camped five miles beyond it on the road to
Livingston.

While traversing the region between Knoxville and Sparta, we were
repeatedly fired upon by bushwhackers, but had only one man killed by
them--a Texian of Gano's squadron. We made many unsuccessful attempts to
capture them, but they always chose the most inaccessible points to fire
from and we could never get to them. Frequently they would shoot at us
from a ledge of rocks not forty feet above our heads, and yet to get to
it we would have had to go hundreds of yards--they consequently always
escaped.

At Sparta, Champ Ferguson reported himself as a guide, and I, for the
first time, saw him, although I had often heard of him before. He had
the reputation of never giving quarter, and, no doubt, deserved it (when
upon his own private expeditions), although when with Morgan he
attempted no interference with prisoners. This redoubted personage was a
native of Clinton county, Kentucky, and was a fair specimen of the kind
of characters which the wild mountain country produces. He was a man of
strong sense, although totally uneducated, and of the intense will and
energy, which, in men of his stamp and mode of life, have such a
tendency to develope into ferocity, when they are in the least injured
or opposed. He was grateful for kindness, and instinctively attached to
friends, and vindictive to his enemies. He was known as a desperate man
before the war, and ill-treatment of his wife and daughter, by some
soldiers and Home-guards enlisted in his own neighborhood, made him
relentless in his hatred of all Union men; he killed all the parties
concerned in the outrage upon his family, and, becoming then an outlaw,
kept up that style of warfare. It is probable that, at the close of the
war, he did not himself know how many men he had killed. He had a
brother, of the same character as himself, in the Union army, and they
sought each other persistently, mutually bent on fratricide. Champ
became more widely known than any of them, but the mountains of Kentucky
and Tennessee were filled with such men, who murdered every prisoner
that they took, and they took part, as their politics inclined them,
with either side. For a long time Ferguson hunted, or was hunted by, a
man of his own order and nearly as notorious on the other side, namely,
"Tinker Dave Beattie." On the evening of the 7th, we encamped in the
vicinity of Livingston. Leaving early next morning, by midday we reached
the C