a documentary record of her service’s cost.
The pension — $8.50 per month starting June 13, 1865, raised to $20 per month in 1899 — was a formal Army acknowledgment that Walker had suffered a service-connected injury. The partial muscular atrophy that the pension compensated was attributed specifically to the conditions of her imprisonment at Castle Thunder. The Army was not, through the pension, acknowledging Walker as a soldier in the full commissioned sense; but it was acknowledging that she had been in the Army’s service, that she had been captured while in that service, and that the capture had caused lasting physical harm.