LOOKING WESTWARD
Let us now turn our backs to the Chickamauga Lake for a glimpse towards the west. To the southwest, we see Lookout Mountain standing like a bright cameo in a position as if it were looking down on Chattanooga. To our right, we view the head of another rocky monster that is looking southward. This is Signal Mountain, which is simply the local name for the southern end of Waldens Ridge. A little to our left, in the background between Signal and Lookout Mountains, stands Raccoon Mountain. These are parts of the Cumberlands and are plateaus, each of them being quite flat on its top. Their average altitude is approximately 2,000 feet above the sea. The Cumberlands were so named by Dr. Thomas Walker in 1748 in honor of the Duke of Cumberland, William Augustus, who two years previous had defeated the Scotch in the battle of Culloden. Following that bloody event, the Duke was so bitterly hated that the early Scotch settlers in America refused to call the mountains by the name Cumberland, preferring to speak of them by their Cherokee name Ouisoto Mountains, (pronounced We-soto).
If we could leap like a giant kangaroo, the first kick of our hind legs down the Tennessee River would leave us standing on the dam at Hales Bar, forty miles from here. Another leap of eighty-two miles and we would rest on Guntersville Dam in Alabama. Our third leap would take us seventy-four miles farther on where we would strike the Wheeler Dam. Next a kitten’s spring of only sixteen miles and we would strike the Wilson Dam. A sudden jump of 52 miles would leave us astride the Pickwick Dam, and then a tremendous long leap of 184 miles and we would find ourselves perched on the Kentucky Dam, only twenty-three miles from the mouth of the Tennessee River at Paducah, Kentucky. If we chose to continue the journey to the mouth of the river we would find ourselves 471 miles from where we now stand on the Chickamauga Dam.
DIAGRAM OF
TVA
WATER CONTROL
SYSTEM
MAP OF THE TENNESSEE RIVER
The high railroad bridge we see directly in front of us is where the Cincinnati-Chattanooga division of the Southern Railway crosses the river. This railroad is owned by the city of Cincinnati and leased by the Southern Railway. The creek a few rods to our right is the North Chickamauga. It has its source on Waldens Ridge and leaves the mountain about fifteen miles from here at Daisy, Tennessee, where it has chiseled out a marvelously beautiful gulch of rustic beauty. When the Chickamauga Dam was begun, this creek emptied into the river a short distance above the dam, but after an artificial bed was dug, its course was changed so that it would find the river below the dam.
To our left, on the south side, we can see where the South Chickamauga Creek empties into the Tennessee. It was there that the Federal troops under General W. T. Sherman crossed on pontoon bridges at daylight, November 24, 1863. The steamer Dunbar assisted in transporting Sherman’s division to the other side of the river. A pontoon was also laid across the mouth of the Chickamauga. It was then that Sherman attacked the right wing of General Bragg’s Confederate forces, which occupied Missionary Ridge from this north end to the south. Sherman was fighting throughout the day while the battle of Lookout Mountain was raging to our southwest. Because Missionary Ridge ends near the Chickamauga Dam, and since the battle fought there on November 25, 1863, has been regarded by some historians as the turning point in the Civil War, a little later I shall describe briefly that battle. For the present we shall leave some of the interesting places below the dam in order to tell about a few sites and historical events that took place above the dam and along the South Chickamauga Creek.