L. P. Brockett, The camp, the battlefield, and the hospital: or, lights and shadows of the great rebellion

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[250] persistent struggles in which Sherman wrestled for the capture of Tunnel Hill, and by which he drew to that point so large a portion of Bragg's troops; and last and most glorious of all that fiery ascent of Mission Ridge, in which that noble Fourth Corps marched and climbed for a long hour through a furnace of flame, and after struggling up an ascent so steep that to climb it unopposed would task the stoutest energies, swept their enemies from its summit, and over all that broad vista disclosed from its summit, saw only a flying and utterly routed foe. Many writers have attempted to describe, and with varying success, this brilliant feat of arms, but none have succeeded so admirably as Mr. B. F. Taylor, of the “Chicago Journal,” himself an eye-witness of it. We give a portion of his description, which is as truthful as it is glowing:

The brief November afternoon was half gone; it was yet thundering on the left; along the centre all was still. At that very hour a fierce assault was made upon the enemy's left near Rossville, four miles down toward the old field of Chickamauga. They carried the Ridge; Mission Ridge seems everywhere — they strewed its summit with rebel dead; they held it. And thus the tips of the Federal army's wide-spread wings flapped grandly. But it had not swooped; the gray quarry yet perched upon Mission Ridge; the rebel army was terribly battered at the edges, but there full in our front it grimly waited, biding out its time. If the horns of the rebel crescent could not be doubled crushingly together, in a shapeless mass, possibly it might be sundered at its centre, and tumbled in fragments over the other side of Mission