On April 3, 1924, Zack Gardner's widow, Annie, filed for a Confederate widow's pension. Unable to produce official records (the Indians having destroyed many of their records at the end of the war out of fear of reprisal from the Yankee government) Annie relied upon eyewitnesses, who filed affidavits. One younger man, J.E. Colbert, who was born in 1857, said that he remembered that Zack served in the same unit as Colbert's father, that being a Chickasaw Battalion. But the most credible affiants are two men who served in the army with Zachariah Gardner. Michael McMenamin states that he knew that Zack served in the Caddo Indian Battalion, because Mcmenamin himself served in Co. I, Caddo Indian Battalion. Absalom F. Cochel testified that he had known Gardner for sixty years prior to his death, and that he knew that Zack Gardner had served in the Caddo Indian Battalion under Captain George Washington and General Cooper until the end of the War. The Confederate pension board allowed Annie a pension based upon the affidavits. It must be remembered that even though Gardner may have been a Choctaw not all Choctaws served in Choctaw units, and so it was with white men in the Territory. Michael McMenamin was an Irishman, born in Ireland, yet he served in a Caddo Indian unit. Many white men served in Chickasaw and Choctaw units, and obiviously one didn't have to be Choctaw to serve in a Caddo unit.