Camp Ford by Johnny D. Boggs

Author:Johnny D. Boggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781428501607
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We dug.

Shoring up our tunnel with pieces of wood scraps, the residents of the 2nd Squadron shebang worked at a murderous pace at night, digging down and east, hiding our dirt underneath blankets and a slop bucket until Sergeant Champlin decided it was time. Two or three times a week, Champlin built a roaring fire, and within hours we were prodding, poking, and slamming the clay chimney outside to save our quarters from going up in flames.

After two weeks of that, our neighbors, some rough-hewn boys from the 12th Michigan Infantry, dismantled their shebang and moved to more inviting climes. Rebel guards started calling us fire flies.

As soon as the collapsed chimney cooled off, we went back to work, repairing the chimney, collecting wood and water. The small entrance to the tunnel required even a small boy like me to wiggle like a worm to get in and out, and we covered it with a chair made from woven grapevines, much like the one I had seen in Captain McGee’s shelter. We worked tirelessly, probably too exhausted to complain about our food. Each morning after roll call, Confederate guards issued a pint of meal per prisoner and somewhere between a quarter-pound to a pound of beef, maybe bacon, some of it condemned as unfit to eat. That said, the prisoners at Ford City had it better than other Southern dungeons. This wasn’t Andersonville, Florence, or Salisbury by any means. By the same token, I must admit, Rebel prisoners in Northern camps such as Camp Chase, Rock Island, and Elmira also starved, rotted, and died in horrific numbers.

At Camp Ford, however, we could supplement our rations, even trade with the Rebs. Along Ray’s Creek, which ran north of camp, we gathered wild onions, and Lieutenant Colonel Sweet allowed prisoners to keep a vegetable garden, much larger and better maintained than Professor Blevins’s patch near Water Street. Breakfast at the 2nd Squadron shebang usually consisted of corn mush, bacon burned to a crisp, and rye coffee, but Champlin surprised us every now and then with a plate of cornmeal pancakes and pine syrup or what he called panola, cornmeal browned in bacon grease with sugar mixed into it.

“The sugar,” he told us, “came with Captain McGee’s compliments.”

We took our meals outside, our quarters too hot after Champlin’s conflagration. Sometimes, when our sergeant proved too capable with his fires and we wound up losing our breakfast as well as our chimney—and once our entire shebang—we would wander over to the center of Ford City. New Yorkers at the Fifth Avenue Bakery sold doughnuts for ten cents, grape pies for a dollar. Bacon cost two dollars a pound, and coffee (burned rye) came in one-pound bags for eight dollars. Those were Union script prices. If you wanted to trade in Confederate currency, which Sweet’s Guards used, the cost of items shot up astronomically. Naturally you could always barter.

Socks were priceless, and good footwear out of most men’s budgets. Buttons moved like golden nuggets, and practically everyone wanted tobacco, especially Confederate-cured plugs.

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