At a location in west Texas we met a friend for a couple of days of digging a Civil War camp. The soil was moist and damp and the weather was nice. The camp was located on a hill and like many other areas the county raised a force of soldiers during the Civil War. They didn't stay for long on this hill but they left their traces.

Most of the counties gathered a company of soldiers for the war and until they got their orders to report for training they camped and waited. Like so many others this spot was a temporary camp that looked like it was there about six months before they moved on.

When digging a campsite like this you soon discover the differences between the kinds of iron targets. While people may scorn the iron in a camp many good finds are iron. There seems to be a difference between how the iron reads on our detectors. There is "soft" iron like nails and then there is the cast pieces. Some iron reads out as "iron" and some reads as "coin" or the top end of the metals scale.

I enjoy digging some of these pieces to understand more of the soldiers life in camp. It always seems that where ever I dig in a camp site I find a sad iron. The handles break off the soldiers toss them away. Here is an example of the kinds of finds that we dug.

This campsite was pretty worked over already but we had fun and dug some interesting pieces. It appeared that old cartridge was found for the old Henry rifle and it was rimfire. Several bullets and a button was found.

One interesting find appears to be jewelry and is either brass or gold. I didn't clean it yet to find out but it looks interesting.

As I stood looking at the spot that the camp melted lead for bullets I could see the burned pieces of wood that looked like it came from a fire only a day or two ago, it lay there for 140 years! I picked up some lead from lying around the ground near the area, still laying on the surface after all these years!

Needless to say we were tired and ready to drop by the time we finished hunting. A fun trip!