Beginnings dedicated to Sam Galyon

The question has been asked many times. How did you get into the Civil War? The only real and logical answer,for me,is that I spent my formative years growing up during the Centennial.

I had no ancestors in Pickets Charge. No one stood in Jacksons “stonewall”. In fact,the three ancestors that fought,wore the Union Blue and spent most of their time languishing on the western banks of the Mississippi , in the swampy bayous of Louisiana.

That was quite traumatic for a very young man who gravitated to the romantic,and heroic exploits of Lees army in Virginia.

I don't know exactly when I got my first Civil War book,nor when the bug really took hold,but for a certainty,it was well before I was even out of grade school.

I remember articles my mother bringing home about Lincolns Gettysburg Address,and assume that that was somewhere in 1963. I have recollections of a phony book report in the second grade on “Gone with the Wind “ How did I ever think I was going to get away with that?. The toy market was rife with Civil War themed toys and sets of soldiers. We saw the introduction of Civil War trading cards.

When you start to write something like this,memories come flooding back that would fill pages and chapters,books and libraries

.Although that sounds like a fun thing to relate,here,those particular memories,albeit germane, are not the focus of this chronicle.Yes,my irrepressible imagination persuaded my neighborhood pals to play Civil War with old mop handles and cast off clothes and hats that kinda sorta looked like uniforms,and many times I made a facsimile of a bed-roll of my blanket( much to moms dismay).

Many times the vacant lot between my house and my closest friends,became Farmer Millers cornfield,many years before I would actually go to that place.

On the rainier days of summer vacation,it seems we all had sets of toy soldiers that we could recreate battles with,encompassing entire drive-ways and bedroom floors. It wasn't just the Civil War that captured my imagination,either. It seemed that all of history had sunk its romantic claws into me and would not let go. We kids were played by the media,back then,as well,and acted accordingly. With everything even remotely historical that Hollywood gave to us,there I was, with anything that could be found,and used as a prop! Every construction site could become the Alamo,and yes even Biblical history swept me up in its arms and more than once I might be found crucifying a friend on a 2x4 cross in the back yard. I once constructed,out of old blocks of wood and empty paint and coffee cans,what I at the time imagined to be a perfectly viable miniature of Jerusalem. Heaven only knows what my Grandmother thought as I insisted she come out to the vacant lot and see it!

Suffice it to say,my preteen years were as imaginative as any kid that ever lived,and that,although all of history had kidnapped me, The Civil War,and the men and boys in gray particularly,had taken my soul. And would,for many years to come.

So,one could say, that as with many of us in this peculiar hobby, my first reenactments were events that took place in the backyards,vacant lots and construction sites of my child-hood,and those years before girls.

Now by the time I entered early puberty,along with Junior High School,and was introduced to a real school library,all bets were off! BOOKS!! Thats not to say there were none at home,there were,but not in this new abundance,and not nearly in this variety.Whole shelves of them actually dedicated to the war that had so captured my imagination. National Geographics,dedicated to the centennial. I remember almost wearing out the 1963 July issue given over to Gettysburg and Vicksburg,memorizing every picture and dreaming of seeing those places in person someday!

And never forget The American Heritage volume,with those fantastic little birds-eye view battle maps,that I pored over for absolute hours.

Of course along with that question of how I came to be a Civil War fanatic,is the question of when did I first start drawing? Thats a deeper and harder one to answer,and one I shall address in a different part of this narrative,as it is an integral part of my journey.

Because the sites of these events plays such an important role in reenactments,I suppose it becomes necessary,to talk about some of my first battlefield visits.

Upon graduating from High School in 1965,it had been decided that my older brother, Erich would attend Concordia Teachers College in Chicago,and so somewhere during the middle of the regular school year ,when I was in the 4th grade,my parents opted for the idea to take him to school in the family car. With us the term “family car”,in terms of the string of pieces of shit I remember my parents owning,needs must be used loosely.

At any rate,looking back it was cruel and unfair to make this decision so long before the actual event and in the middle of the school year,so that it became impossible for me to concentrate on anything else but the possiblity of a stop at Chickamauga on the way up!! man oh man! Chickamauga! Longstreet was there ! Hood was there! Our first great American automobile vacation(with an ulterior agenda),and a chance to see a huge and real and mythical battlefield! Time to see how accurate those Birds-eye view battle-maps stack up to the real thing!

What was longer? The rest of the school year,or the first leg of the actual trip,in anticipation of getting to Chickamauga? The whole trip is a chapter or two in and of itself and perhaps I will tell the tale in another narrative down the wordy road,but for now, I will say that we finally arrived on the very southern end of the battlefield quite near closing time,as would happen in many of my future visits to such places. And so my first battlefield consisted of an hour long stop at the legendary Wilder monument. I have hunted for the picture of my ten year old self sitting atop a large bronze horse near there,but it is,I presume long gone ,which became the sad fate of many old family photos.Running out of time and daylight the rest of my momentous first battlefield visit after the climb to the top of that tower consisted of a cursory drive through the park to the other end,gathering fleeting visual memories in the gathering fleeting daylight that would have to last me for thirteen years until my next oppurtunity to visit the site again,and for almost fifty until I huffed and puffed my way once more to the top of Wilders Monument.

It is of note that upon leaving for this trip,I was handed,by my Grandmother two crispy 0ne dollar bills( a small fortune in 1965) to be used as some spending money,that my parents could scarcely provide.It would become a hard decision forking most of that over the next day at a Cumberland Falls Tourist trap,for what was my very first real piece of reenacting gear: an actual cloth kepi. It was gray with a white band and I wore it til it literally fell apart.

Also of note on that trip was the tiny corner of Virginia that in those days before the Intersate,you crossed through on that particular route. Being as my study so far in the Civil War was mostly the grand affair that was more or less Virginia -centric,passing through even that tiny corner for under a minute was like descending Mt Nebo into the Promised Land. Alas, though ,my real journey to THAT fabled land of Lee and Jackson,Longstreet and Stuart,and smoke filled fields of Confederate triumph,would have to wait another dozen years or so. Of course in the interim, General A. P. Hill would emerge and come to the top of my main cast of heroic Confederate characters. Another chapter.

Fast foreward a few years and and Erich,having met the love of his life at Concordia,another trip was in the offing. This time for a wedding .

A slightly different destination,took us a bit more to the west this time,and a little pleading netted me a two hour rest stop for the drivers at Stones River. My mother,father and sister slept in the car,while my fourteen year old self wandered what little of this place I could get to on foot. This battle was even lesser known to me than Chickamauga,as it yielded none of those characters of the mystical Eastern battles at all. But,after all,it WAS a battlefield and I knew who Braxton Bragg was,for better or

worse,and it did have its own little birds-eye view battlemap in my trusty American Heritage volume with the intro by Bruce Catton,(who by now I had started reading),so it was fine by me. This field would again have to await my return for thirty years,and fifteen years after that would actually move into a top-five spot as a favorite.

As a young man then,it is difficult to look back and say exactly what my impressions were ,let alone my range of emotions. I completely missed the Slaughter Pen,and somehow was disappointed in the fabled Round Forest,but it was after all a Civil War battlefield. It was annoying to me,I think, that the the name-sake river was farther away than I thought it should be, and out of reach. Alas,though,good things come to those who wait,and fourty-five years later when I finally got to see the River,at close to the time of year the battle was fought,with ice clinging to its banks,it was sublime,I will tell you.

There were family trips of one kind or another in the ensuing few years,with a brief stop once at Jefferson Davis. Last home in Biloxi,Mississippi,but nothing that took me into a direct civil War vector.

Until.....Shiloh. I really have a tough time with this one. I had begun my working career and in tandem,my drinking career,so the dates and circumstances are not easy to pin-point. Suffice it to say,I was somewhere between 18 and 21,making it somewhere between 1972 and 1975. Mysel and my parents were on the return trip from my sisters home in Oklahoma. Since no one would actually choose to live there it was, as can be easily surmised service- related to her first husband. Altus AFB to be precise.

Before this,also of note ,on another trip into the western states ,I had the chance to pass in close enough proximity of Vicksburg to see,perhaps a monument and a cannon from afar,but I shall come back to that later.

As with Chickamauga, we arrived at Shiloh NBP fairly close to closing time,but this trip,with enough daylight left to do a fairly satisfactory driving tour. So with the theme song of disneys Johnny Shiloh in my ears and visions of Albert Sydney Johnston (who I knew precious little about at the time),in my head,we set off. It seems as my memory says it was late summer,and mid-week,but either way we had the entire battlefield to ourselves.. At last. A field with some time to actually explore somewhat. A field with quite noticable landmarks still in place. Peach orchards and bloody ponds and a chance to see some recognizable structures to compare once again to those great birds-eye view battle-maps!. Yes,I was STILL enamored of those things,even then. Cannons! My God I had never seen so many! My most vivid memory took place at what I would later learn was Ruggles battery,smack dab in the middle of the worst fighting. It seemed there were dozens,hub to hub, in this long line,and the afternoon had produced a thunderstorm across the mighty Tennessee river,that afforded us these ghostly far off rumbles,that couldnt have been more profound had they been planned.

I recall the ancient capped off tree,against which Sydney Johnston leaned after being wounded,and it seems to me I clambered down into the ravine where he subsequently bled to death. I also recall actually laying on my belly,with my nose almost touching the surface of bloody pond,in some sort of strange communion that only a Civil War buff would understand. And Pittsburg Landing! Never before had I seen such huge cannons as those on Grants last line. What a day! Again,in those long ago days before digital cameras,it is sad that somehow the few pictures we took,are long gone,from leaky roofs to unorganized moves. Perhaps some day they may turn up some where.Well at the time,Shiloh was all and more what I could have hoped for,but alas,it wasnt those ethereal,mythical,what by that time had become larger than life and elusive glorious fields of Virginia. Virginia,what had by that time become tantamount to thbe Holy land.

  Be all that as it may,forty years later, I now look forward to a real possible return to that sacred place with the dear friend after whom this chapter of my story is dedicated. Armed with much more knowledge and a much more grown up sense of what it is I am seeing.