Parading Longhorns, Apple Pie, and the Long Branch Saloon

I love parades. Mainly for their goofiness.  Here’s a guy riding a longhorn steer in my hometown of Lockhart’s annual parade just last Saturday, this year celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the Chisholm Trail.

I’ll never forget the year our family was vacationing on July 4^th in Silverton, Colorado and the parade included a number of young women attired as slices of apple pie. Sadly, the pics I took of them are lost to history.

 

Then there was the parade somewhere in Japan when we visited our friends in the Navy in the summer of 1980. It featured entries celebrating male fertility and you don’t want to see any photos of them, but visualizing a giant walking ‘wiener’ pretty well gets you there. Yes, it was gross.

Tomorrow morning, for about the 20^th year in a row, our Civil War reenacting group will march in the Berges Fest Parade in Boerne, Texas, north of San Antonio. We love it because we get to march down Main St. and shoot volleys of black powder and make a lot of noise.

The crowd appears to love us. We sweat like pigs in our wool jackets and trousers and look forward to finishing the parade at the Long Branch Saloon near the end of the parade route.

The Long Branch is a typical small town bar with stools, a pool table and dance floor. The jukebox plays a lot of Willie Nelson tunes too loud, and a hanging TV seems to always be showing NASCAR races without sound. The beer is sold ice cold in bottles and is Texas-brewed mostly. Shiner Bock is king. Kids and dogs and faux Civil War soldiers are welcome. We pile our gear on the floor and lean our muskets in the corner. The front wall is two roll-up garage doors, usually open on parade day, with the air conditioning futilely chugging away. Men pee into a tin trough, and I don’t know what the ladies’ room is like.

We normally march as Confederates in the parade, but tomorrow at least two or three of the fifteen or so of us are going to wear Union blue uniforms. As Texas reenactors our written mission is to honor Texas’ Civil War citizen-soldiers. And some, not all that many, but some Texas men, joined the Union army instead of the Confederate army.

In fact, I will be marching to specifically honor the memory of John W. Sansom, who was a Comanche-fighting Texas Ranger before the Civil War. He lived in a little community named Curry’s Creek just a few miles from Boerne, where we will be marching in the parade tomorrow.

Even though a Texas Ranger, John Sansom opposed secession and when the war started, he traveled north to enlist in a Union regiment. After the war, he returned home and lived out his days as a farmer.

As a young Ranger, Sansom took part in the 1855 Callahan Ranger Expedition into Northern Mexico, where 110 Texas Rangers chased  hostile raiding Apaches, but ending up fighting Mexican soldiers. That rather messy expedition is the main action in my current novel-in-progress.

Years later, Sansom wrote a memoir of the expedition, which is how I learned of his history as a Union soldier, when 99 out of a 100 Texans enlisted as Confederates.

And I’m wearing a blue uniform tomorrow for one more reason. Bluntly, in light of this week’s horrific shooting at the neighborhood baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, a show of American unity is much better than a one-sided parade of Rebel soldiers. We do live in 2017 and not 1863, after all.

As to our firing black powder from our muskets while marching: One year we were positioned in the parade behind a trio of mounted armored knights on their big warhorses, and we weren’t allowed to fire blanks for fear of stampeding the horses. Frankly, I won’t be surprised if tomorrow we’re told not to burn powder because folks are edgy about gunfire this week. We’ll see tomorrow, I reckon.

Regardless of whether we fill the street with smoke from our musket volleys, we will be blue and gray together, strutting our stuff down a small town Main Street in Texas, then adjourning to a small-town Texas beer joint to let the sweat dry and enjoy a frosty bottle of one’s favorite beverage.

I hope you enjoy your weekend as much as I expect I will.

God Bless America. And parades.