("cracker-boxes," one might call them, if punning were not so
frowned upon), with a big fireplace, two opposite doors, two beds
in diagonally opposite corners, and, I think, no window. Here
was domestic life in something like its pristine simplicity, a
philosopher might have said: the house still subordinate to the man,
and the housekeeper not yet a slave to furniture and bric-à-brac. But
even a philosopher would perhaps have tolerated a second room and a
light of glass. As for myself, I remembered that I used to read of
"poor white trash" in anti-slavery novels.
By this time the sun had so doubled its fury that I would not cross
the bare Kelly field, and therefore did not go down to look at the
"men cut in a rock;" but after visiting a shell pyramid which marks
the spot where Colonel King fell,--and near which I saw my first
Tennessee flicker,--I turned back toward Snodgrass Hill, keeping to
the woods as jealously as any soldier can have done on the days of
the battle. At the foot of the hill was a well, with a rude bucket
and a rope to draw with. Here I drank,--having to stand in the sun,
I remember,--and then sat down in the shelter of large trees near
by, with guideboards and index-fingers all about me, while a Bachman
finch, who occupied a small brush-heap just beyond the well (_he_ had
no fear of sunshine), entertained me with music. He was a master. I
had never heard his equal of his own kind, and seldom a bird of any
kind, that seemed so much at home with his instrument. He sang "like
half a dozen birds," to quote my own pencil; now giving out a brief
and simple strain, now running into protracted and intricate warbles;
and all with the most bewitching ardor and sweetness, and without
the slightest suggestion of attempting to make a show. A field
sparrow sang from the border of the grass land at the same moment. I
wished he could have refrained. Nothing shall induce me to say a word
against him; but there are times when one would rather be spared even
the opportunity for a comparison.
As I went up the hill under the tall trees, largely yellow pines, a
crested flycatcher stood at the tip of one of the tallest of them,
screaming like a bird of war; and further on was a red-cockaded
woodpecker, flitting restlessly from trunk to trunk, its flight
marked with a musical woodpeckerish wing-beat,--like the downy's
purr, but louder. I had never seen the bird before except in the
pine-lands of Florida, nor did I see it afterward except on this same
hill, at a second visit. It is a congener of the downy and the hairy,
ranking between them in size, and by way of distinction wears a big
white patch, an ear-muff, one might say, on the side of its head. Its
habitat is strictly southern, so that its name, _Dryobates borealis_,
though easily rememberable, seems but moderately felicitous.
Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the day--the most comfortable,
certainly, but the words are not synonymous--was a two-hour siesta on
the Snodgrass Hill tower, above the tops of the highest trees. The
only two landmarks of which I knew the names were Missionary Ridge
and Lookout Mountain; the latter running back for many miles into
Georgia, like a long wooded plateau, till it rises into High Point at
its southern end, and breaks off precipitously.
Farther to the south were low hills followed by a long mountain
of beautiful shape,--Pigeon Mountain, I heard it called,--with
elevations at each end and in the middle. And so my eye made the
round of the horizon, hill after hill in picturesque confusion, till
it returned to Missionary Ridge, with Walden's Ridge rising beyond,
and Lookout Point on the left: a charming prospect, especially for
its atmosphere and color. The hard woods, with dark pines everywhere
among them to set them off, were just coming into leaf, with all
those numberless, nameless, delicate shades of green that make
the glory of the springtime. The open fields were not yet clear
green,--if they ever would be,--but green and brown intermixed,
while the cultivated hillsides, especially on Missionary Ridge, were
of a deep rich reddish-brown. The air was full of beautifying haze,
and cumulus clouds in the south and west threw motionless shadows
upon the mountain woods.
Around me, in different parts of the battlefield, were eight or ten
houses and cabins, the nearest of them, almost at my feet, being the
Snodgrass house, famous as the headquarters of General Thomas, the
hero of the fight,--the "Rock of Chickamauga,"--who saved the Union
army after the field was lost. All was peaceful enough there now,
with the lines full of the week's washing, which a woman under a
voluminous sunbonnet was at that moment taking in (in that sun things
would dry almost before the clothes-pins could be put on them, I
thought), while a red-gowned child, and a hen with a brood of young
chickens, kept close about her feet. Her husband, like the occupant
of the Kelly house, was no doubt one of the government laborers, who
to-day were burning refuse in the woods,--invisible fires, from each
of which a thin cloud of blue smoke rose among the trees. The Dyer
house, in a direction nearly opposite the Snodgrass house, stood
broadly in the open, with an orchard behind it, and dark savins
posted here and there over the outlying pasture.
Even at noonday the air was full of music: first an incessant tinkle
of cow-bells rising from all sides, wondrously sweet and soothing;
then a continuous, far-away hum, like a sawmill just audible in
the extreme distance, or the vibration of innumerable wires, miles
remote, perhaps,--a noise which I knew neither how to describe nor
how to guess the origin of, the work of seventeen-year locusts, I
afterward learned; and then, sung to this invariable instrumental
accompaniment,--this natural pedal point, if I may call it so,--the
songs of birds.
The singers were of a quiet and unpretentious sort, as befitted
the hour: a summer tanager; a red-eyed vireo; a tufted titmouse;
a Maryland yellow-throat, who cried, "What a pity! What a pity!
What a pity!" but not as if he felt in the least distressed about
it; a yellow-throated vireo, full-voiced and passionless; a field
sparrow, pretty far off; a wood pewee; a yellow-billed cuckoo; a
quail; a Carolina wren, with his "Cherry, cherry, cherry!" and a
Carolina chickadee,--a modest woodland chorus, interrupted now by the
jubilant cackling of a hen at the Snodgrass house (if a man's daily
achievements only gave him equal satisfaction!) and now by the scream
of a crested flycatcher.
The most interesting member of the choir, though one of the
poorest of them all as a singer, is not included in the foregoing
enumeration. While I lay dreaming on the iron floor of the tower,
enjoying the breeze, the landscape, the music, and, more than all,
the place, I was suddenly brought wide awake by a hoarse drawling
note out of the upper branches of a tall oak a little below my level.
I caught a glimpse of the bird, having run down to a lower story of
the tower for that purpose. Then he disappeared, but after a while,
from the same tree, he called again; and again I saw him, but not
well. Another long absence, and once more, still in the same tree, he
sang and showed himself: a blue-winged yellow warbler, an exquisite
bunch of feathers, but with a song of the oddest and meanest,--two
syllables, the first a mere nothing, and the second a husky drawl,
in a voice like the blue golden-wing's. Insignificant and almost
contemptible as it was, a shabby expression of connubial felicity, to
say the least, I counted myself happy to have heard it, for novelty
covers a multitude of sins.
The yellow-throated warblers were hardly less interesting than the
blue-wing, though they threw me into less excitement. For a long
time I heard them without heeding them. From the day of my arrival
in Chattanooga I had been surrounded by indigo-birds in numbers
beyond anything that a New England mind ever dreams of. As a matter
of course they were singing here on Snodgrass Hill, or so I thought.
But by and by, as the lazy notes were once more repeated, there came
over me a sudden sense of difference. "_Was_ that an indigo-bird?" I
said to myself. "Wasn't it a yellow-throated warbler?" I was sitting
among the tops of the pine-trees; the birds had been droning almost
in my very ears, and without a thought I had listened to them as
indigo-birds. It confirmed what I had written in Florida, that the
two songs are much alike; but it was a sharp lesson in caution. When
a prudent man finds himself thus befooled, he begins to wonder how it
may be with the remainder of that precious body of notions, inherited
and acquired, to which, in all but his least complacent moods, he has
been accustomed to give the name of knowledge.
Here was a lesson, also, in the close relation that everywhere
subsists between the distribution of plants and the distribution of
animals. These were the only yellow pines noticed in the neighborhood
of Chattanooga; and in them, and nowhere else, I found two birds
of the Southern pine-barrens, the red-cockaded woodpecker and the
yellow-throated warbler.
At the base of the tower, when I finally descended, I paused a moment
to look at a cluster of graves, eight or ten in all, unmarked save
by a flagging of small stones; one of those family or neighborhood
burying-grounds, the occupants of which--happier than most of us, who
must lie in crowded cities of the dead--repose in decent privacy,
surrounded by their own, with no ugly staring white slabs to publish
their immemorable names to every passer-by.
From the hill it was but a few steps to the Snodgrass house, where
a woman stood in the yard with a young girl, and answered all my
inquiries with cheerful and easy politeness. None of the Snodgrass
family now occupied the house, she said, though one of the daughters
still lived just outside the reservation. The woman had heard
her describe the terrible scenes on the days of the battle. The
operating-table stood under this tree, and just there was a trench
into which the amputated limbs were thrown. Yonder field, now grassy,
was then planted with corn; and when the Federal troops were driven
through it, they trod upon their own wounded, who begged piteously
for water and assistance. A large tree in front of the house was
famous, the woman said; and certainly it was well hacked. A picture
of it had been in "The Century." General Thomas was said to have
rested under it; but an officer who had been there not long before to
set up a granite monument near the gate told her that General Thomas
didn't rest under that tree, nor anywhere else. Two things he did,
past all dispute: he saved the Federal army from destruction and made
the Snodgrass farmhouse an American shrine.
When our talk was ended I returned to the hill, and thence sauntered
through the woods--the yellow-throated warblers singing all about me
in the pine-tops--down to the vicinity of the railroad. Here, finding
myself in the sun again, I made toward a shop near the station,--shop
and post-office in one,--where fortunately there were such edibles,
semi-edibles, as are generally to be looked for in country groceries.
Meanwhile there came on a Tennessee thunder shower, lightning of
the closest and rain by the bucketful; and, driven before it, an
Indiana soldier made his appearance, a wiry little man of fifty or
more. He had been spending the day on the field, he told me. In one
hand he carried a battered and rusty cartridge-box, and out of his
pockets he produced and laid on the counter a collection of bullets.
His were relics of the right stamp,--found, not purchased,--and not
without a little shamefacedness I showed him my three minie-balls.
"Oh, you have got all Federal bullets," he said; and on my asking
how he could tell that, he placed a Confederate ball beside them, and
pointed out a difference in shape. He was a cheery, communicative
body, good-humored but not jocose, excellent company in such an
hour, though he had small fancy for the lightning, it seemed to me.
Perhaps he had been under fire so often as to have lost all relish
for excitement of that kind. He was not at the battle of Chickamauga,
he said, but at Vicksburg; and he gave me a vivid description of his
work in the trenches, as well as of the surrender, and the happiness
of the half-starved defenders of the city, who were at once fed by
their captors.
All his talk showed a lively sense of the horrors of war. He had
seen enough of fighting, he confessed; but he couldn't keep away
from a battlefield, if he came anywhere near one. He had been to the
national cemetery in Chattanooga, and agreed with me that it was a
beautiful place; but he had heard that Southern soldiers were lying
in unmarked graves just outside the wall (a piece of misinformation,
I have no doubt), and he didn't think it right or decent for the
government to discriminate in that way. The Confederates were just as
sincere as the Union men; and anyhow, vengeance ought not to follow a
man after he was dead. Evidently he had fought against an army and a
cause, not against individuals.
When the rain was over, or substantially so, I proposed to improve
an hour of coolness and freshness by paying another visit to
headquarters; but my Indiana veteran was not to be enticed out of
shelter. It was still rather wet, he thought. "I'm pretty careful
of my body," he added, by way of settling the matter. It had been
through so much, I suppose, that he esteemed it precious.
I set out alone, therefore, and this time went into the Dyer house,
after drinking from a covered spring across the way. But there was
little to see inside, and the three or four officers and clerks
were occupied with maps and charts,--courteous, no doubt, but with
official and counting-house courtesy; men of whom you could well
enough ask a definite question, but with whom it would be impossible
to drift into random talk. There was far better company outside. Even
while I stood in the back door, on my way thither, there suddenly
flashed upon me from a treetop by the fence a splendid Baltimore
oriole. He fairly "gave me a start," and I broke out to the young
fellow beside me, "Why, there's a Baltimore oriole!" The exclamation
was thrown away, but I did not mind.
It was the birds' own hour,--late afternoon, with sunshine after
rain. The orchard and shade-trees were alive with wings, and the air
was loud. How brilliant a company it was a list of names will show:
a mocking-bird, a thrasher, several catbirds, a pair of bluebirds,
a pair of orchard orioles, a summer tanager, a wood pewee, and a
flicker, with goldfinches and indigo-birds, and behind the orchard a
Bachman finch. For bright colors and fine voices that was a chorus
hard to beat. As for the Baltimore oriole, the brightest bird of the
lot, and the only one of his race that I found in all that country,
he looked most uncommonly at home--to me--in the John Dyer trees. I
was never gladder to see him.
A strange fate this that had befallen these Georgia farms, owned
once by Dyer, Snodgrass, Kelly, Brotherton, and the rest: the
plainest and most ordinary of country houses, in which lived the
plainest of country people, with no dream of fame, or of much else,
perhaps, beyond the day's work and the day's ration. Then comes
Bragg retreating before Rosecrans, who is manoeuvring him out of
Tennessee. Here the Confederate leader turns upon his pursuers. Here
he--or rather, one of his subordinates--wins a great victory, which
nevertheless, as a Southern historian says, "sealed the fate of the
Southern Confederacy." Now the farmers are gone, but their names
remain; and as long as the national government endures, pilgrims from
far and near will come to walk over the historic acres. "This is the
Dyer house," they will say, "and this is the Kelly house, and this
is the Snodgrass house." So Fame catches up a chance favorite, and
consigns the rest to oblivion.
My first visit to Chickamauga left so pleasant a taste that only two
days afterward I repeated it. In particular I remembered my midday
rest among the treetops, and my glimpse of the blue-winged warbler.
It would be worth a day of my vacation to idle away another noon so
agreeably, and hear again that ridiculous makeshift of a bird-song.
Field ornithology has this for one of its distinguishing advantages,
that every excursion leaves something for another to verify or finish.
This time I went straight to Snodgrass Hill through the woods, and
was barely on the steps of the tower before I heard the blue-wing.
As well as I could judge, the voice came from the same oak that the
bird had occupied two days before. I was in luck, I thought; but the
miserly fellow vouchsafed not another note, and I could not spend
the forenoon hours in waiting for him. Two red-cockaded woodpeckers
were playing among the trees, where, like the blue-wing and the
yellow-throats, they were doubtless established in summer quarters.
"Sap-suckers," one of the workmen called them. They were common, he
said, but likely enough he failed to discriminate between them and
their two black-and-white relatives. Red-headed woodpeckers were
_not_ common here (I had seen a single bird, displaying its colors
from a lofty dead pine), but were abundant and very destructive,
so my informant declared, on Lookout Mountain. Turkeys were still
numerous on the mountain, and only the Sunday before one had been
seen within the park limits.
The Bachman finch was again in tune at his brush-heap near the well,
and between the music and a shady seat I was in no haste to go
further. Finally, I experimented to see how near the fellow would let
me approach, taking time enough not to startle him in the process.
It was wonderful how he held his ground. The "Rock of Chickamauga"
himself could not have been more obstinate. I had almost to tread on
him before he would fly. He was a great singer, a genius, and a poet,
"with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown,"
and withal a lover of the sun,--a bird never to be forgotten. I wish
I knew how to praise him.
To-day, as on my previous visit, I remarked a surprising scarcity of
migrants. With the exception of black-poll warblers, I am not certain
that I saw any, though I went nowhere else without finding them in
good variety. Had my imagination been equal to such a stretch, I
might have suspected that Northern birds did not feel at home on the
scene of a great Southern victory. Here and there a nuthatch called,
and again I seemed to perceive a decided strangeness in the voice.
From the tip of a fruit-tree in the Kelly yard a thrasher or a mocker
was singing like one possessed. It was impossible to be sure which it
was, and the uncertainty pleased me so much, as a testimony to the
thrasher's musical powers, that I would not go round the house in the
sun to get a nearer observation. Instead, I went down to look at the
monuments of the regulars, with their "men cut in a rock." Thence I
returned to Snodgrass Hill for my noonday rest, stopping once more
at the well, of course, and reading again some of the placards, the
number of which just here bore impressive witness to the fierceness
of the battle at this point. One inscription I took pains to copy:--
[Pointing hand sign] GEN. J. B. HOOD WAS WOUNDED 11.10 A. M.
20 SEPT. '63 IN EDGE OF TIMBER ON COVE ROAD 1/2 MILE EAST OF
SOUTH, LOOSING HIS LEG.
It was exactly eleven o'clock as I went up the hill toward the
tower, and the workmen were already taking down their dinner-pails.
Standard time, so called, is an unquestioned convenience, but the
stomach of a day-laborer has little respect for convention, and is
not to be appeased by a setting back of the clock. For my own part,
I was not hungry,--in that respect, as in some others, I might have
envied the day-laborers,--but as men of a certain amusing sort are
said to turn up their trousers in New York when it rains in London,
so I felt it patriotic to nibble at my luncheon as best I could, now
that the clocks were striking twelve in Boston.
The hour (but it was two hours) calls for little description. The
breeze was delicious, and the hazy landscape beautiful. The cow-bells
and the locusts filled the air with music, the birds kept me company,
and for half an hour or more I had human society that was even more
agreeable. When the workmen had eaten their dinner at the foot of the
tower, four of them climbed the stairs, and my field-glass proved so
pleasing a novelty that they stayed till their time was up, to the
very last minute. One after another took the glass, and no sooner
had it gone the rounds once than it started again; for meanwhile
every man had thought of something else that he wanted to look at.
They were above concealing their delight, or affecting any previous
acquaintance with such a toy, and probably I never before gave so
much pleasure by so easy a means. I believe I was as happy as if the
blue-wing had sung a full hour. They were rough-looking men, perhaps,
at least they were coarsely dressed, but none of them spoke a rude
word; and when the last moment came, one of them, in the simplest
and gentlest manner, asked me to accept three relics (bullets) which
he had picked up in the last day or two on the hill. It was no great
thing, to be sure, but it was better: it was one of those little
acts which, from their perfect and unexpected grace, can never be
forgotten.
A jaunt through the woods past the Kelly house, after luncheon,
brought me to a superfine, spick-and-span new road,--like the new
government "boulevard" on Missionary Ridge, of which it may be a
continuation,--following which I came to the Brotherton house,
another war-time landmark, weather-beaten and fast going to ruin.
In the woods--cleared of underbrush, and with little herbage--were
scattered ground flowers: houstonia, yellow and violet oxalis, phlox,
cranesbill, bird-foot violets, rue anemones, and spring beauties. I
remarked especially a bit of bright gromwell, such as I had found
first at Orchard Knob, and a single tuft of white American cowslip
(_Dodecatheon_), the only specimen I had ever seen growing wild. The
flower that pleased me most, however, was the blood-red catchfly,
which I had seen first on Missionary Ridge. Nothing could have been
more appropriate here on the bloody field of Chickamauga. Appealing
to fancy instead of to fact, it nevertheless spoke of the battle
almost as plainly as the hundreds of decapitated trees, here one and
there one, which even the most careless observer could not fail to
notice.
From the Brotherton house to the post-office was a sunny stretch, but
under the protection of my umbrella I compassed it; and then, passing
the Widow Glenn's (Rosecrans's headquarters), on the road to Crawfish
Springs, I came to a diminutive body of water,--a sink-hole,--which
I knew at once could be nothing but Bloody Pond. At the time of the
fight it contained the only water to be had for a long distance.
It was fiercely contended for, therefore, and men and horses drank
from it greedily, while other men and horses lay dead in it, having
dropped while drinking. Now a fence runs through it, leaving an outer
segment of it open to the road for the convenience of passing teams;
and when I came in sight of the spot, two boys were fishing round
the further edge. Not far beyond was an unfinished granite tower, on
which no one was at work, though a derrick still protruded from the
top. It offered the best of shade,--the shadow of a great rock,--in
the comfort of which I sat awhile, thinking of the past, and watching
the peaceful labors of two or three men who were cultivating a
broad ploughed field directly before me, crossing and recrossing
it in the sun. Then I took the road again; but by this time I had
relinquished all thought of walking to Crawfish Springs, and so did
nothing but idle along. Once, I remember, I turned aside to explore
a lane running up to a hillside cattle pasture, stopping by the way
to admire the activities--and they _were_ activities--of a set of
big scavenger beetles. Next, I tried for half a mile a fine new road
leading across the park to the left, with thick, uncleared woods on
one side; and then I went back to Bloody Pond.