XXXVIII

Bill Marmaduke took official leave of the 19th Alabama Infantry at Bridgeport, Alabama in the Summer of '62. The regiment had remained behind to guard the western approaches to Chattanooga while General Bragg took the Army of Tennessee on its invasion of Kentucky. Bill had been pretty tore up about the loss of so many friends at Shiloh. They all had. While encamped on a knobby hill overlooking downtown Bridgeport, Bill Marmaduke was visited by his old friend Frank Gurley. He looking for recruits for his company of mounted irregulars, who were attached to the 4th Alabama Cavalry, CSA. Looking for some open air from the rank confines of army camp life, he jumped at the opportunity.

They were called Gurley's Ghosts, and they operated throughout the mountains of Madison and Jackson county protecting the western approaches to rebel Chattanooga from Yankee occupied Huntsville. The vital Memphis & Charleston, it must not be remembered, ran from Huntsville to Chattanooga. The one hundred miles between the two cities became a no man's land which was never wholly occupied by either side throughout the war. Gurley's cavalry would ride down out of the mountains to raid Yankee foraging parties or the occasional train.

Frank Gurley had by that point had a bounty placed on him for his alleged murder of the Yankee General Robert McCook on the Winchester Road near New Market, Ala. during an ambush. General McCook was a member of the famous "Fighting McCook" family of Ohioan War Democrats. This concerned Frank none in the least, and for the next two years Bill Marmaduke fought with a wanted man.

For Bill Marmaduke, this experience in the mountains of the Nickajack would influence his future ascension into Reconstruction politics as a Republican war hero. It was here that he grew to become a folk sensation of the Nickajack while riding with the "outlaw" Frank Gurley. It was here, also, he would also fall in and out of love. For there was no soldier in this cruel war that love and death did not go hand in hand.