Bragg spoke to one of his corps commanders, Leonidas Polk, bishop and general. “Chickamauga! This was Cherokee country, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, General. Cherokee Georgia. Chief Ross had his house near here. ‘Chickamauga’ means River of Death. For ages they must have gone up and down, over these ridges and through these vales, hunting and warring, camping and breaking camp—”
“Killing and being killed. We’ve only changed the colour, not the actuality. McLemore’s Cove! The scouts think that Rosecrans is going to push a column across Missionary Ridge and occupy McLemore’s Cove. I think they are mistaken. They are often mistaken.”
“General Forrest—”
“He is near Ringgold, I suppose. General Forrest does not keep me properly informed as to where he is—”
Cleburne came in with his rich Irish voice. “Well, that would make quite a shower of notes, wouldn’t it, sir?”
“I have never had the pleasure of meeting General Forrest,” said D.H. Hill. “He must be a remarkable man.”
“He is a military genius of the first order,” said Cleburne.
Bragg continued to gaze upon the Chickamauga. “The three gaps in Pigeon Mountain are Bluebird and Dug and Catlett’s. We will of course hold these, and if Crittenden or Thomas is really in McLemore’s Cove, I will dispatch a force against them. General Longstreet’s arrival cannot now be long delayed.”
Longstreet, travelling from Louisa Court-House in Virginia by Petersburg, Wilmington, Augusta, and Atlanta, because Burnside held the shorter Knoxville route, had in all nine hundred miles to traverse, and to serve him and his corps but one single-track, war-worn grey railroad of dejected behaviour. Lone and lorn as was the railroad, it rose to the emergency and deserved the cheers with which, after long days of companionship, Longstreet’s troops finally quitted the rails. On the sixteenth the regiments of Hood began to arrive at Dalton. On this day also Rosecrans, a tenacious, able general, completed the drawing of his lines—eleven miles, northeast to southwest—from Lee and Gordon’s Mills on the east bank of Chickamauga to Stevens’s Gap in Lookout Mountain.