Prodigious bullfrogs, big enough to have been growing ever since the
war, lay here and there upon the water; now calling in the lustiest
bass, now falling silent again after one comical expiring gulp. It
was getting toward the cool of the afternoon. Already the birds felt
it. A wood thrush's voice rang out at intervals from somewhere beyond
the ploughed land, and a field sparrow chanted nearer by. At the same
time my eye was upon a pair of kingbirds,--wayfarers hereabout, to
judge from their behavior; a crested flycatcher stood guard at the
top of a lofty dead tree, and a rough-winged swallow alighted on
the margin of the pool, and began bathing with great enjoyment. It
made me comfortable to look at him. By and by two young fellows with
fishing-poles came down the railroad.
"Why is this called Bloody Pond?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Yes."
"Why, there were a lot of soldiers killed here in the war, and the
pond got bloody."
The granite tower in the shadow of which I had rested awhile ago was
General Wilder's monument, they said. His headquarters were there.
Then they passed on down the track out of sight, and all was silent
once more, till a chickadee gave out his sweet and quiet song just
behind me, and a second swallow dropped upon the water's edge. The
pond was of the smallest and meanest,--muddy shore, muddy bottom, and
muddy water; but men fought and died for it in those awful September
days of heat and dust and thirst. There was no better place on the
field, perhaps, in which to realize the horrors of the battle, and I
was glad to have the chickadee's voice the last sound in my ears as I
turned away.
ORCHARD KNOB AND THE NATIONAL CEMETERY.
The street cars that run through the open valley country from
Chattanooga to Missionary Ridge, pass between two places of peculiar
interest to Northern visitors,--Orchard Knob on the left, and the
national cemetery on the right. Of these, the Knob remains in all
the desolation of war-time; unfenced, and without so much as a
tablet to inform the stranger where he is and what was done here; a
low, round-topped hill, dry, stony, thin-soiled, with out-cropping
ledges and a sprinkling of stunted cedars and pines. Some remains of
rifle-pits are its only monument, unless we reckon as such a cedar
rather larger than its fellows, which must have been of some size
thirty years ago, and now bears the marks of abundant hard usage.
The hill was taken by the Federal troops on the 23d of November,
1863, by way of "overture to the battle of Chattanooga," Grant,
Thomas, Hooker, Granger, Howard, and others overlooking the
engagement from the ramparts of Fort Wood. The next day, as all
the world knows, Hooker's men carried Lookout Mountain, while the
multitude below, hearing the commotion, wondered what could be going
on above them, till suddenly the clouds lifted, and behold, the
Confederates were in full flight. Then, says an eye-witness, there
"went up a mighty cheer from the thirty thousand in the valley,
that was heard above the battle by their comrades on the mountain."
On the day following, for events followed each other fast in that
spectacular campaign, Grant and Thomas had established themselves on
Orchard Knob, and late in the afternoon the Union army, exceeding its
orders, stormed Missionary Ridge, put the army of Bragg to sudden
rout, and completed one of the really decisive victories of the war.
For a man who wishes to feel the memory of that stirring time there
is no better place than Orchard Knob, where Grant stood and anxiously
watched the course of the battle, a battle of which he declared that
it was won "under the most trying circumstances presented during
the war." For my own part, I can see the man himself as I read the
words of one who was there with him. The stormers of Missionary
Ridge, as I have said, after making the demonstration they had been
ordered to make, kept on up the slope, thinking "the time had come
to finish the battle of Chickamauga." "As soon as this movement was
seen from Orchard Knob," writes General Fullerton, "Grant turned
quickly to Thomas, who stood by his side, and I heard him say
angrily, 'Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?' Thomas replied
in his usual slow, quiet manner, 'I don't know; I did not.' Then,
addressing General Gordon Granger, he said, 'Did you order them up,
Granger?' 'No,' said Granger; 'they started up without orders. When
those fellows get started all hell can't stop them.'" In the heat of
battle a soldier may be pardoned, I suppose, if his speech smells
of sulphur; and after the event an army is hardly to be censured
for beating the enemy a day ahead of time. I speak as a civilian.
Military men, no doubt, find insubordination, even on the right side,
a less pardonable offense; a fact which may explain why General
Grant, in his history of the battle, written many years afterward,
makes no mention of this its most dramatic incident, so that the
reader of his narrative would never divine but that everything had
been done according to the plans and orders of the general in command.
Orders or no orders, the fight was won. That was more than thirty
years ago. It was now a pleasant May afternoon, the afternoon of
May-day itself. The date, indeed, was the immediate occasion of
my presence. I had started from Chattanooga with the intention of
going once more to Missionary Ridge, which just now offered peculiar
attractions to a stranger of ornithological proclivities. But the car
was full of laughing, smartly dressed colored people; they were bound
for the same place, it appeared, on their annual picnic; and, being
in a quiet mood, I took the hint and dropped out by the way.
There was much to feel but little to see at Orchard Knob; and yet
I recall two plants that I found there for the first time; a low
gromwell (_Lithospermum canescens_), with clustered bright yellow
flowers, and an odd and homely greenish milkweed (_Asclepias
obovata_). The yarrow-leaved ragwort was there also, and the tall
blue baptisia; but as well as I can recollect, not one dainty and
modest nosegay-blossom; not even the houstonia, which seemed to grow
everywhere, though after a strangely sparse and depauperate fashion.
As I said to begin with, the Knob is a desolate place. It made me
think of the Scriptural phrase about "the besom of destruction." I
can imagine that mourners of the "Lost Cause," if such there still
be, might see upon it the signs of a place accursed.
Far otherwise is it with the national cemetery. That is a spot
of which the nation takes care. Here are shaven lawns, which,
nevertheless, you are permitted to walk over; and shrubbery and
trees, both in grateful profusion, but not planted so thickly as to
make the inclosure either a wood or a garden; and where the ledge
crops out, it is pleasingly and naturally draped with vines of the
Virginia creeper. One thing I noticed upon the instant; there were
no English sparrows inside the wall. The city is overrun with them
beyond anything I have seen elsewhere; within two hundred feet of
the cemetery gate, as I passed out, there were at least two hundred
sparrows; but inside, on three visits, I saw not one! How this
exemption had been brought about, I did not learn; but it makes of
the cemetery a sort of heavenly place. I felt the silence as the
sweetest of music (it was a Sunday afternoon), and thought instantly
of Comus and his "prisoned soul" lapped in Elysium. If I knew whom to
thank, I would name him.
A mocking-bird, aloft upon the topmost twig of a tall willow near the
entrance, was pouring forth a characteristic medley, in the midst
of which he suddenly called _wick-a-wick_, _wick-a-wick_, in the
flicker's very happiest style. "So flickers must now and then come to
Chattanooga," I said to myself, for up to that time I had seen none.
It was a pleasure to hear this great songster of the South singing
above these thousands of Northern graves. It seemed _right_; for time
and the event will prove, if, indeed, they have not proved already,
that the South, even more than the North, has reason to be glad of
the victory which these deaths went far to win.
A tablet on one of the cannons which stand upright on the highest
knoll informs visitors that the cemetery was "established" in 1863.
The number of burials is given as 12,876, of which nearly five
thousand are of bodies unidentified. A great proportion of the
stones bear nothing but a number. On others is a name, or part of a
name, with the name of the State underneath. One I noticed that was
inscribed:--
JOHN
N. Y.
An attendant of whom I inquired if any New England men were
here, answered that there were a few members of the Thirty-third
Massachusetts. I hope the New Englanders resident in Chattanooga do
not forget them on Memorial Day.
Twice in the year, at least, the place has many Northern visitors.
They arrive on wings, mostly by night, and such of them as came under
my eye acted as if they appreciated the quiet of the inclosure,
a quiet which their own presence made but the more appreciable.
Scattered over the lawns were silent groups of white-throated
sparrows,--on their way to New Hampshire, perhaps, or it might be to
upper Michigan; and not far from the entrance, and almost directly
under the mocking-bird, were two or three white-crowned sparrows,
the only ones found in Tennessee. On an earlier visit (April 29)
I saw here my only Tennessee robins--five birds; and most welcome
they were. Months afterward, a resident of Missionary Ridge wrote
to me that a pair had nested in the cemetery that year, though to
his great regret he did not know of it till too late. He had never
seen a robin's nest, he added, and was acquainted with the bird only
as a migrant. Such are some of the deprivations of life in eastern
Tennessee. May and June without robins or song sparrows!
On the last of my three visits, a small flock of black-poll warblers
were in the trees, and two of them gave me a pleasant little
surprise by dropping to the ground, and feeding for a long time
upon the lawn. That was something new for black-polls, so far as my
observation had gone, and an encouraging thing to look at: another
sign, where all signs are welcome, that the life of birds is less
strictly instinctive--less a matter of inherited habit, and more
a matter of personal intelligence--than has commonly been assumed.
In general, no doubt, like human beings, they do what their fathers
did, what they themselves have done heretofore. So much is to be
expected, since their faculties and desires remain the same, and they
have the same world to live in; but when exceptional circumstances
arise, their conduct becomes exceptional. In other words, they do
as a few of the quicker-witted among men do--suit their conduct to
altered conditions. A month ago I should have said, after years of
acquaintance, that no birds could be more strictly arboreal than
golden-crowned kinglets. But recently, I happened upon a little group
of them that for a week or more fed persistently on the ground in
a certain piece of wood. Then and there, for some reason, food was
plentiful on the snow and among the dead leaves; and the kinglets had
no scruples about following where duty called them.
At the same time a friend of mine, a young farmer, was at his
winter's work in the woods; and being alone, and a lover of birds,
he had taken a fancy to experiment with a few chickadees, to see
how tame a little encouragement would make them. A flock of five
came about him day after day, at luncheon-time, and by dint of
sitting motionless he soon had two of them on terms of something like
intimacy; so that they would alight on his hand and help themselves
to a feast. He was not long in discovering, and reporting to me, that
they carried much of the food to the trees round about, and packed it
into crannies of the bark.
"Are you sure of that?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," he answered; "I saw them do it, and then I went to the
trees and found the crumbs."
Did any one ever suspect the chickadee of such providence? If so, I
never heard of it; and it is more likely, I think, that the birds had
never before done anything of the sort; but now, finding suddenly a
supply far in excess of the demand (one day they ate and carried away
half a doughnut), they had sense enough to improve the opportunity.
What they had done, or had not done, in times past, was nothing to
the point, since they were creatures not of memory alone, but of
intelligence and a measure of reason.
Beside the unmistakable migrants,--white-throats, white-crowns,
and black-polls,--there were numbers of more southern birds in the
national cemetery. Among them I noticed a yellow-billed cuckoo, crow
blackbirds, orchard orioles, summer tanagers, catbirds, a thrasher,
a bluebird, wood pewees, chippers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, yellow
warblers, wood thrushes, and chats. All these looked sufficiently at
home except the chats; and it helps to mark the exceeding abundance
of these last in the Chattanooga region that they should show
themselves without reserve in a spot so frequented and so wanting in
close cover. One of the orioles sang in the manner of a fox sparrow,
while one that sang daily under my window, on Cameron Hill, never
once suggested that bird, but often the purple finch. The two facts
offer a good idea of this fine songster's quality and versatility.
The organ tones of the yellow-throated vireo and the minor whistle of
the wood pewee were sweetly in harmony with the spirit of the place,
a spirit hard fully and exactly to express, a mingling of regret
and exultation. What mattered it that all these men had perished,
as it seemed, before their time?--that so many of them were lying
in nameless graves? We shall all die; few of us so worthily; and
when we are gone, of what use will be a name upon a stone, a name
which, after a few years at the most, no passer-by will be concerned
to read? Happy is he who dies to some purpose. It would have been
good, I thought, to see over the cemetery gate the brave old Latin
sentence, _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_.
The human visitors, of whom one day there might have been a hundred,
were largely people of color. All were quiet and orderly, in couples
and family groups. Most of them, I remarked, went to look at the
only striking monument in the grounds, a locomotive and tender (the
"General") on a pedestal of marble--"Ohio's Tribute to the Andrews
Raiders, 1862." On three faces of the pedestal are lists of the
"exchanged," the "executed," and the "escaped."
One thing, one only, grated upon my feelings. In a corner of
the inclosure is the Superintendent's house, with a stable and
out-buildings; and at the gate the visitor is suddenly struck in
the face with this notice in flaring capitals: KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS
YOU! That is brutality beyond excuse. But perhaps it answers its
purpose. For my own part, I got out of the neighborhood as quickly as
possible. I liked better the society of the graves; at such a price a
dead soldier was better than a live superintendent; and to take the
unpleasant taste out of my mouth I stopped to read again a stanza on
one of the metal tablets set at intervals along the driveway:--
"On Fame's eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead."
Far be the day when these Southern fields of Northern graves shall
fall into forgetfulness and neglect.
AN AFTERNOON BY THE RIVER.
To an idler desirous of seeing wild life on easy terms Chattanooga
offers this advantage, that electric cars take him quickly out of the
city in different directions, and drop him in the woods. In this way,
on an afternoon too sultry for extended travel on foot, I visited a
wooded hillside on the further bank of the Tennessee, a few miles
above the town.
The car was still turning street corner after street corner, making
its zigzag course toward the bridge, when I noticed a rustic old
gentleman at my side looking intently at the floor. Apparently he
suspected something amiss. He was unused to the ways of electricity,
I thought,--a verdancy by no means inexcusable. But as he leaned
farther forward, and looked and listened with more and more
absorption, the matter--not his ignorance, but his simple-hearted
betrayal of it--began to seem amusing. For myself, to be sure, I knew
nothing about electricity, but I had wit enough to sit still and
let the car run; a degree of sophistication which passes pretty well
as a substitute for wisdom in a world where men are distinguished
from children not so much by more knowledge as by less curiosity.
In the present instance, however, as the event proved, the dunce's
cap belonged on the other head. My countryman's stare was less
verdant than his next neighbor's smile; for in a few minutes the
conductor was taking up a trap door at our feet, to get at the works,
some part of which had fallen out of gear, though they were still
running. Twice the car was stopped for a better examination into the
difficulty, and at last a new wedge, or something else, was inserted,
and we proceeded on our way, while the motorman who had done the job
busied himself with removing from his coat, as best he could, the oil
with which it had become besmeared in the course of the operation.
It was rather hard, he thought, to have to spoil his clothes in
repair-shop work of that kind, especially as he was paid nothing for
it, and had to find himself. As for my rustic-looking seatmate, he
was an old hand at the business, it appeared, and his practiced ear
had detected a jar in the machinery.
We left the car in company, he and I, at the end of the route,
and pretty soon it transpired that he was an old Union soldier,
of Massachusetts parentage, but born in Canada and a member of a
Michigan regiment. Just how these autobiographical details came to
be mentioned I fail now to remember, but in that country, where so
much history had been made, it was hard to keep the past out of
one's conversation. He had been in Sheridan's force when it stormed
Missionary Ridge. As they went up the heights, he said, they were
between two fires; as much in danger from Federal bullets as from
Confederate; "but Sheridan kept right on." An old woman who lived on
the Ridge told him that she asked General Bragg if the Yankees would
take the hill. "Take the hill!" said Bragg; "they could as well fly."
Just then she saw the blue-coats coming, and pointed them out to the
General. He looked at them, put spurs to his horse, "and," added the
woman, "I ain't seen him since." All of which, for aught I know, may
be true.
The talkative veteran was now on his way to find an old friend of his
who lived somewhere around here, he didn't know just where; and as
my course lay in the same general direction we went across lots and
up the hill together, he rehearsing the past, and I gladly putting
myself to school. In my time history was studied from text-books;
but the lecture system is better. By and by we approached a solitary
cabin, on the dilapidated piazza of which sat the very man for whom
my companion was looking. "Very sick to-day," he said, in response
to a greeting. His appearance harmonized with his words,--and with
the piazza; and his manners were pitched on the same key; so that
it was in a downright surly tone that he pointed out a gate through
which I could make an exit toward the woods on the other side of
the house. I had asked the way, and was glad to take it. Not that
I was greatly offended. A sick man on one of his bad days has some
excuse for a little impatience; a far better excuse than I should
have for alluding to the matter at this late date, if I did not
improve the occasion to add that this was the only bit of anything
like incivility that I have ever received at the South, where I have
certainly not been slow to ask questions of all sorts of people.
A little jaunt along a foot-path brought me unexpectedly to a second
cabin, uninhabited. It was built of boards, not logs, with the
usual outside chimney at one end, a broad veranda, a door, and no
window; a house to fill a social economist with admiration at the
low terms to which civilized life can be reduced. Thoreau himself
was outdone, though the veranda, it must be confessed, seemed a
dispensable bit of fashionable conformity, with forest trees on all
sides crowding the roof. Half the floor had fallen away; yet the
house could not have been long unoccupied, for at one end the wall
was hung with newspapers, among which was a Boston "weekly" less than
two years old. From it looked the portrait of a New England college
president, and at the head of the page stood a list of "eminent
contributors." I ran the names over, but somehow, in these wild and
natural surroundings, they did not seem so very impressive. I think
it has been said before, perhaps by Thoreau, that most of what we
call literature wears an artificial and unimportant look when taken
out-of-doors.
Near this cabin I struck a road ("a sort of road," according to
my notebook) through the woods, following which I shortly came to
a grave-yard, or rather to a bunch of graves, for there was no
inclosure, nor even a clearing. One grave--or it may have been a
tiny family lot--was surrounded by a curb of stone. The others, with
a single exception, were marked only by low mounds of gravel. The
one exception was a grave with a head-board,--the grave of "Little
Theodosia," a year and some months old. "Theodosia!"--even into a
windowless cabin a baby brings romance. Under the name and the two
dates was this legend: "She is happy." Of ten inscriptions on marble
monuments nine will be found less simply appropriate.
By a circuitous course the wood road brought me to a larger cabin, in
a larger clearing. Here a pleasant-spoken, neighborly woman, with a
child in her arms, called off her dog, and pointed out a path beyond
a pair of bars. That path, she said, would carry me to the river,--to
the water's edge. And so it did, down a pleasant wooded hillside,
which an unwonted profusion of bushes and ferns made exceptionally
attractive. At the end of the path a lordly elm and a lordlier
buttonwood, both of them loaded with lusty vines (besides clusters of
mistletoe, I believe), gave me shelter from the sun while I sat and
gazed at the strong eager current of the Tennessee hurrying onward
without a ripple. As my foot touched the beach a duck--I could not
tell of what kind--sprang out of the water and went dashing off.
She had learned her lesson. In the duck's primer one of the first
questions is: "What is a man?" and the answer follows: "Man is a
gun-bearing animal." In the treetops a golden warbler and a redstart
were singing. Then I heard a puffing of steam, and by and by a tug
came round a turn, pushing laboriously up stream a loaded barge. It
was the Ocoee of Chattanooga, and the two or three mariners on board
seemed to find the sight of a stranger in that unlooked-for place a
welcome break in the monotony of their inland voyage.
On the bushy, ferny slope, as I returned, two Kentucky warblers were
singing in opposite directions. So I called them, at all events. But
they were too far away to be gone after, as my mood then was, and
soon I began to wonder whether I might not be mistaken. Possibly they
were Carolina wrens, whose _cherry_ is not altogether unlike the
Kentucky's _klurwee_. The question will perhaps seem unreasonable to
readers long familiar with the two birds; but let them put themselves
in a stranger's place, remembering that this was only his third or
fourth hearing of the Kentucky's music. As the doubt grew on me (and
nothing grows faster than doubt) I sat down and listened. Yes, they
were Kentuckies; but anon the uncertainty came back, and I kept my
seat. Then a sound of humming-bird wings interrupted my cogitations,
and in another moment the bird was before me, sipping at a scarlet
catchfly,--battlefield pink. I caught the flash of his throat. It
was as red as the flower--beyond which there is nothing to be said.
Then he vanished (rather than went away), as humming-birds do; but in
ten minutes he was there again. I was glad to see him. Birds of his
kind were rare about Chattanooga, though afterwards, in the forests
of Walden's Ridge, they became as common as I ever saw them anywhere.
The two invisible Kentuckies wore out my patience, but as I came to
the bars another sang near me. Him, by good luck, I saw in the act,
and for the time, at least, my doubts were quieted.