Last weekend I went with Kitty, Mary Rose, JB, Mark, and Amy to a Civil War Re-enactment that Kitty's parents and brother participated in. We got there at about 10 in the monring, and Mary Rose and Kitty changed into hoop skirts, dressing themselves up as "Confederate chicks" as they were called by some of Kitty's reenactment friends. the whole place was pretty cool, because they actually made camp like the Civil War armies would have done. Only Mr. Jenson (kitty's dad) did not have the normal Civil War tent. His was a foot higher than the rest, which made sense, seeing as he's 6'6". Kitty's mom and dad were very nice. Mr. Jenson helped JB and I find some clothes to dress up as COnfederate soldiers. The Jenson's (Mr Jenson and Kitty's brother Sven) were in the North Carolina 1st Calvalry, but they didn't have horses eause they were in B company, which for the purposes of the reenactment was unmounted. However, F company had horses, which was pretty fun to see.
Amy and Mark declined invitation to dress up, but Kitty, Mary Rose, JB and I were all dressed up for the occasion. Kitty was wearing a navy w/ white flowers print dress with a hoop skirt, along with a hat (which is hard to describe, see picture), and Mary Rose put on a green hoop skirt with a matching bonnet. JB and I dressed up as tattered Confederate soldiers at the end of the war with cotton shirts, woolen pants and jackets, suspenders, cavalry boots, and hats. I just had a regular confederate hat, but since those didn’t fit JB’s large head Mr. Jenson lent him his, which was a really cool cap with a huge feather in it. ;) We also had nice belts with cartridge and powder pouches.
JB and I fell in with B company when I marched in review, but because we didn’t have gun training et we had to fall out before theattle. Then we split off into couples as they would have done back in those days, JB escorting Mary Rose, Mark escorting Amy, and Myself escorting Kitty. For the first battle (which was a reenactment of the first day of the Battle of the Wilderness) we stood on the side and watched. It was pretty neat to see, because even though they didn’t use real bullets, the charges they used were pretty loud. And the cannons did shake the ground. :D
Kitty was not too happy when her father and brother “died” though.

After the first battle, Mr. Jenson found an extra gun and borrowed another one from someone else, and took JB and I onto the field for weapons training. The charges for the gun were 60 grains of black powder poured into a small rolled up piece of paper. In order to fire the gun, we pulled on of those out of our cartridge pouches, ripped off the top with our teeth, poured it into the top of the barrel of the gun, then tamped the gun on the ground to pack it down. Then we lifted the hammer to half-cocked, removed the used cap, pulled a new one out of our powder pouch, and placed it on the cone. Finally we cocked to gun to fun, aimed, and fired. The report was not quite as loud as a real gun, though loud enough we understood why some of the people wore earplugs. The cloud of smoke looked really cool too.
After that we loaded up with charges and caps, and headed out for the second battle of the wilderness.
(tbc)