Diary of Orrin Brown, Chattanooga, Tennessee
Saturday–Oct. 22nd
We got up this morning shivering and no wood to make a fire of, we managed to pick up enough to cook breakfast and dinner by going about a mile after it. I went down to the river and looked around and then down town came back and we got dinner and I have wrote a letter home. There is thieveing going on here in Camp every night more or less in the line of Coats Blankets Knapsecks etc. etc. Those Rebbel graves that I spoke of yesterday are holes dug in the ground by the rebs to protect them from our shell so I heard last night.
There is not many horses used here for teaming and the most of them are verry poor and the majority of the mules are as poor as crows. The new troops are coming in every day by the hundreds from all of the western states, we are scrimped on rations pretty close, last night each man drew 4 hardtack about 3 ozs. of salt poark one table spoon full of sugar 2/3 spoonfull of tea and less than a teacup full of beans and about an oz of soap for one days rations. I did not eat any breakfast but the boys bought 1 dos russ for 50 cts so we made out tolerably well.
Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park spans numerous sites over a 150-mile front that saw blood shed in 1863 and 1864. Lookout Mountain towers over Chattanooga from the southwest high above the Tennessee River, while Missionary Ridge’s Crest Road commanded the eastern side of the city. Chickamauga, 26 miles south of the city, became Confederate Gen. Bragg’s wedge between pursuing Federal troops and their supply lines to the North. The hunters became the hunted became the hunters with the ebb and flow of the War. It could not last, however, as Washington threw General Joseph Hooker into the fray from Virginia; Gen. William T. Sherman from Mississippi; and finally Gen. U.S. Grant in command of all Union forces in the “West”. The glow of victory turned swiftly to “the death-knell of the Confederacy”.
.
.
.
STrib
The Economist