XXXII

They called him the "Wizard of the Saddle," and he has become part of the essential folklore of the Nickajack, for better or worse. Of poor Scotch-Irish descent, Nathan Bedford Forrest was only partially literate. He grew up in a hovel in the scratch of south Tennessee, a region of knobby hills and limestone glades known as the Highland Rim. Through cruel and tireless industry, he built up a prosperous slave market on Adams Avenue in Memphis and acquired nearly 3,300 acres in Mississippi. When war came, he placed an advertisement in the Memphis papers in order to recruit his own cavalry unit. It read:

Come on boys, if you want a heap of fun and kill some Yankees!

And kill them in heaps he did! By war's end he had personally killed thirty of them for the cost of twenty-nine horses shot out from under him, a net gain of one.

Once, to cover General Beauregard's retreat from The Battle of Shiloh, Forrest had positioned his cavalry on a hill to block General Sherman's Union division that was in hot pursuit. To Sherman's amazement, he witnessed Nathan Bedford Forrest personally charge downhill into the Union lines, blazing away with his pistols. Yankee soldiers rushed after his horse with bayonets screaming "Kill that sunnuvabitch rebel! Kill him!"

Finding himself in a tight spot, Forrest reached down and slung a wounded Yankee onto the back of his saddle and rode back to rebel lines using the man as a human shield. Sherman was dumbstruck by what he saw.

It would be the first of many times that General Sherman's plans would be stymied by the "Wizard of the Saddle."