Civil War and Reconstruction
Lice
We went into summer quarters at Tupelo. Our principal occupation at this place was playing poker, chucka-lucka and cracking graybacks (lice). Every soldier had a brigade of lice on him, and I have seen fellows so busily engaged in cracking them that it reminded me of an old woman knitting...
The boys would frequently have a louse race. There was one fellow who was winning all the money; his lice would run quicker and crawl faster than anybody's lice. We could not understand it. If some fellow happened to catch a fierce-looking louse, he would call on Dornin for a race. Dornin would come and always win the stake. The lice were placed in plates - this was the race course - and the first that crawled off was the winner. At last we found out D.'s trick: he always heated his plate.
Sam R. Watkins
Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War
By Sam R. Watkins, p.55
(Watkins was born in 1839 near Columbia, Tennessee. He was 21 years old when he enlisted in the Confederate Army, and served until the end of the war, fighting in many of the war’s major battles. Of the 120 men who enlisted in Company H. in 1861, Sam was one of only seven still alive at the end.)
Civil War and Reconstruction >> Civil War >> Soldiers Life >> Camp Life
Sponsored by: National Endowment for the Humanities