Brashear City [Louisiana]
December 23d 1862
Dear Wife,
I received your letter of December 1st on the 7th (it came through the quickest of any I have had from home) informing me of your good health and the children also. Likewise, I learned you had received the guns. It was a lucky thing for me that I sent them when I did as it is impossible to send one now. If I had not sent them then, I should not have sent them at all.
I will write about Hattie’s having her hair cut. If she wants it cut, cut it for her of course. She goes to meeting and wants to be in fashion. It is right to do so as far as you can. I am glad she likes to go to meeting so well.
Hatt, you must not expect a long letter this time as I have but very little news to write. We expect to move from here every day but which way, we know not. But it is one of two—either to Texas or to Vicksburg. I don’t care which. I long to move from here somewhere. It is awful to stay so long in one place.
I want more excitement. Some of the boys find some here. The picket guards get a shot at the Rebels now and then. Last Saturday was the first. Fifteen of our men and about fifty rebel cavalry had a few rounds across the river. Our boys killed 3 men and 2 horses. The rebels did not mark any of our boys more than their clothing. One boy had a ball hole through his pants on the hip. Again Sunday, two of our boys took a boat and went up the river to shoot some ducks. They got up some two miles to a small island when some fifty rebels sprang out of the bushes and fired upon them but did not hit either of them. They turned their boat and rowed out about forty rods and stopped and fired back 4 rounds, drove them back into the woods again. In a few minutes they saw a boat coming towards them with 15 men in it. Our boys fired 2 shots into the boat. They let the sails down and laid down in the boat and the wind was right to drift them back. So you see they are a set of cowards when two men can drive fifty. They have no heart to fight. ¹
Yesterday we was paid off again for two months—six dollars. We are paid up to the first of November. My health is good—first rate.
I shall have to close for want of news. I hope we shall move before I write again so I shall have something to write. I have just heard there is a mail in so I will wait until night before I close.
No mail tonight so I will close by wishing you a Merry Christmas and good night. Respects to all.
— X. W. Wood
to Hatt
¹ In his diary entry of 21 December 1862, Rufus Kinsley of Co. F, 8th Vermont, wrote, “Our land force is small: only the 8th Vermont, 21st Indiana, and a section of the 4th Mass. Battery; but we have four gunboats here in the Bay, and the rebels have only one; but she can run in less water than our boats notwithstanding she is iron clad. The bay here is one mile wide. A little farther up, not more than fifty rods, the rebels occupy the other side, and hardly a day passes but our pickets are fired at. None of us killed yet, although some of our clothes have been wounded. We have killed several of them across the Bay, distant a full mile.” [Diary of a Christian Soldier, Rufus Kinsley and the Civil War, page115]
"In a Peck of Half-Bushels" 