making a feint sufficient to prevent any reënforcement of Bragg's right, moved around the base of Lookout Mountain and boldly attacked the heights. His men climbed up the steep and rough slope of the mountain in the rain. Clouds hung around the summit, and before they reached it they had disappeared in the mist. They kept on steadily, met and routed the enemy, and captured many prisoners and guns. This action is known as "Hooker's battle above the clouds." Benjamin F. Taylor, who was there as a correspondent, and whose son was one of the soldiers that went up the mountain, gives us a picturesque view of the novel scene: Tuesday morning broke cold and cheerless; it was a Scottish morning, and the air was dim with mist. I crossed the ground over which our boys marched so grandly on Monday afternoon, down into the valley of death and glory, where they had lain all night in line of battle. Brave hearts! They were ready and eager for a second day's journey; they had put their hands to the burning ploughshares and there was no thought of looking back. Beyond them lay the hostile camps, and Mission Ridge with its furrows of rifle-pits, and the enemy swarming like grey ants on the hills. You would have wondered at the formidable line of defence the boys had thrown up when they came to a halt. Rocks and logs had been piled in great windrows, filled in with earth. Our wicked little battery on Orchard Knob had ceased from troubling. Fort Wood was dumb, and not a voice from the Parrott perches anywhere. Stray ambulances were making their way back to town, and soldiers were digging graves on the hillsides. Interrogation points glittered in men's eyes as they turned an ear to the north-east and listened for Sherman. By and by a little fleet of soldier-laden pontoon boats came drifting down the river, and I hastened to meet them as they landed. The boys, in high feather, tumbled out, the inevitable coffee-kettle swinging from their bayonets. If a Federal soldier should be fellow-traveller with Bunyan's pilgrim, I almost believe that tin kettle of his would be heard tinkling after him to the very threshold of the Gate Beautiful. "Well, boys, what now?" "We've put down the pontoon, taken nineteen rebel pickets without firing a gun, run the blockade, drawn a shot, nobody hurt, Sherman's column is half over -bully for Sherman!" Those fellows had been thirty hours without rest, and were as fresh-hearted and dashing as so many thoroughbreds. They had wrought all night long with their lives in their hands, and not a trace of hardship or a breath of complaining. It was the second day of the drama-the touch on the enemy's left. The assault upon Lookout had begun. Glancing at the mighty crest crowned with a precipice, and now hung round about, three hundred feet down, with a curtain of clouds, my heart misgave me. It was a formidable business they had in hand to carry a mountain and scale a precipice near two thousand feet high, in the teeth of a battery and the face of two intrenched brigades. Hooker ordered Cruft to move directly south along the western base of the mountain, while he would remain in the valley close under Lookout and make a grand demonstration with small arms and artillery. The enemy, roused by all this sound and fury, were to come forth far up the western side of the mountain and descend to dispute Hooker's noisy passage. Cruft, when the roar behind him deepened, was to turn upon his heel, move obliquely up the mountain. upon the enemy's camps in their rear, wheel round the monster, and up to the white house, and take care of himself while he took Lookout. [The white house was a single farmhouse on the gentle slope of the mountain between the lower and the upper palisade.] Hooker thundered, and the enemy came down like the Assyrian, while Whittaker on the right and Colonel Ireland of Geary's command on the left, having moved out from Wauhatchie at five in the morning, pushed up to Chattanooga Creek, threw over it a bridge, made for Lookout Point, and there formed the right under the shelf of the mountain, the left resting on the creek. And then the play began. The enemy's camps were seized, his pickets surprised and captured, the strong works on the Point taken, and the Federal front moved on. Charging upon him, they leaped over his works as the wicked twin Roman leaped over his brother's mud wall, the 40th Ohio capturing his artillery and taking a Mississippi regiment, and gained the white house. And there they stood, twixt heaven and -Chattanooga. But above them, grand and sullen, lifted the precipice; and they were men, not eagles. The way was strewn with natural fortifications, and from behind rocks and trees they delivered their fire, contesting inch by inch the upward way. The sound of the battle rose and fell-now fiercely renewed, now dying away. And Hooker thundered on in the valley. That curtain of cloud was hung around the mountain by the God of battles. A captured colonel declared that had the day been clear their sharpshooters would have riddled our advance and left the command without a leader; but friend and foe were wrapped in a seamless mantle, and two hundred will include the entire Federal loss, while our brave mountaineers strewed Lookout with four hundred dead and captured a thousand prisoners. I was waiting in painful suspense to see what would come out of the roaring caldron in the valley, when something was born out of the mist and appeared on the shorn side of the mountain, below and to the west of the white house. It was the head of the Federal column. And there it held as if it were riveted to the rock, and the line of blue, a half mile long, swung slowly around from the left like the index of a mighty dial and swept up the brown face of the mountain. The bugles of the city of camps were sounding high noon when in two parallel columns the troops moved |