Anthony: Reading your comments re: Brooks regiment stirred my curiosity since that was the unit most of my ancestors served in. Sometime back I was tracking around in a Missouri civil war website and came across a record of a quarter master for the 34th. Could you give me a sense of the wide variation in supplies issued to the troops and what they were charged for them. I have a copy of a letter my ggf wrote to my ggm thanking here for the shirt and socks she had knitted for him. As I write this I am reminded of the overcoat I was issued when I enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941. It was made of horse hair. I know it is not the way we should so things, but we were told , " off the record" that a good soldier never came up short on equipment. When the first cold weather caused everybody to don the much despised overcoats I traded in my 1917 model horsehair for a barely better new version. On 21 dollars a month you could not afford to be caught short.

Wonder what it was like to fire one of those 69 caliber rifles?

Ed