Brave Deeds of Union Soldiers

by Samuel Scoville

"All sore astonish'd stood Lord Scroope,

He stood as still as rock of stane;

He scarcely dared to trew his eyes,

When through the water they had gone.

"He is either himsell a devil fra hell,

Or else his mother a witch maun be;

I wadna have ridden that wan water,

For a' the gowd in Christentie."

The memory of that brave rescue nearly three hundred years before, as the scout afterward told his friends, was what inspired him to save his fellow-scouts as Buccleuch had saved the first William Kinmont. By saving the lives of these three men he would pay with interest for the life of his ancestor. Shakespeare writes somewhere that the good which men do is oft buried with their bones, but that their evil deeds live on forever. No more mistaken lines have ever been written. Evil brings about its own death. No good deed is ever forgotten or ever buried. Hundreds of years later it may flash out through the dust of centuries and light the path of high endeavor.

Morford scoured Chattanooga and finally found nine men who were ready to go with him and try to rescue the condemned scouts. Leaving Chattanooga they traveled by night and hid by day in caves and thickets among the mountains. Occasionally they would meet or get word from men whom they knew to be Union sympathizers. Finally they hid on the top of Bear Mountain which towered above the river and which separated them from Harrison where was located the jail. Although they had traveled fast and far they were only just in time. The second noon after the night when they reached the mountain had been fixed for the execution. On Bear Mountain they hid in a cave which Morford himself had discovered when hunting there many years before. It could only be reached by a narrow path which ran along a shelf of rock which jutted out over a precipice three hundred feet deep. The path turned sharply and led under an enormous overhanging ledge and ended in a deep cave with a little mountain spring bubbling up on a mossy slope only ten feet wide which led up to the cave's entrance. Inside was a dry, high cavern large enough to hold fifty men. It could not be reached from above by reason of the over-hanging ledge. At that point the path stopped and where the slope ended was a sheer drop to the rocks below which extended around the farther side of the slope so that the only entrance was around the path's bend along which only one man could pass at a time. Morford reached the foot of Bear Mountain just at sunset and led his little band up the steep side by a winding deer-path, the entrance to which was concealed in a tangled thicket of green briar and could only be reached by crawling underneath the sharp thorns like snakes. The path to the cave was no place for a man with weak nerves. It was bad enough as it skirted the precipice, but where it took a sharp bend around the jutting point of rock, it narrowed to nothing more than a foothold not three inches wide. He who would pass into the cave must turn with his back to the precipice and edge his way with arms outstretched along the smooth face of the rock for nearly ten feet. The point at the turn was the worst. There it was necessary to take one foot off the ledge and grope for a tiny foothold below the path while one shuffled around the curve. It was not absolutely necessary for Morford and his men to spend the night in this cave. There were other places where they could have stayed in safety, as no one suspected their presence. Morford, however, had made up his mind to choose his men with the utmost care. It was necessary in order to save the lives of the three condemned scouts to pass through the camp of the soldiers and the ring of guards encircling the jail, break open the jail, rescue the prisoners and break out again. It was a desperate chance and Morford's only hope of success was to have men who would show absolute coolness and daring throughout the whole adventure. The nine men whom he had selected all bore a high reputation for courage, but Morford decided like Gideon of old to cut out every factor of weakness and leave only the picked men. When Gideon was chosen of God to rescue the children of Israel from the unnumbered host of Midianites and Amalekites and the other Bedouin hordes of the desert which were encamped in the great valley that lay at the hill of Moreh, he started with a force of thirty-two thousand. When this army looked down upon the innumerable hosts of the fierce desert warriors, it began to weaken and Gideon sent back twenty-two thousand soldiers who had showed signs of fear. The night before the day fixed for battle, Gideon decided to select from this ten thousand a picked band of men who would be not only brave, but watchful and ready for any emergency. As his army swarmed down to the water-hole Gideon watched the men as they drank. They had kept watch and ward on that bare sun-smitten mountain top all through the long, hot day. As they came to the water some of the thirsty men dashed forward out of the ranks and fell on their faces and lapped the water like dogs without a thought that there might be an ambush at the ford and without a care that they were lying absolutely defenseless before any enemy who might attack them. Others kneeled on their hands and knees and drank. Of the ten thousand only three hundred had bravery and self-control enough to maintain the discipline of a vigilant army. Without laying down their weapons they drank as a deer drinks, watching on every side for fear of a surprise. With one hand they scooped up the water, in the other they held fast their weapon. It was slower, but it was safer. These three hundred men Gideon chose for that band which for three thousand years has been the symbol of bravery and watchfulness. With this little force just before dawn he burst down upon the sleeping Midianites which were as the sand by the sea for multitude. The three hundred were divided into three companies. Each man carried a sword, a trumpet, and an earthenware pitcher with a lighted lamp inside. From three separate directions they rushed down upon the sleeping foe and sounded the trumpets and brake the pitchers and held the flashing lamps on high and then shouting as their watchword, "The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon," they burst into the great camp of the invaders. Roused from sleep, hearing the trumpet notes and the crash of the breaking pitchers and seeing the flash of lights from all sides and mighty voices shouting the fierce slogan, the Midianites scattered like sheep and all that great host ran and cried and fled and every man's sword was against his fellow in the darkness, and when day dawned the ground was covered with dead men, the camp was abandoned and nothing was left of that mighty army but a fringe of fugitives scattered in every direction.