Part 5

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:--

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.

The place was now deserted, and I took a seat under a tree opposite. 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