was
supplemented by what we could gather from the country. Corn was
abundant in the region to the south and southwest of Murfreesboro',
so to make good our deficiences in this respect, I employed a brigade
about once a week in the duty of collecting and bringing in forage,
sending out sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty wagons to haul
the grain which my scouts had previously located. In nearly every
one of these expeditions the enemy was encountered, and the wagons
were usually loaded while the skirmishers kept up a running fire,
Often there would occur a respectable brush, with the loss on each
side of a number of killed and wounded. The officer in direct
command always reported to me personally whatever had happened during
the time he was out--the result of his reconnoissance, so to speak,
for that war the real nature of these excursions--and on one occasion
the colonel in command, Colonel Conrad, of the Fifteenth Missouri,
informed me that he got through without much difficulty; in fact,
that everything had gone all right and been eminently satisfactory,
except that in returning he had been mortified greatly by the conduct
of the two females belonging to the detachment and division train at
my headquarters. These women, he said, had given much annoyance by
getting drunk, and to some extent demoralizing his men. To say that
I was astonished at his statement would be a mild way of putting it,
and had I not known him to be a most upright man and of sound sense,
I should have doubted not only his veracity, but his sanity.
Inquiring who they were and for further details, I was informed that
there certainly were in the command two females, that in some
mysterious manner had attached themselves to the service as soldiers;
that one, an East Tennessee woman, was a teamster in the division
wagon-train and the other a private soldier in a cavalry company
temporarily attached to my headquarters for escort duty. While out
on the foraging expedition these Amazons had secured a supply of
"apple-jack" by some means, got very drunk, and on the return had
fallen into Stone River and been nearly drowned. After they had been
fished from, the water, in the process of resuscitation their sex was
disclosed, though up to this time it appeared to be known only to
each other. The story was straight and the circumstance clear,
so, convinced of Conrad's continued sanity, I directed the
provost-marshal to bring in arrest to my head