The peak and the star for the Unafraid!
John Trotwood Moore.
Solomon
By John Trotwood Moore
(Author of “Ole Mistis,” “Songs and Stories From Tennessee,” “A Summer Hymnal,” etc.)
Chickamauga Creek had no place on the map until September, ’63. Then it ran blood and became history. For it takes blood to make history.
When Bragg went to pieces two months later, after the shambles of Missionary Ridge, Hooker’s Corps was the pack turned loose to harry him out of the valley. They rushed thoughtlessly—Hooker’s hounds always did—and the foremost quickly paid the tax which Rashness pays to Reason. Cleburne, the rebel general, who brought up the rear of Bragg’s army, turned, wolf-like, at a gap in the mountains and cut to pieces the hound that had outstripped the pack in its zeal to snap at harried haunches. The hound whimpered and fell back, but not before Cleburne had shingled the sides of the mountain with the dead of the Yankee army.
The General who claimed the cut-up regiment was mad, and as he rode, with his staff, to the front, he was swearing in a deep, jerky, guttural voice. He stopped to look at the bloody gap, the lusty, voiceless, blue-coated forms, lying so weirdly unnatural—as trees when the hurricane has passed: “Mountain gaps—they are little traps of hell,” he kept repeating, and he spurred on for a guide—to a cracker cabin higher up on the mountain side.
The General rode a clean-limbed, loosely-ribbed, long-back thoroughbred, fresh from a blue grass paddock in Middle Tennessee. For he was weak on horse-flesh, and had impressed this scion of a Derby winner before Rosecrans went North.