590 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Nov. 9, 1912 
Hunting in Civil War Time 
By FRED A. OLDS 
T HE writer has never seen a story about how 
hunting was done in the South during the 
trying period of the Civil War; a time 
when people’s minds in most cases ran to 
slaughter in quite another fashion, the game be¬ 
ing man. But amid all the horrors of that four 
years, in the small boy there still abode the love 
of the pursuit of game, and this, if the reader 
pleases, will be a little story of the life of a 
Confederate boy; the place, Piedmont, North 
Carolina, and the time between the winter of 
1862-63 and the close of hostilities. 
In the first place, it must be remembered that 
everything was subordinate to war, and yet 
schools had to go on, the children had to be 
looked after in many ways, amusements of some 
sort provided for them, and upon the plantation 
life must flow as regularly as possible, since it 
was the plantation which after all was the back¬ 
bone of the Confederacy. The little boy grew 
very used to tithes; for a tithe—that is, a tenth— 
of everything produced on the farm had to be 
turned over to the Confederate States and go 
into the storehouses. So went some of all the 
grain grown, the leather made, the tobacco, the 
cotton, etc., not to speak of the meat. The 
slaves had to be fed and clothed and looked after, 
and to the little boy, whose associates must needs 
be oftentimes the little slave boys, there was the 
idea of proprietorship, for one of the little slaves 
had been given to him for his own, and in his 
child mind there was the idea, not so much of 
proprietorship, for that was indeed dim, but 
comradeship, and this is the keynote of the re¬ 
gard which the whites and the blacks of the war¬ 
time yet have for each other. It may seem like 
an anomaly, but this regard is very keen and 
there is a lot of human nature in it. 
Cold weather had come, the leaves were be¬ 
ginning to fall, the slaves and their owners had 
changed their home-made cotton clothes of the 
warm season for woolen ones, also home-made, 
and to the mind of the little boy there came the 
human instinct for hunting. During the hot 
months he had been many a time in the nearby 
“swimming-hole” with his little companions, 
white and black, and he had seen the young 
game in all directions, for during the war, when 
hunting was done on so limited a scale, game 
and fish of all kinds increased immensely in the 
South, certainly in North Carolina, and deer, 
foxes, rabbits, pheasant or grouse, quail, squirrels, 
etc., were on every hand. So when cold weather 
came, the little boy went to a negro cabin and 
there found “Uncle Esek,” whose snowy hair 
looked amazingly like wool, and who, though 
incapacitated for any particular farm work, was 
always strong enough to “git erbout wid little 
Marster,” who, to be sure, he always called by 
his first name. “Black Mammy,” the wife of 
this veteran, whose hair was carefully wrapped 
in a home-made handkerchief, dyed with some 
product of the woods or fields, was equally glad 
to see the little boy, who had come to “put out 
de rabbit gums,” as Uncle Esek put it; that is, 
to set about here and there in the rabbit runways 
little boxes made of four narrow planks, but 
very often a hollow log, which, with a trigger, a 
slide and a bait made of some green thing (pre¬ 
ferably a bit of cabbage leaf), was and is the 
boy’s favorite as a catcher of rabbits. These 
“gums” were set all about and were visited 
every morning by the black man or the little 
boy, oftentimes by both. The rabbit was food, 
and his skin was in demand, because it would go 
to the hatter, for in nearly every town there 
was a man who made hats out of wool and rab¬ 
bit fur, for everything was in request, the rags 
going to the paper mills or being converted into 
home-made carpets; cloth was used and re-used, 
dyed and re-dyed; every bit of leather was 
A MISS IS AS GOOD AS HER SMILE. 
precious, and the soles of many shoes were 
made of wood, leather being only used for the 
uppers. 
The little boy was barely big enough to use 
a shotgun, and his father’s double barrel, a 14- 
gauge, with the muzzles worn quite thin by 
long use, was to the little fellow by far the 
most valuable object on the plantation. Some¬ 
times he cut wads out of paper, with the old 
wad-cutter, but very often he used what Uncle 
Esek told him was “de bes’ kin’ of waddin’ dat 
whar you gits fum wasses nesses.” By this the 
old darkey meant that the sort of paper which 
the wasp uses in building a nest was an excellent 
thing for wadding. There were no manufactured 
shot to be had, so the boy had to make them 
himself. He did this in a very simple way. The 
farm blacksmith took a small bar of iron and 
through this drilled a hole, and then reamed this 
out, so that it was shaped like a V. The boy 
took a plank and and with a plane cut trenches 
in this about two feet long, into which he poured 
molten lead, so as to make long and square 
pieces. These he rubbed with tallow, and taking 
them and the bar of iron to the blacksmith shop, 
he and Uncle Esek heated the iron and placed it 
across the tub of water into which the blacksmith 
dipped his tools, etc. Taking one of the little 
bars of led in the hand, one end was placed in 
the opening in the bar, pressed down, the heat 
melting it and the molten lead dropped in little 
pellets, sometimes not exactly round, into the 
water. The bar was heated and re-heated until 
the lead was worked up. 
Now then, the boy had his shot. He must 
get the powder. This had to come from one of 
the powder-mills, where rude, yet efficient, 
powder was made from willow-wood charcoal, 
nitre and saltpeter, the latter laboriously gathered, 
the nitre coming from certain caves in Virginia. 
The boy bought the precious powder, paying for 
it with a dingy Confederate dollar note, which 
carried on its face a promise of payment “two 
years after the ratification of a treaty of peace 
between the Confederate States of America and 
the United States of America,” a promise which 
was never realized, however. Having thus ob¬ 
tained the powder, the last thing to be done was 
to get the caps for the gun, and these the mer¬ 
chant had, they having been made in the cap 
factory at Raleigh. They were rough affairs, of 
copper and fulminate of mercury, but they were 
more or less effective. 
Carrying the precious powder and caps 
home, the boy prepared for a hunt, and with him 
went his uncle, who had but lately lost an arm 
in battle, and who was convalescing. In the 
hickory trees the squirrels were busy and un¬ 
afraid, as they were but seldom molested, and 
the boy had good sport. Uncle Esek was on 
hand, of course, and the boy carried his father’s 
gun and also the game bag with knitted exterior 
and within a pouch in which was a large piece of 
the wasp nest. On the other side hung the 
powder flask with the gauge which measured 
the amount, though, to be sure, the little boy used 
a little more, making allowance for the poor 
quality of the powder. There was the shot pouch, 
with its gauge, containing the home-made shot, 
some of the latter being almost pear-shaped. 
But with this outfit the boy killed squirrels and 
contrived to knock over a rabbit or two. The 
great joy was to come on the return home, for 
as the trio approached a little thicket of sassa¬ 
fras bushes, rich with the color of their leaves, 
a great bird burst out and took wing, and the 
boy, as nervous as a pointer dog on a frosty 
morning, yet pulled himself together enough to 
fire and brought down a young turkey gobbler. 
He had gone his limit, and as the bird fell, he 
actually dropped his gun and ran for that turkey, 
which was threshing about in the weeds. Uncle 
Esek was at his heels, and as the boy grabbed 
the struggling bird, which with quick wings was 
beating him on arms and body, Uncle Esek came 
up and helped him with his big prize. He was 
boy enough to insist on carrying the gun and 
other game home, letting Uncle Esek carry the 
turkey until the “front gate” was reached, but 
when he must needs take that bird, and so with 
half a dozen squirrels, a couple of rabbits and 
the gobbler, he walked into the house, a bigger 
