I spent much of yesterday at Fort Stevens on the Oregon Coast near Seaside and Astoria, at a fortress that once served as one of three bastions of American defense against British aggressiveness in the aftermath of the struggle over control of the San Juan Islands. Named after a Union general who had been Washington’s first territorial governor, it is perhaps a little bit ironic that the fortress is almost at Oregon’s northernmost point to guard the mouth of the Colombia River. Be that as it may, the fortress itself, with its grassy ramparts, served as the home of the Union camp, where I spent a great deal of time between the morning and afternoon battles with my fellow comrades of the 20th Maine [1], who for some reason decided to call themselves Darryl, each with a different adjective to describe what kind of Darryl they were. While preparing for the regimental dinner, which I did not stay for, we were joined by the daughter of one of the regimental officers, a spunky lady named Marissa, who fussed over the difficulties she got for being dressed in period and being accosted by strangers about being an unaccompanied lady, to which the regiment responded by claiming that all of them would accompany her to protect her reputation from being considered that of a lady of the night. I found it greatly ironic that reputation, even fictional reputation, would be of such great importance for someone who no doubt in reality would be a fairly typical college student, if not for her lifelong interest in Civil War reenactment gained from her father, but it was heartening to see my fellows (and I) join in to defend her reputation from slander. Is that not a large part of a gentleman’s task, after all, to guard the honor and reputation of those ladies of his acquaintance?

After driving into entirely unknown territory, having never traveled along any part of US 26 past Hillsboro, my arrival at Fort Stevens was somewhat inauspicious. Fort Stevens is a place where carpooling is vitally important, given the fact that the price of admission is based not on the number of people, but rather the number of vehicles, and traveling solo is extremely inefficient and costly. The first entrance I took ended up being the campground entrance, and I was told to drive to the northernmost entrance, which I then did (only to find myself in a bit of a cul-de-sac when I was trying to leave in the afternoon). When I arrived at the camp, it was nearly time for the morning service, which I customarily attend when visiting the reenactments, I found that the service had been shortened to a prayer service as a result of the drizzling rain in the air, which led my fellows to pray for our nation’s well-being, to pray for comfort for the firefighters of our region, and to pray for comfort and healing about a wide variety of serious health woes, to which we all joined in a hearty and heart-felt amen.

I found that there were much fewer there than at Willamette Mission, largely for a couple of reasons. The fire ban because of our drought conditions had not been lifted until just before the event, and so there was not time to prepare very much in the way of artillery for the reenactment, leaving but one cannon and one little mortar. Likewise, very few Confederate troops showed up to this event (similar to their poor attendance at the Colton tactical event I had gone to recently), and so my regiment “galvanized” for the morning battle as generic rebels. When they returned, I asked them why they did this, as this is the second time I had seen this happen. The reply was that the regiment had originally been hardcore Yankees (which I would describe myself as by temperament and worldview) but that in order to help keep up the larger hobby of Civil War reenactment that they were willing to change their costumes to keep up some sort of competitive balance. Furthermore, it was pointed out that in the aftermath of the economic downturn in 2008 that the Confederate numbers, which had previously and consistently been larger than that of Union reenactors, had declined precipitously while those men who supported the Union had stayed relatively constant despite the downturn, which the person I was asking credited, with a bit of malice, to the fact that apparently the pretend Union soldiers had jobs and were able to support themselves. I wondered myself if larger societal trends towards stigmatizing the cause of the Confederacy, to which I agree with Union General (and future US President) Grant that it was among the worst causes for which men ever fought and died, had made it less appealing for people to show off their obvious sympathy for the cause of the Confederacy, in light of the social awkwardness that would result for having displayed oneself so proudly as being a partisan of such a disreputable cause.

Besides this, I got to spend a bit of time in the Confederate camp, which I had avoided last time, and I talked to some of the members of the 1st Louisiana Zouves, about whom my fellow members of the 20th Maine had some unfriendly comments. I had sat next to a member of the regiment who had been too lazy to dress in uniform and go out with his regiment, who was chatting with a young lady in period dress whose father was also a part of the regiment, a gentleman whose pregnant wife was attempting to sleep in one of the tents of the Confederate civilian camp, as the rainy night had made it difficult for many to sleep (including the young woman who had been adopted as the camp follower of the 20th Maine whom I discussed earlier). When I talked history with the gentleman’s father-in-law, who had remained at camp during the morning battle to watch over the food stores, most of the other people thought that we were like two peas in a pod in discussing various period weaponry and other historical matters, as apparently even among reenactors such an intense interest in history of the period is a bit unusual among certain segments. There was also a very worthwhile presentation of various surgical techniques at the field station and the battle hospital, including some tinctures of various medicines used by Civil War doctors and suitably gruesome pretend amputated limbs. People like myself may play war for pretend, but real people died and were horribly scarred by the conflict, and we would do well to act in such a way as to live in peace to the best of our abilities.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/being-a-true-and-faithful-account-of-the-battle-of-filbert-grove/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/join-or-die/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/on-the-legitimacy-of-historical-reenacting/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/were-manly-men-of-maine/