Fording Rivers

For the past twelve years during the weekend before Thanksgiving, I’ve taken part in a Civil War reenactment at a place called Plantation Liendo, about fifty miles north of Houston.  A creek that is normally dry or a little more than a step-over trickle runs through the property. This year our preplanned battle scenario on Saturday included all the reenactors crossing the creek. The problem was we had a good hard rain storm early Saturday morning so that by 1 pm when our two columns of reenactors needed to cross the creek, it was running maybe fifteen wide and a foot deep at the spot where we all intended to cross.

Some reenactors didn’t want to get their feet and trousers wet, and retraced their route to the concrete bridge we’d used to first cross the flowing creek.  That added about a mile of cross-country marching to their day. Most of us, though, decided we were OK with having wet feet, and slogged across. The water came over the top of my ankle-high brogans and reached about to mid-calf.  The deep gooey mud at both banks was worse than the cool water which actually felt pretty good on my sore feet.

In Redeeming Honor, there is a historically-founded scene where the soldier characters have to cross the  Potomac River shortly before the battle at Gettysburg. The fun part was that many of the soldiers took off their trousers for the crossing of the waist-high ford, and some had long drawers on and some did not. Lots of Rebs apparently went commando.

During the actual river crossing in 1863, and in my novel, at the same time as the Texans were wading, a buggy carrying several young ladies crossed the same ford going in the opposite direction. You can imagine the excitement that caused at a time when women dared not display even their ankles in public, and young men did not ever appear shirtless in public, much less without their trousers. But war changes the rules, then and now.

The photo here is of a different bunch of reenactors fording the Potomac River near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia during a pre-reenactment march. While this photo is G-rated, perhaps it gives a sense of what the soldiers looked like holding all their gear and weapons above the water.

  

The bottom photo is lifted somewhere off the internet and is just for fun since it involves a Civil War soldier fording a river and probably reflects how most teenage boys think about going to war. It took me a while to notice that the lovely lady has a bandaged leg, so the scene is not entirely contrived. Right.

Finally, keep in mind that all three of my Civil War novels are available on Amazon and would make good Christmas gifts for the Civil War nuts in your family, ages 15 to 95 – my dad’s 95 now and is reading the third one.

Happy shopping to you all.