Memories, Ghosts and Dreams

Modern-day people of the War

“Hello.  Welcome to Cold Harbor.”

“Keep your seat.  I’m just going back in to see mama.  I come here all the time.”        

I stood, brochure in hand.  The woman was mid-thirties, with the kind of honey-red hair I've always found attractive.   Worry lines starting on her forehead, her manner matter-of-fact.  A local, I decided, whose mother lived in the cluster of houses accessed by the park road.  She quick-scanned the small bookstore at the front of the visitor center, then walked to the desk.  “Who would I talk to about putting up a plaque?”

“Who’s it for?”  Hoping to draw her out, imagining she had a soldier ancestor who had died at Cold Harbor.  Rangers have a mandate from the park historian to plumb the visitors for copies of diaries, letters and pictures of their ancestors.  In return, we can usually tell the person where great-great granddaddy’s regiment was on the battlefield.  Sometimes we can even locate a grave.  

I was gearing up for a session with books and maps when she told me the plaque was for her mother:  “She was a good ol’ southern lady, really into the Civil War and reenacting.  She told us, ‘When I die, just sing “Dixie” and scatter my ashes in that old Confederate trench at Cold Harbor.’

“That’s what we did.”  Her voice caught.  After a moment, she pulled herself together.  “I go back in to see her all the time.  I was just wondering about putting up a plaque.”

I gave her my boss’s name and phone number.  She thanked me, got into her small red pickup truck, and drove off into the park.

For seven years, I worked part-time as a ranger with the Richmond National Battlefield Park.  The job ended almost a decade ago, yet I’m still haunted by the sites and the battles and the people I met whose lives are inextricably bound up with history.   Some of these folks are local.  Others travel cross-country because of an ancestral connection or because stories from the conflict have captured their imagination. A few had to be drawn out; others started talking as soon as they hit the door.  They tell incredible stories about the War—and other tales as well, which resonate, in a strange and fascinating way, with what happened around Richmond a century and a half ago.

Some tales are telling; some poignant; some downright bizarre, like the story from a young graduate student whose great-great grandfather had been wounded in the face at Gettysburg:  “The doctors decided not to go after the bullet.  Forty years later he sneezed and it came out of his nose.”

The pilgrims come from all over and all walks of life.  One history-obsessed Brit toured the Richmond sites in a taxi.  It waited for him while I gave him the quick version of the Cold Harbor tour.   Hundreds of others from Japan, India, the Middle East.  I particularly remember a big group of non-English speakers from South American who came in one day when I was working at the Tredegar Visitor Center downtown.     It turned out they were descendents of the Confederates who had expatriated to Brazil after the War.  They took beaming pictures of themselves with the cannon and the Stars and Bars, then bought a ton of souvenirs.

People from the Deep South seem to feel the ancestral connection most intensely.  A lot of them were raised on the War.  Their pilgrimage to the battlefields is the culmination of a process that started when they were kids listening to family stories on the front porch or around the dinner table. 

   A grandfather, father and son from lower Alabama visited Gaines’ Mill, northeast of Richmond, where their ancestor had been wounded.  I spent an hour with them, worked out approximately where the soldier’s unit had been, and led them to it, then walked with them through the woods along the route of the charge.  In the end, I’m fairly satisfied with my detective work, though the spring where the man laid wounded overnight remained elusive. 

The father and grandfather are obviously deeply moved.  They came up to Richmond for no other purpose.  Well, almost—their wives were spending the day at the Williamsburg outlet stores.

Conversation revealed that there were two stories about the ancestor’s journey back to the Deep South.  In one he had taken himself home, by foot, horseback and train.  In Georgia, some former slaves picked the maggots out of his wounded shoulder and helped him on his way. 

The other account had his brother coming up and taking him home in a wagon.

“How can there be two stories?”  I asked.

“You’ve got to understand just how many people there are with our last name down in that part of the country,” said the grandfather.  And they all tell stories about their ancestor, a magnet for any good, unattached tales about the War, in the same way that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must have picked up all the good stories about Patriarchs that were floating around in the years before the scribes wrote down Genesis.

The seven-year-old, charging through the woods banging trees with a stick he was pretending was a sword, came dangerously close to an active hornet’s nest.  We took him in hand, walked back to the parking lot, and I wished them well on their journey home. 

When the visitor said his great-grandfather was “a Peter Porter,” I got very excited. Porter’s was one of the most dramatic stories from Cold Harbor, a tale of heroism and devotion, and clandestine, late-night expeditions into No Man’s Land.   

I hadn’t heard the “a.”  He wasn’t a Porter descendent.  It turned out that people around Niagara Falls in New York named their sons “Peter Porter” for years after the war because the man was so beloved.  

Porter, a Colonel of the 8th New York Heavy Artillery, was killed during the great charge of June 3.  Afterwards, his body remained among the thousands of dead and wounded between the lines.  Sgt. Leroy Williams determined to recover it.  That night, he crept forward far enough to locate Porter’s remains with binoculars, then returned to the Federal lines and picked four soldiers from among the many who volunteered to help.   

Porter’s body was within a few yards of the Confederate works.  When the soldiers arrived they found it too difficult to move.  Williams sent back for a rope, waiting with the body almost an hour.  A Confederate officer making observations came so close, Williams said, that he “could hear the rattle of his sidearm at every move.”

The rope finally arrived.  Porter’s body was drawn stealthily back to Union lines.  Sgt. Williams later received the Medal of Honor for his deed.        

It turned out that the visitor didn’t know anything about Porter beyond the fact that he’d fought in the War and died at Cold Harbor.  I showed him a book on the 8th, Full Measure of Devotion, a lovingly produced two-volume history that has several pages on Porter.  He bought it happily. 

It’s a strange moment when you reveal that you know more about a person’s ancestor than they do.  Some are determinedly unimpressed.  Perhaps, for them, it only confirms the importance of a family heritage drilled into them an early age by parents or grandparents.  Others look at you as though you’ve just done slight-of-hand—or real magic. 

When I told the young man—a descendent--about Captain Edward Stevens McCarthy, he seemed to think I was putting him on.  Then I showed him the section on McCarthy in Robert Stiles’ Four Years Under Marse Robert.    He immediately bought the book, a fine reminiscence published the year before the author’s death in 1905.   After a call to the park historian, I was able to steer him to the field behind the park where his ancestor died.      

McCarthy’s has always been among the most moving of Cold Harbor stories, a study in devotion and fortitude that opens a window into a profoundly different time.   

A popular Captain of the Richmond Howitzers, twenty-eight-year-old McCarthy was killed by a Union sharpshooter at Cold Harbor June 4.  According to a fellow soldier:  “I heard a sharp crash, the familiar sound of a bullet striking, and McCarthy was lying flat on his back, and motionless.  We jumped to his side!  Nothing to be done!  His chest rose, and fell, gently, once or twice, and he was still, in death.”  Wrote Stiles in another account:  “The men broke down utterly and sobbed like children.”

His family in Richmond was awakened in the night with the news that their son had been killed.  A cousin escorted the body into town.  McCarthy’s two brothers were with the army at Cold Harbor.  They walked the nine miles into Richmond, attended the funeral, then walked back out and resumed their places in the lines. 

Not long afterwards, a younger brother came of military age.  When he did, he also enlisted in the Confederate army.

There were battles all around Richmond throughout the Civil War.  The Park Service preserves representative portions of most of the battlefields.  There are thirteen sites and four visitor centers scattered around the city. 

Cold Harbor, in 1864, was the largest battle.  “Lee’s Last Great Victory” overlaps his first, Gaines’ Mill, from 1862.  Both are under-appreciated. 

At Gaines’ Mill, Lee ordered an attack three times larger than Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg—and this one was successful.  Antietam, the war’s bloodiest day, had 23,000 casualties.  On June 27, 1862, Gaines’ Mill racked up 15,000 in a battle that started mid-afternoon.

Two years later, Cold Harbor’s two weeks of fighting saw 17,000 men killed, wounded or captured.  “Around this crossroads is bloody ground,” reads a marker at the crossroads where the two battlefields intersect.  Of course, the butcher’s bill is only part of the story.   But the tales of tragedy and heroism from the two battles seem particularly subtle, complex and hard to relate.  Part of this is because they took place on confusing ground that bewildered the soldiers and still mystifies visitors today. 

There are no landmarks in eastern Hanover County that capture the imagination, no Little Round Top, no Devil’s Den.  Meandering creeks and rivers cross roads whose twists and turns preserve the sidesteps they took in Colonial times to go around the big oak tree on the edge of the farmer’s field.  And there are two Cold Harbors.  Five roads come together at the Old Cold Harbor crossroads, which is what made it important militarily and why it was the site of the cavalry fight that opened the battle.  New Cold Harbor is about two miles away, the shine of its newness lost sometime in the 19th century.     

In addition to this, Gaines’ Mill is sometimes called “First Cold Harbor,” which makes the battle I’ve been calling Cold Harbor, “Second Cold Harbor.”  To top it all off, as many of the soldiers bitingly pointed out, there’s no harbor anywhere around and, when they fought there in June, it was anything but cold.

I remember a look of plaintive longing that came into a visitor’s eyes when I mentioned Gaines’ Mill.  “Yes!”  he said.  “I’ve been touring battlefields all day.  It would be wonderful to visit a nice old mill.”  I let him down gently.  The actual mill was far from the battlefront.  Confederates remembered it because its four stories towered over the rural landscape and it was close to the places where they formed up to fight.  It would still be a landmark today if Sheridan’s cavalry hadn’t burned it in 1864.             

Cold Harbor was the culmination of Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign, the push toward Richmond that started in early May and which he expected to be over by the end of that summer.  Throughout the war, Lincoln had been looking for a general who could, in his words, “stand the arithmetic”—who would take the terrible losses involved in fighting Robert E. Lee and keep coming.  Grant was the man, but the arithmetic was terrible—55,000 casualties in 40 days of fighting. 

The disastrous Union charge on June 3rd was the central event of Cold Harbor.  The soldiers knew what was coming.  The night before the battle, many were seen sewing labels with their names on them onto their clothes so that their bodies could be identified and sent back home. 

The Union high command seems to have been asleep at the wheel.  No one reconnoitered the ground over which the charge would be made.  Instead, they depended on their overwhelming superiority in men and materiel. 

The results were catastrophic.  “7000 in twenty minutes,” is the casualty figure you see quoted over and over in various sources.  Park historian Bob Krick, who probably knows more about the battle than anyone else, fussily debates this in a memo he sent to the staff:  “The Union casualties on June 3rd, liberally estimated, were not more 6750, and more likely about 5500.  Furthermore, they did not occur in 20 minutes, or even one hour…there is not a single shred of proof that Grant lost 7000 men in 20 minutes, or even one hour.”

Discussions of battlefield statistics bring to mind the tale, perhaps apocryphal, of a very successful World War II bombing raid.  “Our own losses were almost insignificant,” exalted a reporter.  “Only one pilot was killed.”  Shortly thereafter, he received a letter:  “The loss was not insignificant to me.  That pilot was my son.”    

In any case, I have an idiosyncratic take on the numbers.  The 7000 figure was never meant to be exact, in spite of the fact that people probably believed it as soon as it was written down.  It’s a metaphorical rather than a literal number.  In the Bible, when Jesus says we should forgive our enemies “Not seven times, but seven times seventy,” he doesn’t mean that we should forgive 490 times--after which we can hate with a clear conscience.  The “seven times seventy” is meant to indicate numberlessness, a fullness of forgiving.

In the same way, the “7000 in twenty minutes” figure looks toward a fullness of dying, a numberlessness of dead soldiers, the capstone of a campaign of hitherto unimaginable slaughter which cemented Grant’s reputation as “the butcher.” 

It was a scripturally saturated time and the campaign itself gives rise to scriptural thinking.  It started when the Union army entered the Wilderness, the scrubby brushland southwest of Fredericksburg—the name evokes the wandering of the Israelites and Jesus’ temptation--and lasted the biblical forty days.

When you walk the trails with visitors there is set stops where you talk about the battle.  In between, there is lots of trail where the visitors talk to you.  Sometimes this is tedious--middle aged men going on about Longstreet and Lee at Gettysburg, a set piece I can sometimes actually feel approaching, the way you register the conversational imminence of an old friend’s request to borrow money.  Yet other visitors, without anything to prove, speak with a modest, assured eloquence and leave you with wonderful stories. 

It was one of those really long vans, the kind big companies buy to shuttle workers around a job site.  When the side doors opened a myriad of children emerged—“Like mice coming out of a cornfield,” observed volunteer Jim Gates—followed by a father, mother, grandmother and grandfather—“The whole dern family.”  The grandsires were on a rare visit from Minnesota.  The parents rented the van so everyone would be comfortable while they toured around. 

They took the Cold Harbor ranger walk, then followed me over to nearby Gaines’ Mill.  At the edge of the woods I set the scene:  most of these trees not here during the battle; Lee and McClellan; the Peninsula Campaign. 

We started down the path into the woods.  The grandfather, walking beside me, began talking about World War II.  He had been lucky, he said, going in just at the end.  His first action was the liberation of Europe.  They went past Dachau: “These guys were so incredibly skinny, standing by the road, about one every fifty feet, saying, ‘Thank you, thank you’ in whatever language they spoke, some saying it in American. 

“This one really skinny guy gave us a bottle.  We thought it was wine.  We said, ‘Let’s save it.  VE Day isn’t that far off, we’ll drink it to celebrate.’  Then the war was over and we opened it and it was gasoline.  I guess it was just something he had that he thought was really valuable so he gave it to us.”

We stopped near Boatswain Creek.  I described Gaines’ Mill raging indecisively through the afternoon.  When we continued, his granddaughter walked up and took him by the hand.

“Is she spoiled?”  I asked.

“No.  I don’t think so.  We don’t get down here enough to spoil her.  I’ll just tell you one other story.  In Salzburg, I saw a woman coming toward us.  I said, ‘That looks like an American woman.’  She had on a ratty fur coat.  ‘Thank God I’ve found you!’ she said.  “I’m an American.  My husband and I came over here eight years ago.  We got separated and I never got away.  I’ve got to get to the Red Cross to see if I can find him.  The last I heard he was an engineer driving trains.’

“We talked for awhile and then she said, ‘Here, I want to show you something.’  And she reached into that ratty fur coat and pulled out an American flag she had made herself.  About this big.”—He made a modest sized rectangle in the air with his hands--She held it out and said, ‘This is my most precious possession.’”                        

A man relocated to Hanover County from Georgia, talking about his great-great grandfather:   “It’s funny, I moved up here and I find out he fought literally in my front yard.” 

His ancestor was a cavalryman who rode with Jeb Stuart.  “After Appomattox he was going home to Georgia.  He had a mule and a wagon—some of the officers got mules and wagons.  In South Carolina he met three black men, asked them where to ford a creek.  They showed him a spot.  He got out into it, found it wasn’t a ford.  He was trying to unharness his mule to save it when they attacked him.                

“He went down under the water, came up with his saber out and killed one.  He was able to get his gun out of the wagon and kill another.  The third got away. 

“The mule, with all that shooting and fighting, kicked him in the kneecap--crushed it.  He rode into town, found a doctor who wanted to take his leg off.  He wouldn’t let him.  He walked with a stiff leg the rest of his life.  He had gone through the whole war without getting shot.”         

When he got back home he found his family living in the smokehouse.  It was brick, the only building not burned by Sherman.  A gristmill owned by the family had been given to a former slave by the occupying forces.  “He played cards with him for it.  The black man cheated.  He caught him at it, got the mill back.”

After struggling through Reconstruction, the former officer went from strength to strength.  He eventually stood for the legislature and served several terms. 

“He always admired Stuart.  He even had his wife make him a red cape like Stuart wore.  My grandmother told me about him—she used to visit him when she was a child.

“She said that he was always the one that would get up in the night with a visiting grandchild if they cried out or had a nightmare.  She had a terrible nightmare once and he came in to see her, hobbling with his stick, with that cape on and lit from beneath by a lantern.  She said it like to scared her half to death.”              

Tim Fredrikson sees ghosts. A self-described “paranormal magnet,” the reenactor says he has a ghostly visitation “every three or four days.”  One of his most vivid hauntings took place on the Cold Harbor battlefield in June, 1994.  “I’m sitting there and I see ahead of me, walking towards me, a Union soldier. I’m going, ‘OK, there’s a reenactor.  Then, as he gets closer, I realize that he’s no reenactor.

“My mind is telling me: ‘This is not right.  You need to get the heck out of here.  This is definitely not normal.’  But my body is telling me, ‘You’re not going anywhere—you’re stuck.’  Because my legs just wouldn’t move. 

“He kept coming toward me—it was like a scene in a movie where he gets closer and closer and closer to the camera until he gets right into the camera itself—and he passed right through me. 

“It was like I had stuck my finger in an electrical socket.  I felt this incredible charge of electricity.  I think I experienced, at that same time, every imaginable emotion you could describe—the fear, the anger, the hatred of not just that soldier but of all those men who were there.”

I spent thousands of hours working on the Richmond battlefields; countless other non-working hours just visiting.  I saw a few spooky things, but my predominant experience has always been one of tranquility.  Odd, when you consider the carnage and mayhem that took place here.  But if I tune into anything it’s almost always the peacefulness of the natural setting. 

A trucker from Baltimore used to stop by Cold Harbor when he was on his run to Norfolk.  He’d chat, hit the bookstore and look at the exhibits.  In the summer he’d sometimes bring one or more of his five kids.           

He’d always drive the park road, which is really not much more than a paved trail, and joke about helping us with our landscaping because of the branches his rig ripped off.  He’d visit other sites too and had a room in his house filled with paintings and books dedicated to his fascination with the War. 

“How did you get interested in this stuff?”  I asked him once.  It was a slow day and he was the only person there.

“I had a dream when I was six or seven.  I was lying on a battlefield wounded, pretending I was dead.  A Confederate officer rode up on his horse.  He knew I was faking.  He stabbed me with his bayonet.”  He shivered involuntarily.  “I had that dream over and over.  I could feel the cold steel going in.”

A dream of such intensity in one so young leads to speculation that it’s a memory from a past life.  The paradox is that the trucker, like me, seemed peaceful on the battlefield.  Surely he’d be agitated if he were revisiting the site of horrible personal pain. 

The sites themselves seem designed for tranquility, the clash of nineteenth century armies a distant memory.  The trenches, no longer harsh scars on the rural landscape, are now gentle undulations, peaceful earth waves evoking the raked sand gardens in the Zen monasteries of Japan.

I was peaceful too, unless a busload of eighth graders pulled up.

Relic hunters have a fisherman’s relationship with the truth.  More disturbing is the cavalier attitude of some of them to human remains. 

“If you’re a relic hunter, sooner or later you’re going to dig up a body,” I was talking to the long-time hobbyist in the Cold Harbor Visitor Center. 

“Did that happen to you?”

“There was hardly anything left.  I just covered it back up.”

Instead of filling out that story, the man tells another about a farmer’s gang plow hitting a shallow grave and scattering bone fragments over the field the way a storm scatters boat wreckage over the surface of the water.   

“If you see a guy at a relic show with a row of buttons and a belt buckle, it’s a pretty good bet he found a body.”

A young teenager from the neighborhood told the story about her grandparents moving into a new old house they didn’t realize had been a hospital during the War. Inadvertently, they located their pig pen over the graveyard.  The hogs rooted up and ate what was left of the soldiers. 

Stupidity so blatant it makes you want to beat your head against a wall:  “And they found all this Confederate money when they were remodeling.  They threw it away.   Money’s not worth anything if the country doesn’t exist anymore.”                

 “I’ve got just one question.”  Sixtysomething, ball cap, gruff New Jersey smoker’s voice.  “Why do they let them build houses right on the battlefield?  I mean, this is supposed to be sacred ground—right?”     

He half listened to my explanation about land for the park being purchased by local Civil War enthusiasts back in the twenties and thirties.  “This was all they could afford or all that came up for sale—I’m not sure which.  Then, when the Federal Government took it over, the legislation forbade expansion—they literally needed an act of Congress before they could even accept a donation of land.”

“I just keep thinking about those young guys coming over those trenches and getting slaughtered…slaughtered.”  He hadn’t picked up where I left off.  “A lot of them didn’t get a second chance.”  Thoughtful pause.  “I got a second chance.”

I couldn’t leave that hanging:  “What do you mean?” 

He’d had a heart attack just three weeks before.  “I was out—I don’t know how long.  When I came to, the doctor told me I better thank those paramedics.  He said I’d been three stoplights from death’s door.”  Another thoughtful pause.  He repeated the phrase slowly:  “Three stoplight’s from death’s door.” 

He’d vowed to spend more time with his wife and family.  “No more of this working two jobs.  I’m going to do some of the things I should have been doing all along.”

His wife, standing behind him, didn’t seem thrilled. 

They looked at the exhibits.  A new convert, every object filled him with wonder:  “Look at this: a digging tool made out of a canteen!”

They perused the books, then the postcards.  I was still curious. “Did you see anything while you were out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes, when people have a near-death experience, they see loved ones that have passed on…a beautiful while light at the end of a tunnel…”

“I didn’t see nothing.  I threw up, I know that.”

His wife walked up.  “What’s he asking you?”

“He’s asking if I saw anything.  You know, when I was out, did I see Jesus with his arms open or something.”

“You would have seen fire.”

He rolled his eyes, jerked his thumb in her direction.  “That’s a woman for you.”

            Sometimes I feel like the world comes through Cold Harbor.  People appear, tell their stories, then they’re gone and you realize you just had a vital glimpse into what’s out there—not only what is, but what’s possible.  A doctor who gave up his practice because of the incredible success of his newsletter about present-day appearances of the Virgin Mary.  The newsletter had become a beautifully illustrated newspaper by the time we met.  He gave me a copy.  It was full of miracles, prophecies and stories of the saints.  He had also written some half dozen books.  His next project was about Catholic prophecies, which, he said, foretold the Civil War. 

            An Australian cyclist in her mid-sixties.  She parked her bike outside, came in and sat down on the bench.  Strong brown legs, bright blue eyes.  She was riding across the United States--west to east, not east to west, so she was almost finished. 

            An older couple, also on bikes.  Two dog-eared passbooks—they’d been everywhere.  They’d spent a long time as nomads, working to earn travel money, sometimes living in parks as seasonal workers or volunteers.       

One of their recollections got me talking about a visit to Independence Rock, a Wyoming stop on the Oregon Trail.  Settlers going west carved and wrote their names on the Rock.  Many of these inscriptions remain today, as does the Trail itself, two wagon ruts crossing the prairie. 

It was dusk when I visited the Rock, which is the size of a small hill.  I remember an owl hooting while I was up there in the fading light reading all those nineteenth century names.  

            “The most moved we’ve ever been in a national park was at Little Big Horn,” said the man.  “We were there right at sunset too, looking at the graves.  A black stallion came out of nowhere and ran along the horizon.  You could just imagine him carrying Crazy Horse or some other Indian warrior.”

            “It was very mysterious,” nodded his wife.

            “You people come through and torture me,” I chided.  “I’m working here and can’t get away and you come through and tell me about the places you’ve been.”

            “You’re still young, man—go!”  Then, a little bittersweet, but not displeased:   “Of course, then you could wind up like us.  We’ve never had a lot of money but we have a lot of memories.”  He tapped his head significantly, the repository of his treasures.

The two men were waiting when I pulled into the Cold Harbor parking lot.  I was early for work, but they were earlier still. 

“You guys come in and look at the exhibits while I open up.”  I unlocked the doors, counted the money, raised the flag.  They watched the electric map.  When it was over, they came around to the desk. 

“You know anything about the 119th Indiana Infantry that fought around Bethesda Church?”  They were tracing an ancestor who had been a drummer boy.  I pulled out the reference books and told them what I could—most of which, it turned out, they already knew. 

“You can go to the site.  The church has moved.  There’s a school there now and…” 

“We went there this morning before we came here.”

The taller one, the talker, had a round, friendly face and a short, white mustache.  His talk drifted from the drummer boy back to the early 1960s when he and his cousin—the other man--had bummed around the Midwest doing farm work for travel money.     Once, after dark, with no place to sleep, they pulled the car off the road:  “I just kept backing up through a hole in a fence.  About six next morning I heard this WHOOM!--a huge engine right above us.  I looked up at the bottom of an airplane.  We had spent the night on the runway of the county airport!

“Then I looked out my windshield and here comes another plane getting ready to land.  I think my tires left two trenches a foot deep while I was burning rubber to get out of there!”

More rapid-fire tales, then fast forward to jobs and responsibility.  “We married twins—but that’s another story.”  Now they both had grandchildren. 

Back to the drummer boy:  ”We’ve set aside a week to visit all the places he fought.”

He added it was the first time they’d been off on their own together since the sixties.   There was a pause during which I realized this pilgrimage was a distant replay of their early adventures, as well as the wartime trials and travels of their ancestor.  

“There’s no water around here.”  The quiet cousin finally spoke.  Our most-asked question:  “Why do they call it Cold Harbor?”

“It was a British term for a place where you could get a cold meal and a place to sleep.  There were two taverns…”

“So you could get a shot and a beer and a ham sandwich?”

“Right.”

Sometimes the hard-core Civil War people have the best non-War stories.  A Midwest history teacher/reenactor segued from Cold Harbor’s lack of water to the Mississippi moving away from Vicksburg, another of the places battered by U.S. Grant.  “The rivers do what they want.  We found that out when the Missouri flooded in ‘93.  The water was all over the flood plane.  It flooded several cemeteries and sent the coffins floating down the river to New Orleans.”

He was a short, round man, radiating a pleasant sense of self-importance.  Four pens in his breast pocket, captain’s hat, watch on a strap of his safari vest.  “I’ve explored the Lost City of Indianola.  Remember, before the war, how Robert E. Lee was in Texas?”   Like a good boxer, he’d created his own opening.  “It’s underwater now.  I’ve sailed over it several times.”

He’d boated up from Texas, rented a car to trace a Union ancestor who had fought with the 18th Corps.  “My ancestors have been soldiering for 800 years.  And I got three purple hearts—a punji stick in my foot, shrapnel in my thigh, but when I got shot in the butt we were all running like hell!”

Somehow onto LaSalle.  The Park Service had found the remains of a member of the expedition.  “The Indians liked French food—they ate the explorers!” 

A lady from Colorado, on the prowl for traces of an ancestor, Isaac Davis, wounded at Gaines’ Mill.  After the war he became a doctor.  I thought, but didn’t say, that perhaps what he saw being done was so simple he figured anyone could do it. 

He settled in Colorado—Manitou Springs.  It happened that I had come through Manitou Springs the day before, rushing to the airport on the final day of a family vacation in the West.  When I mention this, she warmed to her topic.  Davis had been one of the town’s first settlers.  “He became the mayor of Manitou.”   He was also the coroner and undertaker. 

“There was a man, Tim O’Neill, who was killed in a saloon brawl.  He had no known relatives.  Isaac mummified him.  When it was a warm day in the summer, they’d ‘salt him up good’ and sit him outside the store.”   

“You Westerners have a grisly streak.  My wife’s mother is from Rawlins, Wyoming.  In the museum there they have a pair of shoes made from the skin of an outlaw named Big Nose George.”            

We laughed.

I’d joked and swapped stories with the lady, but after she left, the Manitou mummy preyed on my mind.  It seemed too grotesque until, weeks later, something suddenly clicked and I saw it as darkly humorous way to actualize the scenes burned into memory on the battlefield.   With the genuine article sitting out front, you couldn’t forget the horrors you’d seen—but they wouldn’t sneak up on you either.  There’d be no flashbacks, no bloody tableaus bushwhacking you when you didn’t expect it. 

Gaines’ Mill had its full share of horrors.  Just one story: as a boy I toured the site with a group from summer camp.  They showed us the Watt house, a historic structure near the center of the battlefield.  It was used as field hospital, we were told, and by the time the surgeons finished their work, the piles of amputated limbs mounted to the bottoms of the windows on all sides. 

I haven’t been able to turn up a written account of this.  Still, for a battle with 15,000 casualties, the story is not that farfetched. 

Piles of limbs, piles of bodies, and damaged soldiers everywhere for years and years.  The more I thought about it, the more it made perfect psychological sense for a wounded Civil War veteran to keep a real live dead guy around the shop.