ed near Hood's Division, already
encamped. Chickamauga! how little known of before, but what memories
its name is to awaken for centuries afterwards! What a death struggle
was to take place along its borders between the blue and the gray,
where brother was to meet brother--where the soldiers of the South
were to meet their kinsmen of the Northwest! In the long, long ago,
before the days of fiction and romance of the white man in the New
World, in the golden days of legend of the forest dwellers, when the
red man chanted the glorious deeds of his ancestors during his death
song to the ears of his children, this touching story has come down
from generation to generation, until it reached the ears of their
destroyers, the pale faces of to-day:

Away in the dim distant past a tribe of Indians, driven from their
ancestral hunting grounds in the far North, came South and pitched
their wigwams along the banks of the "river of the great bend," the
Tennessee. They prospered, multiplied, and expanded, until their tents
covered the mountain sides and plains below. The braves of the hill
men hunted and sported with their brethren of the valley. Their
children fished, hunted, played, fought, and gamboled in mimic warfare
as brothers along the sparkling streamlets that rise in the mountain
ridges, their sparkling waters leaping and jumping through the gorges
and glens and flowing away to the "great river." All was peace and
happiness; the tomahawk of war had long since been buried, and the
pipe of peace smoked around their camp fires after every successful
hunting expedition. But dissentions arose--distrust and embittered
feelings took the place of brotherly love. The men of the mountains
became arrayed against their brethren of the plains, and they in
turn became the sworn enemies of the dwellers of the cliffs. The war
hatchet was dug up and the pipe of peace no longer passed in brotherly
love at the council meeting. Their bodies were decked in the paint
of war, and the once peaceful and happy people forsook their hunting
grounds and entered upon, the war path.

Early on an autumn day, when the mountains and valleys were clothed in
golden yellow, the warriors of the dissenting factions met along
the banks of the little stream, and across its turbid waters waged a
bitter battle from early morn until the "sun was dipping behind the
palisades of Look-Out Mountain"--no quarters given and none asked. It
was a war of extermination. The