From the clearings between the thick wooded slopes they gained a sublime vantage of the land which lay below them. The sun was about three palms westing over the Walden's Ridge. It began to burn patches of fog which shrouded the Sequatchie River below. Gurley and Bill Marmaduke removed their eyepieces and surveyed up and down the valley, which opened like a wide gash from the Crab Orchard Mountains of the northeast and down towards the Tennessee River to the southwest, near Bridgeport. There the Tennessee River picks up the floor of this great rift valley and flows thence southwest towards Gunter's Landing.
The Sequatchie River glittered between the gossamers of fog. Upon that road they beheld a great caterpillar of wagons curving into the valley from the south around the Jasper Bend. It stretched across the length of that great divide before turning east over a high pass through the Walden's Ridge. It was miles long from one horizon to the next, the canvas covers of the wagons like the metamerism of some great insect, and they were pulled by mules that looked like ants. This great stream of vehicles and asses and all their precious burden was coming to be called the Cracker Line, a mere thread of artery feeding 50,000 Yankees trapped just beyond the Great Tennessee Gorge. Supplies were never in want. Only the means to get it where it was needed was lacking, and they were desperately needed in Chattanooga.
It is October 1863. The Yankees under General Rosencrans were defeated at the great battle of Chickamauga, Georgia by the Army of Tennessee and were now bottled up in Chattanooga. From his observation post on Bell Hill, the anxious general could survey the campfires of rebel soldiers blinking along the wrap-around crest of Missionary Ridge and then up the brooding shoulder of Lookout Mountain. The numbers were about even, but after a solid whipping at Chickamauga, General Rosencrans was in no mood to test rebel resolve, not yet anyway. The problem was that he was running out of time. Mr. Lincoln was aggrieved at this setback, and War Secretary Stanton was at once apoplectic and downcast. The General's primary problem was one of supply. Napoleon once said that an army marches on its stomach, and as of yet, there was but one supply line that stood to snake around the Great Tennessee Gorge and across the lower Sequatchie Valley. Reinforcements were on the way, he was wired by Secretary Stanton. Rosencrans was certain reinforcements also a meant a replacement for himself... perhaps Sherman, or even Grant.
In the event, it was both of them. Already great forces were on the move to rescue the Yankee army besieged in Chattanooga, a bowl as it were with the high ground all around teeming with rebel infantry under General Braxton Bragg. But that would take time. Meanwhile, General Rosencrans wrung his hands anxiously as but a thin, single road was all that stood to feed his army, which was already on half rations and bombarded daily by the rebel cannons. To interdict this lifeline, General Joseph Wheeler proposed a raid into the Nickajack to sever it across its length. It was agreed to by General Bragg, and Wheeler crossed the Tennessee River above the beleaguered city and crossed over the Walden's Ridge into the Sequatchie Valley.
And so with their optics Frank Gurley and Bill Marmaduke peered north up the valley where the boom of artillery suddenly echoed down between the two escarpments. That must have been General Wheeler, who had descended into the Valley from across the way and was pushing in the Yankee cavalry screen. They continued down the mountain and into the valley floor and north towards the rising crescendo of fire some five miles distant when they encountered a like-sized troop of Federal cavalry. They were about three hundreds off and moving at a canter along the brush line. Both parties halted, seeming to take notice of one another at the same time. Then they observed one another with binoculars. Gurley and the Yankee cavalry captain looked at one another and then they looked at each other's guidons. And when they were certain each were one another's enemy, they seemed to come to the like-mind.
And so Captain Gurley sounded the bugle to charge, and they rode thundering down in a shallow wedge whooping like savages, and the Yankee captain did likewise. And this terrible mass of flesh and gunpowder and steel came careening towards one another across a field of cut corn and rotten squash. And so these two mobs collided into one another, horses screeching and rearing up and men blazing away with their pistols at one another. Men fell with a thud, legs crushed by their steeds, or just bowling over dead, shot through the hearts. Sabers were drawn and men incised one another in blood.
It was impossible to tell how or when it would end. Smoke and dust embroiled this bedlam of mutual slaughter, and the men continued to circle around one another on their terrified horses, slashing with their sabers and firing their pistols at one another. By and by the whole bloody affair suddenly ended within the space of a few minutes. For the victor, they simply saw less and less of the enemy to kill as they either died, fell wounded, or were fleeing to the rear. As it were, Frank Gurley's company prevailed, and when they had come to the collective realization of this, they cheered however wearily, but it was carnage. There were wailing, wild-eyed horses jerking in the field, and moaning men and the certainly dead, and the probably dead. And Gurley took stock, and the sergeant reported fifteen dead and thirty-seven wounded. The enemy left thirty dead on the field and forty-two wounded.
Contact had been made with General Wheeler, and he forwarded carts for the wounded and summoned the remainder of Gurley's command. They were admitted into lines and both Gurley and Marmaduke reported to the General at his headquarters in the field. Bill Marmaduke was warmly acquainted with the General when the latter had commanded the 19th Alabama at Shiloh. The General explained that the Yankee cavalry guarding the wagon train had been driven off, and that his men were now looting the baggage and scavenging what they could take, and destroying the rest. It was no small enterprise. There were hundreds of wagons loaded with supplies stretching for miles. They all needed to burned before Yankee reinforcements arrive. Moreover, the mules could not be left to the Yankees either. They were too valuable in driving supplies over the Walden's Ridge and must be killed. Gurley was told to rest up his men for an hour before they were to proceed to kill all the animals they could find along the train. Then they were report back when they had encountered the enemy. When he had finished, the General gave a very serious salute to them and dismissed them both.
Gurley and Marmaduke were less appalled by the orders than they were disgusted by them. It was war, after all, and war is a beast that will feed itself. The men were fed lavishly from the loot of the train, and they began to examine the wagons that Wheeler's boys were looting. They were great covered wagons as big as balloons and stamped with the mark U.S.A. And they were at once astonished to find within them all the largess of a superior Yankee economy. There were whole loaves of sugar, and hoops of cheese, bushels of pasta and barrels of flour. One wagon held an entire printing press. Another was filled with musical instruments, and yet another with a steam laundry. There were even wagons carrying wagons. Most amazing of all was a vehicle which encased a precious cargo of ice. It was the excess of the Army of Xerxes itself, and for miles and miles this great train had stalled and broken down in the Sequatchie Valley, and left almost wholly unguarded.
When Gurley's men had finished gawking at the immensity of this bounty, they mounted up and prepared to carry out their notorious deed. All around them Wheeler's men were sliding into a drunken revelry. Discipline was breaking down. For soldiers who were half-starved and mostly deprived these days, the temptation was too great. Men were stuffing their pockets with what they could never get home. Some collected little piles of doubtful items to claim possession over, like furniture and dresses. Someone had found a whiskey cart, and the musical instruments were brought out and a man put on the dress jacket of a Yankee colonel and began to sing Yankee Doodle. Gurley's men set off.
As dusk was casting rosy fingers across the cool October sky, Gurley's men rode along the column with their sabers out. They approached each mule, four to a wagon, and lanced each in the throat with the tips of their blades. The mules screamed and sprayed blood on the wagons' canvas top. They sprayed blood on the men. When they came across a drove of cattle, they shot volleys at them with their carbines. The animals lowed and huddled and took every bullet and all gave up and fell. Shooting the horses was the worst, and they most often dismounted for this work. Taking each horse from its harness, they felt compelled to walk it some before putting a bullet up through the bottom of its head. Then they fired the wagons. By and by Gurley and his men left about a thousand yards of such carnage across the Valley floor.
By night the wagons were all lurid pyres. Their embers licked up into the firmament in great cyclones. as they burned all up and down the Valley. It was like a fault had opened up from Hyades itself across the landscape. All that sublime munificence of human industry reduced to ash. That didn't bother Gurley, or Marmaduke, or any of the other men. They had killed thirty men that day, and Lord knows who else yet. They rarely minded killing the mules either. What they did mind was killing of the horses. And slathered in the blood of all the beasts they had killed that day, every man thought to himself that this was not what he had signed up for.
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