Civil Rites
Get yer War Between the States on at Fort Tejon
By Cole Coonce
The Civil War was supposed to last a month or a week or maybe just an afternoon; the first fight was the Battle of Bull Run (a.k.a. Manassas), just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. As war began, it was thought possible that this would be not only the first, but perhaps the last and decisive battle.
Because of the conflict's presupposed brevity, many of D.C.'s high-society statesmen, dandies, and belles went on leisurely horse-and-carriage rides to Manassas, Virginia, brought picnic lunches, and got out their opera glasses to watch the spectacle of combat. To their shock, battle unfolded and the graphic horrors of war became glaringly apparent - and these spectators quickly put down their chicken drumsticks, corked their flasks, got in their carriages, and hightailed it back to the relative safety of their capitol.
Bull Run was a rout for the Secessionists and a fiasco for the Union, and, after some rather brutal bloodletting, the Yankees fled in terror to D.C., dropping their knapsacks and their guns, only to have their hasty retreat halted and bottlenecked by the high-society types whose wagons were either stuck in the mud on the roads or clogging up the bridges.
In that spirit, on the third Saturday of every month of warm weather, Angelenos can put on their Sunday best, jump in their cars, motor up the I-5, and take in Civil War reenactments at Fort Tejon, where the Grapevine peaks just north of Frazier Park, somewhere between Magic Mountain and Bakersfield. This is an opportunity for the curious, the fanatical, and the macabre lookie-loos to pack a toothsome picnic lunch, too - say, buckets of fried chicken, cole slaw, iced tea, maybe topped by some strawberry pie. Then - voila! - the Civil War shapeshifter can assume the mindset of the high-society types of another century, when war and inexorable bloodletting was a naïve abstraction.
As far as the reenactment itself: WOW. The spectator gets a great sense of the heat of battle, particularly with the sounds and smells one cannot experience with that Morgan Freeman movie. In the simulated battles of Fort Tejon, the cannons BOOM and rumble, shaking the ground with the fury of the wrath of God or maybe Stonewall Jackson. Meanwhile, opposing infantry troops point muskets at each other, shoot, reload, and repeat their fire in rhythms and repetitions dictated and perfected by Napoleon. (Indeed, the Civil War was the transition between point-and-shoot Napoleonic combat and the trench warfare that was a feature of World War I.) Amid the prodigious smoke and percussion from the cannons and rifles, and the troops' precise-yet-lumbering choreography, cavalry skirmishes append the pageantry and add an improvisational element of chaos that disturbs the meticulous military tactics of the foot and artillery soldiers.
Because there were few skirmishes and no real battles in California during the War between the States, the Fort Tejon reenactments are generally a compendium of sundry campaigns in the Trans-Mississippi and Virginia theaters. The reenactors will gladly tell the curious and the befuddled about California's role in that war - and how cavalry riders out of both Fort Tejon and Wilmington lobbied, if not begged, to join the conflict on the side of the Union. Indeed, after some ridiculous boat rides and land-based connections, the soldiers of Fort Tejon were absorbed by and fought for regiments of the Massachusetts Cavalry, becoming a unit that earned the respect, fear, and dread of Robert E. Lee's Army of North Virginia. But don't take my word for it: Walk into the simulated camp of the Army of the Potomac at Fort Tejon and ask a blacksmith yourself.
Published: 08/03/2006
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