Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [51]
You Haven’t Seen the Country ’til You’ve Seen the Country by Car
Leaving St Louis, I stopped off at Jefferson Barracks, the oldest operational military base west of the Mississippi River. Established in 1826 on land obtained as part of the Louisiana Pur chase, these barracks assisted and supported the westward expansion of white settlers by keeping hostile Indian groups at bay.
Exactly 150 years before I visited, Missouri was torn apart by the Civil War, an appalling event that left 625,000 Americans dead, more than perished in the two world wars combined. Missouri endured more than a thousand battles and engagements between 1861 and 1865. On the day that I passed through, a Civil War re-enactment group was recreating the Camp Jackson Affair, which set Missouri on the violent, turbulent path to war between the opposing Confederate and Union armies. On 10 May 1861, Union forces clashed with civilians on the streets of St Louis – at least twenty-eight people were killed and another hundred injured. The incident polarised the border state of Missouri, leading some citizens to advocate secession with the Confederacy and others to support the Union, thereby setting the stage for sustained violence between the opposing factions.
Eleven southern Confederate states fought twenty-five northern Union states, but even today nobody can be certain why they went to war. This very complex issue sells millions of books in America every year, and thousands of academics dedicate their lives to studying it. To Abraham Lincoln, the President at the time, the conflict was entirely about slavery; but a recent poll in America found that two-thirds of people think it was actually about issues to do with how much power the federal government had over individual states and that it had nothing to do with slavery at all.
Whatever the true cause, I was enjoying the smell of cordite at the re-enactment. Held over two days in a green, rolling Missouri field, it involved several hundred participants in grey and blue coats watched by several thousand spectators. Like some other scheduled stops on the trip, I must admit that I hadn’t been looking forward to this one. I didn’t expect to have a good time with people who re-enacted battles during their weekends. But I was proved wrong yet again. The re-enactment was beautifully executed, although it was hampered by one fatal flaw: none of the re-enactors wanted to die, because that meant lying on the battlefield for hours on end until the entire shooting match was over. I spotted only one dead guy. He was lying face up and was so still that I wondered if he might actually be asleep. There were far more wounded guys, limping off the field. The bastard that I am, I watched them closely to make sure they kept playing their part right to the end, but I didn’t spot any who gave up hobbling when they thought no one was looking.
It was all very impressive, but I still didn’t have a clue what to say to the camera crew about it. I made a few comments, and an American guy standing next to me started to laugh, so I felt reassured that I’d not overstepped the mark by making fun of the Civil War. He seemed like a good guy, so I asked him to explain exactly what was going on.
‘This battle kept St Louis in the Union,’ he said. ‘So the Unionists are supposed to win, I guess.’
‘Well, they have to in the end, don’t they?’
‘The bit about America losing 625,000 Americans, that’s the tragedy. I heard you talking about it.’
‘That’s right. And we keep doing it. We keep sending people to war. Young, healthy, bright people.’
‘In England you send them on honeymoons, right?’
This guy had a sense of humour. A couple of days earlier, Prince William had married Kate Middleton and now everyone was talking about where they might be going on honeymoon. You couldn’t escape it – even in the middle of America. ‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in it