“Yer gonna hafta run faster than that, Yankee, if yer gonna ketch me!” yelled a barefoot soldier in a homespun gray uniform as he hurried to the front of the room.
Doug Kidd, a local living history interpreter, played the role of a private in the Confederate army last week for students at Southwest Junior High in Springdale. He explained to the students that he had been captured by the North’s army and members of the federal forces took his shoes — sorry as they were — so he couldn’t “runned off.”
As soldiers fought across the Northwest Arkansas region, battlefields lay littered with the “refuse of war,” and soldiers picked up whatever looked interesting or useful, said Kidd, who has studied the Civil War and collected items since he was 9 years old. He got his start re-enacting when the movie “The Blue and the Gray” was filmed in Northwest Arkansas in the 1980s.
“War is tough on a lot of young men,” Kidd said. He used his presentation to show how much U.S. Army soldiers the North had to draw from — especially with the region’s manufacturing industries, while the soldiers of the Confederate States of America relied on items made at home by hand.
“They invaded us,” Kidd said, noting he was speaking from a Southerner’s point of view. “Thus, they marched across our land. So there was an influx of a great number of people across Northwest Arkansas as the armies were coming and going.
“They stripped the land like locusts from the Bible — livestock, crops and even fences and wood from buildings for camp fires,” Kidd continued. “We today have no idea what an army uses. And there were three or four battles here, so they did it three or four times — both sides.”
The soldier before the students carried several bags with him, picked from fallen soldiers, and he began to show what was inside each and compare one soldier’s situation to another.
A simple white haversack carried by a Confederate soldier didn’t contain much — some dried corn pone “that ain’t fitten to eat” and “pee-cans” and “akerns” from which to make coffee.
In comparison, a federal soldier of about the same rank carried meat — a pound a day, while the South’s soldiers might not see that much meat in a month. But the Union officer’s leather pouch held a pewter plate, meat, soft white bread, coffee, tea, “store-bought tabbacy” and “factory-made ceegars.”
“Who’s ever heard of Crowder peas — or blackeyed peas?” Kidd asked. He explained these were raised only as cattle feed. When Fort Sumter was besieged by federal troops, the southerners inside ran out of food — even after eating their horses and mules.
“They boiled those Crowder peas, and the South’s been eating them ever since,” Kidd said. “Corn meal and blackeyed peas saved a lot of lives.”
“I got me a way to make fire,” the soldier boasted on finding a flint and stone — which he struck and made sparks — in the Confederate sack. “I ain’t got nuthin’ to cook, but I ken make the fire.”
Both of the packs from North’s soldiers included the luxury of “Lucifers,” or manufactured matches.
The North’s enlisted man’s sack held a fold-up razor. “I could use that when I get all duded up for women when I’m going sparkin’,” Kidd’s soldier said. The officer’s pack held a shaving cup and brush, a razor, a comb, and a brush with a long handle — an early model of the toothbrush Kidd’s character couldn’t quite figure out.
“Well, I wonder what a body would used that for,” the southern soldier said of the toothbrush. He guessed to clean his gun, polish his boots or comb his mustache.
Kidd’s soldier also paused at a box of papers in the officer’s sack. Because he — as many soldiers from the South— couldn’t read, he asked a student to do the honors.
“Medicated papers,” the student read.
Later, Kidd explained this was toilet paper, just coming into fashion.
The lowly southern soldier began to pack the items he wanted to keep. “I better find them fellers I was a fightin’ with and get me back into this scrape,” he said. “And I’ve got to make sure them Yankees don’t ketch up with me. I ain’t a gonna do no washin’ and such.”
The barefoot soldier left the room, and Kidd returned to explain his items and actions to the students.
“That was a little bit of silliness and a whole lot of fact,” he said.
LAURINDA JOENKS IS A FORMER REPORTER AND EDITOR AT THE MORNING NEWS WHO HAS LIVED IN SPRINGDALE SINCE 1990.