It sounds like you may have been watching a movie version of The Red Badge of Courage rather than concentrating on the verbal dialogue of the novel. The regiment in which Henry Fleming served was from New York, so there should have been no true "Western" accents among the men (unless someone had moved from the West, which was unlikely). Many of the men used rural and colloquial speech, but no accents can truly be detected within Crane's written words. If you are speaking of the old black-and-white film directed by John Huston, then I believe Jim Wilson may have been the character to which you refer.