Joshua walked through the sutler's camp with his father, afterward, hoping to run into Dorrie.
Buy, there was no end of gun stuff. You could get actual Civil War-era formula gunpowder, antique weaponry, musket balls, and—whoa—Civil War-era unexploded bullets ready to be fired by a Civil War-era gun.

There were seamstresses who made the rounds of re-enactments in the South to sew on period buttons to period costumes. Most of the costumes (particularly for the modern fellow, who was much bigger than his nineteenth-century counterpart) were contemporary, made from blends of fabric as close to the period as possible. But that didn't mean you couldn't have the era's buttons, medals, handkerchiefs, bootlaces. (How did they get the 1860s bootlaces?) And there was a brisk trade in tobacco products and antique pipes, pipe stuffers, cans of tobacco from the period (the pipe tobacco inside was fresh, presumably), and flints and lighting devices although the safety match was invented by the time of the Civil War, but these guys liked doing things as old-fashionedly as possible.

You could buy food—some stands advertised "modern" food, and some sold hardtack and biscuits and cured meat. Josh wondered if the people running the stands went out and bought a load of beef jerky for the occasion, but his father put him straight—everything was cooked on an old wood-burning stove or cured in a smoke-cured barn, just like it would have been in the 1860s.

"Did the barn have to be around in the 1860s," Josh asked, "or is that pushing it too much?"

His father, unsmiling: "There is no 'too much.'"

—Wilton Barnhardt, Lookaway, Lookaway