The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 73, July 1969 - April, 1970 Page: 329
605 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Camp Life in the Army of Occupation
The wildlife, as well as the weather, held delights. Grant wrote
to his future bride:
It is just the kind of country Julia that we have often spoken of in our
most romantic conversations. It is the place where we could gallop over
the prairies and start up Deer and prairie birds and occationally [sic] see
droves of wild horses or an Indian wigwam."
Groups of officers often rode on hunting trips of several days deep
into the country that they found "as God made it.""1 The variety
of game they brought back was almost beyond belief. One party of
five officers returned from a three-day hunt with fifty-one geese, ten
deer, four bittern, two crane, sixty-nine snipe, eighteen ducks, four
curlew, three turkeys, and one panther. The panther measured seven
feet and eight inches from tip to tip. The men saw on these hunting
or exploring expeditions herds of deer, wild horses, antelope, and
mules." Shorter forays also were successful. Private Barna Upton of the
3rd Infantry wrote home that "it would do your heart good to see the
hunters come in in the evening with their game on a pole between
the two men: deer, wild turkey, and cranes, pelicans, and eagles for
greens.""
Fishing was just as profitable. Private Upton's regiment possessed
its own seine, and a party went out every day to supply the cooks with
fish. On many days the regimental fishermen would be rewarded with
fifty to sixty bushels of fish, each specimen weighing from two to ten
pounds. Oysters and turtles were among the catches. After one par-
ticularly cold night masses of fish and green turtles were found the
next morning in a torpid state at a reef. They were so abundant and
so easily picked up that the men filled their wagons with the catch.
The soldiers' mess kits held not only fish, fowl, and venison, but also
beef, which were slaughtered daily, and mutton."
Even the encampment of troops, growing larger almost daily with
reinforcements, seemed to add to the scene's attractiveness. One vis-
itor attested in a letter to the New Orleans Weekly Picayune:
"Grant, Papers, I, 54.
4Two Wars: An Autobiography of General Samuel G. French . . . (Nashville, 19o01),
38.
"Henry, Campaign Sketches, 40, 43-44; Weekly Picayune (New Orleans), January ig,
1846.
"William H. Goetzmann (ed.), "Our First Foreign War," American Heritage, XVII
(June, 1966), 87.
uIbid.; Henry, Campaign Sketches, 46; Weekly Picayune (New Orleans), September 8,
1845.329
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 73, July 1969 - April, 1970, periodical, 1970; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117147/m1/365/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.